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.... "
Agree--well said.
I never for an instant thought I "invented" sex.
It was still one heck of a personal discovery, however.
And every enjoyable pastime seriously offends somebody, somewhere. But that doesn't make it wrong.
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.
Some sketch comedy show did a skit where a teenage girl is sitting on the sofa with her mom and dad when an add for a "Girls Gone Wild" type of video comes on the screen and she is the featured girl in the commercial. Quite funny.
I never for an instant thought I "invented" sex.
Of course you didn't! I did. Everyone knows that.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
Sort of says it all.
I bet her Dad is proud.
"She's so neat
what a piece of meat"
That's what your daughters are to a great number of people. A piece of meat. Nothing more.
Sadly there are too many parents who are indifferent to this fact. Even sadder, is their boasting of their indifference.
Pornography is objectively wrong because it violates the Natural Law. By reducing a female human being to the status of a product, it offends against the dignity of the human person. Furthermore, it offends against the natural order of sexual relations: the relationship between husband and wife. By alienating sexual pleasure from the loving and procreative aspects of sexual relations it creates a perversion of those relations. The sin of gluttony comes from the alienation of the sensual pleasure of tasting and consuming food from the nutritive and social aspects of eating; in the same way, the alienation of the sensual pleasure of making love from the reproductive and emotional aspects of the sexual union is sinful (=contrary to the natural order).
Having someone ogle my daughters would bother me, yes. That's because they're 7 and 5 years old.
The primary rule of ethical behavior is: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You have admitted that having someone ogle your daughters would bother you. Therefore, it is ethically unsound for you to condone the practice, since every woman is somebody's daughter.
But they won't be children forever: at some point, it will be their call, not mine.
"They won't be children forever: at some point, if they decide to become heroin addicts it will be their call, not mine." If that's the way you truly feel, I pity you.
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