The Requisite Girls Gone Wild Essay

So, a few weeks back, we added a Fan Pics section to the site [NOTE: we have since taken it down, because we decided it worked better to insert the pics directly into the essays], and since that time, everyone has been asking us what it “means.”  Is it ironic?  Is it serious?  What does it “say” about what we think of women, or feminism?  Are we defending “the gaze,” as they call it in academia when someone chooses to perform the act of looking at another person whom they find attractive? 

    And so far, we have felt like our best answer to these questions is simply not to answer them.  Goodness knows, it’s not because we don’t like questions—but more because, every once in a great while, we like to defend the right of something not to mean anything.  Like we said initially: some girls who like the site sent us pictures of themselves, and asked us to post them, so we did, and then some other girls sent more.  We’ve specified that we’re willing to post pictures of guys too, or pictures of girls that aren’t necessarily “sexy” pictures, but beyond that, it’s out of our hands.  If no guys choose to send pics, or if all the girls who do so choose to make theirs “sexy,” then that’s their business.  We just work here.  Obviously, we like sexy pictures of girls, and hope we get more, and feel that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to admit this—but beyond mentioning the fact that it isn’t our “official” policy only to post sexy pictures of girls, there’s really nothing else we think we need to do to “control” this.

    But it sure has been fun hearing what everyone thinks it “means.”  Some have said “It’s a joke—what could be more ironic than a smart philosophical website with pictures of hot girls wearing t-shirts with the site’s logo?”  Others, “No, it’s serious—they’re actively demonstrating that it’s okay for Liberals to party, and giving the finger to P.C. high-horsitude.”  Still others, “No, they’re striking a blow for the image of smart boys by showing that smart boys can get hot chicks too.”  And yet others, “No, it’s about the girls, not themselves—they’re giving smart girls a forum to show that girls who read intelligent sociopolitical whatsits can still be cool and sexy.”

    Anyway, as Robert Frost once wrote back to a class of schoolchildren divided over how to interpret the closing lines of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in one of those stories that English teachers always tell but that you can’t find sourced anywhere:  You.  Are.  Right.

    The only suggestion we find silly is the theory that we’re selling out with the addition of pics, in a cheap effort to draw more traffic to the site.  It’s fine to say that we’re attempting to distinguish ourselves from the million other political sites out there by doing something different—but as for the fact that this something has taken the form of pictures of girls?  Well, we think that anyone who’s logging onto the web to spank the monkey has at least a few better places than here to check out, to put it mildly (so far, anyway).

    And of course, we balk at Girls Gone Wild jokes.  But as long as you’re bringing it up, we’d like to take this opportunity to make GGW the subject of the third piece in our “Requisite” series, featuring essays on subjects that every internet pundit has to do an article on—because if you don’t, then you just suddenly die for no reason, like in that old Friday the 13^th Nintendo game that made no fucking sense whatsoever.

    The thing about Girls Gone Wild is, since there are so many different reasons for people not to like it, anyone who’s writing an essay about it needs to—

    Ugh!  Damn, that game sucked!  It was like, “Ooh, I’ve got the fucking flashlight, so I guess I’ll just walk in circles around the lake and oops I’m dead.”

    What?  Oh, okay.  The thing about Girls Gone Wild is, since there are so many different reasons for people not to like it, anyone who’s writing an essay about it needs to spend most of their time distinguishing their particular reasons for not liking it from all the others.  With an issue like this, the terms “for” and “against” alone are essentially meaningless—it’s all in the explanation.  And since this is a conversation we are joining very much in progress, let’s run through some of what’s been said so far.

    On the right, you’ve got the Conservatives who are against GGW just because they’re against all porn, or even against anything that’s sexy at all, be it technically “porn” or not.  You’ve also got those even-bigger-asshole Conservatives who are all about the “Good Girl / Bad Girl” dichotomy, and secretly don’t give too much of a shit about traditional porn because it only draws bad girls into its shadow, but lose their shit about GGW because it reaches beyond the pale to involve “normal” girls—for them, the problem is not porn per se, but rather porn “in my backyard,” as the saying goes.

