A Role Model
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in June 2025.
I’m likely not the only person who cringes as they read about what took place in a London hotel room in 2018 between a girl and a bunch of adolescent hockey players that is now being poked and pried to establish culpability in what, by any measure and for all involved, is a dehumanizing story. How did we get here? How can we turn back?
I am struck that E.M., the then 20-year-old woman in this scenario, explains that when consensual sex turned into what we used to call a ‘gang bang’, she took on the persona of a porn queen. She doesn’t deny that she taunted the men, and agreed in the moment that her participation was consensual, all of which clashes with our idea of the behaviour of a rape victim. But I guess – I’m dismally out of touch with porn – that’s how porn queens behave, by being sexually aggressive.
My wonder is what E.M.’s options were, in the circumstances, for role models. Every other movie and lots of books offer role models for consensual casual sex, and from my very limited and second-hand expertise, the evidence to date suggests she and her chosen sex partner played their parts appropriately. The phone call inviting the bros in for a quick three-way was not in that script. What script is it?
An essay by Christine Emba in the New York Times weekend insert of May25/25 supports E.M’s suggestion that it is a porn script, featuring ‘porn-trained behaviours – the choking, slapping and spitting that have become the norm even in early sexual encounters’. Emba cites a 2019 British study that found 38% of British women under 40 had experienced those behaviours. She claims porn is omnipresence and accessible; it’s on 12% of websites and porn bots pop up regularly on several platforms. She worries ‘porn will become more addictive and effective as a teacher, as virtual reality makes it more immersive and artificial intelligence allows it to be more customizable.’ She also says Gen Z is more willing to criticize porn than their elders. Maybe the silence of older generations is because, like me, porn is a world they know little of and have no wish to know more.
That is, I think, a generational abandonment – not the only one, not the one Greta Thunberg took us to task for, but actually a related one. The poisoning of our ethos is as destructive of our humanity as the poisoning of our planet is of our existence. The good news? It can be more quickly corrected. We could fell the enemy with incisive regulation, decisive implementation and diligent surveillance. And we would do that, I think, if the enemy wore jack boots and carried an Uzi and visibly threatened our children, our women, our humanity. But because the poison is dripped into hearts and minds in the intimate space between a screen and a viewer, between mind and mind, we hold our fire. We wait for what we recognize as evidence of wrongdoing.
I think we have it. I think we are seeing it play out before Judge Maria Carrioccia in the London courtroom. For sure we saw it when a French court in Avignon, France, found that 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot had been drugged unconscious and repeatedly raped over nine years by her husband and a motely crew of 50 other men invited through a website. Husband filmed it. To share, perhaps, as his contribution to pornography?
Why DON’T we do something? Because we see these as isolated incidents, unfortunate examples of evil men, boys pumped up on the testosterone of hockey fame. Because we count on women baring themselves in excruciating nakedness and vulnerability before a court system that doesn’t do mercy. Because at some level we kinda think that women are a danger best kept cornered.
I think women may well be a danger: we all know to not get between a Mama bear and her cub. In the same New York Times as Emba’s essay on pornography was an article by Annie Roth on Bonobos, the great apes that share 99% of our DNA. They live in a female-dominated society that ‘make a lot of love in addition to war. They carry out rather heavy petting, make sex toys and engage in homosexual intercourse.’ But when male Bonobos misbehave, retribution is swift and collaborative. ‘From 1993 to 2021, the researchers observed 1786 instances of a male starting trouble with a female. Examples included acting aggressively toward a female or her infant, or monopolizing food. In roughly 61% of these fights, the females teamed up with other females and emerged victorious.’ And they meant business. ‘On a few occasions, [the researchers] suspect[ed] that the male died as a result of the attack.’
Hey, I like that role model of female aggression much better than porn queen. Let’s talk it up with the E.M’s of the world.
