Pornland (7 page)

One way that Playboy has recently gained increased public visibility is through
The Girls Next Door,
a popular reality show on E! Entertainment, which supposedly documents Hefner’s life with his young “girlfriends.” The show, launched in 2005, provides a sanitized version of life at the Playboy mansion, never showing the reality of the experience for the young women who live and sleep with eighty-three-year-old Hefner. In
Bunny Tales,
Izabella St. James, an ex-“girlfriend” of Hefner’s, writes about what really went on at the mansion; how Hefner would have unprotected sex with a number of women, one after the other, but regardless of how many women he penetrated, he could orgasm only by masturbating to pornography. St. James discloses that many of the young women didn’t want to have sex with Hefner but “it was part of the unspoken rules. It was almost as if we had to do it in return for all the things we had.”
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Needless to say, this is not the image the show depicts.

All three companies have had to retool in order to stay afloat in the contemporary porn market. The industry now looks very different from when they began, with men today demanding harder and harder porn. The question is whether they keep up with this demand and move into more hard-core porn or whether they’ve sowed the seeds of their own destruction by helping to create an appetite for such porn. While the future remains unclear, what we do know is that without these three magazines and publishers, the porn industry would not be where it is today. Each publisher was willing to push the boundaries and in so doing, made pornography increasingly visible in mainstream pop culture. The more Flynt and Guccione pushed the envelope, the more acceptable
Playboy
looked, and the more
Playboy
penetrated the mainstream, the more latitude
Hustler
and
Penthouse
were given to move hard-core. This symbiotic relationship meant that by the time the Internet was introduced into homes, the culture had been well groomed to accept pornography as a part of everyday life rather than as an industry that produces a system of images that debases and dehumanizes women and men.

Chapter 2. Pop Goes the Porn Culture

Mainstreaming Porn

Pornography has become the media’s darling topic these days. Right now there is invariably
something
about the business and/or pleasure of pornography staring at you from a newspaper column, cable TV show, local news report or magazine article.

—Tripp Daniels,
Adult Video News

We have come a long way from the days when porn was thought of as dirty pictures for seedy men who couldn’t get a real woman. Today porn is being celebrated everywhere, from Howard Stern’s popular TV and radio broadcasts showcasing rising porn stars to one of the most successful cable TV shows ever,
Sex and the City,
which regularly features porn as a fun addition to a woman’s sex life. Even Oprah Winfrey got in on the act, with
O Magazine
carrying pro-porn articles by “sex educator” Violet Blue, who encourages women to use porn as a sex aid. An article in the
LA Times
in 2008 titled “Porn Stars Are the New Crossover Artists” focused on how porn has become an integral part of mainstream pop culture: “Once largely shunned as pariahs by the entertainment industry, porn stars are turning up with increasing regularity on shopping-mall movie screens and in prime-time television shows, underscoring pornography’s steady migration over the last three decades from the pop-culture margins to the mainstream.”
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How did this shift to the mainstream happen? The answer is simple: by design. What we see today is the result of years of careful strategizing and marketing by the porn industry to sanitize its products by stripping away the “dirt” factor and reconstituting porn as fun, edgy, chic, sexy, and hot. The more sanitized the industry became, the more it seeped into the pop culture and into our collective consciousness.

While there is a long list of sanitizing agents, I have selected for discussion some that are more contemporary and have had a major impact on our cultural shift. Chief among these is the
Girls Gone Wild
franchise owned by Joe Francis, a man many liken to Hugh Hefner in his public persona as a jet-setting playboy. Just as Hefner acted as a bridge between the two worlds, so too does Joe Francis, since his product has been whitewashed as belonging to the world of pop culture, not porn. In this chapter’s discussion of the links between pop culture and porn, what becomes clear is that the lines are increasingly blurring and we are seeing a mingling of the two forms to the point that our pop culture resembles the soft-core pornography of ten years ago.

Girls Gone Wild

I’m not selling Bibles, you know . . . at the end of the day, I’m selling naked girls. People want to buy naked girls.

