Girls Go Wild - so do profits - Empire of 'ordinary' girls flashing anatomy becomes part of culture

PalmBeachPost.com ^ | 16 Mar 03 | Paul Lomartire

[FenianOfEire]

MIAMI BEACH -- Luis Diaz wants breasts, and he's not talking dinner at KFC.

Diaz is waiting for a Girls Gone Wild party Wednesday night at the Chesterfield Hotel on South Beach. He's waiting for women to get drunk and start stripping off their bikini tops -- just like in the Girls Gone Wild videos.

Just like they did Tuesday night.

"Oh, it was wild," says Diaz, 28. "You wouldn't believe it."

On a humid, neon-soaked South Beach, a four-man GGW video crew is working out of a bus plastered with "GIRLS GONE WILD SPRING BREAK" along the side.

Plastered is the operative verb tonight.

The sign at the hotel entrance proclaims "Ladies Drink Free." The lobby and porch are packed with twentysomethings as Nelly's bass-vibrating Hot in Herre pounds from the stereo system.

During spring break, The Chesterfield is usually filled with college kids as guests, four to a room.

But this year, there's a new twist, a new titillation for testosterone-soaked voyeurs.

This year, girls are taking their tops off in front of video cameras.

And that's not all they're doing, Diaz says.

"When the girls see the camera guys in those Girls Gone Wild T-shirts, they just take it off. These are just regular girls.... they get nasty in front of the camera."

Hoping to make the cut

Diaz, a trash hauler who spends his days working these South Beach streets, is monitoring the party from across the street. He has watched the GGW video crew work the topless beach, scoping out girls and potential video stars.

But the crew doesn't have to work too hard.

"The guys don't have to tell them what to do," Diaz says. "They just do it."

Girls at South Beach and other spring-break hot spots are going wild in the hope of making the final cut of the Girls Gone Wild Spring Break video/DVD that'll be out in September.

For tonight's party, the GGW crew spent the day trolling the beach, offering invitations to women including Julie Martin, 22, and her seven girlfriends from Nova Southeastern University in Davie.

"We're just here for a day at the beach," she says, "and they asked us if we wanted to go to a party with free drinks."

Martin, who's working on a master's in biology, knows all about GGW and says with a smile, "you may get in the video, but not with your morals. Maybe we were brought here to be the good girls in the video."

Craig Braelow is the Chesterfield Hotel bar manager supplying the free drinks. He says the four guys in dark blue GIRLS GONE WILD T-shirts aren't making good girls go bad. They're just tapping into what already exists.

"Every day is spring break here," he says. "It's the ambience of South Beach. The girls come down from the Midwest and it's all new to them. They see the native girls, how they walk around and how they get noticed.

"By the time they go home, they've got tattoos, they're pierced and they've gone wild. They've gotten attention from guys who wouldn't notice them back home. I see it all the time."

The Chesterfield's hottest college drink is called Sex on the Beach, a sweet, lethal mix of vodka, peach schnapps, and cranberry and orange juice.

The GGW crew schmoozes selected women, including Martin from Nova, who continually rolls her eyes at the attention. She gets a look inside the bus where the GGW crew takes prospective talent to verify their ages and get releases signed.

Normally, after enough signed releases and after enough free drinks, the bass-heavy hip-hop is turned up and the cameras turned on.

"It depends on how many drinks you have," says Amber Arpaio, 21, "because that changes everything."

At the GGW party the night before, Amber was noticed by just about everyone.

"It got crazy," she says, "it was everything you thought it would be."

She says she's a waitress from North Carolina. Then she tells four guys she's a student from New Jersey.

"It's not stupid to do it," she says of stripping for a GGW camera and a crowd of guys. "It's all fun and games. You might as well show off what you have before you don't have it any more."

Fouzia Clarks worked the Chesterfield bar for Tuesday's party. She grew up in Marseilles, France.

Even though the French are famous for amour, Clarks said: "You'd have trouble finding girls in France to do what they did last night for a video."

When the cameras were turned off, she said, the half-dozen performing women really got raunchy.

"I was surprised," she says. "They're educated, university students, showing their breasts. I don't know. I'm 29 and I don't understand it."

