They both represent ventures that are first and foremost capitalist.
They both involve men paying to own a video of women getting naked.
However, I feel that there are a lot of important differences. An easy point to make is that the women actually get paid in porn, rather than just getting a t-shirt or something similar. Women are also asked if they want to participate in these things well in advance, and are presumedly sober, and under no (direct, in-the-moment) pressure from friends. This is not to say that every porn actor has signed up for a shoot when they were at their absolute best, but the difference is still stark.
The absence of men is neither here nor there, but there is a separate problem that arises. In all of these videos, the cameraman will invariably ask some of the girls to make out, or have sex with each other. You can guess that my problem with this is not the presence of homosexual sex. The problem I have is with women making out with women for men's entertainment, especially if they're not actually interested in women. This is fucked up for a handful of reasons. The most obvious of these is the simple fact that we have women doing things just because a guy tells them to. Even taking gender out of the equation, one should stop and ask themselves why they would complacently do ANYTHING that a stranger tells you to. Furthering the gender roles doesn't help much, either. Worse than this is when it's a guy telling girls to perform sexual acts they're not interested in. One can of course make the argument that porn is full of women doing things that they're not excited about. While I'm sure there is a percentage for whom that's true, I've read too many interviews with porn stars to believe that all, or even most of the women involved dislike their job. In the case of GGW, I'm sure a few of the women are into other women, but in every case, the girls in these videos are told to mess around, and they do it immediately. I'm not saying don't make out with girls. I'm not saying don't make out with your female friends for fun. But come on, people. Don't do it because some tool with a video camera told you to.
And speaking of tools, there's still an extremely important point to cover, and that is that the founder and owner of the GGW franchise, Joe Francis, is a despicable human. He's gotten in legal trouble for trying to get underage girls in his videos, for coercing girls to be in his videos that didn't want to, as well as tax fraud and gambling debts. When he went to jail before appearing in court for 71 counts, including racketeering and child pornography, he made a public statement that anyone that bribed his jailers to give him preferential treatment, that "girls would be involved" in repaying them. Not to say that the average porn mogul has pure intentions, but it's that much more difficult to find anything reputable about the whole affair knowing the CEO is such a douchemachine.
Tell me that is not the most hatable face you have ever seen.
On a more personal note, I still don't understand for whom these videos are made. My curiosity was piqued my freshman year in college, and I downloaded one of these to watch. They just don't make sense to me. Having watched porn, I kept thinking I understood where things were going. The girls were playing coy, then taking their clothes off, and then they (or they and a guy or three) were going to have sex. Instead, nothing happens. They get naked. Then? They talk. Or sometimes make out with each other. In a few rare instances the girls will hook up a little more extensively, but in the end, you're not seeing much you wouldn't see on Cinemax. And yet these DVDs sell so unbelievably well that they keep cranking them out (there are well over 60 of these now) and turning a profit. It's not just that I don't see the appeal, which I certainly don't. More than that, I don't know who does. I've never met a guy who's actually bought one of these, or at least admitted to it. The question that continues to run through my mind, is why don't these people just watch porn? You have to be 18 to buy either one. Do guys who watch porn watch this too? Or is it only for the guys that aren't comfortable watching porn that watch this?
The only theory that makes any sense to me is one I've extrapolated from reading a discontinued blog, Confessions of a Porn Store Clerk, which I read years ago, and found it fascinating. She talks about men that, when they first start coming to her store, will only buy lesbian porn, one assumes because they think it's a little too gay to have to actually see another guy naked. Then after time, they'll slowly start to get into the heterosexual porn. Apparently, for whatever reason the next step is usually to Shemale porn. The last one is a slightly separate issue*, but homophobia seems like a pretty reasonable reason for men to buy GGW rather than normal porn.
Now before you start assuming shemales are gross, you might want to take a look at Nong Poy here.
Whatever the reasons for its success, I continue to not fully understand the Girls Gone Wild series, but hate whatever portions I do.
*Since I would hope you're all as interested as I was about why this last step happens, she states: "I have been given two interesting explanations as to why straight guys like women with penises. The first is that men don't believe that women like or want sex as much as they do. A chick with a penis, then, is a woman who has a full, hearty, male sex drive and must want sex as much as he does. The second one is almost touching to me: Vaginas are mysterious, and penises are by comparison fairly straightforward and easy to satisfy. A guy knows what to do with a penis, so if a woman has one he can be sure he knows how to satisfy her."
Images via wikipedia.org, gamespot.com
That picture is from gamespot?!
ReplyDeleteSo, GGW has had two major effects on my life. First, the commercials are a constant annoyance when I'm trying to watch Comedy Central (after dark), and two, it because Girls With Low Self-Esteem on Arrested Development, and I'm kind of surprised you didn't mention that here, simply because it paints a decently accurate picture (although another parody I've seen just replaced the "Girls Gone Wild" covering the boobs with things like "I Hate You, Dad!").
i remember watching clips of GGW with you freshman year. i think they had girls playing some retarded challenge-game-thingy on the beach. they may or may not have been topless. action, in any sense of the term, was pretty much non existent.
ReplyDeletei remember distinctly commenting, "why the fuck do these make money when regular porn is easier to come by and contains what you might actually consider pornographic?"