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NT I NG U H GIRLS

K E L LY O L I V E R

IN TR O DUCT I ON GIRLS AS TROPHIES

the popular television show America’s Next Top Model devoted a season to college girls. The thirteen ﬁnalists moved into a “sorority house” in Hollywood. One of the competitions featured a mysterious photo shoot. Beforehand, the contestants were told that the “challenge will leave you hanging,” and to “make sure you kill the shot.” The photo shoot was at a taxidermist’s lair where the college women were posed as big-game trophies, with their heads mounted on the wall. Shot in a room with one wall completely ﬁlled with mounted animal heads—including deer, antelope, elk, and moose—the girls stuck their heads through wooden frames. Mimicking the animals on the wall, they stared wide-eyed into the camera with their mouths slightly open, as if surprised to be “dead.” The camera repeatedly cut between the girls’ mounted heads, shots from behind of their decapitated bodies clad in nearly IN THE FALL OF 2012,

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America’s Next Top Model: Mounted coed photographed at

FIGURE I.1

taxidermist.

sheer bodysuits, and the dead animals that surrounded them. The soundtrack featured animal sounds as some of the girls posed for the photo shoot. Later, back at the studio, the judges evaluated the photographs. In the words of one judge, they wanted “dead but intensity.” One of the top-scoring models was praised with

FIGURE I.2

America’s Next Top Model: Posed to look like a dead animal.

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“your eyes have an intensity but also a blankness as if your soul is gone”; while others were criticized: “you needed to be dead smize, not alive smize” (“smize” being judge Tyra Banks’s neologism for smiling eyes). Another model was praised for looking like “the witch from Snow White”—Maleﬁcent with her hair styled into two giant horns on top of her head. When one of the girls complained that the wooden frame was hurting her, the photographer replied, “Uncomfortable beauty is what we’re going for.” Praised for looking dead, these girls were subjected to this awkward scene for reality television, and for the resulting trophy photographs, judged as part of a “beauty contest.” It’s not news that beautiful women are treated as trophies. In this photo shoot, however, their status as hunted prey is made explicit. These college girls were treated as animal prey shot dead by the camera for mounted trophies. The camera becomes the weapon in the hunt for beautiful dead girls. In light of creepshots of unconscious girls looking “dead” on Facebook sites posted by fraternities, and several high-proﬁle rape cases involving unconscious girls described as “dead” by their rapists, bystanders, and the media, it is both stunning, and yet not surprising, that a popular reality television show would feature college girls as mounted trophies. After all, “corpse chic” has replaced “heroin chic” as the latest fashion trend. (Photos of women, or parts of women’s bodies, taken without their knowledge—and therefore obviously without their consent—are called “creepshots.”) Moreover, fashion photography has a long history of depicting young women as bloodied, bruised, tortured, and corpse-like. Famous fashion photographers such as Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, and Steven Klein nearly specialize in images of violence toward women in sexy and sexual poses (Sauers 2012). In 2007, following this trend, America’s Top Model featured contestants as murder victims, many of them scantily clad in lingerie, as if they had been sexually assaulted before their murders. The “dead girl” trope is still popular in fashion magazines and on Internet porn sites. For example, Victoria Beckman’s Autumn 2015 Lookbook photo

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shoot features models posing as unconscious, lying on the ground, or draped over chairs. Snuff porn and various varieties of pornography feature incapacitated girls and women, some looking dead. And, of course, there are fraternity photos of unconscious nude or semi-clad girls in embarrassing poses on closed Facebook sites across the country. Unfortunately, images of bruised, abused, or “dead” women and girls as high fashion or in advertising are nothing new. As Margi Laird McCue observes: “Striking examples of the depiction of women as sex objects who deserve to be battered are often found in advertising. In the late 1980s, for instance, many fashion ads featured women who were abused, bound and gagged, or in body bags. . . . Mainstream magazine fashion layouts featured women pulled along by corset ties, their necks in choke collars; trussed and restrained in straitjackets and straps; blindfolded; and sometimes stuffed in garbage bags. One Esprit ad depicted a woman on an ironing board with a man about to iron her crotch; a Foxy Lady ad showed a woman who had been knocked to the ﬂoor with her shirt ripped open; and a Michael Mann ad pictured a woman in a coffin” (2008). Other examples include a Bill Blass ad from 1966 that features a model posing as a dead woman tied to the front grill of a car. In 2007, a highly stylized Dolce & Gabbana ad depicts a group of young men around a shirtless man who is pinning a woman to the ground, suggesting gang rape. A 2006 Jimmy Choo ad shows a dead woman in the trunk of a car. A 2008 ad for a designer men’s clothing line by Duncan Quinn features a man in a suit smirking into the camera while dragging an unconscious woman (wearing only her underwear) across the hood of a car, a necktie tied around her neck. And in 2012 Pop magazine featured a photograph of sixteen-year-old model, Hailey Clauson, being choked by an unseen man (Sauer 2012). The list goes on and on. And this put forth as so-called high culture. Pornography, of course, is notoriously ﬁlled with images of abuse of women, most especially sexual assault and rape (Timberg 2013).

