EMILY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

 

I am still pissed off. The violent death of Emily Sander in November of 2007 left the usual wreckage. Her family was devastated. Her friends were  bereft. The Kansas towns where she grew up and went to college was  wounded. But within in a month or two few remembered  her name, and we will forget that once until we  look behind the veneer and see the dark face of our capitalistic news media; provocateurs who cater to the public’s prurient interests. 

Without the ennoblement of the Bill of Rights, they (we) would all have been arrested as pornographers long ago. And the truly ironic aspect is that the media sold their papers and commercials by billing Emily as an “internet porn star”, as if the pittance she made from selling her image and reputation had ever come anywhere near the treasure collected each day by CNN, NBC, FOX, and even the Associated Press, all of them marketing Emily’s image and reputation. 

Her life didn’t make her newsworthy to them. Marketing her self as the “barely legal, Zoey Zane” certainly did not distinguish her significantly from millions of others living a fantasy on the net. Even her brutal murder by itself did not earn her a dubious equation with “man bites dog”. But her life and death tied to the word “pornography” is what finally made Emily Sander “worthy” as news.

The word “pornography” was born from an odd root. The ancient Greek sources are “porneia”, meaning fornication, and “graphein” meaning to write. They refer to the advertising signs hung outside the prostitute’s place of business (above). For three thousand years a “pornographer” was anyone who wrote anything about the lives of prostitutes or their customers. Which was a legal and respected profession.

It wasn’t until the Victorian age (about 1850) and with the invention of photography, that the noun “pornographer” evolved into the more specific meaning of “…Someone who presents, shows or sells writing or pictures whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal”. But the last 150 years has failed to inspire a simple accurate definition of what is now considered to be pornographic. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that the best description he could provide was, “I know it when I see it.” And it is that hazy justification which allowed the news media to sell Emily Sander as an “internet porn star” without calling themselves “pornographers”.

Emily was a lovely, vibrant 18 year old woman, discovering her sexuality at a time when the internet gave young women economic power over their bodies.  She wanted to make a profit from that power. And if that was a mistake it was her mistake to make.  Said Nikki Watson, a fellow student at Butler Community College, "She was a young teenage girl and she wanted to be in the movies and enjoyed movies. She needed the extra money. Nobody in El Dorado, Kansas knew besides her close friends." 

As a writer Rhonda K. Baughman pointed out in a piece which appeared on the Larry Flint web, "Emily Sander was neither royalty of adult entertainment, nor, truthfully, was her Internet site naughty enough to warrant star status."

But Kansas is infamous for its fear of shifting that power away from men who have traditionally held it. And the life of Emily Sander is and was proof that that cultural wars over sexual conduct have always been a fraud. 

Emily did not murder herself. She is blameless for that crime.  The precipitous cause of Emily's murder appears to have been that over Thanksgiving she revealed her web site to her boyfriend, who immediately broke up with her. A week later, on 8 December, she met a 24 years old man at a local bar. He made her feel wanted and desired. She accompanied him to his hotel room, where he raped her and strangled her with a telephone cord.  The internet had nothing to do with it. So said the cops.   

Emily’s death is no more proof that internet sex sites are dangerous for women than the murder of Stacy Peterson, a Chicago cops fourth wife, is proof that being married to a cop is inherently deadly. Neither of these two women were murdered as punishment for some moral shortcoming, no matter what the implied moral tag the media wants to tie on their lives. They were murdered by men. And 57% of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands, ex-husbands or boyfriends. 

And that makes Emily a member of the unlucky majority of women, whose greatest enemy are the men in their lives. She was a freshman at the local junior college. That should have made her death worthy of being a headline; but it didn’t. As the saying goes, sex sells – especially it sells newspapers and cable and internet news ads. The slaughter of another young woman by an enraged male ego was simply another “dog bites man” story and not “news worthy”; unless she could be described as an “internet porn star”.

Well, Emily wasn’t much of a “star” until she was murdered by the media. On what was once her web site (ZoeyZane.com) her business partners, RagingBucks,com posted the following; “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007…the media…sent more traffic to Emily’s adult site in two hours then the site has received in the two months since the site has gone live”. 

The “Fort Worth Star-Telegram” printed the absurd statistic that 30,000 customers paid $39.95 a month to look at Emily’s nude photos. In fact “RagingBucks” offered access to images of dozens of women for that price. Emily was merely one of the newest.  Five minutes of investigation by main stream media would have shown, as anyone who has ever been the victim of internet porn pop-ups and seen the prices listed could testify, that being a "solo nude model" hardly qualifies anyone as an "Internet Queen" or even defines their site as pornography in the opinion of the majority of the population. 

"RagingBucks set up a fund for Emily's family and seeded it with $3,000. The least the "Star-Telegram" could have done was to match that amount, so that Emily might at least be paid symbolically part of the money she made for them. But they never did. 

But what finally, ultimately pisses me off is that if you “Google” the name Emily Sander you get 1,920,000 references, and almost all of them refer to her at some point as an "internet porn star". But if you Google “Isreal Mireles” you get just 734 hits -  and he’s the SOB convicted of raping and murdering her and then dumping her body beside a highway before picking up his 16 year old pregnant girl friend and fleeing the country.  

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