—Joe Francis, creator and owner,
Girls Gone Wild

Girls, often drunk, are the commodity that Joe Francis sells to consumers. Famous for getting girls to “go wild” for the camera, Francis is today a multimillionaire businessman who owns what is often seen as a fun, young, hip company that spontaneously captures young women undressing and flashing in public.
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In most of the media articles on Francis, it is mistakenly assumed that
Girls Gone Wild
(
GGW
) is merely a show where inebriated college girls flash their breasts, while in reality much of the footage, especially on its Web site, is explicit sex, ranging from woman-on-woman sex to solo women inserting dildos into their (shaved or waxed) vaginas. Francis set out to deliberately and carefully craft an image of
GGW
not as a porn product, but rather as hot, sexy fun that pushes the envelope of mainstream pop culture. The more visibility
GGW
has in pop culture, the bigger the potential market. That this was a successful marketing scheme is evident in the $40 million a year
GGW
does in sales.
3

Francis’s business plan to develop a brand that stood out from other mainstream porn videos by giving it a more soft-core-focus gloss worked, since he has created what he (correctly) defines as “one of the most widely recognized entertainment and lifestyle brands in the US. This one-time pop culture phenomenon has become a part of the fabric of America and is synonymous with youth culture.”
4
But for all his claims that his show firmly belongs in pop culture, in reality
GGW
is closely tied to the pornography industry and its distribution channels. One of the most telling business deals that Francis recently brokered is with WebQuest, a California-based interactive services firm whose client list is 95 percent pornographers, including Vivid
and Hustler, two of the largest and most successful pornography corporations in the world. According to
XBIZ,
WebQuest built “the
GGW
Cash members area, constructing new tours and preparing to launch the program as a continuation of the
Girls Gone Wild
video line of flesh-flashing co-eds.”
5

On the
GGW
Web site, the usual warning posted on pornography sites flashes on the screen: “GirlsGoneWild.com (the website) is an ‘adult-oriented’ site containing images and text of a sexual nature. Only adults at least 18 years of age are permitted to enter.” A “bonus” offered by the Web site is free access to other pornography Web sites, including Lipstick Lesbos, a pornography site run by the hard-core company Hustler. The ad for Lipstick Lesbos on the
GGW
site reads, “Hustler proudly presents their top selling XXX Lesbian Video Series. You get a front row seat to see what goes down when the boys are away and pussy comes out to play.”
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The links to these pornography sites illustrate how Francis actually sees
GGW
because it is standard practice to host links only to those businesses that are directly related to the corporate positioning of the company’s site. It is also noteworthy that the
GGW
site does not have even one link to any pop culture site that is also known to push the sexual limits of mainstream media (for example,
MTV,
Maxim,
or
FHM
).

Another sign of how
GGW
is positioned is its visible presence at porn trade conventions that showcase the porn industry’s wares. At a 2007 three-day pornography consumer trade show in Los Angeles called Adultcon, models from
GGW
wore scanty clothing and posed with fans who wanted to take their pictures. This was clearly a marketing strategy to promote
GGW
DVDs; over forty are listed for sale on the wholly pornographic Adultcom Web site. In the promotional copy accompanying the DVDs, the products are pitched in ways that will appeal to porn consumers. The copy for
GGW Sexiest Moments Ever
reads: “At
Girls Gone Wild,
hot and sexy college girls are our business, and business is booming! This volume is loaded with girls from all over the country, getting wild for our cameras, and for you. We’ve truly outdone ourselves with this mind-blowing edition of sexy and steamy moments.”
7

