Erin Andrews and Consent

Transcript (and links) after the jump.


A lot of people have been talking and writing about Erin Andrews, the ESPN reporter who had a video taken without her knowledge – of her walking around a hotel room naked.
Both FOX and CBS news have featured clips or pictures of the video and it’s a top Google Search right now.
I’ve been really happy to see that a lot of male sports bloggers are writing about feeling badly and almost feeling complicit in the objectification of sexualization of Andrews because of past posts they wrote about how hot she is, or featuring pictures of her that were meant to somehow titillate their male audience.
I also think that it’s awesome that our own Community bloggers – like Dangerfield and Marc – have taken on the broader questions surrounding sports culture and masculinity.
What I’m really interested in, however, is the non-consensual issue that comes up in this story. People aren’t interested in this video, this isn’t a big internet sensation, because Andrews is a hot celebrity who people might be able to see naked. You can see plenty of hot women naked online. Folks want to watch this – and people find it interesting – precisely because Erin Andrews didn’t know she was being filmed. And that reveals something really fucked up about the way American culture views women.
That what we consider hot or sexy, is looking at naked pictures of women without their consent.
I just wanted to open this issue up in comments and see what people thought about how this story relates to violence against women and, really, to rape culture as well.

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