First off, let me note that I hate Carrie Prejean as much as the next sentient human.
That out of the way, it’s time for me to defend Carrie Prejean.
As you may have heard, former Miss California USA-slash-anti-gay activist Carrie Prejean has a sex tape that’s gotten loose, and perhaps “several more” in the hopper. (No, I’m not linking to stories; keep reading, you’ll see why.) This is, of course, totes hilarious, as Prejean was trying to build a career around moralizing while still being a normal human with feet of clay. This tape, as I read from various liberal blogs and see discussed on liberal talk shows, is a tape of Prejean masturbating that she sent to an ex-boyfriend at some point. The ex-boyfriend is now distributing the tape, and telling stories of how Prejean allegedly wanted him to say she was underage when she made it — leading Michael Musto to opine waggishly that she’s just a typical girl, wanting to look younger than she is.
Hee hee, ho ho, sigh.
You know why Carrie Prejean wants us to think that tape may be illegal? Because she doesn’t want everyone and their twin sister to have video of her masturbating. Why? Because she didn’t release a video of her masturbating for worldwide distribution. She sent it to her then-boyfriend.
Now, yes, Prejean has been involved in moralizing. And here’s where I’m supposed to say that she has this coming, having the temerity to be a sexual being while criticizing others for their sexuality. But you know what? I’m having trouble believing that. Because while Prejean’s opinions on same-sex marriage may be wrong, it doesn’t therefore follow that it’s okay for someone she trusted to break that trust by sharing private videos with the public. Indeed, on the moral spectrum, I’m having trouble seeing why Prejean should be embarrassed by the sex tape, and a whole lot of reason to think that her ex-boyfriend is a major league asshole who women should avoid like the plague. Men too, for that matter.
Guys? It’s me, Jeff. Let’s say your wife, girlfriend, lover, friend with benefits, or friend without benefits is nice enough to send you a tape of herself in flagrante delicto. Guess what? She didn’t sent that to you and anyone you feel like forwarding that to. Unless your best friend, your preacher, your mom, Harvey Levin, Joe Lieberman, or J.K. Rowling was copied in on the email, ((They may have been. Hey, I don’t judge.)) you shouldn’t send it to any of them without first seeking permission from the young ((At heart. As long as you’re legal, I say feel free to send sexy videos to your heart’s content, no matter how old you are.)) lady in question.
The reason, of course, is that this woman is choosing to risk a bit of her privacy to give you a momentary sexual thrill — perhaps many, depending on how lonely you are and whether or not your girlfriend goes to college out of state. You owe it to her not to run to your roommate and say, “Hey, look what this girl sent me!” Why this is so should be blindingly obvious — what said woman sent for your consumption may not be something she’d want her mom, her high school math teacher, Kevin Sorbo, or the crowd at an L.A. Lakers game to see. She sent it to you, personally, because she likes you and trusts you enough that you won’t go sending it to someone else. If you go sending it to someone else, that proves that you’re a scumbag who can’t be trusted, and while the woman may be guilty of not seeing that quickly enough, the only real jerk in this picture is you.
You see, it’s like sex. If you and your girlfriend are having consensual sex, that’s fine. If you invite your buddy in unannounced to start having sex with your girlfriend too, without clearing it with her? That’s rape. No, selling smutty pictures of your ex-girlfriend to TMZ isn’t rape. But it’s rape’s evil, less-reviled cousin, and it’s in the same moral ballpark. And just because we like to put the fault back on the Carrie Prejeans of the world for sending these tapes in the first place, the fact is that their privacy is being violated, while the ex-boyfriend in question is lauded for said violation. A moment’s foolishness in the name of lust or love is understandable; a willful betrayal of trust in the name of lulz or cash is reprehensible.
It’s sick and wrong. And it’s nothing to laugh about, even if the victim in this case has been moralizing about other things. For all her wrongness, I don’t recall Prejean arguing that LGBTQQ individuals should have their nude, intimate photos and videos released to the world. She’s wrong on marriage. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to laugh when she’s violated.
Jeff
I read this blog for balance and to keep form being an echo chamber conservative (more a center-right Libertarian).
On just the Clean facts, and pure analysis, this is a beautifully crafted piece of accurate logic.
For that to be true you have to make some assumptions.
All people who are not trying to actively physically harm you deserve a baseline human respect. (a basement of diginity which others will not attempt to ride below for advantage)
I may like like a lot of your opinions, but I sometimes do learn things.
A+ for Integrity.
Steve
Typo in above post.
Points if you can find it.
What if there were a video of her marrying a woman?
On a personal level, this negatively affects me personally: I’ll never get my girlfriend to send me a video of herself masturbating now.
Of course, the privacy invasion bothers me more than that, and the idea of calling her put for “hypocrisy” that is not, in fact, hypocritical. Even if she’d spoken out against masturbation both before and after making the video, of course, it would be wrong to send the video to all and sundry, but one could defend letting it be known that she masturbates, if that counts as masturbation. In any case, she didn’t marry a woman, that we know of, so there’s no point to this beyond embarrassing her for being sexual, which ought to be normal.
Right on! And Hershele get it: this sort of thing is *exactly* why guys don’t get more erotic communiques from their girlfriends…because it’s obvious that this common sense/basic level of respect for privacy and decency can’t be assumed; in fact, we assume that you WILL show it too all the d00ds you live with/work with and therefore we assume the momentary thrill pales in comparison to the risk of shame and embarrassment. Same with sex…removing the threat of stoning/pregnancy/expulsion from society has certainly helped us free our desires and drives, but remove the threat of violence/assault/slut-shaming, etc. and there’d be a lot more sex going around too. :)
I wonder what the motivation was. Does he want his 10 minutes of fame? Is he angry with her on a personal basis? Is he angry about her various political and social stances?
Did he take money for this?
I wonder what self-justification he used for this despicable act? Or is he just a fool and thinks there’s nothing at all wrong with this?
Oh, I’m no cheerleader for Ms. Prejean. But this guy is no gentleman and has shown himself to be bereft of honor.
I have been thinking along the same lines. For all Prejean’s bigotry, grandstanding, ego centrism, persecution complex, and hypocrisy, I can’t see how shaming and embarrassing her for her sexuality isn’t a cruel violation.
All people should be free to express their sexuality within consensual relationships that involve trust. All people should be able to know their body and how it gives them pleasure. Prejean did nothing wrong in making or sending the tape.
I know firsthand how painful such a violation can be. I had one immature girlfriend (I’m female) who let her friends read and respond to racy messages I sent her while I was drunk. She didn’t intervene, nor did she tell me until much later that it wasn’t her. It destroyed my trust in her and in our relationship.
And with that experience, I’ve paid attention to what happens to young women, many of whom are trying to figure out their sexuality, who have misunderstood both the people they trusted and how electronic and digital information can be intercepted or replicated. The 2008 documentary American Teen features a girl who sends her boyfriend a topless photo. He shares in with friends he “trusts”, and one girl with a vendetta forwards it to the whole school along with a comment that she has “pepperoni nipples.” This is very common.
I think that many Americans aren’t well prepared for healthy, honest sexual relationships. From our massive problems with rape and sexual abuse to the objectification of women in pornography and mass media, we aren’t, as a culture, giving people the tools to understand their sexualities in a complex way. That’s why purity movements and heterosexual, “Christian” marriage are such powerful discourses. But they are a poor substitute for what we really need.
Prejean is fascinating, I think, because she has tried to walk a fine and a false line between mainstream sex appeal and pornography, between a woman empowered and exploited.
It’s one thing to point out her hypocrisy, lying, and double standards, and another to bring her pain using the very standards that we acknowledge are flawed, damaging, dysfunctional.
i haven’t kept up as much as i should on this major issue facing our republic, so i just now read the remark that produced this whole bruhaha:
is it me or does her postion appear to be that of barack obama? its sounds pro-choice except she finds one choice immoral.
In all fairness Carrie Prejean has received a lot of unwanted attention for expressing her political views. However she has also chosen to go on to a lot of talk shows and claim that god told her to answer the way she did and that she was unfairly persecuted for her views.
manju,
We don’t live in a country where you can choose same sex marriage, except in Iowa or Massachusetts.
Obama’s not against gay marriage. He voted against DOMA. His version of “with all deliberate speed” on DADT is equally frustrating and hypocritical. Most view his stance as pragmatism and an attempt to avoid controversy. He’s perfectly fine with letting states recognize same sex marriage, just not willing to put himself on the line for anything beyond Civil Unions.
Getting married is not something generally done in private. It’s not like a video of her masturbating.
If I said “People who have colds are despicable. If they washed their hands frequently enough, they wouldn’t get them,” and my pharmacist made it public I had gone to him for cold medicine last month, that would be a breach of confidentiality and it would be wrong.
But it would be far less wrong than, say, my psychiatrist tape recording me telling her intimate, personal details of my history of being abused, then broadcasting them to the world and laughing about it.
Even if I was on the record for repeatedly saying that abuse victims “have it coming” it would be wrong.
I try to have a “hate the bigotry/love the bigot” attitude.
Ain’t easy, though.
RonF, I assume that his motivations were a combination of spite + boasting that a Miss California sent him a masturbation tape. Reasonable guess?
Just need to say this — OMG, what a loser ex-boyfriend!!! And need to add my 2 cents.
I dated someone whom I trusted to take intimate videos of me. And he used those images of me in CDs that he sold to colleagues. I caught him out and his defence was that he’s so proud of my (unsupermodel) body and he wants everyone to see it. It gave me such cognitive dissonance…and I dated him for 3 more years after that.
I agree that it was an immoral invasion of privacy for Prejean’s ex-boyfriend to share the tape. It’s nothing to laugh about. But, I do think it’s relevant to the public discourse.
Thanks to the National Organization for Marriage, Prejean was beginning to build a career as a Traditional Values darling. Before this sex tape reveal, Maggie Gallagher and NOM had written a narrative in which Prejean was a poor, upstanding victim at the hands of a powerful, immoral homosexualist mob.
For instance, when she was fired from Miss USA after breach of contract, NOM said:
“Of course [gay-friendly Hollywood elitists] will try to punish her, but we know she will be fine in the end, because her values are in the right place.”
Get it?
Her values are in the right place. She’s a folksy folk Real American, unlike LGBT people who have leftist Hollywood Values.
While Prejean’s invasion of privacy is nothing to laugh about and while I personally find nothing immoral about an adult making a sex tape, that she made one is most certainly relevant. I have hunch that NOM and the others on Team Morality would think that those who make such tapes do not actually have their values “in the right place.” And that’s why this tape is relevant. It counters NOM’s false narrative about who does and does not have what sort of values.
Great commentary.
At every institution where I have worked one was not allowed to pass on the contents of a private email without prior permission. (Presuming, of course, the content did not involve the disclosure of something illegal–such as the intention to commit a crime.)
The fact that I dislike the woman does not mean I condone any crime carried out against her. Violating her privacy is at least immoral. I condemn that violation just as I would condemn someone breaking into her house or stealing her car.
Thank you for making the point better than I could.
How could she have had such an ill relationship? He wasn’ t a boyfriend he was a D bag.
And this is the kind of thing that makes me want to say to MRAs: want the culture to change? Want women to stop regarding men with suspicion, fear, and sexual withholding? Then change male culture. Stop treating locker room stories like they’re anything but inappropriate violations of a woman’s sexual privacy. If a friend forwards you a pic or video of his girlfriend, delete it without looking and give him an earful until he recognizes what a dick move that was, or stop giving him the benefit of your friendship. Police your own camp and make it safe for women to trust you; don’t berate women for harboring the concern that any seemingly-nice guy could turn around and betray and humiliate you.
Elusis:
Reminds me of something that happened to me: A guy my age in a class I was teaching was in a group with a young woman, maybe 19, who was working as a model. One day, as I was walking around in class, checking up on the work groups were doing, I noticed these two exchanging email addresses, and I thought, “Good! A group that’s really going to work.” That night, I got an email message from him with nothing but a URL and the subject line, “Check this out.” When I clicked on it, it took me to the woman’s MySpace page that had photos of her modeling <ivery revealing lingerie; it made me feel, actually, quite dirty to look at them–at leas the ones that came up on the page before I closed the window–without her knowledge. I confronted him about the inappropriateness of sending those photos to me and he seemed to get it, though I don’t think he would have seen anything wrong with it if I hadn’t been her teacher–him (45) trying to bond with me (45) over the half-naked body of a 19-year-old woman. In other words, he got that it was inappropriate only because I was her teacher.
The thing was that I also had to talk to her, not because she’d done anything wrong, but to make her aware of just how little control she had over those images once they were online, and once she started giving people access to them, and to make her think about whether she really wanted those pictures to be able to circulate among the people she coexisted with in a professional situation. At first she didn’t get it. She kept telling me that she put the pictures up precisely because she wanted people to see them. It was only after I asked her the third or fourth time if she would really want me to have those pictures in my head while I was grading her papers, especially given the fact that she had not given me the URL, that she looked up and said, “Wait. You’re my teacher. That is really kind of creepy.”
She did not want to confront the guy at all, and it was the end of the semester, so everyone was going there separate ways. The whole thing ended there, but it left a really bad taste in my mouth.
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The pageant rules and regulations required full disclosure of any nude photos or videos of a sexual nature. Failure to fully disclose such information is grounds for disqualification. Carrie Prejean did not disclose that she made/transmitted 8 masturbatory sexting videos and 30+ nude photos (that are known of as of 11/14/09), fraudulently competing in a pageant that she was ineligible to enter. THAT is the ISSUE.
No, it’s really not.
IF the pageant rules required disclosure of private nude photos (which I doubt) then those rules are immoral and ridiculous.
If, as I think is more likely, they required disclosure of nude photos taken for commercial purposes, then Ms. Prejean didn’t have any of those.
Either way, clearly slut-shaming her is unacceptable, no matter how stupid and hateful her politics are.
—Myca
PAGEANT FRAUD!!!11111!!!!!!!!! OH nOESs!!!!!!1111!!!!!!!!!
Yeah. That’s totally THE ISSUE.
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Dang. I’m usually one to hop full on onto the “call right wingers out on their own hypocrisy” bandwagon, but damned if you aren’t farming some whole-grain truth here.
Its a shame she felt it was appropriate to make such tapes for her boyfriend.
I think it is wrong to have sexual relations — or to induce them through such behaviors – outside of marriage. It is also wrong for the guy to distribute them on-line.
But it is hyper cowardly of him to keep his name and picture hidden and there is a certain way that is worse. She at least has faced this with some degree of bravery. He is hiding like a wuss.
By the way — I am not a fan of PreJean’s but I still think its ok for her to promote good family values even if she is a flawed person. Aren’t we all? Yet we should promote good things anyway.
Richard – that’s a really good illustration. What a skeevy thing for that young man to do (and yet, he’s soaking in the same patriarchy we all are, so I can hold him responsible for his actions while also being sympathetic to how earning social capital gets people to do stupid things). I appreciate that you intervened.
And of course, her initial complicity is upsetting and frustrating, but another symptom of the same disease.
Sometimes I wonder what will happen in another generation when there are no available candidates for political office under the age of 50 who have never been on the Internet. The “neg” researchers will be raking in the money, but when everyone has embarassing (posts on Usenet, comments on message boards, photos on an archived version of MySpace, blah blah blah), will it cease to be a discriminating factor with the electorate?
In any case, I wish there were some kind of cultural antibiotic we could administer to cure the “woman as de-humanized sexual conquest” disease. Failing that, we have to treat it like invasive plant eradication, and rip it out wherever it grows. And as men are far more exposed to it than women (a transman friend of mine said he was completely gobsmacked how much degrading talk about women he’s heard since he began passing in all-male spaces like locker rooms), the bulk of the work falls to them, if they choose to do it.
Oh, I agree, and I wish she would promote good family values instead of actively working against marriage and loving committed families. Trying to destroy families that aren’t like hers is the opposite of promoting good family values.
—Myca
Elusis:
I don’t know how old you are, and I am being lazy about not looking back at my comment, but he was my age, 45 at the time. I just wanted to say it is refreshing to be called young, when so many of my students seem convinced that, at 47, I ought to just get it over with, retire and enter the old age home already. ;)
Elusis:
It’ll be mutually assured destruction, at any rate. It’s not so much that voters won’t care anymore, since even voters who themselves have skeletons on the Web will always be fascinated by a good juicy scandal, but no candidate will release her opponent’s Key West pics when her own weird beliefs on gun control 20 years ago are just as available to him.
That said, it’ll be done by Geraldo Rivera types (on both sides) without asking the candidates anyway, just like now.
Myca, I almost said substantially the same thing (less eloquently), but decided not to engage.
[ha ha only serious]
I long for the day when celebrities who make and release sex tapes are celebrated and not scorned, when “slut” is a badge of honor rather than an insult, and even a loser like me might get laid once in a while.
[/ha ha only serious]
Doug S.: Slut is being re-taken, see the blog Evil Slut Clique. And the only response to Prejean has to be ridicule. We had loads of fun this weekend at my blog with Carrie Prejean LOLcats.
Adding you to my blogroll. Nice ta meetcha.
Richard – you’d think, at 36, as a teacher of graduate students who are in some cases 20 and even 30 years older than me, I’d stop conflating “students” with “young people,” but you’d think wrong apparently. ;)
And, I’m going to suggest that 47 is still young as my parents are 65, and as far as I’m concerned they’re just now barely tipping middle age. (Please leave me safe in my delusion.)
Elusis:
Don’t worry, forty seven is plenty young. I was gratified today when one of my colleagues actually called me a baby. I probably haven’t been called that by a coworker since I got hired, when I was 27–which was, at the time, very young at my institution. Most of the people in my department were at least 10 years older than I was. Now, though, we seem to be hiring more people closer to the age I was then. (And it’s odd, this is my 20th year, which makes me senior to an awful lot of people who are, chronologically, my senior by quite a bit.)
Gay “marriage” is not a good family value. Gay marriage is a masquerade. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A trojan horse.
Speaking of horses, Chas, fuck you and the disgusting, hateful, defective one you rode in on.
Chas:
How funny! I feel the same way about Mormon marriage! I guess the difference is that I don’t try to legislate it.
In any case, we’ve reached the point in your rhetoric where ‘family values’ are utterly divorced from actually supporting and promoting existing families, but instead have to do with forcing families who don’t share your particular religious views to conform to them anyway. That’s a bad, hateful place to be.
Homophobia is ugly, Chas, and there’s enough of it here already.
Please don’t post here any longer.
kristinc:
Kristinc, although it should be obvious that I sympathize with your position, please avoid saying things like ‘fuck you’ to other posters.
—Myca
[“Some of my best friends are gay” type post from Chas deleted by Amp. It’s amazing how every person in America who wants unequal legal rights for lgbt people, claims to have a gay best friend; yet I’ve never, not even once, met an openly gay person who said that their best friend is against equal legal rights for lgbt people. How is that possible?
You’re not a friend to lgbt people, Chas, any more than the people who once claimed to love Jews very much but still favored keeping them out of their country club were friends to Jews. You’re either someone who favors legal equality for lgbt people, or you’re a bigot and a hater. It really is that simple.
Anyway, Chas, I’m sorry Myca’s post was too subtle for you, but to make it clear: You’ve been banned from posting on this blog. Ever. So go away.
–Amp]
Thanks, Amp. I was in class all morning, and I just knew he was going to post while I was otherwise occupied.
—Myca
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