by Ariel Levy
“It’s all girl-on-girl, we never shoot guys,” explained Bill Horn. “That’s not what Joe wants. And no pros. It has to be real.”
Reality has always been Joe Francis’s beat—specifically, those realities that appeal to people’s darkest impulses: voyeurism, violence, and erotomania. On the GGW Web site, you can still purchase Francis’s debut effort, Banned from Television, a hideous compilation featuring “a public execution, a great white shark attack, a horrifying train accident and an explicit undercover video from a sex club bust!” as the video is described on the site. “That’s how Joe made his first million,” said Horn.
Out on the back porch, a phalanx of young men watched, entranced, as a very pretty nineteen-year-old from Jupiter, Florida, named Jennifer Cafferty lifted up her pink tube top for the camera. “Okay now, show me your thong,” said Puck. She laughed and twirled her honey-colored hair around her forefinger. “Just show me your thong,” he said again. “Just really quick. Just show me your thong. Show me your thong now.” She whipped around and lifted her skirt.
“Yeah,” shrieked one of the young men watching her. “Yeah, yeah!”
Then she put her hands on her hips and said, “Where’s my hat?”
The next day at the beach, only the light was different. “We want our picture with you!” a blonde in a bikini yelled at the crew, shaking her digital camera in the air.
“We don’t want pictures,” Leist called back. “We want boobs!”
“I think I’m going to have that embroidered on a pillow,” said Horn.
A pack of guys were drinking beer out of a funnel, and they decided they wanted GGW hats. Badly.
“Show them your tits,” one yelled at the two girls splayed on towels next to him. “What’s your problem? Just show them your tits.”
Puck set up the shot and waited with his camera poised for the female response. “No way!” the girl in the black bikini said, pouting.
“You know you want to,” the funnel-wielder taunted. People started to circle around, like seagulls sensing a family about to abandon their lunch. “Do it,” the guy said.
“Yeah, do it!” yelled a spectator.
“Show your tits!” screamed another.
“Show your ass!”
There were maybe forty people now gathered in a circle that was simultaneously tightening inward and expanding outward around Puck and the girls and their “friends” with every passing second. The noise rose in volume and pitch.
I caught myself hoping the crowd would not start throwing rocks at the girls if they decided to keep their clothes on.
We’ll never know, because after a few more minutes passed and a few more dozen dudes joined the massive amoeba of people hollering and standing on top of beach chairs and climbing up on each other’s shoulders to get a good view of what might happen, it happened. The girl pulled down her black bathing suit bottom and was rewarded by an echoing round of shrieks that sliced the sky.
“More!” someone yelled.
Other people pulled out their cameras. The people who had cameras built into their cell phones flipped them open and jumped up to try to get shots of the action over the human wall.
The second girl rose up off her towel, listened to the cheers for a moment, and then spanked her friend to the rhythm of the hooting.
“Yo,” a guy said into his phone. “This is the best beach day ever.”
It sounds like a fantasy world dreamed up by teenage boys. A world of sun and sand where frozen daiquiris flow from faucets and any hot girl you see will peel off her bikini top, lift up her skirt…all you have to do is ask. It’s no surprise that there’s a male audience for this, but what’s strange is that the women who populate this alternate reality are not strippers or paid performers, they are middle-class college kids on vacation—they are mainstream. And really, their reality is not all that unusual. People on spring break are obviously young, and Horn was right to call the flashing a rite of passage. But it is an initiation into something ongoing rather than a one-shot deal, more like having a first beer than a bat mitzvah. The heat is turned up a little in Miami, but a baseline expectation that women will be constantly exploding in little blasts of exhibitionism runs throughout our culture. Girls Gone Wild is not extraordinary, it’s emblematic.
If you leave your house or watch television you probably already know what I’m talking about, but let’s review some examples:
• Jenna Jameson, the world’s highest grossing adult film performer, is her own industry. She has been in music videos for Eminem and Korn and advertisements for Pony and Abercrombie & Fitch (a brand whose target market is teenagers). She has taped voice-over for the video game Grand Theft Auto. She was on the best-seller list for six weeks in 2004 with her memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, which was written up in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Publishers Weekly. There was something profoundly weird about the fact that one of the most widely read authors in the country was simultaneously selling “ultra-realistic, lifelike” replicas of “Jenna’s Vagina and Ass” with complimentary lubricant on her own Web site.
In 2003, there was a massive, four-story billboard of Jameson hovering above Times Square. The group Women Against Pornography used to give tours of the area in the late 1970s, when Times Square was a seedy red-light ghetto, in the hopes that “radical feminists, with our deeper understanding of porn and our sophisticated knowledge of sexuality, would succeed in turning around public opinion where old-fashioned moralists had not,” as the feminist Susan Brownmiller wrote in In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution. It didn’t work, but decades later, developers, chain stores, and Disney succeeded where the feminists had failed and the neighborhood became the spit-shined shopping smorgasbord it is today—a suitable destination for red tour buses with guides far less invested in overthrowing the patriarchy than Susan Brownmiller was. Now that porn stars are no less mainstream or profitable than Mickey Mouse, however, a giant billboard of Jameson—the star of movies like Philmore Butts and Up and Cummers—is perfectly at home at the Crossroads of the World.
In 2005, Jameson’s publisher, Judith Regan, told CBS, “I believe that there is a porno-ization of the culture…what that means is that if you watch every single thing that’s going on out there in the popular culture, you will see females scantily clad, implanted, dressed up like hookers, porn stars and so on, and that this is very acceptable.”
• Female Olympic athletes took time out from their rigorous training schedules in the weeks before the summer 2004 games in Athens to appear naked in Playboy, or next to naked in FHM (For Him Magazine). There was high-jumper Amy Acuff laying on the ground—her blonde hair pooled around her, eyes closed, hips thrust skyward—in FHM (pages away from a sex quiz that included the question “Have you ever participated in a gang bang?” and the answer “Why else do you think my parents shelled out more than $100,000 for college?”). A few pages later, Amanda Beard, the world record–holder in the two-hundred-meter breast stroke, knelt with legs spread and lips parted while she used one hand to hike her top up and expose the underside of her breasts, and the other to pull her bikini bottom down low enough on her pubic bone to prove to the world that she was thoroughly waxed. Haley Clark, a former world record–holder in the one-hundred-meter backstroke and world championship gold medalist, was pictured naked and bending over in Playboy, in a position referred to as “presenting” when exhibited in the animal kingdom. The collective effect of these pictures of hot (and, in most cases, wet) girls with thighs parted, tiny, porny patches of pubic hair, and coy, naughty-girl pouts made it almost impossible to keep sight of the women’s awesome physical gifts. But then, that may have been the whole point: Bimbos enjoy a higher standing in our culture than Olympians right now. Perhaps the athletes felt they were trading up.
• Lesser jocks are striving for their own red-light experience. “Cardio Striptease” classes are now offered at Crunch gyms in New York, Los Angele
s, Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago. “Strong, powerful women are sharing it,” Los Angeles instructor Jeff Costa told me. These strong, powerful women are encouraged to attend their workout sessions in bras and thongs to add frisson to the fantasy that they are real strippers, who have mysteriously come to symbolize sexual liberation despite the fact that it is their job to fake arousal. “Stripping equals sex!” Costa said. “Look at music videos, Victoria’s Secret ads, all this stuff…lap dancing is everywhere! Ask anyone doing choreography right now: This is where it’s at.” Costa proudly told me that a mother had recently brought her daughter and eight of the girl’s friends to one of his classes for a sweet sixteen celebration.
• ABC aired the first televised Victoria’s Secret fashion show in 2001. “Security is tight, and so are the girls!” quipped host Rupert Everett. It was a cavalcade of legs and breasts interspersed with center-foldish interviews with the models—one aspired to fly to the moon, another loved animals. At first, people were surprised and a little rattled to see soft-core on network television during prime time. But a panty procession would soon seem quaint, compared to the tidal wave of reality shows that swept over television and brought our culture that much closer to a raunch aesthetic and state of mind.
Harem-themed reality shows were particularly successful. In The Bachelor, Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, Joe Millionaire, and Outback Jack, troupes of women were secluded with one man in various bodice-ripper fantasy locales, like a castle or a McMansion or the wilds of Australia. There the women engaged in competitions, many of which involved bikinis, to show who among them was the hottest and the hungriest. Contestants for the hunk spoke with fetishistic longing about getting married and, more importantly, about their fantasy weddings before they’d ever met the groom. A contestant on The Bachelor gave a proud soliloquy on the yards of white silk she’d already purchased for her wedding gown; another spoke about wanting to find her “Prince Charming” so she could “feel like a real woman.”
The reality TV universe is a place that seems strangely untouched by any significant cultural event of the twentieth century, least of all the feminist movement. Even NBC’s smash The Apprentice, a show that supposedly hinges on the financial acumen and professional cunning of America’s future business leaders as assessed by Donald Trump, culminated its first season in a thonged flurry of exhibitionism when four of the show’s female cast members appeared in their underwear in the May 2004 issue of FHM. For free. As Trump put it to Larry King, they “did this for nothing. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t win the contest.”
• Between 1992 and 2004, breast augmentation procedures in this country went from 32,607 a year to 264,041 a year—that’s an increase of more than 700 percent. “The younger girls think that beauty is raised cheeks, a higher brow, big breasts and fuller lips—you know Pam Anderson,” Dr. Terry Dubrow told the New York Times. Dubrow was one of the two plastic surgeons responsible for the gory, cookie-cutter makeovers on The Swan, a reality series launched on Fox in 2004 in which average-looking women were surgically, cosmetically, and sartorially redone to look average in a shinier, pornier way—the brunettes became blondes, the breasts became bigger, the clothes got tighter and sparklier, and all the teeth became implausibly white.
Local newspapers like LA Weekly carry page after page of ads for surgeons who specialize in “vaginoplasty” or “vaginal rejuvenation.” That is: cosmetic operations to alter the labia and vulva so they look more like the genitals one sees in Playboy or porn. The surgeries are not intended to enhance sexual pleasure. They are designed exclusively to render a vagina “attractive.” The Society of Gynecologic Surgeons has warned that vaginoplasties can cause painful scarring and nerve damage that impede sexual function (i.e., make the vulva painfully hypersensitive or numb), but nevertheless the demand for these procedures is increasing. On plasticsurgerybeverlyhills.net it says “plastic surgery of the vulva has become quite popular over the past 5–8 years,” and is “being considered by women of all ages.” They caution that large labia “can give a ragged appearance” to the female nether regions if they aren’t “corrected.”
• The spring 2004 fashion shows oozed so much smut they prompted Barneys Creative Director Simon Doonan to write in his New York Observer column, “The hetero porno antics which dominated the first few days of Fashion Week were a mystery to us attendees…we poofters and fashion chicks, when confronted with all this Bada Bing muff culture, can only stare at each other like terrified gerbils trapped in the headlights.” The designer Jeremy Scott decorated his show (which he called “Sexybition”) with pole dancers and the actress Lisa Marie, who was dressed as a dungeon sex slave and appeared to be having either an extended orgasm or an epileptic seizure onstage. Likewise, the Pierrot knitwear show was set up like a mock porno shoot with the designer, Pierre Carrilero, playing the director and the models rolling around in various familiar porn tableaux (black man/white woman, three-way, etc.). Designer Betsey Johnson’s tagline was “Guys Love B.J.,” and to enhance her message Johnson’s models wore labels like “Fluffer” down the runway. (A fluffer is a person on a porn set whose job is to keep the male performer’s penis erect.)
• Elton John, a knighted performer known for queenie costumes, giant wigs, and of late, treacly compositions for animated Disney movies, set his stage for a series of gigs in Las Vegas in the spring of 2004 with a pair of enormous inflatable breasts in front of a massive LED screen on which he played a film of Pamela Anderson spinning around a pole. The huge shows were held at the 4,100-capacity Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Despite his popularity with royalty, children, and gay men, John’s concert had the look and feel of a very large Hooters club.
• In publishing, recent years have seen a spate of X-rated books—none of which have been sheepishly tucked away in the Erotica section behind the Kama Sutra. XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, a collection of photos by the prominent photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, came out in October 2004 with accompanying essays by big-name writers like Gore Vidal and Salman Rushdie. The portraits were sold at the famous Mary Boone Gallery in New York City. At the opening of the show, I asked Greenfield-Sanders—whose former subjects have included Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senator Hillary Clinton, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—why he chose to move from politicians to porn stars. “Because porn has become so much more a part of our culture,” he said.
Pamela Anderson’s autobiographical novel, Star, which came with a nude pinup of the author on the reverse side of the book jacket, stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks in the summer of 2004. Back when hooker-turned-writer Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl came out in 2001, you could find it prominently displayed at Barnes & Noble, right next to Harry Potter. Quan shared a “Meet the Author” event in Washington, D.C., with Chief Justice William Rehnquist. As she put it to the New York Times, “If that’s not being part of the Establishment, I don’t know what is.”
This is our establishment, these are our role models, this is high fashion and low culture, this is athletics and politics, this is television and publishing and pop music and medicine and—good news!—being a part of it makes you a strong, powerful woman. Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual, and because the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture.
This comes from an article that ran in the Washington Post…not exactly a fringe publication:
Who hasn’t dreamed of doing a fireman spin around a stripper pole? Because over-the-knee boots are an uptown girl’s way of getting down. Because Carmen Electra—star of a new striptease-for-exercise DVD series—is eager to teach America’s women how to play a “naughty secretary.” Because Madonna pole-dances in a magazine and Kate Moss pole-dances in a video and Pamela Anderson once talked of quitting acting
to strip during Kid Rock’s concerts. Because Oprah recently learned how to do a stripper walk. Because stripping will tone your abs or heal your soul…Because it’s hot and men like it. Because it’s powerful; forget the men. All this is why everybody wants to be a stripper. It’s why these days the stripper pole—which you can buy cheap online and install in your den—seems to run like a steel beam of sleaze through the American psyche. With stripper-chic, as with so many advances in popular culture, the nation owes a great debt to Los Angeles.
One wonders how we will ever be able to repay Los Angeles for this powerful, soul-healing advance. “Everybody” wants in on this; “who hasn’t dreamed” of it? We skipped over the part where we just accept and respect that some women like to seem exhibitionistic and lickerish, and decided instead that everyone who is sexually liberated ought to be imitating strippers and porn stars.
Not so long ago, the revelation that a woman in the public eye had appeared in any kind of pornography would have destroyed her image. Think of Vanessa Williams, crowned the first black Miss America in 1983, and how quickly she was dethroned after her nude photos surfaced in Penthouse. Later she made a comeback as a singer, but the point is that then, being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from. Now, being in porn is itself the comeback.
You may remember that Paris Hilton was but a blonde teenager with a taste for table-dancing and a reported $28 million inheritance with her name on it when she and former boyfriend Rick Solomon made a video of themselves having sex. Coincidentally or not, the tape got out and became a staple on Internet porn sites a few years later, right before Hilton’s reality series, The Simple Life, debuted on Fox in December 2003. In September 2004 a second tape of Hilton having sex, this time with Nick Carter, a former member of the band Backstreet Boys, and Jason Shaw, a Tommy Hilfiger model, started making the rounds. The point, though, is not what she did, but what we did with it. The net result of these adventures in amateur pornography was that Paris Hilton became one of the most recognizable and marketable female celebrities in the country. Since the advent of the sex tapes, Hilton has become famous enough to warrant a slew of endorsement deals…there is a Paris Hilton jewelry line (belly-button rings feature prominently); a perfume; a string of nightclubs called Club Paris set to open in New York, Atlanta, Madrid, Miami, Las Vegas, London, and Paris; and a modeling contract for Guess jeans that has landed Hilton all over the pages of Vogue, Lucky, and Vanity Fair. Her book, Confessions of an Heiress, was a best-seller in the summer of 2004. Her debut CD—the first single is entitled “Screwed”—is forthcoming. And at the close of 2004, Barbara Walters interviewed the heiress as part of her annual special on the ten “most fascinating people” of the year. Paris Hilton isn’t some disgraced exile of our society. On the contrary, she is our mascot.
