Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - Posts
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Ugh. I'm not sure what to make of Natalie Dylan, the 22-year-old who popped her media cherry in the fall when she put her virginity on the market and is now back on the scene with her staggering price tag in hand: $3.7 million is the highest bid so far to be the lucky guy to bang her for the first time. (Don't believe her that the hymen's intact? Well, the lie detector backs her up, and she says she's willing to undergo medical tests for doubters).
The libertarians, of course, say this is the free market at its best: "I frankly don't care whether or not the young lady auctions off her virginity, and if someone is foolish enough to pay her more than three million dollars for the somewhat dubious honor of deflowering her, that's between the two parties in the contract as far as I'm concerned," writes Jazz Shaw on the Moderate Voice. That's basically what they said on Jossip, too, and Boston Herald editor Jules Crittenden seems to think "Natalie" (she's going by a pseudonym to protect her safety but apparently has no problem with having pictures like this or this floating around) is on the right track: "If demand is that high, it sounds like a lot of working girls could save themselves a lot of trouble, go for the big bucks in a one-off and retire," he wrote on his blog.
That free market argument makes sense to me. Her body, her choice to sell it for millions. What bothers me is that she's a women's studies major claiming this is "empowering." To whom, exactly? I guess the idea is that she's sending a message to other students who need help financing their education (her goal, hilariously, is a masters in Marriage and Family Therapy). The message: You, too, can pay for your education by having sex with strangers.
But does that actually qualify as empowerment? When Izzie on Grey's Anatomy stripped off her scrubs and shoved her boobs in Alex's face to make the point that she wasn't ashamed of having put herself through med school by posing for underwear ads, I was screaming and grabbing my own boobs right along with her. The logical side of me has a hard time explaining why this is any different, other than that it's illegal (Emily, Dahlia, it is illegal, right?) and less regulated: She's not in a studio posing for pictures; she's in a bed somewhere, being penetrated by a stranger. But even imaging it going totally right—the guy is clean, he uses a condom, he doesn't hurt her—it still feels off to me. Can any of you articulate what I so clearly can't: why this is so far from empowering, and why prostitution is not the same as modeling? Or is the libertarian argument as sound as it seems at first glance?
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Prince Harry, the spare to Charles' heir who thinks a swastika armband is a great costume-party accessory, is a precious gift to the British press. Nothing sells papers (and provides columnists with fun fodder) like a racist-epithet-spewing royal. So, when a video surfaced in which Prince Harry was caught calling a fellow army officer cadet a "Paki" and telling a soldier who had swathed his helmet in camouflage netting that he looked "like a raghead," the papers ordered extra ink. Most opinion writers gave him well-deserved guff for his racist remarks, and the prince made the now-familiar nonapology, saying he "is extremely sorry for any offense his words might cause." In Tuesday's New York Times, John F. Burns summarizes the story nicely.
Except that, as in most of the English papers, Burns neglects to mention another slur that the prince didn't even acknowledge or apologize for. The video also caught him asking a member of his squad some questions after an exercise: ""[I want to hear about] your ups and downs in the exercise. Highs and lows. ... Good points, bad points. How do you feel? Gay? Queer on the side?"
Now, that isn't as openly offensive as the P and the R words, but Harry's casual homophobia certainly doesn't express solidarity with the gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the British military.
Harry is a vile, one-man ad for republicanism, but the press doesn't seem to be all that sensitive, either.
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Emily, a quick response to yours on Elena Kagan: Just as you and I were wondering whether Dean Kagan would suffer for her relative lack of oral-advocacy experience, I received e-mail from a well-respected Supreme Court oral advocate, Roy Englert, whose institutional memory is far longer than mine. Roy reminded me that until Seth Waxman became solicitor general in 1997, “it was very unusual for the SG to come from private practice, and very unusual for the SG to be someone who had done Supreme Court arguments before becoming SG.”
Roy also pointed out that until very recently “the SG was either a respected academic or a federal judge who resigned to take the position.” Drew Days was a professor at Yale before becoming SG; Ken Starr was a D.C. Circuit judge who resigned to become SG; Charles Fried was a professor at Harvard before becoming SG; Rex Lee was a professor and dean at Brigham Young University before becoming SG. And so on through Robert Bork, Erwin Griswold, and Archibald Cox. By that metric, Kagan is not so much an outlier as far as her résumé is concerned, but rather a return to a tradition of primarily academic, as opposed to oral advocacy, credentials.
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