Raunch Culture Rip-Off -- By: Carolyn McCulley

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 13:2 (Winter 2008)
Article: Raunch Culture Rip-Off
Author: Carolyn McCulley


Raunch Culture Rip-Off1

Carolyn McCulley*

*Author, Speaker
Gaithersburg, Maryland

It was the latest political scandal: a tough-on-crime governor gets caught transporting a high-priced prostitute over state lines. The media cranks up all the requisite snarky stories. The politician’s wife is trotted out to glumly stand by her man as he admits to what he was caught doing. After a few tense days, he resigns. As the porn industry makes the requisite million-dollar media appearance offers to the now infamous call girl, the story seems about played out in the media cycle.

Fade to black; await the next scandal.

That is, until a staff member at one of those porn distributors realizes he could save his boss the money—for the producer of Girls Gone Wild already had sexual footage of this call girl when she was an 18-year-old on spring break in Florida. She loses her million-dollar offer; he likens the archival discovery to “finding a winning lottery ticket in the cushions of your couch.”2

And millions of people who had never before seen nor heard of Girls Gone Wild are suddenly made aware of one of the prime showcases for the “female raunch culture” that arose in the third-wave of feminism.

I had only heard of the show a few years earlier, when a critique titled Female Chauvinist Pig: Women and Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy was published in 2005. I was intrigued because I had not encountered anyone within the feminist movement standing up to say women were making horribly wrong choices in the name of sexual liberation. So I previewed the book on Amazon, where the featured chapter was about the author’s experience with the Girls Gone Wild camera crew. Stunned by the description of the show, I shut down my browser. There was no way I could order the book. I was going to have to derive my understanding of Levy’s thinking from magazine summaries and other second-hand sources.

So in this essay I will try to be as discreet as possible (challenging to do!), but if you just want to read the executive summary, here it is: God created sex. It is very good within His design. Outside of God’s design, it inevitably causes problems. We are living in the fallout of that every day. Young women who are assaulted with “porn-positive” ideology of third-wave feminism are jaded, cynical, infected, and often deflated about these “freedoms.” They are ripe to hear about God’s plan for their sexuality. As Christians, we should not shrink from meeting them where they are and boldly demonstrating and proclaiming the gospel. We need to be ...

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