aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Girls Gone Wild: virgin whores

Any regular Comedy Central viewer is familiar with the Girls Gone Wild commercials. A gay man, I pretty much completely ignored them. Ariel Levy didn’t.

Three years ago she went to South Beach at spring break and wrote about it in Slate. The piece still gets good traffic; because it’s still so insightful:

Crazy Debbie is a 19-year-old personal trainer by day. She wears body glitter, white stilettos that lace up to her knees, and a rhinestone Playboy bunny ring. “I did a scene for them last night,” she says proudly, which is to say she masturbated for the GGW cameras in the back of a bar. “People watch the videos and think the girls in them are real slutty, but I’m a virgin! I just think this is fun. Miami is one of the few places where people aren’t ashamed of their bodies. And yeah, Girls Gone Wild is for guys to get off on, but the women are beautiful and it’s fun!”

Here’s Ariel speaking in yesterday’s Fresh Air interview:

I think there’s still a lot of emphasis on purity and virginity, you know, and some of the early stars of raunch culture, for example, were Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears. And when they first became popular, it was like, you know, they were half-naked, they were our--these national pastimes was just drooling over these girls--but they had to tell us constantly in their music that sex was something they sang about, not something they engaged in. I mean, I still think that there’s this real pressure to be a virgin even while you look like a whore. It’s like we want all our sort of iconic female roles in one.

And I think, you know, not unrelated is the fact that we keep pumping billions of dollars into abstinence-only education, which tells these young people, essentially, `Just say no to sex until you’re married.’ And we do that despite the fact that there’s never been a single study to show that this works, and, of course, the United States has woefully high levels of, you know, teen pregnancy and STDs spread.

So I think it’s like, there’s an actual anxiety about sexuality paired with a sort of endless appetite for hotness.

RELATED: ”Baby give me a kiss” by Claire Hoffman in the LA Times. An absolute must read look at the man behind the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ soft-porn empire.