SEXIS WRONG

Girls Gone Wild
Greta Christina
The Tease
I’m sure I started seeing the ads around the same time everyone
else did. Suddenly, the late-night TV shows were full
of them: the pulsating graphics, the loud, leering voice-over,
the drunken college girls pulling up their shirts to show their
pixelated boobs. The first one I watched in appalled fascination;
the next several dozen I flipped away from, disdainful
and dismissive and rolling my eyes in amused disbelief.
And, I will now admit, somewhat turned on.
It was the first time in a long time that I’d felt embarrassed
about being turned on. To be more precise, it was the first
time in a long time that I’d felt embarrassed about what was
turning me on. I am a happy consumer of very graphic porn,
and I typically like my porn kinky and perverted and pretty
fucking nasty. I will happily watch (or read about, or look at
photos of) young ladies in school uniforms being spanked
and fondled by teachers and nuns, or a woman being given
an enema and forced to keep it in while she’s beaten with a
cane, or Rocco Siffredi shoving his cock down a porn actress’
throat and holding it there while tears pour down her face. I
will watch it, and I will jack off to it, and I will write about it
in the national press if I can. But somehow I couldn’t admit,
even to myself, that I was getting turned on by the “Girls
Gone Wild” videos. Or, to be more precise, by the TV ads for
the “Girls Gone Wild” videos.
The problem wasn’t that they looked exploitative, or that
they looked pornographic (if anything, they didn’t look pornographic
enough). The problem was that they looked tacky.
Adolescent. Dumb. The kind of thing yahoo Dartmouth frat
boys would jerk off to. I didn’t want to admit to even a remote
possibility that I shared pornographic tastes with yahoo Dartmouth
frat boys.
I have to say, the whole phenomenon puzzled me. I mean,
why on earth were these videos so popular? Why were they
selling at all? Hardcore video porn is readily available to anyone
with a credit card. You can rent it at your local video store
or have it discreetly mailed to your home, fast and cheap and
no questions asked. You can easily see explicit, seriously
graphic videos showing almost any kind of sex you can think
of. Why would you pay money for videos where the main
feature is drunken college girls showing their boobs?
But I started thinking about it a bit. (Always a dangerous
move.) And it occurred to me that “Girls Gone Wild” did
seem to offer some things that hardcore porn didn’t. Some
of it might be the verisimilitude, the easy suspension of disbelief.
If you’re an ordinary Joe, it’s pretty hard to honestly
imagine yourself having sex with pornstars. But it’s not hard
to imagine yourself in a huge, noisy street party, watching
uninhibited-for-the-weekend girls pull up their shirts. And it’s
not much of a stretch to imagine one or more of those uninhibited
girls going off with you and doing even wilder things
in private.
There was more to it than that, though. For one thing, the
“Girls Gone Wild” ads were all about the “reveal,” the moment
when the woman goes from being covered and decent
to being naked and shameless. I love that moment. It just
makes me swoon. They don’t do it nearly enough in hardcore
video porn—and they don’t make nearly a big enough deal of
it when they do. Hardcore porn is often like a crappy lover—it
rushes through the foreplay to get to the “good stuff,” so
impatient to get off that it ignores the nasty, teasing buildup
that makes the good stuff so good. The “Girls Gone Wild”
ads held the promise of videos that didn’t rush, videos that
would give you that lovely, swoony “reveal” moment...over
and over and over again.
164 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG