bryan stratton dot com

I warmed up my writing synapses this morning by wading into a discussion about Joe Francis, the Girls Gone Wild douchebag, on SuicideGirls.com (not at all safe for work). I’m reposting what I wrote here, because if the past is any indication, I’ll probably have my SG account canceled by the end of the week.

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Not that I’m trying to say that this is an apples-to-apples situation, but…

I have several friends who shot sets for this site and other reputable “female empowering” alt-porn sites when they were in their late teens or very early 20′s. They were paid a pittance and signed away all rights to the photos, because it was a scene that they wanted to be a part of, and because when you’re 19, $100 can make the difference between coming up with your part of the rent or not. (Or it can buy you a fairly substantial bag of weed or a tiny amount of coke. I’m not saying all these girls leapt off of the pages of Les Miserables. Although I do have a great story about a dancer I knew who stripped to save her farm…)

After these friends of mine did a little growing up and wanted to pursue more mainstream careers, they tried to get the sites to remove their photos. Despite the fact that the sites had gotten much, much more than their money’s worth from the sets, the sites refused to comply. One even sold their archives in bulk to other, less reputable sites, with the only condition being that they had to change the screen names of the girls. The sites did nothing illegal, and they were well within their contractual rights to do these things, but it definitely ran contrary to their mission statements.

Now, $100 isn’t a t-shirt and a trucker cap. And creating a scene that people want to be a part of isn’t plying them with liquor and coercing them into taking their clothes off. And even if you’re only 19, you should be smart enough to realize that maybe in 10 years, you might want to run for the local school board and not want pictures of your boobies floating around on the internets.

But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that SG and similar sites exist solely to empower women and create great erotic art any more than Joe Francis produces Girls Gone Wild to promote women’s freedom of expression. At the end of the day, despite the gulf of differences that separates them, both rely on horny guys paying to see young women’s naked bits to pay the bills.

And if this is the last post anyone sees from me, it’s because my account got suspended right after I posted this.