Porn Perspectives

You're Wild! (what?) You're Wiiiiiiiild!!!

I’ve long despised the franchise known as “Girls Gone Wild.” So it pleased me greatly to see the LA Times rip apart its mastermind, Joe Francis.

For those who haven’t seen the late-night ads, the Girls Gone Wild videos are predicated on this very simple formula: go to a location where drunk young girls abound (spring break, bars, etc), shove a camera in front of their attention-starved faces, and ask them to lift their shirts in exchange for stupid merchandise (a t-shirt or a trucker hat usually). Shocking how pliable these girls are…I see it as a combination of the need to rebel from their parents, maintain their virginity while still sexualizing themselves, a desire for attention, and a cultural obsession with reality TV.

As the Times article explains:

Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it's 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.

Francis has made a fortune off these girls. What irks me so much is that the girls featured on the countless GGW videos are almost invariably intoxicated. They likely would not make the same decision where they stone-cold sober. Of course, I do think some of the blame lies with the girls who make the decision to go on Spring Break, get drunk wearing a bikini, and act irresponsibly. At the same time, one must wonder, in the words of Susie Bright, "Why are we at a place where the only way a young woman thinks she can be important or meaningful is to take her top off for a creep's camcorder?"

Bright sums up a feminist position that I personally agree with: "It's not the topless part that's the problem, it's the exploitation by this prick. If the women took their tops off for their own movie, their own orgasm, and their own point of view, it would be a completely other story."

Most astutely, she notes: “Francis' dirtiest secret is that he traffics in porno-puritanism, in sexual shame. His profit lies in young women snookered into doing something "shameful" that they will want to hide the rest of their lives— once they sober up. They have been ruined— the ultimate GGW turn-on. It's the frisson of humiliation that makes him, and his audience, hard.”

Ariel Levy has done the best analysis I’ve seen of the problem of GGW and similar media in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs. In essence, Levy argues that GGW is not women being liberated, as many of the featured girls might posit (we’re past feminism; we’re now at a point when women should be able to flash their breasts at a camera with impunity). GGW, in Levy’s (and my) view is women acting at being liberated. Big difference. They are not in control. They are not expressing themselves—it’s all a ploy to appear to be something they believe men and society will value. And the main beneficiaries are Joe Francis’s wallet and horny male viewers.

Porn on the Go!

AVN reports that Playboy Enterprises has created a division dedicated to mobile and wireless efforts, and has named Ed Lang senior vice president and general manager. According to Ed, “The Mobile business is one of the company’s fastest growing revenue streams and an important aspect of Playboy’s strategy as we aim to provide Playboy content to our customers across all entertainment platforms.”

Ed had previously been VP of mobile initiatives with Sony, COO of a mobile marketing and production company in NYC (helping launch America’s Next Top Model, among other things), and also executive director for mobile content at AOL.

Is there any doubt that the porn industry is serious about expanding into mobile content?

Fred Lane foresaw this trend back in 2005, and I used his and other research in my thesis to describe the forces shaping and challenging this evolution towards “m-commerce” (for the complete discussion, see chapter 3, pp 66-7):

“…a prominent trend on the horizon is a shift towards mobile content, which consumers can download onto PDAs, cellular phones, and iPods. The mobile content sector has grown substantially, with $700 million in sales worldwide. By 2009, Juniper Research estimates this will triple to $2.1 billion (AVN, January 2006).

“Given that the adult industry was on the forefront of technological development that enabled e-commerce, it makes sense that the industry would also guide the shift towards m-commerce (Lane 2005).

“The strongest barriers to m-commerce include payment methods and perhaps most importantly, age verification. Phone companies are likely to resist involvement with adult companies, whose customers are notorious for their denials and complaints, so new kinds of payment systems will have to develop. As for age verification, underage access is a politically sensitive issue; if minors start downloading content through their cellular phones, Congress could easily block m-commerce. As with payment methods, new technology is under development to enable secure, legal transactions (Lane 2005).

“While some within the industry express skepticism that consumers will clamor to watch adult content on tiny mobile phones or iPods, many businesses are confidently marketing “iPorn” and other content intended for viewing on Apple’s ubiquitous iPod. A spoof site, KryptoniteStudios,com, marketing “iPod Erotica” employs the tagline “Masturbate on the go,” and helpfully informs customers that with the iPod’s 15-hour battery life, they can fly from New York to Paris “and still have hours of masturbation time left as you stroll the Champs Elysees.” The Playstation game device PSP is another target for mobile porn. A Web site called SexOnThePSP.com offers specially formatted PSP-ready adult movies.

“The increasing resolution of mobile screens and faster connections offer hope that this product segment will become popular with American consumers (Lane 2003). Already, mobile content is making headway in other countries. Despite the current technological hurdle of slow download speeds, companies like Britain’s Virgin Mobile and the Australian mobile phone company Huchinson’s 3 are exploring the possibility of offering adult content through mobile phones. Wireless operators in Europe and Asia who offer adult video clips or live sex chats via mobile phones are finding positive reception among customers (Bryan-Low 2005).

“Analysts predicted worldwide spending on such content for cellular phones to top $1 billion in 2005; with companies such as U.S.-based Verizon Wireless exploring the possibility of using its extensive network for adult content, it seems the United States will not be far behind in adapting to this new format (Bryan-Low 2005). Jay Grdina, president of Jenna Jameson’s site ClubJenna.com, reports that the wireless division of the company has seen “incredible results” in the European market (Grdina 2005). The domestic market is slowly developing, contingent on the incorporation of age-verification procedures. Grdina predicts that as the wireless technology sector grows, the fastest gains in software and applications will be in this area.

“A second noteworthy technology trend, in addition to the predicted shift toward mobile content, is convergence….The mobile technology … is another realm in which convergence is occurring, with consumers soon able to make calls, check e-mail, and watch video all on the same device.”