Pornland (8 page)

Many of the people I speak to when lecturing are baffled as to why young women agree to appear in
GGW
at all—after all, they get only a tank top or a hat for doing so. From the Web site and videos, it seems that literally thousands of girls are ready and willing to throw themselves at Joe Francis. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which are connected to the sophisticated recruiting machinery of
GGW
and some as simple as the fact that nearly all the young women are in late adolescence—a time of special vulnerability to cultural messages. After speaking with young women who appeared on
GGW,
what has become clear to me is that Francis and his team are experts in manipulating these women into becoming the raw material of his product. The important point to remember is that these women have already been seasoned by the culture to see themselves as sex objects, and Francis and his team build on this by overwhelming them with compliments about how hot and beautiful they are and what beautiful bodies they have.

Given its visibility in pop culture, young people tend to associate
GGW
with celebrity culture. Beyond the appeal of celebrity cachet, though, the party culture message associated with
GGW
is that everyone featured is having fun. By editing out those women who refuse to cooperate,
GGW
creates a closed world where everybody seems only too willing to perform sexually for the camera. The public image of
GGW
itself then becomes a recruitment tool as it draws in young people looking to do something adventurous and edgy.

As soon as the
GGW
bus pulls into a vacation resort, the staff creates a party atmosphere, whether it be on the beach or in a nightclub. Francis’s team members are typically in their twenties and early thirties, attractive, casually dressed, and bathed in celebratory status by virtue of their connection to
GGW.
These men shoehorn their way into student peer groups by using their “cool” status to ingratiate themselves with the women, and they adopt a “fun-loving” persona as they begin to scout for potential recruits. In this way, they work their way into a group of women who are most likely (at least) ten years their junior.

The team is coached to always be on the lookout for a “10,” which translates into a young, white, blonde, blue-eyed female with big breasts and a toned body. The cameramen even get bonuses for finding and filming such women.
13
Women of color, especially black women, appear to be completely off-limits. For example, in one painful scene from
GGW
’s
Sex Starved College Girls 3,
the cameraman homes in on three girls, two white and one black. All three look excited to be on
GGW,
but it is the white women who get all the attention. As they begin to kiss, the camera focuses on the white women. The black woman stands perfectly still, not knowing what to do with herself as her two friends get into a heavy make-out session. As the scene continues, the camera blocks out the black woman completely. This exclusion of women of color from
GGW
suggests that the targeted audience is white men, because there is a general belief in the porn industry that men on the whole prefer to watch porn that features women of their own racial group.
14

If you watch enough of these videos, you’ll spot a pattern: the
GGW
team targets a woman who is surrounded by male and female peers. The cameramen then proceed to encourage the surrounding students to nag the woman to flash. Some of the women agree quickly while others take a lot of convincing. Because many of the young women are in the developmental stage where peer acceptance is all-important, it is not surprising that they cave in. If Francis and his team were themselves to be seen to pester a woman into flashing, then they would appear as adult predators of adolescent girls. Instead, they cleverly manipulate the peers of these girls to do their “dirty work.”

The
GGW
team, by setting up camp in student-dominated places, is actually infiltrating the private space of these students. Spring break (or similar times when students get together on vacation) is typically a time when young adults congregate without older adult supervision. There is an expectation on the part of the students that while on vacation with peers, they will be able to experiment sexually with minimal consequences. According to one study:

Activities on spring break . . . were described as exceptions to everyday experience, outside of usual standards, expectations, norms. Students used phrases such as “what happens in Daytona, stays in Daytona,” “nothing that happens here comes home” and “nothing counts.” They portrayed an atmosphere in which the usual rules and moral codes did not apply. Students provided detailed descriptions of how some had behaved “totally out of character” or in ways that “they never would at home.” These illustrations and the results of the statistical analysis support the picture of spring break as the environment in which personal codes are temporarily suspended.
15

This sense of having a “pass” to experiment sexually on vacation with unforeseeable long-term consequences is precisely what Francis exploits as a way to recruit young women. The alcohol-soaked, sexually charged, no-holds-barred atmosphere of spring break provides a perfect atmosphere for the
GGW
team to manipulate the girls into behaving in ways that would normally be outside their repertoire of behavior.

The videos in which the girls are seen actually performing sexually (this is usually masturbation, girl-on-girl sex, and/or inserting dildos into the vagina and sometimes anus) show just how predatory the
GGW
team is. The first scene often reveals the cameraman walking into a room and approaching a woman or a group of women, who giggle as he begins dishing out the compliments. He then, in a gentle voice, starts to give them instructions on how to undress and what to do with each other. He will say things like “Why don’t you touch her tits?” “Give her a slap,” “Open your legs wide,” and so on. If we consider the power imbalance in the room at that moment, then it becomes easy to understand why it’s so difficult for a woman to change her mind once a scene has been set in motion. The cameraman is older, has celebrity status, and, most important, is clothed. She, on the other hand, is a late adolescent, most likely drunk, and naked in front of men she does not know.

Adolescents, by definition, are trying on identities to see which one fits. They are seeking out ways of being in the world that make sense for who they are and who they want to be. Since the most visible identity on offer for a young woman is one that emphasizes her as a sexual being to the exclusion of anything else, then performing sex on camera becomes one more way to express who you are.

One of the major problems associated with being on
GGW
is that the young women’s behavior is forever frozen in time on tape; they can’t take it back, hide it, or deny that they did it. For some of the young women I have spoken with, the aftermath of appearing in
GGW
was devastating. One young woman who flashed for
GGW
told me that she felt like the image would follow her for the rest of her life. She said that she had agreed to flash “because I was drunk and it seemed like fun. Well, it isn’t fun now because what people always seem to find out about me is that I was on
GGW.
” While they might have thought sexually performing for the camera was fun at the time, their families, communities, and peer group turned against them once they found out what they had done, labeling them as sluts, a label that they carry with them wherever they go. These young women grew up in a media culture where women such as Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and Kim Kardashian seemed to have benefited from having sex tapes of them in public circulation. What these young women find out after performing for
GGW
is that while celebrities can get away with such sexual performance on camera, the average female stripped of wealth and glamour gets treated not as a Paris Hilton wannabe but as a “slutty” girl who deserves to be ridiculed and shunned.

For many of the young women I have spoken with, life changed dramatically after an appearance on
GGW,
and some even suffer symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. One woman told me that after she had girl-on-girl sex with her friend, she felt like “a stupid whore and I can’t stop people watching me. All the guys at school watch me and I feel horrible.” Their moment of recklessness has been captured on film, and they feel that it will define them for the rest of their lives, overriding all other parts of their identity. For some of these young women, wherever they go, be it a new school or job, their
GGW
images dog them. Some drop out of school, others become depressed, and many carry a deep sense of shame. What I found was that their lives had been derailed as plans for school or careers were dropped. Ellen started college with the hope of being a business major but after the tape of her having sex with her friend was shown at a frat party during the first semester, she dropped out of school. In Ellen’s case, as in that of others I interviewed, depression prevented her from even leaving the house. Trisha told me that “my life will never be the same. I had so many plans and look at me now, a dropout with no future.”

As these women struggle to rebuild their lives, Joe Francis gets richer and richer. He has hit on a winning idea and in spite of the many legal cases against him—he has been accused of racketeering, drug trafficking, child pornography, bribery, possession of a controlled substance, and introducing contraband into a Florida jail—his company continues to grow. By developing a brilliant marketing campaign and brand, he has helped to make the culture more porn-friendly and by so doing, he has further blurred the line between pop culture and pornography.

Jenna Jameson

Her breasts are scarred from having her breast implants removed, her face looks like it collapsed, and she still has her silicone injected lips! Not to mention her puss and ass are probably as big as a car garage. . . . It is a good thing she retired because this is one old slut that needs to be put down.

—Blog post

Jenna Jameson achieved what seemed like the impossible just a generation ago—she became the first-ever real porn star. She managed to break through the porn barrier by moving seamlessly between the porn world and mainstream media. In the past, porn performers couldn’t shake the sleaze factor and were hence considered untouchable by most mainstream pop culture industries. Jameson changed all this as she became a household name, thanks in part to the many stories on her life in celebrity magazines such as
People
and
US,
her best-selling book
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,
shows about her that appeared on VH1, E! Entertainment, and HBO, and her appearances in ads for companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch and Pony
.
That no other woman in porn has ever penetrated the mainstream to such a degree is not lost on the porn industry.
Playboy
in its January 2009 issue named Jameson the first porn performer to “become a mainstream icon.” The Adult Movie Awards run by
Adult Video News
has a category called Jenna Jameson Crossover Star of the Year, in which female porn performers compete to see who has come closest to emulating Jameson’s mainstream status.

The story told by the media of how Jameson became a porn star is one that highlights just how carefully the porn industry crafts its image as fun, chic, and hot while ignoring the reality of what happens to most women in the industry. In interviews she often says that she got into the industry because she is a very sexual person and pornography was an obvious career choice. Interviewers take this at face value, buying into an image of a highly sexual woman who luckily finds her niche in porn. Numerous stories underscore how she is in control of her own life and how she is a living example of the way a woman can make a successful career in the porn industry. In these accounts, porn is cleansed of its sleaziness and Jameson, a white, blonde woman with an all-American look, becomes the walking (wholesome) image of the industry, rather than the men who own and control much of the porn or the many women who end up poor with damaged bodies and STDs, working the streets to pay the rent.

Missing from most media accounts of Jameson is the real story of her life, which is much less glamorous than her public image. In
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,
she gives a detailed account of a childhood and early adulthood marred by neglect and abuse. Her mother died when she was two and her early life was chaotic, not least because she was at times neglected by her father. As a teenager, she was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead and later raped by her abusive boyfriend’s uncle. When she was sixteen, her father threw her out, so she went to live with her boyfriend, who encouraged her to start stripping. She was so desperate that in order to get her first gig, she removed her braces with a pair of pliers. Later on she became addicted to a cocktail of drugs and nearly died.

While articles occasionally mention the abuse, they gloss over the actual amount and the ways that such experience shapes choices and decisions in later life. The story of a neglected teenager being turned out of her home by her father and encouraged to become a stripper by her boyfriend is much more seedy and unlikely to paint the porn industry in a positive light. Most of these articles instead focus on her wealthy lifestyle and the way she has built a one-woman porn empire. Indeed, she made many millions from her films, from her Web site, called Club Jenna (now owned by Playboy), from selling computer games in which the user gets to masturbate Jameson as well as have “sex” with her, from her sex toys, T-shirts, mugs, action figures, and ring tones that feature her moaning. She even has an anatomically accurate model of her vagina and buttocks molded in soft plastic. An article in
Forbe
s on Jameson demonstrates the way that mainstream media cleanse the porn industry by focusing only on her success. It summarizes her life as follows: