Women and Media
Of late, I have become very interested in representations of women in the media, as part of my ongoing theme of interest that can be best described as how women consume media, and how media consumes women. Tell me what is wrong with this soundbite, from an interview in Elle magazine (scroll down to the headline, “Ashton Kutcher talks sex, drugs with his stepdaughters.”
Did you guess, selling out one of his stepdaughters by announcing in a major market media outlet that she was no longer a virgin? (Don’t get me started on the American construction of this phrase, where one ‘loses’ one’s virginity, in which case I am assuming that mine is curled up somewhere safe, along with my high school graduation watch, one pearl earring, that set of car keys I accidentally dropped over the side of a boat, and half a dozen socks that just disappeared out of the dryer over the years, all just waiting to be found. Or the semantics in giving it away rather than having it taken - but I digress). There is nothing wrong with being on either side of the virginity line, but there is something very wrong when your sex life is given over to the media as interview fodder - by one of your parents.
The quote being floated around from the in print article is this:
I knew that one of the girls had had sex and hadn’t really talked to us about it, so I wanted to create an open forum for her. So over Christmas last year, we had a conversation about sex — all of us except Tallulah, the youngest … and one boyfriend was there.
There is something so off putting about introducing his step-children’s sex lives into an article about himself as a way of describing his identity as a step-parent. The two oldest girls are about 19 and 16, and essentially, this little vignette, which was no doubt offered up as a way to bolster his media identity as a caring family man, essentially announces publicly that the sex lives of both young women are now suitable for media consumption, starting with the speculative line that inquires, to which of the two was he referring?
I don’t want to know the answer to that. But I am not sure I wanted to know that the question existed, either. However, when actors decry the intense media/gossip speculation about their personal lives, I cannot help but wonder how often any of them stop to consider how intimately they have invited the press into their lives in the past, and how that past invitation assumes future, and equal, access. You can’t sell your secrets to the media in order to get press on the way up the career ladder, and then complain about how intrusive the press is once you achieve fame. But neither of these two young women invited the press in to speculate about their sex lives. Their step-father did. And I wonder if he has any idea why that is a problem.