Kendra Sunderland, the woman media outlets insist on degrading by calling “Library Girl,” has pleaded not guilty, claiming that the video was recorded and released without her consent. Is that a great legal defense? Not really, considering the crime was the fact that she did it, not that it was recorded. But it’s an incredibly important point to make, because the deeper issue we should be looking at here has nothing to do with the library and everything to do with how a woman is being treated because of the cultural context of the crime she’s accused of.
What was once one video is now well over a dozen because her identity went national and anyone in possession of a cam feed recording of her has re-uploaded them with her name attached. Pornographic actors and actresses have long used pseudonyms to protect themselves from this kind of breach despite their work being completely legal, yet our culture feels the need to victimize them further once they’ve been outed.
Personally, as someone who has sworn allegiance to individualize sovereignty, the entire thing makes me sick to my stomach. I find it impossibly frustrating that the media has avoided the issue altogether and all school and city officials have done is the public relations pee-pee dance. You’d think those fancy master’s degrees would get you a rhetoric more than one step above the commenter on the Gazette-Times joking about how her lawyer should “drill his client a little better. HA HA HA.”
The important thing happening here is that a woman’s life has been turned upside down through no fault of her own, but we’re all too fixated on a pair of exposed breasts in the OSU library to address it. Par for the course in a society that hates women.
By Johnny Beaver
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