Who's Getting Off on the Sexual Coercion in Kendra Wilkinson's Sex Tape?

For most people, it's pretty clear that no consent is bad and consent is good. But what about when the consent is thinly mustered, or fades in and out, or is heavily influenced by the powerlessness of age or status within a relationship? Those are the questions I asked when I read this review of Kendra Wilkinson's sex tape, which was released by porn company Vivid this week.

A few weeks back, when blurry photos of the 24-year-old reality TV star began to pop up on various entertainment sites, I could only think about how young she looked. I thought that Wilkinson must have been over-age, since thousands of people were coughing up money for the chance to see her have sex, but I knew that she must have been only just. It turns out that I was right. Kendra was 18-years-old when she made the video, in love with the 22-year-old guy who filmed her and unsure, at best, about whether she wanted her sex life stored on the guy's video recorder.

"Kendra doesn't really want to be videotaped. She says so on quite a few occasions," reads The Evil Beat's review. After describing the first frame, which shows the young woman practically begging her boyfriend to put down the camera, which only increases his annoyance, "Kendra seems resigned to her fate, and, almost instantaneously, she shifts characters, from a very young woman being pressured into a sexual situation she finds uncomfortable to a willing sexpot, grinding obligingly on the bed."

It was almost too much to read this review, which continues to detail Wilkinson's obvious discomfort with the acts, pushing her boyfriend away and, again, willing him to switch off the camera, before he ultimately ejaculates without a condom against her wishes. And the reviewer hits the uneasiness nail on the head, describing how "the male partner’s desires come first and more forcefully, and the young woman is disrespected and dis-empowered and left with a sense that she’s less valuable and less capable of demanding respect and control than her male counterpart."

"You should not be turned on by this," the reviewer writes. "You should be pissed off." Which is what brings me to erotic coercion and people who get off on it. A common thread in our culture's sexual narrative, whether it's porn or love scenes in movies, are the two identities for women: virgins or whores. The whores always want sex, so no coercion necessary. The virgins must be persuaded, cajoled, convinced, and sometimes forced into sex, or sex-related acts.

This dichotomy presents other issues about the nature of consent. When the women are very young and, as The Evil Beet pointed out, feel powerless and unworthy of respect as an equal sex partner, is she really consenting? The review says that, "this isn’t rape — not even close," but I wouldn't necessarily call it consent either, at least not all of it as it as described. I wonder if we've been so conditioned to seeing women and girls persuaded into sexual acts that a video like this is released and very few people raise red flags. Instead, the disturbing display of coercion is netting Wilkinson, her ex-boyfriend, now 28, and a porn company more returns than any other video in its history.

Photo credit: mobilchina2007