One more disturbing consequence of the increasing celebrification and spectacle-ification of pretty much everything. It's no surprise that Francis got his start in "reality television"--this is probably where he learned that the conceit of "spontaneity" exponentially increases the voyeuristic gratification value of whatever "wildness" gets caught on film. What could be more titillating than the premise that "the girl next door" (to use his phrase) turns out to be "ready and willing and a dirty slut"?
The reasons some of the girls quoted gave for wanting to be filmed reminded me of an article I read a few years back, where the reporter asked several teenaged hopefuls at a modeling tryout what their reasons for wanting to become models were. Instead of enthusing "I love clothing and makeup and fashion and glamour" or whatever you might think, most of their reasons were banal solipsisms like "I just want other girls to want to be me." Of course, they were just teenagers, so this wasn't totally surprising; kids that age in general tend to be preoccupied with attracting the attention and envy of others as an end in itself. But it also reflects a troubling confusion of the interests of the consumer with the interests of the entertainer where entertainment--as business, as product--is concerned. Once you sign that contract and get in front of that camera, it's no longer about armchair fantasies of starring in your proverbial 15 minutes; you've now also become a product, and parties other than your audience now have an interest in what they can get from that product...meaning the responsibility now rests with you--ready or not--to understand what the worth of that product is and negotiate its use accordingly.
Can a drunk 18-year-old who's also high from the Spring Break/nightclub buzz reasonably be expected to grasp such a responsibility? Legally speaking, evidently yes, but ethically speaking, I'm inclined to think not, and that's what makes Francis' "business" setup disturbing, even setting aside the neon-sign indicators that he's an exploitative cad in ways that go way beyond that setup. I don't doubt that many if not most of these girls regard the whole thing as a kind of cheeky lark both before and afterwards, but again, there's some troubling confusion involved as to who's cheeking who. Who is really getting rich and famous? Who is really "liberating" their sexual license? Who is really winning (some) men's admiration with their boldness and swagger? Who is really getting the last laugh at the contradictory list of things society expects their gender to be? The awful irony of that comment from the woman Francis raped cuts directly to the ugly imbalance of power underlying it all:
"It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"
A perfect vicious circle: the desire to be "famous" so that "people will give you anything you want" leads to doing precisely what you
don't want so that other people can get famous--or just get what
they want--at your expense. Which of course was the idea all along--for Francis to get famous, and his consumers to get what they paid their $9.99 for. And all you got was this stupid T-shirt...and maybe a $0.00 laugh with your friends, if you're lucky.
Francis' own bizarre, if depressingly familiar, mixture of attraction to and contempt for the women he "works with" mirrors this irony right back: the "qwerty keyboard" taunts; the rants about [expletives] who don't "get" the First Amendment; the laments about the halcyon days of "innocent spontaneity" giving way to being rudely "hounded" by "calculating exhibitionists"; the careening back and forth between bullying brutality and perversely tender "I'm sorry, baby, give me a kiss" crooning.
[Sociologist and Tulane University assistant professor Vicki] Mayer has studied the young cameramen, who, she says, often sign up because they hope to break into Hollywood. Usually, she says, they end up disillusioned after spending night after night with women who lose their inhibitions for a T-shirt. "As much as it would be easy to see this as a simple relationship of men treating women a certain way, there are mutual relations of exploitation. I kind of feel like both sides could be seen as exploited." She's concluded that the winners are "the owners of these companies who are contracting cheap labor and free talent for a media product."
It would be interesting to read some of Mayer's perspectives on this (and on the women involved, as well)--one of the first things that occurred to me as I read about their filming process was to wonder just how many poorly paid nights of coaxing yet another round of rote "show-us-your-tits" scenes out of yet another fleeting sequence of drunken "I-want-everybody-to-see-me-because-I'm-hot" teenagers it would take before the whole gig lost any semblance of appeal whatsoever.
