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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 agree. But then I regard sex as something wonderful and not as something evil. If I find someone beautiful, how can that be considered a form of disrespect?
I want large numbers of women to ogle me.
"Princess of the Streets". A classic. "Peaches" is a more appropriate tune in this case.
Sadly there are too many parents who are indifferent to this fact. Even sadder, is their boasting of their indifference.
Recognizing that little girls grow into adults who are responsible for their own lives does not constitute indifference.
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Cute.
If I find someone beautiful, how can that be considered a form of disrespect?
Because pornography reduces a human being to the status of mere meat. People are not consumer products to be used and thrown aside.
Erotica and pornography are two different things. Eroticism (the expression of eros, a form of love) is a subject-oriented esthetiic experience based upon one's admiration of all aspects of another person -- her charm, her beauty, etc. Pornography is an object-oriented sensual experience based upon one's sexual passions toward a woman's body alone. Admiring a woman's beauty is not the same as lusting after her body; the first sees the whole person, the latter, a collection of parts. Pornography reduces some father's daughter to the status of take-away fried chicken -- a certain amount of "breasts and thighs" to be had for a price. I fail to see how this practice enobles the human spirit or enhances our civilization or its culture.
Unless it offends God, then I'd say the debate is over.
How are they going to see it? Oh, probably on E! "Wild On Spring Break."
In 20 years, this will be the stuff of primetime TV -- uncensored, even -- and, people then will laugh at what "prudes" we were today. Why, just last night, a TVLand documentary was recalling the uproar caused by the sit-com "Three's Company" in 1978. Some deemed it unabashed, non-stop, in-your-face sex. "Can you imagine if Friends had aired back then?"
Pictures?
Pix could bring on the Viking Kittens in this case.
On the Simpsons the other day, Marge said "boy Fox tv made the transition to hard core porn so subtle I hardly noticed it". I find it strange that you can't show a nipple on prime time but you can describe absolutely any gross disgusting depraved act in gory technical detail all you want. That's sick! A nipple would be a lot more wholesome.
Is that why the Daily Sun, home of the "Page Three Girl", is the biggest-selling daily tabloid in Great Britain? I sure as hell don't think it's because of the quality of journalism.
Shalom.
Which causes men to look for something different - something more.
Shalom.
Well said.
Hence, C.S. Lewis's (prophetic) book, "The Abolition of Man."
Shalom.
Men don't need an excuse to sin.
It's because "Three's Company" aired in 1978 that trash like "Friends" airs today.
We can't leave the bar alone. We either raise it or lower it.
I'll let you guess which is more likely.
Just because you call something "prudish" doesn't make it wrong. We call that "ad-homenim attack" and it is the sign of a weak argument.
The "prudish" sexual mores of women remining chaste until marriage (including modesty) and remaining faithful within marriage are the bedrock of any society. That makes them "good" as well as "prudish" and morals we can only wish would return.
Shalom.
Shalom.
I sure hope you didn't mean to talk about your wife that way.
The world needs men who respect women as life's partners, not as toys or trophies. This goes for mothers, daughters, and wives.
Shalom.
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