    And that’s about it for the right—an open-and-shut case.  A stupid open-and-shut case, as usual, but an open-and-shut case nonetheless.  For the left, things have been a little more complicated—as they tend to be when you’re, you know, not stupid, or at least not as stupid. 

    For starters, you’ve got the Liberals who are also against all porn, but for feminist reasons instead of religious ones.  And it’s probably already clear that we’re not them.  Obviously, from our past essays, it is clear that we don’t have a problem with porn.  We’ll go on the record again here and say that 1585’s official position on porn in general is that it is fucking awesome.  But a discussion of Girls Gone Wild, as most Liberals realize, cannot simply be a discussion about porn in general.

    And this is where the difficulty comes in for that segment of Liberals used to defending porn in general from attacks by both the right and by far-left feminists: we have to explain why GGW is different enough to warrant being “against.”  It can’t be the young ages of the girls involved (at least, the ones who are actually over 18), because there are any number of girls that age who do regular porn; it can’t be the fact that there’s usually drunkenness and/or substance use involved, because ditto with regular porn; and it can’t be the fact that GGW goes searching for participants rather than waiting to be approached, because shit, Playboy does that, and Playboy barely counts as porn at all.

    Matters are complicated even further by the fact that, if you let them talk long enough about it, you begin to realize that many Liberals simply don’t like the type of girl that Girls Gone Wild favors—GGW videos are all about the squeaky-voiced, blonde-haired, orange-skinned sorority girl, rather than the “badass bitch” type more common to “normal” porn, and it’s harder to defend something as empowering when it avowedly idealizes girls who are, well, stupid (yes, regular porn doesn’t exactly celebrate female intellectual achievement either, but the relevant fact here is that in regular porn you are dealing with women who have actively chosen to do porn, rather than the trope of girls being “tricked” during a “weak moment”).  Now, we’re sure that we would find a GGW video too fucking annoying to jerk off to if we ever tried, but we also realize that a simple disagreement about aesthetics isn’t sufficient cause to ban something, or whatever it is that the people who are “against” GGW want done about it.  We realize that many women—and many men—would prefer it not to be the case that lots of guys are attracted to squeaky-voiced blonde sorority girls, but something can’t be made illegal just for being a tangible reminder of a fact that you don’t like.

    And don’t say no-one would buy that, because we would totally buy that.  Seriously, if someone starts making videos like that, then we will not only buy them, but we will link to your site, and be your best friend.

    But regardless of whether anyone would ever actually do this (seriously though, please, someone do this), we get the sense that it wouldn’t piss people off nearly as much.  So what does that mean?  That the exact same thing should be illegal if it’s with dumb girls, but legal if it’s with smart girls?  That would require giving smart people and dumb people different status under the law—which, normally, we would be all for, but it seems trivial to do it just in this one specific case.  If we’re going to roll like that, it should apply to a whole bunch of different stuff.  Oh, and also, it should involve the smart people getting to wear capes.

This girl is a pale redhead who is into bondage—
Hence, she is smart, so it's okay!

    In any case, no thorough discussion of Girls Gone Wild can be limited to an analysis of “the thing itself,” as we say in the analysis biz.  Just as is the case with a surprisingly inexpensive pair of sneakers, there are also many important questions relating to the process of how “the thing itself” got to you in the first place.    

    Any idea can be defined two ways—by itself, or by the history of itself.  For example, the word Christianity can refer to the tenets of that religion and the things its practitioners believe, or to the history of the things its practitioners have done in its name.  The first definition includes only the teachings and example of Jesus, and the second includes the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and Jerry Falwell (who dropped dead a couple of hours after we typed this paragraph…  Powers—we have them!).  That’s a pretty big fucking difference between two possible ways of seeing the same word.

