Sense Gone Wild

I've come up on the last week of the Job, much, much faster than I anticipated. The summer has blurred around me, a watercolour miasma that dizzies and hurts the eyes and bends, liquid, into abstractions, fragments of time. Someday, you and I, we can sit down and discuss all of the misadventure of it.

But the point is, with three days left, I just do not give a fuck. So I'm back to posting from work. Contrary to popular belief and almost everything I've said about it, I don't hate the Job. I don't like it. But I don't hate it. It's actually ok, as far as summer student work goes - the coworkers are nice, the pay is good, I have a comfy chair. But it's nothing if not draining, and it gets in the way of a lot of things I'd much rather be doing. In short: I'm glad to see the motherfucker go.

In (what is quickly becoming) the tradition of finding harrowing, fascinating articles among the Particles and Sidelights of Making Light, I've spent the morning reading this LA Times profile of Joe Francis, the creator of "Girls Gone Wild" and this accompanying, excellent post from hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. You really need to read them (if you're having trouble getting at the LAT article, bugmenot is an easy fence-jumping way to get past registration portals).

The LAT article is surprising, and a little frightening, and disturbing and disgusting. In it, Claire Hoffman, the article's author, is assaulted by Francis, who, in the same night, predatorily selects women in the nearby club to appear in his videos, gets them drunk (under-age) and then, allegedly, rapes an 18-year-old:

Footage from that night shows a close-up of Szyszka's driver's license, proving she's not a minor. The camera then captures Szyszka lying on the bed. Her nails are chipped, her eyes coated with makeup. Following a camerman's instructions, she shows her breasts and says, "Girls Gone Wild." She seems shy but willing. She smiles. The unseen cameraman asks her to take off her shirt, her skirt, then her underwear. She sprawls on the bed, her legs open. At his suggestion, she masturbates with a dildo, saying repeatedly that it hurts but also feels good. Francis enters the room at certain points and you hear his voice, low and flirtatious, telling her, "You are so adorable." When she says she's a virgin, he responds: "Great. You won't be after my cameraman gets done with you."

When I talk to Szyszka seven days later, she says she "didn't quite realize" she was being filmed. "But I didn't care because I was drunk and who cares?" Then she adds: "It didn't feel good to me at all, but I was totally faking it because I was on 'Girls Gone Wild.'"

Eventually, Szyszka says, Francis told the cameraman to leave and pushed her back on the bed, undid his jeans and climbed on top of her. "I told him it hurt, and he kept doing it. And I keep telling him it hurts. I said, 'No' twice in the beginning, and during I started saying, 'Oh, my god, it hurts.' I kept telling him it hurt, but he kept going, and he said he was sorry but kissed me so I wouldn't keep talking."

Afterward, she says, Francis cleaned them both off with a paper towel and told her to get dressed. Then, she says, he opened the door and told the cameraman to come back, saying, "She's not a virgin anymore."

The article goes on to chronicle Francis harrassing and lying about Hoffman to police officers, bystanders, her editor, and the woman herself, documents his various court appearances, and generally paints a picture of a deeply disturbed man who makes an enormous amount of money from the mass exploitation of young people. As hilzoy said, Francis might very well be a sociopath.

The article serves to underline two things for me. One is the nature and power of celebrity - Joe Francis should probably be in jail, or in isolation somewhere, being rehabilitated or analyzed or assessed. But, instead, because he had the idea to sell a video chronicling gruesome accident footage (his first project, before "Girls Gone Wild," was a VHS called "Banned from TV") and then to take advantage of the effects of youth, booze, and a camera, he has a private jet. He's created a brand from essentially tricking women into taking their tops off, and that means that he has an estate in Hollywood, hosts celebrities and millionaires at enormous parties, and is reportedly considering buying Playboy.

The other is the nature of pornography. It makes me think about a couple of things Alan Moore said in this interview with the Onion's AV Club about his (and Melinda Gebbie's) new, pornographic comic book Lost Girls:

None of the filmed or photographic material did anything for me, because there's such a lot of emotional human baggage that comes with anything that involves real models, real actors. You're too aware that this is somebody real, and that they might not have actually wanted to do this for a living. There's an air of disappointment or sadness that hangs over the material.

And I thought, when I read that, y'know, he's right. There's people behind all of that, isn't there? And there's a good chance that a lot of those people would rather be doing something else. And that's so much more true for "Girls Gone Wild". Most (if not all) of those girls are under the influence of something - drugs, alcohol, or, perhaps most pervasively, celebrity. Joe Francis is essentially wielding a psychological broadsword. "Girls Gone Wild" is a huge brand identity - there's the allure of fame, or what fame it can bring, and fame's made hundreds of thousands of people do strange, destructive, and irrational things for hundreds of years.

And yes, you can argue that these girls choose to do what they do, choose to put themselves in that situation. But you'd be hard-pressed to say that Joe Francis's coercion-engine doesn't have anything to do with it, and you'll never be able to make a case for the violence and assault that Francis has reputedly perpetrated time and again against people who have been lied to, harrassed, or threatened.

And no one makes the choice to get raped. End of story.