Empire built on flashing

Girls Gone Wild is the known-on-every-campus video brand created by Joe Francis, 29, who graduated from the University of Southern California and is now CEO of the production company he started called Mantra Entertainment.

He's built an empire on flashing females.

The GGW core audience is heterosexual men 18 to 25, who have bought 4.5 million tapes/DVDs worth $90 million-plus. The tapes/DVDs are sold on the GGW Web site and through TV informercials and late-night cable ads. There's a staff of 90 employees at the GGW headquarters in Santa Monica.

The 83 GGW releases -- $9.99 to $19.99 -- are more-of-the-same: Topless, almost always white women, at frat parties, street parties, beaches and bar "talent shows." You can hear a cameraman urging a drunk, topless woman to kiss other women or pull her bikini bottom down.

With names such as Dormroom Fantasies and Wet T-Shirt Strip Off, many of the releases are made up of recycled clips.

Last year, Francis signed a deal with "celebrity host" Snoop Dogg and has since added rapper Eminem. A GGW crew followed Eminem on his recent Anger Management Tour to tape girls going wild at his shows and in his hotel rooms for a future video/DVD.

A member of a GGW video crew can make $300 to $1,000 a day crisscrossing the country from campus to campus capturing female flashers who are paid nothing beyond free drinks and a GGW tank top.

This R-rated, softcore sell is going way past direct-sale videos. A first-ever live spring break pay-per-view special aired Thursday from South Padre Island, Texas, and a GGW feature film is in the works.

"Their secret to success is keeping it R-rated because you can sell it on TV," says Jeffrey Cartwright, CEO of hardcore Adult Stars Magazine. "They're selling the same thing you can see tonight in a movie on Showtime."

"It hit at the right time, and it's a stroke of genius," says Cartwright, "because it's not sex, it's girls taking their tops off."

In a December Los Angeles Magazine profile, multimillionaire GGW creator Francis bragged that "feminists love us, because girls are doing what they want to do. It's like girls burning their bras in the '70s, you know?"

The fact that his fame and fortune is built on getting college girls drunk is a non-factor, he says.

"Look, if you're drunk, you still know what you're doing. I've tried to take many girls home on many different occasions, and they were really drunk, and it still doesn't work out," Francis told the magazine. "I think every guy has experienced the same thing. I don't care how drunk they are. They're still going to say no."

Francis, who turns 30 on April Fool's Day, was working on the TV show Real TV in 1997 and noticed that gruesome video was routinely cut. He spliced those edits -- including a shotgun suicide and a woman being hit by a train -- into a video called Banned From Television that took in $10 million in a year.

That was one Ferrari, a Mercedes, two planes, a helicopter and four homes ago for Francis.

GGW owns a Panama City beach house where this South Beach crew soon will rendezvous with other crews to tape a party featuring Snoop Dogg.

And because Mr. Dogg may be coming to South Beach in the next few days, the GGW crew is on hold. No taping Wednesday night. No coaxing girls to go wild. Just free drinks and loud music.

Luis Diaz, sitting on a planter across Collins Avenue, is disappointed, but not distraught.

He'll always have Tuesday night at the Chesterfield, where he saw girls gone wild.

"There was this big blond girl and this Asian girl, you wouldn't believe it.... "

[discostu]

I said I was dealing with the hypothetical. And actually no we think of it very much the same, that's my point.

[Jhoffa_]

Bump..

[B-Chan]

First, let's strip the "social aspects" right out of the question, unless you're going to argue with a straight face that it's somehow sinful to dine alone.

Sinful? No. But doing anything alone (except for therapeutic or other extraordinary reasons) is hardly good for a man. Man is a social animal; meals are meant to be enjoyed in the company of family, friends, or loved ones, not while alone in a car in traffic. The trend towards eating alone (as in fast food) has destroyed the social aspects of eating. The result: people eat too much, too fast, and the wrong things.

As for the nutritive aspects, it is an objective fact that if you eat too much, you will get fat and suffer various unfortunate health consequences (or purge yourself and suffer various other unfortunate health consequences). The negative health consequences of viewing nekkid people, or of being viewed nekkid (if it's warm enough to disrobe in reasonable comfort) have yet to be demonstrated.

