Real men set norms? Anti-trafficking campaigns and the limits of celebrity norm entrepreneurship

Abstract

This article analyzes celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship through a specific instance of its enactment: Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (the K&M Campaign). Drawing from literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship, and using qualitative-interpretive methods of data collection and analysis, I show how the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of this norm entrepreneurship that demonstrates why and how celebrities communicate norms to the broader public. To illustrate, I show how changing political-economic conditions have facilitated celebrities’ ascendance in the polity, and I argue that Kutcher and Moore have emerged under these conditions to actively oppose human trafficking. Using their considerable resources, they have promoted an “individual responsibility” norm that instructs the public to avoid coercive sexual and labor activities and trafficking situations. I then argue further that the K&M Campaign provides broader lessons about norms’ fluidity: even when they are seemingly incontrovertible and their entrepreneurial proponents (celebrities) have extensive resources, norms may be contradicted and contentious nonetheless. In this case, by promoting an individual responsibility norm, Kutcher and Moore inadvertently conveyed retrograde gender norms and minimized the importance of broader structural solutions to human trafficking.

Keywords

celebrities gender human trafficking norms public awareness sex trafficking

For every issue, there’s a celebrity spokesperson. Film star Susan Sarandon is a regular speaker at the March for Women’s Lives in support of women’s reproductive rights. Pop star Madonna created the charity “Raising Malawi” to draw attention to children’s health and education in the African country. And basketball star LeBron James has spoken publicly against racist police practices in the United States. While their actions can be dismissed as examples of self-promotion, these celebrities are also acting as “norm entrepreneurs:” individuals interested in challenging and changing norms, which are broadly defined as beliefs about appropriate behavior for persons with a given identity (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998).

To understand celebrity norm entrepreneurship, this article analyzes a specific instance of its enactment through Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s media campaign against human trafficking (hereafter referred to as the K&M Campaign). This campaign includes the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” (Real Men) videos, which were released in 2011 through YouTube, and a human trafficking public service announcement (PSA) for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS PSA), featured on CNN’s Airport Network in 2011 and now available through YouTube.

I argue broadly that the K&M Campaign provides an early, high-profile example of celebrity norm entrepreneurship regarding human trafficking that demonstrates why and how celebrities communicate norms to the broader public. To illustrate, I draw on literatures about celebrities and politics and norm entrepreneurship to first define the concept of “celebrity” and show how changing political-economic conditions have facilitated celebrities’ ascendance in the polity. Namely, the decline of the Hollywood studio system alongside conditions of “late modernity” created space for celebrities to engage in political/humanitarian activities by using their considerable resources to stake normative claims and act in partnership with government bodies. I argue here that Kutcher and Moore emerged under these conditions, as norm entrepreneurs, to actively oppose human trafficking. Using their extensive resources, they engaged with the public and government agencies to promote an “individual responsibility” norm that instructs the public to avoid sex and labor trafficking situations.

Next, I argue further that the K&M Campaign provides broader lessons about norms’ fluidity: even when norms are seemingly incontrovertible and their entrepreneurial proponents (celebrities) have extensive resources, norms may be contradicted and contentious nonetheless. Although no one would argue that human trafficking is normatively appropriate, and Kutcher and Moore devoted extensive resources to oppose human trafficking, they also contradicted and undermined their efforts in the process. By promoting an individual responsibility norm, they inadvertently conveyed retrograde gender norms and minimized the importance of broader structural solutions to human trafficking.

Norm entrepreneurship, celebrities, and human trafficking

Defined as “standards of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity,” norms “embody a quality of ‘oughtness’ and shared moral assessment” (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998: 891–892). Human societies are marked by their vigorous discussions of norms, sets of shared norms, and means for imposing costs on norm violators (Haidt, 2001, 2007). However, norms are not “things” or static concepts with fixed boundaries that are taught, internalized, and adopted when codified in law (Clapp and Swanston, 2009; Krook and True, 2012). In fact, as I explain below, norms are vague, fluid, and evasive processes that are framed by diverse actors and adopted in diverse contexts (Krook and True, 2012).

In political science, international relations (IR) scholars have devoted the most attention to norms, considering how they emerge, spread, and impact international politics. In general, this happens through a three-stage process involving their emergence, acceptance, and internalization (adoption). Two mechanisms dominate explanations of this process: international institutions, from where norms are embedded and generated, usually in response to demands for inter-state cooperation; and advocacy by norm entrepreneurs, who are motivated by principled ideas and seek to change international or domestic/public behavior (Hyde, 2011).

In his classic study of the social construction of deviance, Howard Becker (1963) coined the term “moral entrepreneur” to describe actors involved in the making, promotion, and enforcement of norms. Termed “norm entrepreneurs” (Sunstein, 1996), these actors are interested in changing social norms, and they include either charismatic individuals or social movement actors who create or promote new norms, and they also may wage campaigns to enforce norms that are already established and codified (Adut, 2004). Examples of notable norm entrepreneurs include Ida B Wells and Frederick Douglass, who created and promoted anti-slavery norms in the United States from the mid- to late 1800s. Similarly, the international campaign for women’s suffrage can be traced to women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony, among others (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998).

Since norm entrepreneurs’ work involves “risks as well as potential benefits for those who carry [this] out” (Adut, 2004: 531), their motivations may be hard to explain, but they often involve references to empathy, altruism, and ideational commitment (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). However, this does not mean that norm entrepreneurs are morally pure—they often work within and define their chosen norms against existing (and possibly popular) norms, and to do this they may act inappropriately to advance their agenda and create normative contradictions in the process. For example, many prominent suffragettes were middle and upper class women who worked within a framework of white supremacy. While they advanced pro-suffrage norms, they also reinforced norms of racism and classism by excluding women of color and emphasizing that it was unfair for nonwhite men to vote while all (white) women could not do the same.

Norm entrepreneurs thus operate by engaging in a “framing” process where they make an issue resonate with relevant audiences by providing a singular interpretation of a particular situation and indicating appropriate behavior for that context (Nadelmann, 1990; Payne, 2001). Of course, frames are often disputed and compete with each other (Payne, 2001). But generally, norm entrepreneurs use an organizational platform like an international governing body or NGO to make their frames resonate with the broader public and secure the support of state actors. Then, after they have persuaded a critical mass to adopt new norms, the norm has arguably reached a threshold or tipping point, after which it either “cascades” or dies (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998).

Political science scholarship on norm entrepreneurship has highlighted the actions of “serious” figures such as academics and political leaders (to name just some examples), but it has devoted less attention to celebrities. Arguably, this omission is reasonable because the news routinely covers celebrities arrested for (among other things) drunk driving and cheating on their partners, which raises questions about whether they are even capable of norm entrepreneurship. Yet, as the following discussion indicates, celebrities have long been part of the American (and global) political landscape, staking normative claims and acting in partnership with government bodies to create or promote new norms. Consequently, they merit scholarly consideration.

Celebrities as norm entrepreneurs

Before discussing celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship, it is important to first theorize the concept of “celebrity.” As Boorstin (2012) writes, this term has roots in the Latin “celebritas” (fame) and “celeber” (frequented), and thus a person of celebrity is known for his “well-knownness” and has a name that “needs no further recognition” (Mills, 2000 [1965]: 72). However, celebrities are not “naturally” famous; instead, they are constructed and mediated through a combination of texts (e.g. television shows), producers (e.g. publicists), and audiences (those who encounter and use their images) (Gamson, 1994; Rojek, 2001). As such, they operate as a largely commercial phenomenon that is coordinated by a wide-ranging media industry and produced and consumed by audiences. While one’s achievements in entertainment (the focus of this article), sports, and fashion typically confer celebrity status, the advent of reality television and social media technologies in the 1990s led to a “demotic turn” (Turner, 2014: 91), where the media was increasingly drawn to “the ordinary.” Consequently, fame no longer depends entirely on one’s position and achievements. As the popularity of Kim Kardashian attests, one may also be famous for doing nothing other than attracting public attention (Turner, 2014).

Yet no matter how one attains celebrity status, celebrities know that their audience may withdraw its acknowledgment at any moment (van Krieken, 2012). A quality of exchange thus defines the process of celebrity construction, mediation, and maintenance, particularly in an increasingly corporate and conglomerated media market with growing demand for celebrity content. Celebrities exchange visibility and privacy for fame, the media exchanges information about celebrities for subscribers and advertising revenue, and the public exchanges attention and possibly money for information about celebrities (Hellmueller and Aeschbacher, 2010).

Examining celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship therefore has much analytic purchase because it provides insights about how and why a fleeting quality like “fame” allows one to advocate for and even influence policy about serious and enduring issues. In fact, various political-economic conditions have fostered celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship, namely the changing structure of the entertainment industry. In the US, celebrity entertainers played a relatively minor role in politics and broader national discourse until the mid-20th century, mainly because they were constrained by their contractual agreements with Hollywood studios (Gamson, 1994). In the 1960s, however, the Hollywood studio system declined while trying to recover from the nation’s Red Scare (the fear of the potential rise of communism and the radical left), leading many actors who were formerly constrained by studio contracts to become “free agents.” These developments, alongside mounting social turmoil in the United States, set the stage for celebrity entertainers to become politically active, and some engaged in particularly radical ways, such as anti-war activism (Yrjölä, 2011). For example, Jane Fonda visited Vietnam to show her opposition to the war, where she was photographed in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, which earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and the ire of American veterans.

But more commonly, celebrities became active in the humanitarian realm, which, broadly speaking, attempts to alleviate human suffering and bring about a more humane, peaceful, and cooperative world, often by casting a unified “humanity” against individual victims who must be cared for (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016; Yrjölä, 2011). Although celebrity humanitarianism can be traced to the 1950s, when the United Nations asked American actor Danny Kaye to become its first Goodwill Ambassador, it escalated with the development of television and the explosive growth of the human rights arena through the 1960s and 1970s (Thrall and Stecula, 2017). Bob Geldof’s 1985 recording of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and the related Live Aid concerts were the key events that signaled the ascendance of celebrity humanitarianism. As Richey and Ponte (2008: 716) document, “An estimated two billion people watched the concerts, and the telethon raised almost US$150 million, the largest ever at that time”.

Alongside the decline of the Hollywood studio system, various conditions of “late modernity”—namely, changes in the relationship between the media, the public, and the political process—have also facilitated and legitimized celebrities’ political/humanitarian engagement. Developments in communication technologies have collapsed the distance between celebrities and ordinary life, as the popularity of reality TV and YouTube attest (Bystrom, 2011), and they have also drawn closer links between celebrities and topical issues (Biccum, 2011). But as the public has grown closer to celebrities, it has also disengaged from the political process (Brockington and Henson, 2014). Therefore, to (re)engage the public or, at the very least, draw its attention to important issues of the day, political leaders often rely on “celebrity” in various ways.

First, in an increasingly informal and individualized political environment, political leaders use celebrities’ social media and marketing strategies to reach out and relate to their constituents (e.g. by posting a photo of themselves shaving on Instagram) (Manning et al., 2017).

And second, and more significantly, neoliberal political trends emphasizing market-based solutions to social problems have led states and political leaders to incorporate more elites into the policy process, including corporate actors, the charitable sector, and celebrities (Bang, 2007; Brockington and Henson, 2014; Hart and Tindall, 2009). As individuals with “attention capital” (Van Krieken, 2012), celebrities can draw the public’s attention to issues in ways many elected officials cannot (Steele and Shores, 2014a). Namely, celebrities may use their position in what Lindquist (2010: 227) terms the “humanitarian media complex”—the ever-evolving assemblage of films, investigative reporting, and documentaries, among other media formats—to shape public perceptions of humanitarian issues (including human trafficking). In so doing, celebrities “speak for” the Third World, the poor, etc. (Kapoor, 2012) and act as emotional sovereigns who stand for and provide narratives of accountability and social justice (Richey and Ponte, 2008).

All of this furthers elite dominance of the political process, where, in part, celebrities use their media expertise to convince the public that they have the answers to the problems they face (Bang, 2007; Hart and Tindall, 2009). Consequently, as Steele and Shores (2014a) so trenchantly observe, state authority is now shared with celebrities who often act with and beyond the state, as indicated by the veritable explosion in celebrities’ engagement in both Democratic and Republican electoral campaigns and get-out-the-vote efforts (Nolan and Brookes, 2013; Payne et al., 2007); testimony before Congressional committees (Demaine, 2009); and international diplomacy (Choi and Berger, 2010), development (Biccum, 2011; Brockington, 2014), and humanitarian aid (Repo and Yrjölä, 2011).

Scholarship about these activities indicates that celebrities may activate and promote norms. Lindenberg et al. (2011) examined the effects of a normative message, presented by a celebrity, on a group of college students in Denmark. Although this study is limited in scope, its findings show that “the prestige-generating power of success makes celebrities special and gives them the power to exert normative influence” (Lindenberg et al., 2011: 103). And as Alexandra Budabin (2015) shows in her study of Mia Farrow’s activism regarding the Beijing Olympics, celebrities engage in norm promotion to draw attention to an issue, secure an organizational platform, build state support, and shape policy.

What, then, are the potential benefits and disadvantages of celebrities’ political engagement and norm entrepreneurship? On the one hand, celebrities’ high profiles bring issues to the public’s attention (Demaine, 2009), and they also provide “information shortcuts” for average citizens (Frizzell, 2011). Yet, on the other hand, celebrities often lack training and knowledge about the issues they address, and they over-simplify issues (Demaine, 2009; Dieter and Kumar, 2008), detract attention from more committed and knowledgeable local activists (Cooper, 2007; Meyer and Gamson, 1995), and fail to account for the solutions they propose (Haynes, 2014).

However, the disadvantages of this activity are more significantly rooted in celebrities’ positions as meticulously mediated constructions (Rojek, 2001). Put simply, a celebrity may use her fame to engage in norm entrepreneurship to draw attention to issues and to herself in order to build her brand identity. But in this process, celebrities also engage in broader meaning production (Yrjölä, 2011), defining “standards of appropriate behavior” (norms) for political leaders and vast audiences. For example, Project RED was founded in 2006 by Bono and Bobby Shriver “to get businesses and people involved in the fight against AIDS.”¹ Here the normative message was that chic consumerism was an appropriate response to AIDS; however, this also masked the social, racial, and environmental trade and production relations that underpin poverty, inequality, and disease, particularly in Africa (Richey and Ponte, 2008). Such examples thus illustrate how, as objects of consumption, celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship may define and give meaning to issues in ways that do not critique but instead legitimate a particular social order and the inequalities it supports—namely, capitalism and its underlying logic that the individual has commercial and cultural value (Kapoor, 2012; Richey and Ponte, 2008; Turner, 2014).

Building on this scholarship, I consider celebrity activism against human trafficking, a high-profile issue that has captured the attention of the public, political leaders, and, of course, celebrities. Defined as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion … for the purpose of exploitation” (United Nations, 2014: 42), celebrities’ opposition to this is not “entrepreneurial,” and the K&M Campaign may be read as a low-stakes way to leverage their public profiles and support an uncontroversial cause. However, my goal is not to evaluate the campaign’s sincerity; instead, I use it to highlight the conditions that make the growth of celebrity norm entrepreneurship possible, and to indicate the fluidity of norms more broadly.

Interpreting celebrities’ anti-trafficking work: A discussion of methods

To study the K&M Campaign, I collected qualitative data and employed interpretive methods of analysis. The primary data for this project included, centrally, the Real Men videos, which were originally available through YouTube, and the DHS PSA, which is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvT-Us792Hg 2. To understand Real Men’s and the DHS PSA’s visibility, I contacted a representative from the DNA (Demi and Ashton) Foundation (now THORN Digital Defenders), which sponsored the campaign. They provided me with a list of the campaign’s media coverage and a chart (based on their own data) that documents the campaign’s reach and impact (see Appendix 1). I also had various email and phone conversations with representatives from THORN. To date, I have not been able to secure a conversation with Mr Kutcher, Ms Moore, or their representatives. Additionally, I have been in contact with the DHS since March 2015 (my most recent email correspondence (July 12, 2016) informed me that they were still working on my request), and I also obtained information from CNN, which displayed the DHS PSA in airports.

Here it is important to note the limitations of this primary data. Since it comes from the K&M Campaign’s producers and supporters, one can assume that it is structured and presented to show the Campaign in a positive light. Therefore, from a methodological perspective, I could not take the videos and related data at face value. To understand these materials, I thus used interpretive methods of analysis (IMA), which seeks to understand and describe social and political phenomenon by recognizing that there are multiple socially constructed realities, where “truth” is context dependent (Chilisa, 2012). IMA takes language and other texts/artifacts seriously to focus on problems of meaning “that bear on action as well as understanding” (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2006: xii). However, since interpretations are never fixed, one must also look for actors’ (and institutions’) specific, situated meanings and meaning-making practices in a given context, while understanding that multiple meanings are possible (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012).

To interpret Real Men’s meaning as an instance of celebrity norm entrepreneurship, I did not view the primary data (described above) as static, with fixed meanings and messages; instead, I understood it as produced by and situated within a broader context. I therefore collected and reviewed scholarly and news articles about Real Men and the DHS PSA (many of which are cited below) that critique them and also explain the broader context of their development and release. Altogether, these articles illuminated various gaps, omissions, etc. in the data provided by the K&M Campaign’s producers and supporters.

Additionally, when interpreting the K&M Campaign’s materials, I was attentive to their discourse—the interactive process of conveying ideas, which includes normative ideas about “what is good or bad about what is” (Schmidt, 2008: 304–306) that are often conveyed and exchanged among a range of actors in varied contexts (Schmidt, 2010). Often, discourse is used for the purpose of “social persuasion,” where discourse partners—individuals who are respected for their wisdom (or, in the case of celebrities, their exposure or “known-ness” (Boorstin, 2012))—use language and evidence to support a particular norm or explain a norm violation (Haidt, 2001: 829). Ideally, this social persuasion will evoke different emotions and ultimately encourage individuals to see an issue in different ways (Greene and Haidt, 2002; Haidt, 2001; Kahneman, 2013).

To interpret how the K&M Campaign conveyed norms to the public, I thus viewed “norms as anchored in language and revealed by repeated speech acts, leading to a semblance of permanence or institutionalization” (Krook and True, 2012: 105). I was particularly attentive to norms regarding sexual, gender, and labor-related behaviors, and I reviewed the Real Men and DHS PSA videos for recurring ideas or language related to these topics. I listed the normative themes that emerged and noted the processes and methods by which celebrities communicated them to their audiences.

Kutcher, Moore, and anti-trafficking norm entrepreneurship

Celebrities’ activism regarding human trafficking has grown since 2000, when the US Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (Majic 2016), and today, celebrity interventions, documentaries, artistic works, and fiction films powerfully distribute trafficking and “modern slavery” rhetoric (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016). And amidst these activities, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s efforts merit special consideration: they were among the first entertainment celebrities to devote significant resources to and gain visibility around this issue and partner with a government body (DHS) through their efforts. But, like celebrity status itself, their actions and normative messages were mediated by various factors—namely, as the following pages discuss, the prominence and success of the anti-trafficking movement, alongside their financial and technological resources, created a context in which Kutcher and Moore developed and promoted a particular anti-trafficking norm.

In line with scholarship noted above, Kutcher and Moore fit the definition of celebrity norm entrepreneurs: they were (and are) well-known for their film and television pursuits, and for the tabloid fodder around their personal lives. Their anti-trafficking norm entrepreneurship emerged through their development of empathy, altruism, and ideational commitment. Soon after they were married, Kutcher saw “Children for Sale,” a documentary on Dateline about sex trafficking in Cambodia, which sparked his empathy for victims. As he declared in a 2011 press release, “I was watching six and seven year-old girls be raped for profit … I don’t want to live in a world where these things are happening and I’m not doing anything about them” (Kavner, 2011). Kutcher’s recounting of the Dateline documentary was an exaggeration (viewers did not see children raped), but his statement expresses a norm that trafficking constitutes inappropriate behavior that must be punished.

Anti-trafficking norms

This norm did not appear out of thin air, indicating how anti-trafficking norms, like other norms, are not fixed; instead, they are fluid and evasive processes that are adapted and embedded in varied contexts by diverse actors, and they reflect culturally and historically specific discourses about gender, race, class, and sexuality (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016; Krook and True, 2012). In fact, anti-trafficking norms’ emergence can be traced to the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, when there was great societal concern about the allegedly rampant trafficking in white women and girls for the purposes of prostitution (Doezema, 2010). Today, there remain no reliable estimates of the numbers of persons trafficked for any purpose (McGough, 2013), but concern about this issue—and about sex trafficking in particular—has again come to prominence (O’Brien, 2011).

As Carisa Showden and I (2014) document elsewhere, the contemporary (North American) movement against human trafficking emerged in at least the 1970s, when sex workers and feminists clashed about whether prostitution embodied the subordination and enslavement of women in society. These debates were amplified further through the so-called “feminist sex wars” of the 1980s, where feminist scholars and advocates debated pornography’s role in the oppression of women (Abrams, 1995). In the 1990s, rising public and political attention to women’s rights globally drew attention to women and girls’ exploitation in the sex industry, as the media circulated stories of Latin American, Eastern European, and Asian women illegally trafficked to work in brothels in Western Europe, among other locations (Gozdziak and Collett, 2005; Soderlund, 2005). Soon, the US public and political leaders became concerned that women and girls were also being captured and coerced into prostitution and other forms of sex work (i.e. sex trafficked) in “their own backyard.” Aided by prominent journalists such as Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times, and by a deluge of films such as Taken (2008) and The Whistleblower (2010), human trafficking was framed in individual terms: predatory men captured (young) women for (sexual) slavery (Showden and Majic, 2016).

Varied normative positions surround the issue of human trafficking, indicating the fluidity and adaptation of norms by diverse actors. One of the most prominent positions, advocated by groups such as the International Justice Mission and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, has framed human trafficking in terms of individual responsibility, prosecution, and punishment (Kinney, 2006). Focusing mainly on sex trafficking, these norm entrepreneurs have used PSAs (among other measures) to argue that male clients and traffickers trick and lure women and girls into prostitution, and thus it is normatively inappropriate to tolerate any (coerced or voluntary) sex work. Women should be diverted from the criminal justice system and offered social services that help them exit the sex industry, while the (male) traffickers and clients must be punished to end their “demand” for commercial sexual services and other forced labor.

In contrast, critical trafficking scholars and groups such as the Network of Sex Work Projects have framed human trafficking as a problem caused by structural factors such as gender inequality, anti-immigration measures, and economic inequality. By downplaying these factors to focus on individual (male) responsibility, they argue, sex work/trafficking is presented in limited ways. Discursively, women are cast as passive victims for rescue, whereas men are active agents who have power and profit from their engagement in the sex trades or other labor (Agustin, 2007). Moreover, focusing on punishing men’s “demand” for sex sidelines sex workers’ demands for housing, living wages, and education (among other needs) (Gira Grant, 2014: 42–43) and reinforces racialized, colonial, and anti-immigration sentiments. Men who purchase sexual services or act as traffickers are often framed as “brutal Eastern Europeans” or “rapacious Africans” (Doezema, 2010: 1), while women are described as “passive migrant objects” (Agustin, 2007: 23) or as “exotic” and ignorant (Kempadoo, 1998: 10).

Yet, despite the fact that “decades of research and activism [has] put forward a convincing critique of the passive and enslaved trafficking victim” (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016: 2), policymakers have largely internalized individual responsibility and punishment norms as appropriate responses to human trafficking. Outside of the US, the first and most notable policy example of this norm internalization emerged in 1998, in Sweden, when political leaders passed a law criminalizing those who purchase sexual services (mostly men) but not those who sell them (mostly women). And in the US, the expansive and consistently re-authorized TVPA allocates funding to federal agencies and state and local governments to promote the arrests and prosecutions of (sex) traffickers and purchasers of sexual services.

Resources

Therefore, while the individual responsibility norm Kutcher and Moore promoted is clearly not new, their promotion of it is significant because it indicates how celebrities use their fame and considerable resources to bring norms to the wider public. Unlike many “common” norm entrepreneurs, who must develop a public profile in order to have their message heard, Kutcher and Moore were (and are) already famous, and they could hire advisors to establish their credibility and create a platform for their actions. Specifically, Kutcher and Moore studied human trafficking and developed their response with Trevor Neilson, a prominent “philanthropic advisor” who formerly worked in the Clinton White House. Through his Global Philanthropy Group, Neilson was an early supporter of Bono’s Africa initiative, and he has since helped steer the charitable endeavors of celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and Angelina Jolie (Holson, 2010).³

Neilson helped Kutcher and Moore create a platform for their norm entrepreneurship. In 2010, they created the DNA Foundation (Demi and Ashton Foundation) to save children from child sexual slavery. In September of that year, Kutcher, an early technology investor and enthusiast (he was one of Twitter’s first adopters), spoke at a panel on technology, social media, and philanthropy at the Clinton Global Initiative, which “seeks to leverage celebrity influence in the political and entertainment fields to encourage philanthropy in the USA” (Brockington, 2014: 94). Coached by Neilson, he told the assembled group how the DNA Foundation was using social media to combat sex trafficking by helping more women and girls access technology (Huffington, 2010). Later, in November 2010, Kutcher and Moore also spoke to the United Nations at a panel announcing the UN-sponsored fund for victims of human trafficking. As Laura Holson (2010) reports, Kutcher tearfully told the audience of 500 that “slavery, globally, is a dirty little secret” and that the average age of a sex slave is 13. Moore also tearfully told a story about a child prostitute she met in Los Angeles who was forced to sit in a tub of ice if she did not earn US$1500 per night.

In addition to hiring philanthropic advisors, Kutcher and Moore used their technology and communications resources and their Hollywood social network to reach their targeted public: men. They launched Real Men at a Clinton Global Initiative event on April 11, 2011 and, as Table 1 indicates, it features various prominent male celebrities performing a domestic task incorrectly.

Table 1.

Real Men Don’t Buy Girls videos (overview).

Starring celebrity	Title	Featured activity	Other featured/named celebrities	Number of views (as of January 2015)
Sean Penn	Real Men Know How to Use an Iron	Penn irons a grilled cheese sandwich	Jessica Biel, Edward Norton	322,426
Ashton Kutcher	Real Men Do Their Own Laundry	Kutcher takes a pair of dirty socks, throws them in the garbage, and takes a new pair out of a package	Eva Longoria, Ariana Huffington	286,105
Bradley Cooper	Real Men Know How to Make a Meal	Cooper opens a cereal box, pours milk inside, and eats out of the box with a large serving spoon	Eva Longoria, Conan O’Brien	276,328
Justin Timberlake	Real Men Prefer a Close Shave	Timberlake attempts to shave with a chainsaw	Eva Longoria, Piers Morgan	167,037
Isaiah Mustafa	Real Men Have a Sense of Direction	Mustafa walks blindfolded (and shirtless) through a parking lot and gets into a car	Eva Longoria, Pete Cashmore	113,743
Jamie Foxx	Real Men Know How to Use the Remote	While watching The Apprentice, Foxx opens a beer bottle with the remote	Eva Longoria, Donald Trump	69,853
Drake	Real Men are Distrustful of Robots	Drake beats up a robot. [Video content no longer available]	Eva Longoria, David Spade	63,322

Note: This presents the most-viewed versions of the videos. Other identical versions exist where, at the end, Longoria will refer to another celebrity.

Source: Real Men Don’t Buy Girls video page on YouTube, which was originally available at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL95E64A6AEEED5718 (last accessed in November 2015).

The videos all follow a similar format to the most widely viewed video starring Sean Penn and featuring Ed Norton (322,314 views). This video opens in a dimly lit wood-paneled living room, where Penn is hunched over an ironing board. Jazzy music plays in the background, and the viewer can hear hissing and see the steam from the iron. The camera turns to Penn, and then text on the screen appears, read by a deep masculine voice: “Real men know how to use an iron.” A pull away shot reveals that Penn is in fact ironing a cheese sandwich, followed by the same deep masculine voice stating, “real men don’t buy girls.” Then Penn reappears, taking a bite out of a grilled cheese sandwich; his face then fades into a picture frame with the title “Real Man.” Then another framed picture of Burt Reynolds appears with the same text, followed by two other celebrities (Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford). Jessica Biel appears next, standing beside a framed picture of Edward Norton, and she says to the camera, “Edward is a real man. Are you?” Then, the screen reads, “Take a stand against child sex slavery,” and two textboxes below it state “I am a real man” and “I prefer a real man.” There is also a link below to “demiandashton.org.” A prompt encourages the reader to “Click here to create and share your own Real Men video now!”⁴

The Real Men ads indicate how Kutcher and Moore promoted the individual responsibility norm by deploying gendered discourse that encouraged men to change their behavior and act more responsibly. Through their slogan, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls,” they emphasize that men’s non-normative behavior (i.e. the purchase of sexual services from young girls) is the main cause of sex trafficking. Real Men conveys this individual male responsibility norm by referencing another widely-held norm that men are incapable of (feminized) domestic tasks and behaviors, by showing them as clueless individuals who cannot make a cheese sandwich, shave, or do their own laundry. However, the featured male celebrities are already inter-textually known (renowned) as famous men who usually play uber-masculine roles (Steele & Shores 2014b). This “irony” makes the ads funny and, in theory, draws (male) viewers in to engage with the message by inserting their own photos into the campaign.⁵

According to data obtained from the DNA Foundation (now THORN Digital Defenders) in Appendix 1, Real Men was popular: 1.6 million people participated in it (a representative from THORN could not specify the nature of this participation (interview, January 22, 2015)); traffic to demiandashton.org increased 2117% in the first week of the campaign; and online mentions of the terms “child sex slavery” and “real men don’t buy girls” increased 1120% and 2738%, respectively, in the first month of the campaign.

Through their foundation and the Real Men campaign, Demi and Ashton became highly visible anti-trafficking norm entrepreneurs and, in line with scholarship noted previously, their high profile made them attractive to government agencies working to end human trafficking. Indicating Steele and Shores’ (2014a) insight that state authority is now often shared with celebrities, the DHS began to work with Kutcher and Moore through its Blue Campaign, which was created “To harness the authorities and resources of the Department of Homeland Security to deter human trafficking by increasing awareness, protecting victims, and contributing to a robust criminal justice response” (DHS, 2010). While the Blue Campaign (https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign) involves a number of measures, such as producing informational materials and law enforcement trainings, in 2010 it announced that it had “partnered with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher to produce a public service announcement (PSA) to raise awareness about human trafficking”. While Real Men was directed at men, the DHS PSA—a major (first) celebrity-government anti-trafficking partnership—was aimed at the broader public. This PSA appeared in airports across the US in 2011, on CNN’s Airport Network, but unlike Real Men, its tone is much more serious and it focuses on all types of trafficking.

The one-minute ad opens with Kutcher and Moore stating that the United States welcomes millions of people each year, but thousands (especially women and children) arrive full of hope, only to find themselves living in slavery. Kutcher and Moore then pose a number of “Have you …?” questions to the viewer, voiced over various photos of individuals in compromised positions, including have you “had ID or travel documents taken?”, “been told what to say to immigration officials or law enforcement?”, “been forced against your will to work without pay, pay off debt, or engage in sex?”, and “been threatened with violence or had your family threatened?” Then the camera shows Kutcher and Moore, who ask the viewer, “are you a slave?” They proceed to instruct the viewer to seek help through the police, the DHS website, or the DHS trafficking hotline. Next, they state that the “US is determined to stop trafficking” and “law enforcement officers and agencies are tracking down and prosecuting traffickers and protecting victims.” Panning to Moore’s and Kutcher’s faces, the PSA tells viewers to “Do your part. Be Alert. Take Action,” and to “make a difference in someone’s life by helping to end human trafficking.”

Like Real Men, the DHS PSA also promotes an individual responsibility norm regarding human trafficking, but in this case the targeted individuals include victims of trafficking and members of the general public. This targeting is most apparent when the PSA asks the audience (viewers in airports) to consider a number of indicators of human trafficking, such as having documents stolen or being forced to engage in sex. Following this, they ask the audience, “Are you a slave?” and then proceed to explain that if one answers “yes” to this question (or any others), the individual should contact the authorities and/or the national human trafficking hotline. While it is certainly helpful for individuals to be aware of trafficking situations (and to know what to do if they find themselves or someone else in one), the DHS PSA conveys the norm that individuals must identify and help trafficking victims and connect them to the state.

Like Real Men, the DHS PSA reached a potentially large audience. A CNN official informed me (email correspondence, September 18, 2015) that PSAs like Kutcher and Moore’s run without charge, and since “they do not have revenue associated with them and are just run sporadically when unsold ad inventory is available,” the network does not track the number of times that they air. However, according to their marketing materials (CNN Airport Network, 2011), when ads do appear on the Airport Network, it is possible for them to be in 45 airports and 27 club rooms annually, nationwide, reaching an estimated 234.9 million viewers: an “upscale and influential” audience whose median age is 45 and average income is US$101,400 per year.

Through all of their campaign materials, Kutcher and Moore promoted an individual responsibility norm (that was previously established and best known in anti-trafficking circles) to a much wider public audience. Yet, like so many other norms, this one is not static—it was not conveyed and accepted “as is.” Rather, the K&M Campaign illustrates norms’ fluidity: despite their considerable profile, resources, and seemingly incontrovertible normative position, Kutcher and Moore also promoted other (arguably less desirable) gendered individual responsibility norms.

As noted previously, anti-trafficking norm entrepreneurship has long been framed in terms of gender equality, and the K&M Campaign highlighted this in the Real Men ads. Here one may argue that Kutcher and Moore used humor about men’s supposed domestic shortcomings to engage the target audience: presumably, if men watch the ads and laugh, they will be receptive to the normative message about sex trafficking. However, this strategy actually undermined gender equality norms on a number of levels, thereby indicating a norm’s fluidity and potential for contradiction in the norm entrepreneurship process.

