Ezra Klein: Girls Gone.

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January 29, 2007

Girls Gone.

Props to the activists who shut down the planned Girls Gone Wild event in Bloomington. The issue with GGW isn't the porn, but the practices. Everything from rape to assault to pressured/inebriated consent to economic exploitation. It's a grotesque business model that pretends criticism is about the product rather than the often illegal methods used to produce it. Don't believe me? Read this.

January 29, 2007 | Permalink

Comments

Pfff. Irving Kristol was way ahead of you:
"A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she's being paid minimum wage."

Posted by: Chris | Jan 29, 2007 7:59:44 PM

Wow. Note to self: Irving Kristol is a defamatory asshat.

Posted by: paperwight | Jan 29, 2007 8:40:59 PM

"The issue with GGW isn't the porn, but the practices."

Yup.

Posted by: Petey | Jan 29, 2007 8:44:48 PM

After some googling on his name, it seems clear this guy is one of those who has sex and violence all muddled together, and he really reealy needs professional head help.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Jan 29, 2007 10:10:47 PM

And people wonder why I'm a "prude, and obsessed with modesty". Wendy Shalit got it right. This will NOT happen to my daughter, if I have anything to say about it.

One has to wonder at the parents that created these adults. What sort of values, if any, did these people grow up with? (no, I'm not just talking about the girls)

Posted by: Yocheved | Jan 29, 2007 11:13:30 PM

Wendy Shalit is an intellectually-dishonest retrograde fundamentalist victim-blamer. (Stupidly, I read her book. Now I know better.) There are better ways to keep your daughter secure and happy with herself than swaddling her in fabric for the rest of her life. Joe Francis does not take advantage of young women's comfort with their bodies - he takes advantage of their discomfort with the idea that boys won't like them.

Posted by: Sara | Jan 30, 2007 12:25:45 AM

Worse, he capitalizes on everything that these girls were NOT taught in order to protect them from themselves. Lack of competent sex education just leaves young people to learn on their own and that leaves openings for the Joe Francises. I wouldn't put it past him to be funding the No sex education movement for his own benefit.

Posted by: Hawise | Jan 30, 2007 7:48:49 AM

One has to wonder at the parents that created these adults. What sort of values, if any, did these people grow up with? (no, I'm not just talking about the girls)

Wonder? About what? These are, the vast majority at least, white, upper class young women. They're frequently vacationing in expensive locales when the videos are shot and are seldom seen in cheap vehicles or hand me down clothing. They have expensive jewelry and sport manicures and hair designs that cost more than some people spend on food every week. Do I need to mention plastic surgery? Draw whatever inferences from that you wish.

Me, I think it's clear what the conservative-fundamentalist-capitalist way of life produces. And you can see it as well for only $19.95...

And a slightly irrelevant sidenote here. There are two things that joe francis did that made him what he is (insert perjorative here) and neither has anything to do with girls. The first was to get his advertising accepted on cable stations. His two minute commercials that run incessantly on some networks (late at night, of course) are unique in the porn world. The second and possile more important of the two is the way he sells them. francis simply stole his business model from time/life. He doesn't offer sales of single tapes. When you buy one tape, you're automatically signed up for a new tape to be shipped to you on a regular basis (at a higher cost) with automatic billing. This opt-out sales model means he always gets at least some repeat business. Throw in a dash of semi-respectability ("come on, it's not porn, it's just...") and you have a guy worth a few hundred million dollars. Oh, and a criminal.

Posted by: ice weasel | Jan 30, 2007 9:35:39 AM

Yeah, we need to take advice from a moral titan like Irving Kristol.

Posted by: Walt | Jan 30, 2007 4:32:00 PM

check out ariel levy's female chauvinist pigs: the rise of raunch culture

Posted by: jaimeita | Jan 31, 2007 12:21:12 AM

None of the Neoconservative or Theoconservative fundamentalist websites have praised this successful attack on pornography in the Red State heartland.

Seems the Neoconservative or Theoconservative fundamentalists, by their deafening silence, support pornography.

Or perhaps Girls Gone Wild hasn't reached a contract deal with Kate O'Beirne?

Posted by: Ira Schwartz | Jan 31, 2007 12:08:32 PM

I'm something of a theocon, props to the people with standards who drove out this little pimp.

Now can we just get some anti-obscenity laws with teeth? Modest censorship is necessary to protect women and men from such degradation.

Posted by: Kevin Jones | Jan 31, 2007 5:21:44 PM

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