    Similarly, the first definition of Girls Gone Wild merely denotes young women removing their clothes on camera of their own free choice (albeit while drunk).  The second definition includes a handful of hushed-up rapes, and numerous threats—and occasional actual instances—of physical violence against people who stood in the way of the fratty juggernaut.  The first definition is basically synonymous with the definition of a good time, and the second is basically synonymous with that of the fucking mafia.

    And this, finally, brings us to a point that isn’t complex, and doesn’t require a whole lot of clarification—to the one fact in this debate that anyone who deserves to be listened to agrees on.  Namely, that Girls Gone Wild impresario Joe Francis is a flaming asshole to an extent that eludes all efforts at description.  Here’s a link to a recent L.A. Times article that details Francis’s various crimes (up to the time of its publication, at least) more extensively than we have time to do:

"Baby, Give me a Kiss" by Claire Hoffman

    Okay, the thing is that—  …wait, his lawyer really said that?  The “he has a big dick” defense thing?  Wow. 

    Okay, the thing is that, at this point, this isn’t really about whether someone has a problem with sex.  It’s about whether someone has a problem with sociopaths.  And you’re supposed to have a problem with sociopaths.  All articles about GGW from now on should be about this guy, not about whether it is okay for girls to flash their tits if they want to.  At this point, that is immaterial.  If someone else made videos where girls flash their tits, it would be a totally different story.  It would be possible for someone to do basically the same thing in an acceptable way, but Joe Francis himself does not.  For example, if we made videos where girls flashed their tits—which we’re not saying we want to do, necessarily, but also not saying we don’t want to do—everything would be totally fine.  Trust us.

    But even when a Girls Gone Wild essay moves from “Girls Gone Wild is terrible” territory specifically into “Joe Francis is evil” territory, there are still problems, mainly due to the male distaff of the virgin/whore dichotomy, which we have dubbed the asshole/loser complex.  In short, it refers to the worldview in which all males are either aggressive, self-centered dickheads who only care about getting laid (assholes) or pushover dorks who can’t get laid, and who are even more pathetic than the aggressive dickheads because they wish they were aggressive dickheads but are unable to be (losers).  In short, any guy who talks shit about Joe Francis (or someone like him) leaves himself open to the accusation that he is only pissed off because he isn’t Joe Francis (or someone like him) and secretly wants to be—the risk of eliciting these accusations is exponentially increased, of course, if the shit-talking takes the form of a long essay published on the internet, which can only mean that the author is obviously a nerd, because otherwise he would be out getting laid instead of writing essays and posting them to the web.

    Luckily, however, this particular essay-that-talks-shit-about-Joe-Francis is by 1585, and thus nips such accusations in the bud.  No-one who knows what they’re talking about can accuse us of being jealous losers, because we’ve spent the last several months building up cred by being explicitly anti-jealous-loser.  We even wrote an essay where we partially defended Paris Hilton, for fuck’s sake, so if we say Joe Francis belongs in jail, it can’t be laughed off so easily by whitehat types.       

    We’re not pissed off by Francis’s statement about how “the guys with the greatest sexual appetites are the ones who are the most driven and most successful.”  In fact, we agree with it.  It’s just that we also realize that being horny and driven can take a lot of different  forms besides simply running around with a camcorder and screaming “show me your tits.”  The Norton Anthology of Poetry, for example?  Chock-full of extremely horny people, a great many of whom got laid like madmen.  So, we don’t think the difference between us and Joe Francis is that he is simply more horny—and therefore more manly and successful—than us.

    Rather, we’re calling him out on the fact that there’s some rhetorical sleight-of-hand going on in that statement, because GGW isn’t just about across-the-board horniness; it’s about a very specific type of horniness, centered on the figure of the “girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

    A girl can “not know what she’s doing” for many reasons—she can be young, dumb, drunk, insecure, or all of the above.  But regardless of the explanation for her state, the male state of attraction primarily—or even exclusively—to the “girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing” isn’t more manly.  It’s decidedly less manly.

    Attraction to the “girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing” is rooted in the fear (that’s right, fear—i.e., totally not macho) that if she did know what she was doing—if she were just as sexy, but basing this on her own desire for pleasure—then either she would not want anything to do with you, or you would not be able to satisfy her if she did.

    And this is not manly.  Manliness, as it relates to the sexual arena, means being a “ladies’ man”—a term that was once seemingly incompatible with feminism and social progressivism, but which obviously now needs to be brought back.  And being a “ladies’ man” means that you know how to please women, not that you know how to trick the weakest of them into pleasing you, and can only even manage that when they’re drunk. 

    What that means is that you are a fucking pussy.  And guys who act like they’re the shit but who are secretly fucking pussies have a burning desire for the entire world to be transformed into Junior High, because that was the last time in life that any representative number of women actually thought guys like this were cool.

    Think about it: have you ever heard James Bond refer to the female genitalia as “taco?”  No, you haven’t.  This is because James Bond is not in Junior High.

    When the camera cuts to a post-coital Bond in bed with his latest paramour, the woman always says the same thing:  “Oh, James!”  To review: that’s “Oh, James!”, not “Oh, I was so drunk I was nearly unconscious, I have no memory of signing your stupid release form, and I’m suing.”  Calling us pussies for pointing out this distinction would be no different from calling Bond himself a pussy, and we don’t think even Joe Francis has the balls to suggest that he is manlier than 007.

    What is most important to remember here, in a dynamic where manliness is at stake, and at a time when the very definition of that term is so up-in-the-air, is that Joe Francis is not Bond—Joe Francis is a Bond villain.  Joe Francis is the evil, rich megalomaniac bent on world domination whom Bond beats at baccarat in the beginning and later rescues the girl from, and who flips his shit at the end and is last seen running around his fucked-up lair with an AK-47, indiscriminately mowing down his own henchmen, while a disembodied voice intones “T-minus 10… 9… 8…”

    And this is totally where Joe Francis is headed.  If you work for him, then now would be a good time to begin exploring alternate career options, because you don’t want to be inside the fucked-up lair when it blows.

    Now, the reason it has been so hard for people to figure this out is that most of the anti-GGW rhetoric out there has been explicitly feminist—and as such, it could make no distinction between horny guys who don’t care about women, and horny guys who do.  It had to take the blanket stance that being a horny guy is bad, period.

    Luckily for women, however, we are not feminists—or at least not that type of feminists.  And, along those lines, what this essay proves is that women are helped, not hurt, by men who are not straight-down-the-ticket feminists, but are not assholes either.  If all men did swallow the line about horniness being bad, period, then there would be no reason for guys who aren’t already doomed to be losers not to become just like Joe Francis, because the simple fact of not being losers would mean that they have nothing to lose—they would perceive themselves as already having crossed the Rubicon in terms of being a “bad person,” so what the Hell.

These legs have two PhDs and speak four languages

    What we’re trying to hammer home here, for other Sadean Liberals, is the fact that, even though Joe Francis’s empire does in fact speak to deep, dark undeniable truths about humanity, that doesn’t mean you can’t think he’s an evil son of a bitch.  Because he is an evil son of a bitch.  Yes, it is true that there is a part of every woman that wants to be the center of attention at any cost, and yes it is true that there is a part of every man that wants to be the guy who can order girls to disrobe and have them instantly comply.  But so what?  There is also a part of every guy that wants to be the world’s biggest asskicker, but that doesn’t mean you can’t dislike someone who goes around punching people in the face.  Condemning a thief does not require you to deny the fact that people desire money, and so on. 

    To sum up, because we realize that our position may still be hard for some people to comprehend:  we do not hate Joe Francis because he is horny, or because we’re jealous of him, or because he offends us, or because he is too tough for us.

    We hate Joe Francis because he is a pussy—the only insult that matters to guys like Joe Francis.

    But to what extent can Francis’s evil mean that his product should or can be banned?  If the CEO of a widget-manufacturing company raped someone, then that would only mean that the CEO himself should go to jail for the rape, and that someone else should be named CEO, and continue overseeing the manufacture of widgets.  Even if this rape took place in the CEO’s office at widget headquarters, this would still say nothing about the morality of widgets themselves.  To make a case against widgets themselves, it would need to be established that rape is somehow necessitated or made inevitable by the widget-producing process—and this seems impossible. 

