Hollywood rape: Why Polanski is getting a free ride

Special commentary by Gail Dines

Roman Polanski did not “have sex” with a thirteen year old. He raped a thirteen year old anally and vaginally after drugging her. This doesn’t seem to bother much of the media who keep saying “had sex with,” nor does it bother Hollywood who continued to have close ties with Polanski after the rape, even giving his film “The Pianist” an Academy Award for best picture. Now, to cap it off, some stars, including Woody Allen, have signed a letter calling for his release. What does it take to hold a celebrity male accountable for his actions? Obviously, raping a child is not enough of a transgression, nor is physical assault on a woman. Jack Nicholson in 1996 was accused of severely beating a prostitute he had just had sex with. This was front page in the British newspapers but hardly got a mention in the American press. A year later Nicholson won the Academy Award for best actor.

There are most likely multiple reasons why Polanski is being given such soft treatment by the press and his Hollywood buddies, but I would bet that some of this has to do with how our society sexualizes girls. In an increasingly sexualized culture, we see girls, often preteens, dressing and acting like miniature women. Padded bras, thongs, low cut jeans, midriff revealing tops and high heeled shoes are now available for young girls.

Lest we think that this is cute, in a recent interview I did with incarcerated child molesters in a Connecticut prison, some of them told me that they had to avoid going to the mall because the sight of the pre-adolescent girls aroused them. One explained to me that their clothes “give off sexual signals that the kids are unaware of.” One particularly eloquent child rapist explained that he really didn’t have to work hard to prepare his stepdaughter for rape because “the culture did a lot of the grooming for me.” By this he meant that all the sexual messages of the culture had sparked a precocious interest in sex in his 10 year old victim, and he used her questions about sex as a way to introduce her to child porn.

Child porn is still illegal in this country and I suspect the average man surfing porn sites is not actively looking for images of children being raped. But there is now a subgenre of porn that has exploded over the last few years. Called pseudo-child porn because it uses women who are 18 or over, the goal of the porn is to make her look much younger. With titles like Fuck the Babysitter, Daddy’s Whore, First Time with Daddy and Cute Teens Fucked Hard, the user doesn’t need much imagination to know what he is getting. The women in these movies look very different from the usual women who populate porn. In place of big breasted, curvy women with oiled bodies, these women are typically small breasted, thin and surrounded by markers of childhood such as stuffed animals, cartoon-themed bed sheets, Disney posters on the wall and, of course, lollipops, lots of them, that she seductively sucks.

These images add to the general sexualization of children in pop culture. One of the pioneers of this was Calvin Klein, who in the early 1980s, used the then fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields in ads for his jeans with the famous tagline "Do you wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." In the mid-1990s Klein ratcheted up the imagery by using mostly underage teenagers in poses that looked so much like actual child pornography that the Justice Department started to investigate him for possible violation of the law. Klein escaped prosecution, only to come back a few years later with ads for his childrens underwear line that featured prepubescent boys and girls wearing only underwear. This time Klein was forced to pull his ads almost overnight due to public outcry. Around the same time, a seventeen-year-old Britney Spears released a debut single called “Baby, One More Time” which became an instant international success. In the accompanying video, Spears is dressed in school uniform with a knotted shirt that reveals a bare midriff, socks and braided hair as she writhes around asking her ex-boyfriend to “Hit me baby one more time.” Spears later went on to employ Gregory Dark to direct her videos, a long-time porn director whose films include The Devil in Miss Jones, New Wave Hookers and Let me Tell Ya ‘Bout Black Chicks.

Miley Cyrus, the Disney girl wonder, is routinely sexualized. In her videos she has been shown pole dancing and simulating anal sex. Last year Cyrus caused a stir when pictures of her wrapped in a bed sheet and wearing a bed-head hairdo, graced the pages of Vanity Fair. Why such a fuss? One reason could be that photographer Annie Leibovitz, by copying the visual codes of porn, made stark the degree to which we are now living in a culture that packages girls as sexualized commodities. This does not bode well for girls as many of them, according to an American Psychological Association report, are internalizing these messages and come to see themselves, not as active desiring sexual subjects, but as passive desired sexual objects.

The men I interviewed in the Connecticut prison picked up on these cultural messages, and ended up committing the same crime as Polanski, but they are not famous film directors so they went to prison. They were just your average guys who got bored with porn and needed a shot in the arm to keep them aroused. While some started with the pseudo-child porn sites, all ended up with real child porn and then went on to rape a child. Not one of these admitted to raping a child, they all rather “had sex” with her. Polasnki has also avoided taking responsibility for his actions and now the media are complicit in redefining what it means to rape a child. While perpetrators and the media talk about men having sex with children, their victims will live with the rape for the rest of their lives. Why is the media not telling their stories?

Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, and a founding member of Stop Porn Culture. Her new book, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality, will be published by Beacon in July 2010.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future