Really? What about mental and emotional health? We're not talking about merely viewing naked people here (as you disingeniously suggest) -- we're talking about viewing people engaging in sexual acts for the purposes of sexual stimulating the viewer. The psychological consequences of partaking in regular masturbation while viewing pornonography are well documented; surely you recognize that when titlillation is the only goal, the thrills have to get kinkier and kinkier as viewers become increasingly jaded. The history of pornograhy since the 1940s bears me out. Yesterday it was cheescake tool calendars; then topless models; then full nudity; then hardcore sex; then bondage, homosexuality/ bisexuality, multiple partners, and S&M. Today, all of the above are the norm; mere boy/girl screwing is considered boring. People want their porn kinkier than ever -- and that means kiddie porn, snuff films, bestiality, coprophagia, and God knows what else. Is that the direction we as a society want to go?

Where a demand exists, a supply will soon follow. The only permanent way for a culture to avoid an endless spiral into the sewer is for a change to occur in people's hearts so that the demand for pornography disappears. Barring that, laws against porngraphy must be passed and strictly enforced. Either men will rule their own behavior, or the law will.

[CyberCowboy777]

Let me tell you about a hard job - one that really takes a toll on the body and mind. I have been in construction, sales and now computer consulting. I have never had a more grueling job.

When I was 17 I worked in a Quarry, a rock quarry.

My day began by showing up at 5:30am, I would begin by starting the compressor, saying hi to the other 5 or 6 I would be working with (in Spanish) and put on the gloves.

I was a splitter - yep I split rock. Take 1 large boulder recently blasted from the side of a mountain. I mean large, 4 to 8 tons (average 4' x 5' x 8' or so), and begin by drilling 14 to 40 6" holes in the boulder. Right down the middle of the stone, all the way around, less one side. To drill you are using a compressor driven jack hammer - a big one (100lbs or so) and a small one (60lbs or so). You drill into solid rock using your arms, legs, butt or arm pits - you need enough pressure to actually drill into rock while holding a drill sideways as you work your way around.

Once you have drill enough holes you must fill the holes with feather and wedges. The wedges are steel wedges 3/4 of the diameter of your hole and the feathers are thin pieces of steel that you slip on either side to create a snug fit for your wedge. You place two feathers and one wedge in each hole.

Now hammer. Allot. You have two hammers, one 90lbs sledge and one 4lbs trimming hammer. Here you are using the sledge, allot. Hit each wedge a couple of times and then start over, hitting each wedge up and down the line until it make your first split. Yep - your first split. You have got to large boulders now. Before we go on I would like you to realize the effort needed to make this split happen. Swinging a 90lb sledge sideways or down while standing on an awkward boulder is enough to make a man cry after the first day or so. It is not the 1st swing or the 10th, it is the 80 and the 230th.

Now you have two stones, you need to split it down into trimming hammer size so repeat the process on each piece. 1 piece, then 2 pieces, then 4 pieces, then 8 pieces. Each piece getting smaller. Now you are ready to split these manageable blocks into usable stone for the mason or homeowner. Of course these are manageable for you, the average guy would bust a gut trying to lift one.

You must split each block (about 200lbs to 350lbs) into Squares (square pieces 3" to 4" thick 6"x 6" to 18" x 18"), Recs (like Square only rectangle), A-split (like squares only three sided) and Thin Split (any combination of those except 2" to 3" thick). Any thing too thin or odd shaped is c-split and anything thicker must be split thinner.

Here is the interesting part. I got paid $5.00 an hour and tonnage. Square & Recs made me $10.00 a ton, A-split $8.00 a ton and C-Split was worth $3.00 a ton. In the first week you are lucky to make 5 tons C-Split and a couple tons of A-split. If you got good (only two white guys ever made it to "good" and neither was me) you could make $15.00 to $20.00 an hour, just not for long. Mostly Mexican did this job, they lived together and saved their money. They would work for 5 or 6 months and then go back to Mexico.