For one, the Real Men ads have the disturbing effect of likening simple, benign domestic tasks to sex trafficking by showing that knowing how to use a remote, make breakfast, or ask for directions is akin to knowing that one should not purchase sexual services from young girls. Second, while few would agree that it is normatively acceptable to force a girl into sex work, the statement that “real men” do not “buy girls” discursively re-produces more traditional gender norms. Namely, the videos cast (predominantly white) men in the role of protectors, a “tired and harmful trope” (Auguston, 2014: 1), while simultaneously presuming their “dominative masculinity” (Young, 2003) by casting them as predators who endanger young girls. And in addition to reifying dominative masculinity, Real Men also emphasizes diminutive femininity by objectifying girls and rendering them silent and invisible. In effect, while “real men” may not “buy girls,” the ads indicate that “real girls” do not sell sex. Here, girls are framed as young and innocent objects for purchase, not animate human beings, which also minimizes the fact that boys and queer youth engage in sex work (Curtis et al., 2008; Marcus et al., 2014).

And third, by extension, Real Men’s strategies also reinforce limited gendered notions of sex trafficking. By stating that “real men don’t buy girls,” the campaign frames the purchase of sexual services (and sex trafficking specifically) as a heterosexual phenomenon, where men are dominative predators who perpetrate the majority of harms against girls. However, research indicates that men, boys, and transgender persons are also victims of sex and labor trafficking (Marcus et al., 2014), and as data from a study of male and transgender trafficking victims shows, these individuals may experience violence even more severe than that faced by female victims (Ditmore et al., 2012). Possibly, the K&M Campaign adopted this frame because female victims may garner more sympathy. But in so doing, they, like the suffragists noted previously, reinforced non-egalitarian norms (in this case, regarding ideal victims and predators).

Additionally, by focusing on individual responsibility, the K&M Campaign offers a simplistic solution to a highly complex problem (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016). In particular, the DHS ads place the burden on individuals to find and report victims and perpetrators of trafficking, which is not always a simple or possible task. Trafficking victims often may have “periodic contact with police, immigration officials, hospital staff, and other authorities for years before being identified and freed from enslavement” (US Department of State, 2013: 22). Therefore, even though human trafficking is thought to occur on an enormous scale in the United States (and worldwide), “only a small fraction of trafficking victims are currently identified” (Simich et al., 2014: 2). And among those victims who are identified, many may be unwilling to speak with authorities or others about their experiences because of stigma, the fear of deportation, or for many other reasons (Chapkis, 2003, 2005). Ultimately, placing the burden on the public to identify victims is a limited solution at best, serving mainly to legitimize criminalizing policies and interventions, which do little to challenge structural and causal factors of inequality (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016).

Celebrity norm entrepreneurship: Implications and future research

The K&M Campaign raises questions about celebrity norm entrepreneurship: namely, how do celebrities communicate norms to the broader public, and to what effect? As this article has demonstrated, celebrities have long been a part of the political landscape, and Kutcher and Moore’s efforts are but one recent example. Yet even with considerable resources to support their efforts and control their message, Kutcher and Moore’s campaign indicates how norms are fluid, and how their promotion is not without effect. The remainder of the article discusses these findings’ implications for norm and celebrity politics scholarship, and for how we think of norms and social change more broadly.

This article adds to the growing body of scholarship regarding celebrity norm entrepreneurship in the humanitarian realm (Kapoor, 2012; Tsaliki et al., 2011) by examining celebrities’ efforts to fight a crime (human trafficking). Although there have been many analyses and critiques of celebrities’ (and others’) anti-trafficking efforts (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016), this analysis provides a broad view of such celebrity norm entrepreneurship by situating it historically and looking at its effects, particularly in this late modern moment when the public is often disengaged from the political process and public affairs. At this time, unaccountable elites, including technocrats, business tycoons, and academic experts are increasingly involved in governance (Kapoor, 2012), and, not surprisingly, celebrities have joined their ranks. As media savvy communicators who can simplify complex issues for their fans and the broader public, they are key players in the late modern global political realm (Demaine, 2009; Kapoor, 2012).

Kutcher and Moore exemplify such celebrities: they are famous, skilled communicators who drew from their extensive resources to reach a wide audience and promote particular norms regarding sex trafficking. As such, they are part of a growing “humanitarian media complex” that uses celebrity testimony to present a particularly melodramatic representation of human trafficking (Lindquist, 2010: 227). Studying celebrities’ roles here is important because while their attention-grabbing media strategies and other tactics may help promote norms, their lack of expertise often leads them to misrepresent and misinform the public and political leaders. These shortcomings are particularly evident in Real Men. Although Kutcher and Moore hired a philanthropic advisor to guide their efforts, Trevor Neilson and the Global Philanthropy Group are not human trafficking experts. As a result, Kutcher repeated incorrect information to the public—namely that the average age of entry into prostitution is 13 years of age (a statistic that is routinely reported by government officials and the news media). However, this is a mathematical impossibility that appears to have originated as a misrepresentation of “the average age of first noncommercial sexual contact (which could include kissing, petting, etc.) that was reported by underage girls in one study (Silbert and Pines 1982)” (McNeill, 2014). By pointing out these inaccuracies I am not stating that sex trafficking is a non-issue and/or that celebrities are incapable of raising awareness about it. Instead, I am indicating how, in the course of staking normative claims, celebrities may distort the issues they speak about because they lack relevant expertise. Moreover, celebrities are not necessarily held accountable for their errors and misstatements. When confronted by the Village Voice about his inaccurate statistics, Kutcher responded angrily that they were only questioning him because their parent company, Village Voice Media, owns Backpage.com. This site advertises adult sexual services and has long been accused of promoting the commercial sexual exploitation of children (Cizmar et al., 2011).