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CREEPSHOTS OF UNCONSCIOUS GIRLS

Life imitates art, and vice versa. Thus, art often revolves around the objectiﬁcation and assault of girls and women. Unfortunately, increasingly, life imitates pornography, particularly creepshot photographs of unsuspecting girls and women. With uncanny regularity, college and university officials are discovering Facebook pages, and other social media, used by fraternities, or creepshooters off the street, to post photographs of women, sometimes unconscious, naked, or in compromising positions. For example, at Penn State, one fraternity was suspended from its national chapter after a police investigation turned up pictures of drugs, hazing, and nude, unconscious women (Garrity & Blinder 2015). According to the New York Times, “Pledges were required to make stories with pornographic images and a ‘sex position of the day.’ Members regularly posted embarrassing photographs of women in ‘extremely compromising’ positions and used demeaning language to describe them” (Southall 2015:A13). One detective said that, in some photos, women were “passed out and nude or in other sexual or embarrassing positions. It appears from the photos provided that the individuals in the photos are not aware that the photos had been taken” (Garrity & Blinder 2015). This is not an isolated case. Photographs of nude or semi-naked women, unconscious, taken without their knowledge, end up on social media sites, especially sites devoted to pornography and creepshots, and are remarkably popular on the Internet. Even the word creepshot suggests that women are being shot, not with guns, but with cameras. Unsuspecting girls and women are prey for creep-hunters looking for the best shot to post online. Even more disturbing are recordings and creepshot photographs of “party rapes” taken by perpetrators and bystanders. There are several notorious cases of videos or snapshots of unconscious girls being dragged, undressed, prodded, peed on, written on, and/or penetrated with ﬁngers and objects, or raped—a high school girl in Steubenville (Ohio), referred to by

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her rapists as a “dead girl”; a college girl on a beach in Panama City (Florida), who was drugged and then raped while bystanders watched and recorded; teenaged Rehteah Parsons, who committed suicide after photographs of her being raped circulated online; Audrie Potts, another suicide after photographs of her semi-naked body went viral at her high school; and then there was the Vanderbilt University rape case where police ﬁnally convinced a college junior that she’d been gang-raped by her boyfriend and his football player buddies by showing her videos and photographs the perpetrators took of her, which they had sent around to friends. A documentary about rape on campus entitled The Hunting Ground (2015) presents colleges and universities as hunting grounds for serial rapists who prey on unsuspecting women, especially freshman. Campuses are dangerous places for girls and young women. First, perhaps surprisingly, rape myths are higher on campuses than in the general population. Rape myths include the notions that girls and women are “asking for it” if they wear provocative clothing and/or that they enjoy being raped. Second, college administrations are not equipped to deal with rape and often don’t respond quickly or effectively. The Hunting Ground records the testimony of dozens of college women who recount difficulties dealing with college administrators when they report sexual assault. In many cases, their claims are dismissed or ignored. Third, studies show that most rapists are serial rapists or repeat offenders (Lisak & Miller 2002). On college campuses, sexual predators learn that they can force sex on girls and women and get away with it. In one study, half the college men surveyed said they had used force on a date; and in another study, over 30 percent of men surveyed said they would force a woman to have sex and yet didn’t consider this rape. Obviously, for these college boys and men, the boundary between sex and rape has been blurred. Fourth, drugs and/or alcohol are involved in most rapes on campus. When drugs and/or alcohol are involved, reporting rates are so low as to be almost nonexistent (Lisak & Miller 2002; Wolitzky-Taylor et al. 2011). If most rapes are committed

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when the victim is under the inﬂuence of drugs or alcohol, and the reporting rate in these cases is near zero, then the actual numbers of girls sexually assaulted on college campuses must be mind-boggling. Fifth, there are very few consequences for the perpetrators of sexual assault, especially if they are well-respected fraternity brothers or college athletes. Very few college boys and men found guilty of sexual assault face any punishment whatsoever. Criminal prosecution is nearly nonexistent. Further, hearings at colleges and universities rarely result in expulsion. Finally, girls and women who do report sexual assault are often harassed and face retaliation on campus. Some eventually drop out of school, a few even commit suicide. Many girls and women report that the harassment they face after the assault is worse than the assault itself. The fact that these women’s victimization and pain is not taken seriously compounds the trauma of sexual assault. All of these factors make colleges and universities dangerous places for college women when it comes to sexual assault. In the words of a junior at George Washington University (not featured in the documentary The Hunting Ground ), “At frat parties, it’s more of a hunting ground. Not all guys are like this, of course, but sometimes it feels like the lions standing in the background and looking at the deer. And then they go in for the kill” (Schwarz 2015). Girls are treated as prey by sexual predators, who often use drugs and alcohol to trap them.1 But these sexual predators are not scary men jumping out of the bushes at night. They are clean-cut fraternity brothers, honors students, and star athletes. These are the promising young men sitting next to their prey in English class or calculus. They are the clean-cut guys at the end of the table in the student union. They may be the head of their class, or president of their fraternities, or leading athletes. These are not the mythical depraved black men supposedly raping white women so popular in the imaginations of conservatives and reactionaries. For the most part, these are young middle-class white men—the boys next door—raping middle-class white women, the girls next door. Perhaps this is why, until recently, sexual violence

