Posted on 03/17/2003 8:37:42 AM PST by 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.... "
I wasn't talking about making any law. Please reread my post.
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.
"Objective" science is a fine guide to policymakers when combined with other guides, such as religious belief, philosophy, gut reactions, and common sense. The scientific method is not the be-all end-all of human judgement, fortunately.
"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.
No argument, huh? You should know that weak attempts at ad hominem won't work on me. Please try again.
"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?
Quelle jejeune. Why bother with anything?
Your unsupported assertion ("no sane person believes that either is possible in the real world") may be true in your cynical version of the Real World, but kindly do not assert the same for the reality the rest of us inhabit. People's hearts can be changed; the production and sale pornography can be outlawed by the enforcement of extant law.
Really, if you're going to insist on denying what you wrote, you ought to try a board that doesn't provide links to the message to which a reply is directed....
I replied: "Really? What about mental and emotional health?"
You said: "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."
I replied: "I wasn't talking about making any law. Please reread my post."
In the first context of our conversation, we were discussing the impact of pornongraphy on human mental and emotional health, not legal policy. As one can clearly see from the above verbatim exchange, you were the one who suddenly started talking about making law, not I. Therefore, I stand by my comment that I wasn't talking about making any law. I wasn't -- not in the context of the subject being discussed (mental and emotinal impact).
In a later exchange, when we were discussing legal policy, I did say that "laws against porngraphy must be passed and strictly enforced", but by then we were discussing a different topic.
You had no responses to my arguments, choosing instead to engage in parsimony and ad hominem. With this in mind, further discussion between us seems pointless. I stand by my assertion that pornography is degrading and pernicious.
You either are or are not. This attempt to finesse the issue is worthy of Bill Clinton.
You had no responses to my arguments
That's because you haven't offered any arguments -- just statements of what you find objectionable. The two are not interchangeable.
If you expressed yourself at all well in your writing, we don't think of sex at all the same way.
Shalom.
What I said is that I don't contemplate people having sex. You seem to. I have no problem with it - even the screaming, curling of toes, scratching of backs, etc, between my daughters and their husbands. But I generally have better things to think about than how people have sex. Sex is not a spectator sport (even in one's mind). I no more spend time envisioning people having sex than I spend time envisioning them taking a dump.
That was my point.
Shalom.
But I don't need to carry this further.
Shalom.
Hopefully you understand my point. If you still disagree I will continue to think highly of you as a FReeper and a human being.
Shalom.
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