SEXIS WRONG

sex is more authentic. It’s because they’re fucking for each
other, not for the camera. And it’s so fucking beautiful that it
almost made me cry.
Now, before you run off to the GGW website with your drooling
mouth hanging open and your credit card in your quivering
hand, I should make something very, very clear: This is
not nature’s perfect porn. This is a seriously mixed bag. Even
though Bad Girls/Girls Who Like Girls is nastier and more authentic
by far than the other GGW videos I saw, there’s still
an element of doing it for show instead of for pleasure—not
nearly as much as in Uncensored and Doggy Style, but still
more than there should be. There’s also way too much sameness
among the girls: While the GGW videos aren’t anywhere
near as homogenous as a mainstream porno, the girls are still
overwhelmingly young, slender—and white, white, white.
And the unscriptedness means that tempting ideas often
get dangled under our noses only to be dropped or ignored. I
was so very titillated when Rebecca in Bad Girls said she had
“dirty, kinky titties that need to be punished”...and so very
disappointed when neither Rachel nor Amy picked up on this
charmingly obvious hint and obliged her.
Worst of all, the camera guys in the hotel-room scenes are
often annoying, even intrusive. You can hear them talking to
the girls while they’re taping, and thus you can hear them not
being able to shut the hell up. They offer their own running
commentary on the action, commentary that (for the most
part) adds nothing to the mise-en-scène except yahoo-dude
stupidity and annoyance. And their intermittent directions to
the girls interrupt the spontaneity, imposing (or trying to impose)
what they want to see over the natural flow of what the
girls want to do.
I did enjoy Bad Girls/Girls Who Like Girls. I even enjoyed it a
lot, certainly far more than I’d expected. But I can’t be 100%
sure that I would have liked it as well if my expectations
hadn’t been so low.
But What Does It All Mean?
What does it all add up to? Was my pre-having-any-actualinformation
analysis anywhere near on target? What is the
place of GGW in the socio-sexual landscape? The politicoeconomic
landscape? What do I think of these videos as a
dyke, as a sex radical, as a radical feminist, as a porn aficionado?
Were my expectations fulfilled? How would I rate them
on a scale of one to ten? Would I recommend these videos
to a friend?
Well, let’s see. With a few notable exceptions, my pre-actually-seeing-the-damn-videos
analysis wasn’t that far off. The
girls weren’t nearly as drunk as I’d thought they’d be, so I
was definitely wrong there. And the whole humiliation angle
pretty much dissolved as soon as I started watching. The
girls seem perfectly happy to be showing their boobs or making
out or whatever, and most of them are quite brazen about
it. There is a certain glimmer of the humiliation thing which
I’ll get to in a moment, but for the most part, that just didn’t
pan out. (Somewhat to my disappointment, but mostly to my
relief—I was actually pretty uncomfortable with the thought
of getting off on real-life, real-time sexual shame, no matter
how compelling the idea seemed.)
But the verisimilitude, the transgression, the moment of the
reveal—all of these were there in trumps. Even in the crappy
videos that sucked, they were there. If anything, I underestimated
the importance of the reveal. The simple sight of naked
boobs is definitely not the main point—the pulling up of
the shirt, the moment of naked-boob revelation, is very much
the point here. That’s not just a lucky triggering of my quirky
personal kinks—it’s a decision on the part of the producers,
an intentional triggering of what seems to be a lot of people’s
kinks. There’s actually one scene in Girls Who Like Girls where
the camera guy asks one of the girls to pull her pants back up,
so she could pull them down again. (He was trying to get her
coordinated with her friend, and it clearly wasn’t enough to
have two naked butts onscreen at the same time—he wanted
the simultaneous reveal, the two naked butts being bared
at the same moment.)
The GGW producers know that the reveal and the transgression
are hot, and they market accordingly. According to Bill
Horn, vice president of marketing and communications for
Mantra Entertainment (the parent company of “Girls Gone
Wild”), “There’s something about watching that girl go over
the line: go over from, ‘Come on, do you want to, do you
want to go wild, no no no’—and then you see, right there, she
does go wild. That’s appealing to people.” That was a little
distressing, actually: to find out that my brilliant, sex-radical,
sex-theorist theory was actually part of their goddamn marketing
plan....
But I can see why. If they’d shot, say, an hour and a half of
footage at a topless beach in Italy or Spain, with half-naked
women casually swimming or reading or sunning themselves,
it’d be unbelievably dull. It’s the moment of exposure, and
the girl’s own excitement at that moment of exposure, that
makes it exciting. There are, in fact, a few scenes in GGW of
girls just dancing around topless—and they’re definitely less
enticing than the flashing.
Interestingly, a lot of the flashing scenes end with the girl
pulling her shirt back down over her breasts. (Or pulling her
pants back up. Or whatever.) This lends credence to the
whole “good girl crossing a line” theory: When she covers
168 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG