Raising the Minimum Age for Porn

Feminist blogger Garance Franke-Ruta, in a piece on the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal, has an interesting article on what should be done about Joe Francis, the auteur behind the Girls Gone Wild videos. Franke-Ruta has hit on excellent solution for driving him out of the business of preying on drunk college girls. She wants to raise the minimum age for consenting to participate in hard- and softcore pornography to 21.

"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 Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of 'talent,'" says Franke-Ruta. On her blog she explains that while a girl may be adult enough to fight in Iraq at 18, she is not mature enough to decide whether it is a good idea to flash the camera. "Our laws recognize that maturity comes slowly," she says, pointing out that there are minimum ages for holding elective offices. She also says that she doesn't mind so much if girls give it away for free.

Franke-Ruta's efforts to throw more pornographers and consumers of pornography in jail and make our young women less wild has been criticized by a few libertines like Ezra Klein, but I don't think she goes far enough. Can a girl of 21 really know what she is consenting to when she signs a release form for a pornographer? Does she really understand what the ramifications might be later in life? That is why I propose that we raise the minimum age of consent to participate in pornography to 65.

I think by 65 a woman has finally attained the maturity necessary to weigh the pros and cons of participating in pornography. Since she will most likely be retired or on the way to retirement by that age, there is little danger that such images will come back to haunt her in her career.

Requiring that porn stars be elderly would open up new career opportunities for senior citizens, which would be an excellent way for them to supplement their retirement and social security incomes. It would certainly prove more diverting for many than playing bingo at the senior citizen center. I think many seniors would be grateful for the chance at an exciting new second act as an exotic performer and many people would be surprised at just how much they would appreciate this opportunity. As Annie Gottlieb pointed out in her fascinating Bloggingheads segment with Ann Althouse, "Older women are really kind of bawdy. We're like honorary guys. We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain and nothing to hide. As a result we can be down and dirty with them about all the stuff that younger women would go "Oooh' at."

Criminalizing pornography featuring anyone less than 65 would not only save younger women like Franke-Ruta (who had a interesting Bloggingheads episode of her own with Althouse) from going "Ooh!," it would no doubt also greatly cut down on the supply of this terrible scourge. It would force consumers of pornography to disgorge themselves of most of the porn they already own or face legal consequences. Finally, anti-pornography crusaders would achieve most of their aims without actually having to pass a law banning obscenity per se, which might have been stricken down on First Amendment grounds. The sight of small towns across America holding porn bonfires would warm the cockles of the hearts of those who have crusaded for years against the degeneracy of our culture. And think of all the perverts that would be rounded up and hauled off to jail protecting our society from their deviancy. It would be enough to provide Dateline NBC with enough material to run 24 hours a day.

I also think Franke-Ruta may have found a way in which pro-abortion feminists and those opposing abortion can finally agree. If a woman is not mature enough to have control over how her body is being used in images when she is 18, how can we say she is mature enough to have control over her body in deciding to get an abortion? Raising the age of consent laws for abortion to 21 would certainly cut down on the number of abortions, but think what would happen if we raised the age of consent to 65. Abortion would be completely eliminated.

Franke-Ruta may have hit on the solution to healing our divided nation, even though she doesn't go quite far enough. Raising the minimum age for participating in pornography to 65 would just be the first step to returning America to the greatness it had before the 1950s when sex began to warp our culture.

Young men would begin to think of sex as something their grandparents do to make a little cash and could put the energy they once used to search for porn on the Internet into fighting terrorism or curing cancer or pursuing more difficult quests on World of Warcraft. Young women would once again be coddled and protected from having to make decisions that their unformed minds can't handle. Grandma and grandpa would no longer have to worry how to pay for their prescription medications. And if the terrorists no longer saw our country as being so decadent, perhaps they would finally leave us alone, which is a point Dinesh D'Souza made in his book The Enemy at Home.

Franke-Ruta modestly calls her suggestion "more a general principle for legislation than a fully worked out proposal (I'm no lawyer)." But even if she was just proposing something off the top of her head without really thinking about it, she may have stumbled on an idea that, with just a little tweaking, could actually save our country.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Garance Franke-Ruta, Sex, Bloggingheads, Joe Francis, Girls Gone Wild, Ann Althouse