Whose Pleasure?

Girls Gone Wild is a symptom of our culture’s stunted view of female sexuality.

By Lisa Jervis

While there are a number of flaws in Garance Franke-Ruta’s proposal to curb young women’s participation in the boob-flashing-fests of Girls Gone Wild and its ilk (which, it’s only fair to mention, Garance fully admits), the response of some lefty-type guys (and at least one woman)—and the chatter of most of their commenters—pretty much completely miss the point.

These guys jump to protest the potential infantilization of hot chicks, defend young women’s rights to earn a living from porn, and point out the absurdity of Garance’s Law, which would render a gal unfit to show her titties when she is perfectly free to join the military, vote, and have an abortion. Meanwhile, no one is talking about the culture that has produced hordes of young women eager to lift their shirts in response to drunken requests from frat boys and their older, camera-toting brethren. And that makes it almost irrelevant that these lefty dudes are right about the absurdity and the infantilization and the often-quite-good wage of sex work. It’s also well worth noting that so many discussions conflated drunken flashing with actual paid sex work; it took quite a bit of commenting before people pointed out that the girls who go wild get nothing in return except branded swag while the company that owns their images makes millions.

Though Garance’s excellent follow-up corrects many of her critics’ misapprehensions and explains why current laws are ineffective against Joe Francis’s criminal and sleazy behavior, there’s still a crucial piece missing from the discussion, one that even feminist bloggers have only hinted at. Somewhere in all this blogospheric sound and fury, we’ve got to be able to find a way to examine and counteract what girls (and boys too) are taught about female pleasure and desire.

I appreciate Garance’s thought experiment (which, in my opinion, is really the best way to view her proposal) because it at least attempts to examine women’s interests beyond an overly simplistic it’s-my-body-and-I’ll-flash-if-I-want-to watered-down “choice” feminism that disingenuously posits a world in which power is no longer gendered and individual decisions have no ramifications beyond the individual. But her experiment fails because it looks at only the half of our culture that punishes women for sexualized exuberance. What about the half that rewards women—with attention, praise of their hotness, and even (slightly) more sophisticated things like assumptions about how cool and free and comfortable they must be with their bodies and sexualities—for showing their goods?

The Girls Gone Wild phenomenon has been produced by a culture that, for all the progress we’ve made around de-stigmatizing sexual expression, especially for women, still conceptualizes female sexuality as being primarily about display that brings pleasure to (presumably male) observers. But what about women experiencing their own pleasure in ways that render an audience irrelevant? Girls and women are steeped in cultural messages saying it’s more important to look like someone else’s version of sexy than to experience sexual pleasure. They’re taught that you might want to make out with another girl because men think it’s hot, not because kissing girls might feel good. Girls wear the latest short skits and lacy tops to schools where their sex ed is abstinence-only, and a mini-gaggle of pop stars got famous for saving themselves for marriage while simultaneously cultivating junior-sexpot personae. Movies about girls exploring their sexuality get harsh treatment from the MPAA while their boy-focused counterparts become hits with far raunchier content and, not coincidentally, lots of scenes where guys watch their female classmates undress. Just one example of many is “Coming Soon,” about a trio of high school girls’ quest for an orgasm; the film’s masturbation scene had to be significantly trimmed to earn an R rating. “American Pie,” on the other hand, was an R-rated hit revolving around male masturbation—and the only time a girl gets close to touching herself, the guys are secretly watching her on a webcam.

By pointing this out, I’m not denying that it can indeed be fun and sexy to show off your body, and that the attention you get in response can also be sexy (though as all women know, it can also be incredibly creepy). But if we’re going to make any change in, to use Garance’s phrase, the supply side of late-teens porn, we need to change the cultural context of sexuality at all ages. We need to examine where the sexiness of being looked at comes from: without question, the consistent, multifaceted, exhausting—yet inexhaustible—barrage of messages that female sexuality is about making a display that gets someone else off has a lot to do with it.

The trick is to help young women navigate and respond to the barrage without patronizing, faux-feminist posturing; reinforcing outdated virgin-whore ideas about what kinds of girls lift their tops; sighing over the outlandish behavior of kids today; or discounting or denying girls’ behavior as simple false consciousness—all of which is happening way too much, both in feminist circles and elsewhere. If we can’t widen our analytic lens enough to see this, then we’re going to be stuck in Joe Francis’s world forever.

Lisa Jervis is the founding editor and publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture.

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