November 1, 2007

I was talking to a friend recently who asked me if I had any moral qualms about what Girls Gone Wild does. I asked what he meant, and he said he wondered how I felt about the claim that GGW exploits women.

Well, to paraphrase another friend, I responded by saying that Girls Gone Wild exploits women the way Steven Spielberg exploits actors. We love women. We celebrate them.

I explained to my friend that in all the time that I’ve been doing Girls Gone Wild, I've never seen a woman of any age who appeared before the GGW cameras who didn't WANT to do it. The girls enjoy the experience, and most of them seem to actively seek out the opportunity.

This is a point that is lost on the casual observer. I think most people who have a problem with GGW suffer from the misperception that somehow, GGW preys on women who are too young or too drunk to know what they are doing. And this simply isn’t the case. For one thing, who wants to watch a drunken woman go wild? That’s not sexy. Our cameramen are given strict rules of conduct, and one of those rules is that we do not put drunken women on camera. Yes, a lot of the women are young, but can you say they’re “too young”? The “age of consent” is the age at which society generally accepts that a person has gained enough maturity and life experience to understand the

choices he or she makes. In America, that age is 18. I wouldn’t accuse any 18-year-old of not being old enough to understand what he or she is doing – except, perhaps, when they are volunteering to go off to war. At the same time, I would never knowingly let a person under 18 appear on camera for Girls Gone Wild. If a cameraman working for Girls Gone Wild was ever caught filming an underage girl, that cameraman would be fired immediately. We go to great lengths to make sure that never happens.

A lot of pundits argue the point that girls who appear naked before the GGW cameras will come to regret it later in life. In reality, I can’t think of a single case where a woman has achieved some level of success in life, only to be harmed by the disclosure of old naked photos of herself – even though I’ve often heard just the opposite being claimed.

The few examples anyone can offer involve women who were seeking success by exploiting their looks in the first place; Vanessa Williams, Katie Rees, Vanessa Hudgens ... and in the final analysis, how did the naked photos hurt any of those women, except to bring them publicity?

The only instance I can think of where a woman was supposedly embarrassed by the disclosure of old naked pictures of herself was Dr. Laura Schlesinger. And it was only embarrassing to her because she chose to be embarrassed about it. It pointed out her own hypocrisy,

because she's such a stridently conservative loudmouth whose only approach to sexuality seems to be advocating complete abstinence. In any case, at the end of the day, did the disclosure of those pictures do any harm to her career? Of course not. In fact, she should have been proud of those pictures. She had a pretty tight little body back in the day, if I remember the photographs correctly.

There will always be people who claim to have a moral issue with what Girls Gone Wild does. As if providing an opportunity for women to celebrate both their freedom and their beauty on camera is somehow intrinsically wrong. Just as some people consider homosexuality to be morally wrong. Or eating meat for that matter. To me, something isn’t morally wrong unless it hurts someone -– like cheating on a spouse, or stealing. But if no one is getting hurt, what makes something “morally” wrong? That it might offend some sensibilities is not enough, in my estimation. We all choose what we are going to be offended by. And generally, we can turn away from what we don’t want to see or participate in. Girls Gone Wild is not predatory. No one is coerced into something they don’t want to do. No one is coerced into watching Girls Gone Wild, either.

I think it’s also important to know that Girls Gone Wild has a policy of not releasing footage of any woman who changes her mind in a reasonable period of time. If we get a call from a woman a day or two after she flashed for our cameras, asking us not to use the footage, we don’t. It’s

that simple: It’s company policy. We want women to enjoy the experience they had with us and not regret it.

We don’t hurt anyone. So what is the moral question? Girls Gone Wild is a pop cultural phenomenon for the simple reason that it’s fun. The popularity of Girls Gone Wild DVDs tells me that there are millions of people in this country who agree. Anyone is free to like Girls Gone Wild, or not like it. But to suggest that what we do is morally wrong? Well, that’s just wrong.