    People say we don’t know shit about economics, but look how many times we just said widgets.

    Anyway, if the root problem with Girls Gone Wild—apart from Joe Francis himself being evil—is the apotheosis of the dumb girl who “lacks agency” or whatever, then this begs the question: is GGW the disease itself, or only a symptom?  Did Girls Gone Wild actually cause the present dominance of the dumb girl to any significant extent, or is it rather that a groundswell of dumb-girl nostalgia resulted in Girls Gone Wild?

    We’d argue the latter, but suggest that it’s not so much dumb-girl nostalgia originating with boys, but dumb-girl defense originating with girls—and that the new epoch of dumb-girl defense was ushered in not by ideas from the right (as in the past), but by the mutation of complex and well-intentioned ideas from the left into oversimplified and nearly opposite forms.

    Examine recent pop music, for example.  People always talk about how so much contemporary Top-40 music is “about sex”—but that’s kind of vague, so let’s unpack it a little.  Try comparing the number of recent songs by female artists that are about simply liking sex to the number that are about using sexuality to get stuff (fame, gifts, etc.).  It feels like there have been way more of the latter, doesn’t it?

    It’s starting to seem like, if you asked a group of teenage girls which was “worse,” having sex with an older man because you just thought he was hot and would enjoy having sex with him, or having sex with an older man because he was paying your way through college or some shit, a lot of (most of?) the girls would say that the first thing was worse.  Now, it makes no difference to us, you understand—either way, it’s none of our business—but it just seems like something that needs to be pointed out, if only for the sake of analyzing where it’s coming from.  We mean, the best way of putting it is that the definition of the word “whore” seems to have gotten reversed somehow: literally, whore means prostitute—someone who exchanges sex for money or goods—but this definition has been contaminated via use of the term against women (mostly by other women) who have sex because they like it, and who are sexy enough to get lots of it, outcompeting other women in the process.  Recent notions of female solidarity have been successful enough to disseminate themselves, but obviously lacked the power to do away with the fact of the very existence of sexy women, who obviously still dominate pop music and the media in general.  The solution was for sexy women to start singing not about liking sex, but about using sex to exploit men financially, thereby mollifying less well-adapted women with a veneer of Lysistrata-esque sexual socialism.  Ironically, this sexual-Robin-Hood mentality permeates the ethos of Girls Gone Wild itself as much as the feminist antithesis to it: a woman who exploits men does so on behalf of all women, just as—in the mind of Joe Francis—a man who exploits women does so on behalf of all men.     

    But, symbolic victories aside, this just brings us back to the original, literal definition of whore, i.e., the one involving sex in exchange for material goods.  How has this happened when, as far as we can tell, the official position of all feminists and various other “strong women” on the subject was that it was fine and good for women to have sex just because they like it?

    We’ve never heard Richard Dawkins—who first proposed meme theory, the idea that beliefs propagate themselves in a manner analogous to how genes do so—posit the existence of meme mutation, but we think the situation just described may provide strong evidence for its existence.  By meme mutation we mean the successful dissemination of an idea that, apparently, no-one has ever actually explicitly voiced or advocated—i.e., a collective misunderstanding, occurring because the mutated idea was better adapted to its society than the actual idea was.

    If we had to guess, we’d say that this was due to a weird intermingling of messages from the right and the left.  You see, for years, rules about sex were fairly simple: authority figures on the right—e.g., pretty much any adult—told kids not to have sex, ostensibly because of religious shit, and the kids had sex anyway.  Oppressive, yes—but phenomenally simple to comprehend; no confusion possible.