I remember this job well, I did it for three months. Mostly I remember the Pain, incredible pain. Imagine placing a 250lb rock against the inside of you leg\calf area. Now use your other leg to steady the stone as you pound on it to split down to a couple of 70lb stones. Do the same thing with each new smaller piece in an effort to turn the jagged odd shaped rock into a square paving stone. It hurts. Now imagine the feeling of doing that 100 times a day in the first two weeks and 70% of the time you bust the stone into c-split. AAAHHHH

I went home each day to a bath and bed for the first two weeks. My hands would not come out of the grip position for days when I was not working, only to stiffen back during Mondays grind. Think hold a can of beer position and not being able to extend them further. You try swinging a 4lb and 90lb hammer all day, when your not gripping a jack hammer of one size or the other. Back pain? When was I not hunched over during a 8 to 10 hour shift? 30 minutes for Lunch. I did my time in the early spring in the Northwest. Remember I was outside, all day. Cold, wet and I hit my fingers allot the first month. We had snow one day and hail a couple of times, we were less than a mile from the Columbia River Gorge so you can imagine the wind, the cold cold wind.

I remember vividly the day I quit. Another cold drizzly day, it is the Northwest after all. 40 degrees if your lucky and wet. I was on a decent role, pulling 3 or 4 tons of good stuff a day. And cut, boy was I cut. I had only hit my finger once or twice that day. Did not matter much, after the first month you hands and fingers are numb to all but the hardest blow. You have lost a fingernail or two and your tuff. So I am moving along and suddenly I feel a burning sensation on my arm. I look down and see my controlling arm caught in my small drill (the drill bits slip in and lock into place with a lever of sorts), a good sized chuck of my arm, muscle and flesh, were caught in the lever. Of course I turned off the drill. Then I waited. I waited for someone to come over and hold the drill so I could lift the lever and release my arm. My supervisor came over and throw up, the Mexicans a asking what to do in Spanish (I had picked up a bit) and the one other white guy was calling for help.

Enough was enough, I was tired of the freaking out. So I grabbed hold of the drill with my legs and lifted on the lever, it moved a little and I ripped my arm out. The supervisor came back over and asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, I said no. I finished working the shift. And it was a good day. I made 4 tons Squares, 5 tons A-split and a couple tons a C-split. And I quit, never going back....... to the quarry.

I spent the next 3 years working in a landscape supply sales yard for the same company. Loading trucks, big trucks and little trucks, helping little old ladies and weekend warriors. Sometimes loading a 15 ton with a trachoe and other time hand loading 12 ton of the stuff I use to split. Allot of time in a loader and answering questions. Learned allot and became a manager of one yard and then another.

All the while working two days a week as an apprentice for an IT consulting firm. Extending my computer education (I apprenticed for a year at 16) and going to school.

Your back reminds you? I have a slipped disk and cannot sit in one place for more than a few minutes without pain. I have an arm with deadened nerves.

I would still prefer my daughter do that than work porn, better I would do it again to keep my daughter from needing to porn.

[discostu]

That's a really nice diatribe. But it ends with a blatant mistatement of my position. Let's try it again, slowly and you should try to read it without inserting emotional contexts that AREN'T there:
Many jobs suck
Parents wouldn't want their kids to work in these many jobs that suck
Porn is on that list
As I specifically said I'm not trying to rate which sucky jobs no parent would want their kid in suck more than which other sucky jobs no parent would want their kid in
I don't see anybody trying to ban these other jobs just because parents wouldn't want their kids working them
Therefore it is a disigenuous arguement to say that's a reason to get rid of porn

That's great that you've got these sucky jobs rated so that if your kid winds up in something other than porn you can say "well it's better than porn" (I'm guessing you wouldn't have anything rated below porn), and I don't contest your list because it's a personal list and there's no reason to contest personal feeling. But it doesn't change my basic point. Nobody is saying that a good reason to not partake of fastfood is that you wouldn't want your kid making those fries even though you wouldn't (we're removing porn from the option list here, just judging the jobs by their INDIVIDUAL merit). Nobody is saying we should stop using gas because no parent would want their kid pumping it. Nobody is saying we should stop using stone because no parent would want their kid quarrying it. This shows that it's simply not a valid arguement against porn, be against it all you want makes no difference to me, but "you wouldn't want your kid doing it" is not an effective arguement against it.