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on campus has received little serious media attention. There is reluctance to believe that these all-American boys are capable of rape. There is the notion that “boys will be boys” when it comes to sexual assault. Within a culture that still has not shaken off its patriarchal heritage, these men are the heirs to the future. College administrators, the general public, and the media have resisted the idea that these successful college boys and men who have bright futures ahead of them might be sexual predators. Often taking the perpetrator’s side over their victim’s, popular sentiment too often has been that the men are the ones harmed by rape charges, that they have the most to lose, which assumes, of course, that their futures matter more than those of their victim’s. The prevalence of cellphone cameras, however, is changing the way we view sexual assault, especially when the cellphone camera becomes part of the assault. Social media may be changing attitudes toward rape. On the one hand, there is a valorization of rape and lack of consent, evidenced by creepshot photographs and the fact that perpetrators take pictures of their rapes as part of the “fun.” The photographs are supposedly taken with the victim’s consent and that is part of what makes them “funny,” and why perpetrators share them with friends. On the other hand, cellphone photographs give investigators hard evidence that is taken seriously, even when a girl or woman’s testimony might not be. In the words of one detective assigned to the Vanderbilt rape case, “pictures don’t lie.” The implication, of course, is that girls do. Throughout Hunting Girls, we will consider the contradictory ways in which social media is changing our attitudes toward sexual assault and the reporting of rape. While using drugs and alcohol to incapacitate girls and women in order to sexually assault them is not new, taking creepshots of their naked bodies and posting them online on social media sites is new.2 The effects of social media on rape culture go beyond exacerbating the harms of rape. Social media not only extend the harm and trauma of the assault into the future in ways that make it more difficult for victims to heal, but also photographs of sexual

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assaults and party rape have become a new form of pornography. In fact, in some of the high-proﬁle cases mentioned above, perpetrators have been charged with disseminating child pornography. Even in the Vanderbilt case where the victim was twenty-one years old, the photographs themselves were part of the crime since they were taken and disseminated without her consent. Photographs taken as part of the sexual assault and posted online as trophies or further abuse have become evidence in criminal trials. Spectacles of party rape circulated for “entertainment” haunt and shame victims to the point that some take their own lives. In many of the aforementioned cases, since the girls were unconscious at the time of their rapes, they found out about them through social media, or by being shown photographs of themselves in compromising positions. The girls and young women in Steubenville or Panama Beach, at Vanderbilt, or those featured on the Facebook page of the Penn State fraternity, all found out about their sexual assaults through third parties who showed them images of themselves passed out and abused. The impact on victims of discovering that they have been raped while unconscious is profound.3 Given that women’s testimony to their own victimization is often discounted, it is telling that the impact on the public of these photographs of girls unable to give clear and coherent testimony is also profound. Creepshot photographs of sexual assault enter a complex web of pornography, entertainment, social media, harassment and shaming of victims, and criminal evidence that can be used in court to convict perpetrators. The irony is that in some of these cases, the victims are unconscious and unaware of the sexual assault such that what is often viewed in court or in hearings as a “he said, she said” account of what happened becomes a case of the perpetrator accidently providing hard evidence in cases where “she” was unconscious and cannot testify to what happened. The perpetrator, or in these cases, usually perpetrators in the plural, provide a reliable witness in the eye of the camera. Two of the central themes of Hunting Girls are the role of the camera in sexual assault and

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the rape of unconscious victims. Not only do creepshot photos and unconscious party rape go together as new forms of entertainment, but also they are on the rise, to the point that some call party rape an “epidemic” on college campuses (Carey et al. 2015; Filipovic 2015).

PARTY RAPE

Given the use of alcohol and rape drugs that render girls and young women unconscious, the incidence of unconscious rape is truly incalculable on college campuses. First, women may not even know they were assaulted. They may wake up wondering but never sure. Second, conscious or not, the rate of reporting when alcohol is involved is only 2.7 percent (Lisak & Miller 2002; Wolitzky-Taylor et al. 2011). In the last decade or so (since about 2005), the prevalence of alcohol-accompanied sexual assault has led the U.S. Department of Justice to identify a distinct type of rape, “party rape,” which is defined as one that “occurs at an off-campus house or on or off campus fraternity and involves . . . plying a woman with alcohol or targeting an intoxicated woman” (Sampson 2002:6; Armstrong et al. 2006:484). Party rape is classified as a form of acquaintance rape, even if the perpetrator and the victim are strangers. In terms of sexual assault, party rape makes colleges and universities “hunting grounds” for sexual predators, many of whom never consider their activities rape, and most of whom never consider themselves rapists. Party rape, however, is not just the result of alcohol consumption. A combination of factors comes to bear in rape on college campuses. Certainly, not every man who parties is a rapist and not every woman who parties is a rape victim. One study concludes: “Cultural expectations that partygoers drink heavily and trust party-mates become problematic when combined with expectations that women be nice and defer to men. Fulfilling the role of