    Now, kids have got the same message coming at them from the right, plus a much more nuanced stance on female sexuality coming at them from the left, which seems to be something like:  “Theoretically, sex is great and natural and there’s nothing wrong with it, but at the same time boys are evil, so if you have sex with one it’s because he tricked you, but remember that you are also supposed to like sex or it means that you’ve been brainwashed by the right, so you need to have sex at some point, but only if it’s something you’re into, only you might just be getting tricked into thinking you’re into it by boys, so to make sure you’re actually into it and don’t just think you’re into it, first you need to write a thesis about it, and then once it’s been peer reviewed, you need to…”

    Of course, the one message coming from the left that’s been easy for young girls to understand is that it’s “empowering” to use one’s sexuality to control, take advantage of, exploit, or get revenge on men—so this becomes the path of least resistance in terms of how much thinking it requires you to do.  Figuring out whether you “like” sex in the “correct” way is a huge headache—but if it’s all about the Benjamins, then what could be more cut-and-dry? 

    The problem is not, as many on the right would suggest, that terms like slut and whore have lost the impact they once had as pejorative terms—anyone who spends any time around young women can attest to the fact that they still use those words to describe women they don’t like every ten seconds—but rather that there is now a huge divide between the idea of having sex and the idea of liking sex.  Many young women today are still quite worried about being “sluts,” but feel that it makes them less of a “slut” to appear in a Girls Gone Wild video than it would to simply go home with a normal, non-camera-wielding guy whom they just happen to find attractive.  The latter would mean that you want sex, which is a no-no, but the former only means that you realize that you have the power to make boys want to have sex with you, which is, by definition, “empowering,” regardless of whether you yourself are actually having any fun.

    The problem, currently, is exactly the opposite of what everyone—right and left alike—seems to think it is.  Pundits of either stripe will go on about the ever-increasing hypersexualization of the culture, though they are of course allegedly mad about this for different reasons.  But is today’s culture really so sexualized?  If you look at it in terms of what people are or aren’t allowed to say on TV, or in terms of what sex stuff a kid of a certain age knows about, then yes, sure.  But if you were to talk to a representative sample of young people, and ask them what they think about all this, you would discover a startling thing.  Despite what they know about, or have been exposed to—or maybe, in fact, because of these things—today’s teenagers are “against” sex in numbers not seen since the days prior to the counterculture revolution of the 1960s.

    This is, of course, due in part to the specious consubstantiation of patriotism and traditionalism that has held sway since 9/11, and its effect upon a generation of children terrified enough to believe anything—a child who is eighteen today was twelve when she or he saw the Twin Towers collapse, and if the next thing that child heard out of an adult’s mouth was “This means you’re not supposed to have sex,” then that shit is going to take one uphill fucking battle to reverse.

    Due in part, but not in whole.  The seeds of the problem were planted before this, during the Hot-Girls-vs.-Not-Girls Wars of the ’90s, when, among women, the figure of the desire-driven sexual competitor became anathema, leaving victim and prostitute as the only two acceptable roles for the desirable ones.  Party girls had to become the know-nothing party, first feigning and eventually actualizing ignorance, either of the ramifications of their situation, or of their own capacities for real pleasure beyond the rote repetitions of their assigned role.

    It would appear that this essay has come far afield from a “close reading” of Girls Gone Wild as “the thing itself”—but didn’t it need to?  Do not take these extrapolations as excuses, or accuse us of not admitting that Joe Francis is an evil scumbag—we have admitted this plainly, and will continue to do so.  We hope Joe Francis is convicted of any or all of the charges being brought against him at this moment, and that he goes to jail for a long time.  But we also urge you to remember that getting rid of Francis will not fix the problem, and that, as Dylan soberly sang of the filthy assassin Beckwith, “he’s only a pawn in their game.”

    The next move is for young women—both those who choose to whip out their funbags given the slightest opportunity, and those who choose not to whip out said funbags alike—to figure out whether they do, or would, truly enjoy doing so.  If they do, then that’s awesome, and we personally look forward to seeing their tits the next time we’re in the neighborhood.  If they don’t, then we guess that’s awesome too.

    The only unacceptable answer is “I don’t know.”

These tits were the valedictorian of their high school,
graduated from college with highest honors,
and run their own literary journal

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