If the phrase “slut shaming” is too loaded for you, I’d be happy to switch to “rape culture.”
Your reply kind of makes my case for me. It’s not about her “innocence”, or lack thereof, at all. It’s about her consent. The fact that so many people here are so fixated on her supposed lack of innocence is creepy.
It seems clear that there are some lines in what can and cannot be done with stock photos, both legally and socially. So, really, there are only two questions here:
The answer to point 1 sounds like “maybe.” The answer to point 2 is “definitely.”
Hypothesis: she knowingly put provocative poses on a stock photo site, then waited for the inevitable, and then got all outraged, as planned.
It’s true, we live in a world with an overwhelming amount of misogyny. There is indeed a culture which perpetuates the objectification and abuse of women.
The issue of this endemic misogyny is difficult to even discuss. It so quickly descends into name-calling, simplification, and false equivocation.
This why I am uncomfortable with how readily you invoke such emotionally evocative terms in relation to this issue. There are many very real victims to a culture of rape, but I don’t think this person is one of them.
It is a mistake to suggest that this thread is representative of that culture.
There is something fishy about the narrative this woman presents, and there is something alarming about how readily she compares her situation with a very serious sexual assault.
Does she have legal recourse? The consensus seems to be that she does not.
Does she have social recourse? I think posting this video was a form of social recourse.
Do her claims seem reasonable and internally consistent? I have my doubts.
Is it acceptable conflate the contents of this ad campaign with sexual violence?
I agree that her use of the word “rape” seems extreme. I also agree that we have a big problem with misogyny. Where we seem to differ is that I see misogyny here, and I think it’s appropriate to call it out. I’m sorry that you don’t like the words that I used, but let’s be honest: people never like being called out on misogyny. It’s never well-received.
Take a moment to step back and consider the claim: this woman posed for some photos in some slightly wild poses, and then waited for someone to photoshop her in an offensive manner into a massive ad campaign so that she could sue them. Or something. That’s a pretty impressive long con.
Now, consider something else: this ad campaign ran five years ago. You can find it at the copyranter site, which was directly linked to from the original article. And if you read that article, and a couple of related articles, you’ll see that it was apparently pretty controversial at the time. Ad industry blogs call it out as offensive. BK got local complaints. They pulled the ad early.
Somehow, that part of the story – that many people have found this ad offensive, that there was significant blowback, that the model didn’t even find out how her image was being used until four years after the fact – hasn’t really entered the discussion here, despite being linked to directly from the original article, where it is explained in plain English. Yet people have found the time to find other photos of this woman in very slightly crazy poses, and photoshop her licking sandwiches and whatnot, resulting in a chin-stroking discussion over whether she’s a virginal innocent or some sort of litigious criminal mastermind.
Why do you think that is? Why do you think there’s so much speculation on her purity, and so little consideration of the actual facts of the case?
About your #1: Actually, she has no legal recourse at all. She lost it by putting up the other images in the same photo shoot. That’s WHY I posted the one image I did from her other stock of images — that are all still available for use from Shutterstock, BTW. (She hasn’t bothered to get them taken down in five years.) The Burger King ad was not itself “pornographic”, it was just suggestive - and only to the right culture, the western culture, not the one it was advertising to - so her only claim could be that it “sullied her image” somehow. It can’t do that if she already did the same or worse.
Here’s a VALID example of a model’s image “being sullied”. In this case, a model’s image was used in an HIV awareness ad, and it was used in a way that suggests she herself is HIV positive. That’s a valid claim, and THAT is most likely why this other model has decided to come crawling back out of the woodwork. This case was allowed to go to trial in March of this year, and is for $450,000 against Getty Images.
Same thing for #2 of your suggestions. She’s a model, and she knows this. She’s trying to get some cash. I wouldn’t be saying it if I thought she had a valid claim against the company, or that someone had somehow mistreated her. She, in her own video complaint, included some of the other pics from that shoot — so she knows they exist, and she must be OK with them.
Also, it’s common practice for models used in stock images to just sign off on image use so long as it’s “clean” - this was. Many stock models never know where their image will end up.
About the ad. It was only ever designed for the Singapore market. (It wasn’t “pulled” from the U.S. market as Copyranter claims.) At the time, some people in western countries (with far dirtier minds) decided to make the worst of it. Here’s a quote from someone talking about it in 2009:
They got two “blows” in there. Nice. The sandwich (by itself an obscenity), slathered in unnaturally ultra-white mayonnaise, is floating in the air directly across from the disturbingly pale profile of a young, gape-mouthed woman who looks frightened to death of the manly meat. Sexy!
People couldn’t resist having something to talk about, and sex is always fun, isn’t it? So people decided to make a furor over an image that they would never even see as an ad.
