Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 62

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Popular Culture Review

she and her parents will be killed by Traynor. She insists that she wants to escape
and notify the police, but points to Traynor’s constant threats of murder. Thus,
Lovelace textually justifies her actions in the name of avoiding harm:
There was always a gun pointed at my head. Even when no gun could
be seen, there was always a gun pointed at my head...It’s impossible
for people to understand real terror unless they’ve felt it, lived it, tasted
it. It’s impossible to picture your own death until that possibility is real,
until.. .you are looking at a madman holding a loaded gun. (69-70)
Jaksa and Pritchard (1988), however, point out that ethical decision-making
based on avoidance of harm may be at the cost of another harm. For example, a lie
told to protect the deceived from suffering might also prevent the deceived from
making a decision (100-101). In Lovelace’s case, not contacting the police to avoid
self-harm and harm to her parents presumably led to the harm of other women
being used by Traynor for monetary gain.
Absent from Lovelace’s ethical justification are peer consultation and the test
of publicity. Obviously, the former would have been of little value to her, considering
her “peers” were working in the sex industry. However, the latter, with its reliance
on gaining a wide range of divergent views before making an ethical decision,
might have been effective in developing a strategy for ending her victimization.
Meanwhile, like Lovelace, baseball legend Pete Rose relies heavily on a
conscience-based ethical justification in his autobiography of expiation, Pete Rose:
My Story (1989). Rose was suspended for life from baseball on August 24, 1989.
Rose had admitted to betting heavily on football and basketball through bookmakers
and associations with felons. He denies ever betting on baseball or his own team,
the Cincinnati Reds. However, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, the
late A. Bartlett Giamatti, believed that Rose had bet on baseball, thus warranting
the life-time suspension for the future Hall of Famer (232-233).
Although admitting to heavy gambling, Rose justified his exploits by
convincing himself that no ethical lines had been crossed as long as he did not bet
on baseball. For Rose, gambling is an enjoyable activity that fills up his free time
and feeds into his competitive nature (261). Precisely put, gambling on any and
every sport other than baseball meets the dictates of his conscience — a less stringent
ethical exercise than peer consultation and the test of publicity.
Because of its relentless attack on how the press covered his suspension, Rose’s
autobiography engages in its own measure of self-deception in the act of
ameliorating an image. He believes the press is more accountable for the rapid
decline of his image than his own actions, accusing the media of journalistic overkill
and distortion, even responding in “orgasmic glee” upon the publicizing of his