The largest pornography convention in the world is run by
Adult Video News
every January in Las Vegas. In January 2007, IVD (one of the major distributors of pornography in the world) hosted a party for
GGW
that was described as one of the most exclusive parties held during the convention. According to
AVN:
“Mainstream models and party-girls mingled with hardcore starlets, suits groped sluts, and it wasn’t long before the girl-girl smooches began amid the inevitable ‘Woo-hoo!’ mating call of genus
Whoranicus Americana. . . .
Spotted in the throng of revelers [was]
Girls Gone Wild
mogul Joe Francis.”
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Probably the most succinct description of the way
GGW
links pop culture to porn is WebQuest president Bruce Benevento’s use of the word “bridge” when describing how
GGW
’s image will help place pornography products in the mainstream market. WebQuest’s other major pornography client is Hustler, and when comparing the two companies, Benevento is quoted as saying: “Larry Flynt has been branding for 30 plus years, but if you say
Girls Gone Wild,
everybody knows exactly what you are talking about. . . .
GGW
is a socially acceptable adult product because it conjures up images of young college kids having fun, frolicking on the beach—it seems very innocent. And while the Hustler brand has tremendous power, there are some markets that are closed to it. You don’t see Hustler.com at night on television like you do
Girls Gone Wild.
. . . This is a unique opportunity to bridge markets.”
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What separates
Hustler
from
GGW
is, in Benevento’s opinion, not that
Hustler
is pornography and
GGW
is pop culture, but that
GGW
is,
unlike Hustler,
a pornography product that can be marketed as pop culture.

The success of
GGW
is largely due to the way that the porn industry has shifted toward the more hard-core. As body-punishing gonzo sex became the norm, it crowded out the softer porn. Francis filled the resulting void with
GGW.
It never shows male-female sexual relations so there is no intercourse, erect penises, or ejaculate—all markers of hard-core porn. Instead all we see are young women, lots and lots of them in various stages of undress and sexual activity. These women are indeed the selling point of
GGW,
and not just because they are young and conventionally attractive but because they are what Francis calls “real.” All over the
GGW
Web site are phrases such as “real girls,” “all real,” and “raw, real and uncut.” Francis argues that it is, in fact, authenticity that distinguishes
GGW
from other porn products:

There really was never anything like it in the mass market before. You didn’t ever get to choose real girls. . . . What
Girls Gone Wild
doesn’t have in sexual desire, it makes up for in its voyeuristic realism. One can compensate for the other without seeing full male female penetration sex. It’s so compelling; it doesn’t have to be harder. I think what a lot of adult companies do is they just keep getting harder and harder and harder and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier, that’s how they feel it needs to go. But you can be more compelling without having to do peeing or those different fetish things. What makes it compelling is it’s real. Those are real girls doing these things.
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What appears to be so important about “real” is that the
GGW
images are perceived by users as a documentation of reality rather than a representation of it.
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In place of the scripted and carefully crafted scenes of hard-core porn, the user supposedly gets to witness a real woman doing porn for the first time in her life. By using “real” women,
GGW
socializes users, suggesting that everyday women are sexually available. These are women the user can imagine hooking up with for the very reason that they are not professional porn performers. This brings the porn story of “all women are sluts” right into the center of pop culture and subsequently the lives of men. Like reality TV, the viewer can insert him- or herself into the action by believing that what he or she is watching is actually real and not staged.

What makes
GGW
look real is the women’s lack of sophistication, which is evident in their nervous giggles, their sometimes clumsy moves, and their need to be coached by the cameramen on how to perform. They look more like girls than women. In the more explicit
GGW
videos, the unexpected sometimes happens; clothes get tangled up, dildos aren’t inserted properly, women collapse in a heap of laughter, and orgasms—whether real or fake—take a long time to happen, and when they do, they appear to be authentic. Real seems to be what the viewers want, and while many porn sites advertise that their women are real women (rather than porn performers), few can actually deliver on the promise because they use women who are often recognizable to seasoned users.

The voyeuristic thrill men get from
GGW
with its “real” girls—after all, it’s not called
Women Gone Wild
—would seem to be akin to watching a female lose her virginity, as this is the first time the girl has performed sex on camera. What she also loses is her “good girl” status as she shifts from being the girl next door to the girl who is just as slutty as the other women in porn. That
GGW
particularly goes after the “good girl” is evident in the comment made by former
GGW
production manager Mia Leist that the camera crew hones in on “the ones you wouldn’t expect to do it.”
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This adds a kind of authenticity to
GGW
that is missing in the more formulaic, scripted type of porn. In
GGW
it is not always clear just how far the cameramen can push the girl. Will she stop at flashing or can they get her to go all the way?