I’m not “slut shaming” anyone. I’m discussing this woman as a professional. She’s a professional model, who knows quite well what her job entails, and I truly do believe that she thinks she can cash in on some past media furor - especially with another case currently proceeding - but it doesn’t play if you look at how she already represented herself.
I don’t mean to suggest any malicious intent on the part of ‘Jane Doe’. I don’t see any evidence that she plotted to create this conflict. Nor is it clear to me how she would benefit from making this video now.
Let me say that Burger King is gross. Their food is horrifying, and their promotional tactics are low brow. Welcome to the world of advertising.
Is what they did gross? Yes.
Is it offensive? A little.
Is it surprising or unexpected? Not even a little bit.
I realize it was controversial by Singaporean standards, but as was previously mentioned theirs is a prude society which only legalized oral sex in 2007. Considered in a broader context this ad campaign is very similar to thousands upon thousands of others seen throughout the world.
I remember years ago working as an intern on a photo shoot for some perfume that was contained in a rather phallic bottle. The art director explicitly asked the model holding the perfume to position the bottle below her lips so as to imply an imminent act of fellatio. The model cheerily agreed, and did her best to accommodate. As a then teenage intern I was shocked, I felt like I could never make such a shameless request, but for the professionals in the room, it was just another day at work.
It’s not necessarily a good thing, but this is the way these industries operate. It is a sad fact: Crude appeals to the lowest common denominator make money. I welcome an earnest discussion of how the ad industry could do a better job achieving the same effectiveness without resorting to such base tactics.
Until more enlightened promotional tactics become the status quo, if you are going to work as a model, if you are going to work in advertising, more likely than not it will involve some sexual objectification. If that is something you are deeply uncomfortable with, this maybe is not the best line of work for you. If you still want to be in this industry, be prepared for an uphill battle, and some very careful contract negotiation.
I think it’s difficult to justify the outrage ‘Jane Doe’ expressed and the particular rhetoric she chose to express it with. Given the career she has chosen, and the contents of her portfolio, one wonders how she came to expect anything else.
Perhaps we are just very publicly seeing someone come to terms with what it means to work in the industry they have chosen.
I admit a few of the comments in this thread may be a little crass, and a little misogynistic (some of the impromptu photoshop seemed to be rubbing salt in the wound). But by and large I think you will find that the good folks of the BB message boards, are more thoughtful, and more receptive than most. Even in this very thread, I am impressed that there hasn’t been more name calling.
There’s really no way to respond to this without you being willing to name/quote particular instances. Without that specificity, your only accomplishment will be a fishing expedition.
The response you’ve gotten and the bulk of engagement you’ve participated in has been with people who haven’t done what you claim, even though you’ve implied that everyone who thinks this case has little merit does so from the POV of abuse and victim-blaming. Be specific and rely less on implication if you don’t want to be dismissed.
We’ve come a long way, phallic foods are now being advertised by both sexes.
That ad’s actually a Super Bowl ad from 2007. So it both predates the Buger King ad, and was directly targeted to American audiences. They even included a child in the coordinated TV spot!
Absolutely not. Please don’t do a disservice to rape victims by equating this with rape, as the model herself did.
Totally what I got out of it–based on the catalog of photos on iStockPhoto, the model didn’t have an issue with the raunchiness, and based on her video and the writeup, it seems that she’s been mortified by the media response and the response of people she knows.
Other than the crass Photshops put on here, I don’t grasp how pointing out that, hey, the notion that she’s shocked–shocked, I say!–that an image from a slightly raunchy photoshoot was used in a raunchy way, is in some way slut shaming. Honestly, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed on this site and others, it’s that some people use emotionally loaded phrases like this as a more sophisticated way of saying, “Shut up.”
I’m guessing that if there was any actual slut-shaming, it was from her friends and family.
That’s almost certainly not how it works. Models are hired by photographers. They sign model releases. Photographers then own both the copyright and the right to commercially exploit the model-released images. Licensing the pictures to stock-photo agencies is one way they sell these images. The model almost certainly has no control over where the photographer chooses to license his pictures.
She was posing with he mouth open! It’s totally OK to put a dick placeholder in front of it! And she deserved it, because look at her other pictures!
Yeah, totally difficult to see how this could possibly lead to a culture of people believing that women might deserve things based on how they’re dressed, and how it’s OK to treat women like this, even if you don’t physically rape them.
No, she still has the right to complain (don’t we all?) but that’s entirely different than having legal recourse.
Maybe because douching is generally not a healthy practice. It upsets the natural pH balance and kills off friendly microorganisms (I think — this is what various hippie-ish girlfriends have told me.)
Ah, HHS confirms it: http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/douching.html
AKA “Cry wolf” from the shepherd and the wolf story
I’ll just leave this here:
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