Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 115

Self Matters
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to “get laid” by them, lest these heroes become down-to-earth servomechanisms:
extensions of our mundane desires—extensions of us.
Ask any rock star, however, and he or she will cheerfully acknowledge
that sleeping with fans (on the part of those “privileged” enough to do so) has
always been a popular contemporary pastime. A few short weeks following
9/11, New York City firefighters had become a collective commodity: FDNY t-
shirts alone accounted for millions of dollars in profits, not all of which went to
relief organizations. Firefighters routinely appeared on radio and TV talk shows;
one made an appearance as an opera singer on public television. On the eve of
9/11 2002, ESPN televised a football game featuring survivors from the FDNY
and the NYPD. Before 9/11, needless to say, ESPN had little or nothing to
broadcast about amateur adult athletic competition in New York or anywhere
else.
All this seems innocuous enough compared to the transformation, in
mid-summer 2002, of two California teenage rape victims into eager media
celebrities. On a July afternoon near the high desert town of Antelope Valley,
sixteen-year-old Tamara Brooks and seventeen-year-old Jackie Marris were
abducted at gunpoint, tied up, and raped by a drunken ex-felon who was later
shot to death by Kern County Sheriffs deputies. Immediately after being
assaulted, one girl stabbed the perpetrator in the neck while the other smashed
him in the face with a whiskey bottle.
When a rape occurs, the policy of print and electronic media is not to
divulge the name(s) of victims. From the beginning, however, the case of
Tamara and Jackie was different. The girls agreed to tell their story on national
television, Tamara explaining,
Me and Jackie want to get the message across to everybody to
never give up on anything . . . . If you ever give up, you’re
lost. Whatever obstacles you have, you’ve got to fight your
way through.3
The platitudinous (not to mention rehearsed) sound of Tamara’s words,
along with the response of her father, Sammie Brooks, a teacher at Antelope
Valley College, raised suspicions about media exploitation of the girls. Brooks
commented, “I think she’s having fun with the publicity. People wanting to see
her and have her on TV and magazines is good healing for her.”4 He didn’t
add—perhaps he didn’t know—that talk show bookers often tell guests who’ve
gone through traumatic experiences that discussing what happened on TV is
therapeutic. The transparent truth is, of course, that TV producers are more
interested in audience ratings than they are in the psychological welfare of
victims like Tamara and Jackie. Sammie Brooks went on to explain that he
hadn’t seen his daughter since the police rescued her and Jackie because she