Beyond highlighting celebrities’ potential ignorance, the K&M Campaign indicates some broader implications of celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship. For one, it shows how this activity often legitimates consumer and corporate capitalism as solutions to issues such as human trafficking. As discussed previously, celebrities are products that are created and consumed, and their norm entrepreneurship further fuels their self and product promotion. In Kutcher and Moore’s case, they drew from and enhanced their own fame while promoting a particularly gendered, individualistic understanding of human trafficking. In so doing, they encouraged the public to identify and help trafficking victims and purchase consumer goods. In fact, after their divorce in 2011, Moore partnered with Tiffany & Co., the luxury jeweler, to sell diamond handcuff pendants, and the proceeds presumably went to help victims of trafficking (Haynes, 2014). As well, reflecting Kutcher’s technology interests, the couple renamed the DNA Foundation “THORN Digital Defenders,” and they expanded its mandate to “partner across the tech industry, government, and NGOs and leverage technology to combat predatory behavior, rescue victims, and protect vulnerable children” (see wearethorn.org). With these expanded technological efforts, Kutcher became the first person to amass 1 million Twitter followers (which no doubt benefited his investment in the company), often tweeting about sex trafficking (Haynes, 2014).

Together, the K&M Campaign’s emphasis on individual and consumption-oriented solutions to sex trafficking indicates a second limit to celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship: by (re)producing the celebrity product, celebrities potentially detract attention from “the very social inequalities, hierarchies and conflicts that allow exploitation and trafficking to occur” (Andrijasevic and Mai, 2016: 5). While Kutcher and Moore’s efforts emphasized how individuals perpetrate trafficking, extensive research indicates that individual men or organized crime networks are often not the leading cause of entry into prostitution and/or sex trafficking arrangements. Instead, economic need, or dislocation as a result of wars and/or economic development projects, often increases vulnerabilities to sex and labor trafficking (Doezema, 2010; Hoyle et al., 2011; Sharma, 2003). Moreover, many young people begin trading sex because they have left unstable homes, and/or they need food, clothing, shelter, or other resources; less often, they are bribed and kidnapped by individuals who purchase sexual services (Curtis et al., 2008, Marcus et al., 2014, Phoenix, 2002).

Arguably, structural responses such as adequate public provision of food, shelter, education, and other resources would do more to limit young peoples’ entry into sex work than simply telling men that “real men don’t buy girls” (to say nothing of encouraging them to buy a Tiffany pendant). Victims of trafficking often need secure and stable housing, job training, education, and employment in order re-establish their lives; however, even the US Department of State (2015: 355) admits that funding for essential services such as victim shelters remains insufficient. Indeed, within a broader humanitarian media complex, celebrities’ talents may be used more effectively to raise awareness about this service gap, but telling this “structural story” is less dramatic and sexy than a made-for-Hollywood narrative where a predatory man captures an innocent girl.

The K&M Campaign does not represent all celebrity norm entrepreneurship, but it is a high-profile example of this and, as such, it indicates directions for future research. With current data, it is impossible to determine the K&M Campaign’s impact on viewers (or policy), but its visibility and potentially wide reach indicates that many people at least saw the campaign and were exposed to the misinformation and gendered individual responsibility norms it promoted. Although the Real Men campaign was criticized in the media (Cizmar et al., 2011) and, certainly, the public was not entirely passive in its consumption of the campaign’s images and messages, more research is needed to understand how its communicative strategies (and other efforts like it) impact the public and policymakers.

This research is important because as the anti-trafficking movement has ascended, celebrities have joined in as norm entrepreneurs through a variety of platforms (Majic 2016). To name just some examples, in 2012, eight months after learning about sex trafficking from her teenage daughter, actor Jada Pinkett Smith addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the topic. Additionally, celebrities have been active about human trafficking in international governing organizations, such as the United Nations (Haynes 2014), and they have also been part of local government efforts to detect and fight sex trafficking. For example, in New York City, actors Sarah Jessica Parker and Gabourey Sidibe created public service announcements about sex trafficking for the Brooklyn DA’s office in 2010 (Burger, 2010). And outside of government agencies, actress Emma Thompson co-curated an interactive art exhibit in New York City, titled “Journey,” which used seven shipping containers to chronicle the “seven stages” of a trafficked woman’s experience (Vo, 2010: 1). This list of examples is not exhaustive, but it indicates the great extent of celebrities’ norm entrepreneurship regarding human trafficking.

Therefore, future research must consider celebrity norm entrepreneurship in more detail, across a wide range of cases. Do other examples, such as Sarah Jessica Parker and Gabourey Sidibe’s anti-trafficking ads for the New York City government (noted above), deploy similarly gendered, individualistic norms? Does any of this norm entrepreneurship (regarding trafficking or other issues) challenge problematic norms? Answering these questions will enhance understandings of celebrities’ growing roles in the polity, and the prospects for normative and policy change more broadly.

Footnotes

Appendix

Appendix 1.

Impact of the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign.

Number of people who participated in the “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” campaign	1.6 million
Increase in site traffic to www.demiandashton.org	2117% (in first week of campaign)
Educational engagement on www.demiandashton.org (Note: Average web page viewing time across the web is 57 seconds. Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com)	Average time on site: 2 min 30 sec. Top pages visited: Get Informed & Take Action.
Increase in online mentions of relevant terms during campaign:
– “child sex slavery” (505 mentions 3/2010; 6121 in 4/2010)	1120% increase
– “real men don’t buy girls” (236 in 3/2010; 6699 in 4/2010)	2738% increase
Incremental growth of DNA-inspired anti-trafficking community on Facebook and Twitter (starting at baseline of 54,000)	71,000 new people
Number of calls to the Polaris Project’s National HumanTrafficking Resource Center hotline directly tied to campaign	133 calls

Source: THORN Digital Defenders.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY Research Award Program (Award # 68629 00 46).

Notes

Author biography

Samantha A Majic, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. Her research examines political activism and public policy related to sex work and human trafficking in the United States. Her books include Sex Work Politics: From Protest to Service Provision (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and Negotiating Sex Work: The Unintended Consequences of Policy and Activism (co-edited with Carisa Showden, University of Minnesota Press 2014).

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