Jessica Hahn, media whore: sex scandals and female publicity

Abstract

–While much writing has focused on historical associations between women and “the private,” and on women's entry into “public” roles, very little consideration has been given to the gendered aspects of publicity itself. Drawing especially on media narration of Jessica Hahn–who became a media figure due to her role in the 1987 Jim Bakker sex scandal–the author demonstrates how fresh political rhetorics lend themselves to stale sexual roles and scripts, and some key ways in which publicity is gendered. Sex scandals, it is argued, are an especially useful spot to witness the interplay between female sexuality and female publicity, both of which are explicit narrative elements of sex scandals. After briefly recounting the history of the public character of sex scandal vixen/victim, with roots in virgin-or-whore roles reaching back into the 19th century, the author points to the ways Jessica Hahn's image both replays and departs from that earlier characterization. As two newer contemporary discourses of feminism and of celebrity meet up with the virgin-whore discourse, they become conjoined: bodily virginity and media innocence, the loose woman and the media whore, the good girl and the self-commodifier, map onto one another. The sex scandal icon serves to mark the limits, and the restricted terrain, of female publicity.