I notice you did sales next. If my only choices for a hypothetical kid were quarrying or sales I'd pick quarrying, I think sales emphasises the shallow and devious aspects of the human personality and it will eventually make people evil (you seem to have gotten better, that's good many don't).

And the more personal experience with other crappy jobs we list the more my arguement is proven out. The worse your experience with that job is, the less you'd want any kid of yours working in that field, and the less you try to convince people not to support that line of work and protect other people's kids from it, then the more hypocritical that line of reasoning is against porn.

You want to be against it because it's degrading, fine IMHO it's more degrading to the consumers but that's OK. You just think people shouldn't be paid to get naked, OK. Makes a bad statement about our society, gotcha. Just nasty, see your point. But you wouldn't want your kids doing it just doesn't cut, there's a huge list of things nobody protests that nobody wants their kid to do, and unless you're rich they're probably gonna do at least one (and unless you grew-up rich you probably did at least one). BFD life goes on, give me a GOOD reason that's can't be just as easily applied to hundreds maybe thousands of job titles out there.

[CyberCowboy777]

And my points is:

I have really hard, bad jobs and I would want my kid to do those jobs over Porn any day.

The personal Cost is much less.

BTW - I am not for banning porn.

I would hope that men that like it would imagine their daughter doing it.

I am not for keeping people from getting paid to get naked. Whatever, that is their choice.

I just would not want my daughter in that position, so I do not support it.

Thinking of my daughter in that position brings a human, known face to the picture.

How very sad for a father, how much worse for a daughter.

[CyberCowboy777]

Here:

Would you want your son working as a slave for a diamond mine in Africa?

Then don't support those that do it to others sons - don't buy blood diamonds.

[Old Professer]

Thgere's this great commercial on T.V. where the voice-over says something like, "He goes naked through the woods, he skinny-dips,..." turns out "he" is a dog frollicking - I can't see much difference here other than "gender."

[Old Professer]

Every generation thinks its invented sex,

More like, every generation thinks it perfected sex...

[Old Professer]

Having someone ogle my daughters would bother me, yes. That's because they're 7 and 5 years old. But they won't be children forever: at some point, it will be their call, not mine. Will it be tough to let go? I'm certain it will, but the oglers won't owe me a moment's consideration for all that. My daughters might, but that's between me and them.

I'm going to get serious for a minute, my friend:

You cannot pretend to know the universe and not know yourself.

[Old Professer]

I saved this by e-mailing it to a friend and myself; this story has the hard edge of truth - work has got to be its own reward.

[steve-b]

What about mental and emotional health?

If you can't measure it, you can't make laws for it. If you disagree about the need for objective science as a guide to policy, then you'll want to run along to the DUmpster to pledge your support for Algore's environmental agenda.

The history of pornograhy since the 1940s bears me out.

Since the 1940s? Really, I hadn't expected the sort of person who thinks that the world began with their own generation to take much interest in FR.

The only permanent way for a culture to avoid an endless spiral into the sewer is for a change to occur in people's hearts so that the demand for pornography disappears. Barring that, laws against porngraphy must be passed and strictly enforced.

Since no sane person believes that either is possible in the real world, why bother?

[Physicist]

You cannot pretend to know the universe and not know yourself.

It's because I know myself that I say that. I was young once, and remember what it was like. I assume that the boys 10 years from now will be much like I was. Therefore, I know that there is no possible way that my daughters will not someday attract the amorous attentions of more than just their future husbands. I'm almost as certain that they will feel flattered by it. They've all been honed by evolution to respond that way.

How will I react to that? I know myself well enough to tell you that my heart and head may sharply disagree. I guess it all depends on how they react to it, and right now I can't tell you that.

[Physicist]

Every generation thinks its invented sex,

Ouch! Did I really write that?

IT'S

[dennisw]

My wife nursed all 8 of our kids by the way.
______
That's how it should be. Good for her and the kiddies.