{"id":3348,"date":"2007-05-04T13:12:52","date_gmt":"2007-05-04T20:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/05\/04\/the-age-of-consent-for-acting-in-porn-should-be-raised-to-21\/"},"modified":"2007-05-04T13:12:52","modified_gmt":"2007-05-04T20:32:40","slug":"the-age-of-consent-for-acting-in-porn-should-be-raised-to-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3348","title":{"rendered":"The Age Of Consent For Acting In Porn Should Be Raised To 21"},"content":{"rendered":"

Garance Franke-Ruta<\/a>, in an op-ed published by OpinionJournal<\/a>, argues that people below age 21 should not legally be able to consent to appear in porn.<\/p>\n

But the “Girls Gone Wild” problem concerns adult porn: At what age is a girl ready to make that decision, one that she will live with–technologically speaking, at least–for the rest of her life? A woman of 18 may be physically indistinguishable from one who is 21, but they are developmentally worlds apart. […]<\/p>\n

A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery–that is, for participating in pornography–would most likely [be] sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world’s next [“Girls Gone Wild” owner] Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of “talent.” And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself–long since routinized–but its “barely legal” category. “Girls Gone Wild”–like its counterparts on the Web–is treated as a kind of joke. It isn’t. There ought to be a law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On her own blog, Garance explains further<\/a>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

…Our laws recognize that maturity comes slowly. In addition to the minimum drinking age of 21, the minimum age for entering Congress is 25, and for the Senate, 30. Many jurisdictions make 21 the baseline minimum for holding state senatorial or other government positions, while others use 25 as their local baseline. Several states have a 30-year-old minimum for the governorships, and we\u2019re all familiar with the 35 year minimum that exists for the presidency.<\/p>\n

Under what I am suggesting \u2014 which is really, at this point, more a general principle for legislation than a fully worked out proposal (I\u2019m no lawyer) \u2014 women and men under 21 would retain the right to flash anyone they wanted or take photos for personal use, under the theory that the people a law is intended to protect should not be punished under it. All that would be lost is young men and women\u2019s ability to participate in commercial enterprises looking to sell their erotic images, and the risk of involuntary distribution of their non-commercial images. Women and men would gain a greater right to control their own erotic images until age 21. The anti-porn laws we have now are much, much stronger than the one initially passed in the late 1970s, and what I was thinking of is something a bit more like that initial legislation, which would provide women and men with a tool to control their own images and prevent exploitation, but not result in any kind of massive prosecutorial crackdown per se. The intent would be to expand the zone of privacy for young men and women. The key factors to be regulated would be commercial use of images and unwanted use of non-commercial images.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it’s slippery of Garance to say “Women and men would gain a greater right to control their own erotic images until age 21”; no doubt there are some people who would actively want to sell their own images for commercial exploitation, and this law would force them to wait until their twenty-first birthday. So only certain people — those who consent in (often drunken) haste and then repent at length — would gain more control under this law.<\/p>\n

But I still agree with Garance’s proposal. Yes, some people would be prevented from doing what they want by this law; it’s also the case that some people want to work for less than the minimum wage. Some workers would prefer to have laxer worker safety standards because they believe they could get more work that way. For that matter, it’s no doubt the case that there are some 15-year-olds out there who would like to be able to be paid to appear in porn.<\/p>\n

In all these cases, that some people’s interests are harmed in order to provide other people with greater protection is an acceptable trade-off. (This is even more true of an age restriction law, which harms some people’s interests only temporarily.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Garance Franke-Ruta, in an op-ed published by OpinionJournal, argues that people below age 21 should not legally be able to consent to appear in porn. But the “Girls Gone Wild” problem concerns adult porn: At what age is a girl … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc","category-sex-work-porn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}