SEXIS WRONG

and wilder footage they couldn’t show you in the ads? Or
was that just a come-on? And my libido was dying to know:
Would this actually be a turn-on? Wouldn’t an hour or more
of drunken, softcore amateur porn and girls pulling up their
shirts get a bit dull after a while? Would “Girls Gone Wild”
make me reach for my vibrator or reach for the remote? I
decided I had to have the courage of my erotic convictions,
that a woman of my stature in the sex-positive community
shouldn’t be afraid of a little bad taste and commercial hype.
Besides, nobody but me had to know. (Unless I wrote about
it in a big sex anthology or something....)
The Actual Videos
See, all this stuff I’ve been saying about transgression and
humiliation and the moment of sexual revelation—that’s just
speculation. I’ve been telling you what’s hot about the “Girls
Girls Who Like Girls has one of the
sweetest, most touching, most
genuine lesbian sex scenes that
I’ve seen in any porn.
Gone Wild” TV ads. I haven’t said a damn thing yet about the
actual videos.
I wound up getting three “Girls Gone Wild” DVDs: Girls Gone
Wild: Uncensored, a DVD collection of the first three videos
they released; Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style, the one with
Snoop Dogg; and Girls Gone Wild: Bad Girls/Girls Who Like
Girls, a two-DVD set that I hoped, based on the title and the
description on their website, would be more explicit than the
other videos.
The DVD with their first videos is very much what you probably
think of when you think of “Girls Gone Wild”: shot after shot of
Mardi Gras or spring-break girls pulling up their shirts to show
their boobs or pulling down their pants to show their butts and
occasionally their pussies, with intermittent footage of moderately
more explicit activity. Watching it was very much what
I’d expected and feared: tedious, grating, marginally arousing
but ultimately a grave disappointment. True, the girls aren’t as
completely hammered as I’d expected them to be—a lot of
them definitely seem tipsy, but none of them are puking-andfalling-down
drunk. But apart from that, Girls Gone Wild: Uncensored
confirmed every nasty, uncharitable thought I’d had
when I first rolled my eyes at their stupid TV ads.
Actually, in some ways it was worse. Whatever eroticism
there might have been in the sight of girls showing off their
goodies to the crowd was all too often disrupted by the sight
of unwanted, groping hands reaching into the shot. Ugly,
gross, upsetting. The prevalence of fake boobs was disappointing,
as well: It’s always distressing to see young, attractive,
healthy women who’ve cut their lovely breasts open and
replaced them with ugly, plastic blobs. And the sound—a
relentless, one-note cacophony of drunken frat-boy hollering
and “woo-hoo”ing—was like a jackhammer going in the next
room. Even turned way down, it gave me a headache.
And for all the supposedly uninhibited bacchanalianism, those
first GGW videos have an odd absence of sexual pleasure.
Sure, there’s a certain amount of sexual activity along with all
the flashing: tit-licking, tit-fondling, butt-smacking, dry-humping,
even some brief cunnilingus—most of it girl-girl, with a
few guys in on the action—plus pouring beer on tits and similarly
idiotic spring-breakitudes. But almost none of it seemed
like the girls were doing it to get off. It seemed like they were
doing it for show, for the crowd and the camera and the shock
value. The fondling and such usually didn’t last very long, and
it didn’t look focused, and the girls didn’t seem all that interested
or turned on, and it typically ended with
them collapsing in fits of “I can’t believe I just
did that” giggles.
I’m not saying they weren’t enjoying themselves—most
of them seemed to be. I’m saying
that the pleasure they were seeking didn’t seem to be sexual.
Not physically sexual, anyway. I think they were enjoying
the attention, the recognition of their beauty and hotness, the
power they had to get the crowd worked up, the exuberant
thrill of the forbidden, the triumph of going further than the
other girls and being the baddest and bravest and hottest and
most attention-getting of all.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not one of
those puritanical feminists who think seeking sexual attention
is an automatic sign of poor self-esteem. I think that’s crap.
We’re social animals; we seek attention in a zillion different
ways, and seeking sexual attention is no more screwed-up
than seeking attention for your art or athleticism or intellect.
I’m saying that there’s a huge difference between sex done
for sex’s sake and sex done for show. (I used to work as a
stripper, so I’m intimately familiar with that difference.) And
the latter is a whole lot less interesting to watch.
In Uncensored, you could usually tell when it was real and
when it wasn’t, when a girl was letting another girl grope her
to get the crowd screaming, and when she was doing it for
the pleasure of a hand on her breast. The times that it seemed
real were actually pretty hot, even kind of beautiful. But those
moments were few and far between, and they didn’t last very
long (nothing in this video lasts very long), and if anything,
they made the rest of the video that much more frustrating.
(Girls Gone Wild: Doggy Style was much the same in all the
abovementioned ways, only with better production values, a
166 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG