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Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US pp 99–120Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Use of Celebrity Men in Anti-Trafficking and Ending Demand Interventions: Observations on the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” Public Service Campaign

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Part of the book series: Global Masculinities ((GLMAS))

Abstract

This chapter explores the shaping of masculinities in relation to celebrity culture, using the example of the high-profile “Real men don’t buy girls” anti-trafficking campaign circulated via social media. This discussion looks closely at the visual and textual rhetoric of the campaign’s anti-trafficking message. Through the lens of celebrity culture, masculinity is at risk of being constructed as a series of celebrity-driven images, while the cause of anti-trafficking becomes partially obscured behind the spectacle of celebrity. While celebrity advocacy brings with it tremendous potential to raise popular awareness of anti-trafficking, whether such campaigns can change hegemonic masculinities, or simply reproduce what they seek to change, remains an open question.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See <http://www.youtube.com/user/DNAFoundation>. The archived website of the DNA Foundation can still be accessed at: <http://web.archive.org/web/20120130202318/http://demiandashton.org>.

  2. 2.

    As Moore notes: “People’s criticism has created even more conversation. While we didn’t want to offend anybody and it’s certainly not our intention to make light of any issue we take very seriously, we see that it’s actually doing what we intended” (qtd. in Hickey 2011).

  3. 3.

    Indeed, this chapter understands trafficking as defined in the UN “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons” (United Nations 2004), which states, “‘Trafficking in persons’ shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery” (42).

  4. 4.

    Accordingly, identity—specifically gender—is therefore changeable, yet disciplined by various systems and institutions to maintain social order and hierarchies (cf. Butler; Hudson; and Connell 2005). In this view, gender is not inherent and fixed (cf. Butler). While conventionally gender is understood in binary form (with masculine and feminine existing in opposition to each other as monolithic entities), this chapter moves away from this view, in accepting that masculinities are multiple, fluid, constructed, and precarious.

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Collier 1995, 1998, 2004, 2010; Connell 1987, 2000, 2005; Connell and Pearse 2009; Gardiner 2002; A. Harris 2000; Liddle 1996.

  6. 6.

    An example of this increased celebrity scrutiny and its effects is that, immediately following Kutcher’s Penn State Twitter incident in which he tweeted a controversial comment about a child sexual abuse scandal, he turned over his ‘personal’ Twitter account to an image management firm for all outgoing communications.

  7. 7.

    Paradoxically, Arianna Huffington’s photo also appears once in the series. But, Huffington is not named as a ‘Real Woman’ but that, instead, she “Prefers a Real Man”.

  8. 8.

    There were three sources cited on the DNA Foundation website: [1]http://www.freetheslaves.net/, [2] UNICEF http://www.worldofchildren.org/index.php/honorees/honoree-journals-from-the-field/165-a-white-paoer-on-the-child-sex-trade-by-harry-leibowitz, [3] http://www.justice.gov/criminal/ceos/prostitution.htmlr (DNA, n. pag.).

  9. 9.

    A spirited media debate soon erupted, contrasting the ‘100,000 to 300,000’ underage trafficking victims cited by Kutcher, to the ‘few hundred’ victims proposed by the newspaper Village Voice, based upon a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study (see Cismar, Conklin, and Hinman 2011). Further clouding the issue, the Village Voice is part of a parent company that owns Backpage.com, an ads-serving website that “dominates the sex trafficking industry” (Kristof 2012, n. pag.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jesus College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Sarah L. Steele

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Tyler Shores

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  1. Sarah L. Steele
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Correspondence to Sarah L. Steele .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of English and American Studies, Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

    Stefan Horlacher

  2. Department of English, Kent State University , Kent, Ohio, USA

    Kevin Floyd

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Steele, S.L., Shores, T. (2017). The Use of Celebrity Men in Anti-Trafficking and Ending Demand Interventions: Observations on the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” Public Service Campaign . In: Horlacher, S., Floyd, K. (eds) Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50820-7_6

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