Object Lessons | Girls Gone Wild co-opts the language of choice

Carolyn Bradley Columnist

If you’ve spent any time in an American college bar with TV screens in the last few years, then you are probably familiar with Girls Gone Wild (GGW). In my hometown, at least, the franchise’s videos—consisting of footage of very drunk young women kissing, cavorting, and flashing for the camera, and usually letting out cheerleader-like shrieks while they do it—seem to have replaced “Ladies’ Night” as the standard sales gimmick for bars hoping to attract male customers. The show’s not-so-deceivingly simplistic formula involves a camera crew making visits to party-heavy areas across the country, from sports bars to Mardi Gras, offering t-shirts and trucker hats to the girls who flash or to the guys who encourage them to do so.

You have to hand it to Joe Francis, the show’s founder: barely legal girls flock to his camera crew in droves, hoping to be filmed. Not only does their volunteer work allow Francis to turn a fabulous profit with so few input costs, it also puts him in the enviable position of turning a little Feminist-101 on any of his detractors who might suggest that the show is degrading to women: after all, the women’s appearance is their own personal “choice.”

Isn’t it funny, though, how the language of “choice” seems to have been turned against women in recent years? Throughout the 1990s, we were told that breast implants provide women with greater “choices” and control over their bodies. More recently, the word is that Ivy League women are increasingly “choosing” to become housewives rather than entering the work force. We’re constantly hearing that women are “free” now that they have the right to make “choices.” And yet, at the same time, we’re told that women opt for choices which uphold the age-old patriarchal structures that feminism had hoped to destroy.

Of course, the problem with the language of “choice” is the way it masks the cultural conditions that influence women’s decisions in the first place. When all of women’s choices are portrayed in a vacuum, feminists are shunted from challenging the nature of those choices, lest they sound judgmental or even reactionary. Thus, feminists are told they have no right to comment when women “choose” to participate in GGW. It’s worth pointing out, though, that if a woman’s drunkenness is required to achieve her consent, Francis is walking a fine line in saying that her decision constitutes a “choice” in the first place.

Moreover, shouldn’t we be asking what drives women to make the choices they do? Francis has been quoted in the LA Times as saying that women consider flashing for his videos “empowering.” But if that’s indeed the case, then the real question is, why do so many women seek out power through their sexuality? Maybe our culture does not provide women with strong enough alternatives for gaining power. According to 2005 government data, full-time female workers in America make on average only 81 percent of what their male counterparts make. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, if women learn from an early age how much they have to gain from getting men’s attention.

And yet, what’s disturbing about GGW and similar shows like The Man Show, is not the way they focus in on female sexuality. It’s the way they delimit and manipulate the image of female sexuality to turn it against women. Look, there are ways for women to look sexy without them also looking incoherent and immature, but the makers of these shows apparently never got that memo. They also never got the memo about beauty coming in all shapes and sizes. The GGW camera crew receives bonuses if they can get blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls weighing less than 110 lbs. to flash. Am I the only one who recognizes a Nazi-like, Aryan fetish behind this, though? Besides the demented way this image excludes brunettes and medium- or heavy-set girls, the darker subtext is that women of color can’t be beautiful. If women are in search of something “empowering,” maybe it’s because they feel threatened by the culture’s insistence on their inadequacy.

It’s not that women shouldn’t have the right to make choices, of course they should. It’s just that I’m tired of the way choices get confused with freedom and respect. Here’s my theory: it’s going to take a lot more than a t-shirt and a trucker hat for women to win ourselves that.