DSK and the Meaning of Consent

I have a great idea for a movie. Here’s the pitch: A poor, slutty immigrant takes a job as a chambermaid so she can have great sex with the hotel guests. One day she hits the jackpot. She walks into a room only to be met by an irresistible stud old enough to be her father. Known in his home country as “The Seducer” he offers her a full view of his impressive manhood.

Overcome with lust, she falls to her knees and the two have great consensual sex. But being a woman and all, she is a lying, scheming whore and accuses the seducer of rape.  The poor seducer becomes one more victim of “sex offender hysteria,” as one caller to National Public Radio named it, and now he must defend his good name.

Where to pitch this? I could go to the usual adolescent boy filmmakers such as Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler, since they specialize in making movies about manipulative predators who are really good guys underneath. But wait. I have a better place. The porn website Maid Bangers seems tailor-made for this story. The teaser on the website reads: “Tom and Steve are on a Mission ? They conquer hotel after hotel. When they are in town, not one maid is safe! “ (Emphasis Theirs).

On the site, free teasers lure in the viewer. Take “Luna” for example. According to the text, “Luna was spotted by Steve in the hallway and he immediately went after her. He came up with some lame excuse to get her back to the room, and it worked great. Once in the room, she couldn’t resist the boy’s charm.” Sound familiar? “Maya” has a similar experience. “Tom and Steve invited her in and before she could really understand what happened, she had a cock up her ass & one in her mouth.” Just in case this sounds like a rape to you, don’t worry — the pictures surrounding the text show Maya having hot, orgasmic sex.

The Strauss-Kahn story belongs in the world of porn. It is here that all sex is consensual, no matter how manipulative and violent, and all women are whores who need a man to release their inner slut. In porn, women don’t do unskilled, low-paid work to feed themselves and their children. No, they work because this is where you go to get laid. Sites such as Fuck the Nanny, Nurse Hardcore, Naughty Bookworm, and Secretary Porn all tell the Strauss-Kahn story. Women don’t need a living wage, health care, safe housing, child care, or a career. They just need monster loads of “jizz” to make them happy.

Only in a porn culture could we take seriously the idea that what transpired between Strauss-Kahn and the unnamed woman was consensual. Only here could we actually spin a story of a single mother risking her livelihood to have Strauss-Kahn’s penis rammed down her throat.  And only here could we focus on the credibility of the woman while making light of the history of a man who was well known for his predatory behavior.

And don’t let’s forget that this is a black woman. We know that black women have the tendency to be “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”  If they could smear squeaky clean Anita Hill, a conservative Christian who spent her early career demonstrating her allegiance to the white Republican establishment, then every woman is fair game.  David Brock, a former research fellow with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, recalls in his book, Blinded by the Right, how he set about destroying Anita Hill by taking a “a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory?and often contradictory?allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix. Hill was an ambitious incompetent passed over by Thomas for a promotion. She was “kooky.” She was a man-hater. She had a “perverse desire for male attention.” She had a “love-hate” complex with Thomas. She made “bizarre” sexual comments to students and coworkers. She sprinkled pubic hairs into her law students’ term paper.” He now says that what he did was disgusting, but it worked, and Anita Hill became one more victim of a misogynist culture that protects its own at any cost.

Next on the chopping block is French Journalist Tristane Banon, the goddaughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife who claims she was attacked by Strauss-Kahn. I was going to pitch this story, too, to the porn industry but it turns out someone beat me to it. The porn movie, Goddaughter 3, tells the tale of “a beautiful temptress who uses her alluring erotic skills to climb ‘the family’s’ ladder of power. She does anything with anyone to reach the top ?. The danger, mystery, intrigue and hot, sultry sex are back!”

Stay tuned.

Gail Dines is a professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College and chair of American Studies. She is the author of Pornland: How Pornography Has Hijacked out Sexuality, published by Beacon Press.  She can be contacted at gdines@wheelock.edu