Laws Gone Wild!!!!!!!!!

Girls Gone Wild (GGW), the wildly successful pornography franchise, has built its fortune on amateur exhibition videos peddled through ubiquitous (and obnoxious) advertisements. Relying on a low-budget strategy of propositioning young drunk girls into becoming adult film stars, GGW is at the top of the porn game.

Mantra Films Inc., the production company behind Girls Gone Wild, was founded by twenty-four year old University of Southern California graduate, Joe Francis, in 1997. Mantra Films Inc. began operating on a simple business model – travel to locations where intoxicated young girls congregate and offer drunk girls free merchandise in exchange for flashing the camera. The low production cost and high sale value of Girls Gone Wild videos meant immediate success for Joe Francis and Mantra Films. In the years since its launch GGW has become an empire, producing over thirty raunchy videos and netting millions of dollars each year.

Girls Gone Wild has enjoyed success in more than just the pornography and business realms - it has also become virtually invincible against legal action. Girls Gone Wild has faced several legal scandals in recent years, including charges of racketeering, distributing images of women without their permission, and filming underage girls, but GGW has rarely lost a legal battle. Each lawsuit brought against GGW has been dropped or settled out of court. Aside from a 1.6 million dollar fine in 2006 for failing to create and maintain age records for its videos, Girls Gone Wild has escaped the legal system unscathed.

In GGW’s most recent legal victory, a St. Louis court ruled in favor of Girls Gone Wild in a 5 million dollar lawsuit brought by twenty-six-year-old Jane Doe (whose real name was withheld from court records). In 2004, Jane Doe was dancing at a St. Louis bar when a GGW cameraman asked her to flash the camera. She refused the cameraman’s request, but a woman came up behind her and pulled her top down. The image of Jane Doe’s exposed chest appeared in Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy without her verbal or written consent. The woman’s claim that she did not want to flash the GGW camera is backed up by video evidence in which she audibly refuses to expose herself.

A St. Louis Circuit Court jury deliberated for just 90 minutes before the jury foreman, Patrick O’Brien, declared their decision against Jane Doe. “Through her actions, she gave implied consent," claimed O'Brien, "She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing."

 The Jane Doe decision raises questions about a society that is quick to blame the victim, but slow to condemn a pornography giant with a history of questionable activities. Dancing at a bar should not “imply consent” to expose one’s private parts to the entire country - even an expensive GGW defense attorney should not be able to convince a jury otherwise. The fact that the jury took only 90 minutes to decide this case is evidence that something greater than GGW’s corporate power is at play here.

Implied consent is a blame-the-victim defense that has been used to absolve the guilty since the legal system began. Placing the responsibility of injustice on a victim, usually female, for “putting herself at risk” allows oppressors to avoid blame while witnesses look the other way without guilt.

Blaming the victim is a societal trend that studies show is on the rise. In February 2010, the BBC reported that more than 50 percent of men and women surveyed said victims of rape should accept responsibility for their assault in certain circumstances. This chauvinist attitude makes court cases like Jane Doe’s easy to disregard. We can explain her claims away with “she knew what she was doing” or “she asked for it,” and remain blind to the underlying problem.

We fail to sympathize with the Jane Doe case because objectification of women has become so normalized we no longer consider someone who has been objectified to be a victim. According to Female Chauvinist Pigs, a recent book by feminist writer and researcher Ariel Levy, women are more accepting of sexualized images of females today than ever before. According to a 2008 study in the Journal of Adolescent Research, female college students are more than twice as likely as their mothers to say pornography is an acceptable outlet of sexuality (50 percent of college students, compared to 20 percent of their mothers). And if recent trends in pop culture are any indication, young girls would rather emulate women who are famous for sex scandals (Paris Hilton) than women who are famous for political success (Hillary Clinton).

This trend toward women’s acceptance of female sexualization and objectification contributes to the systems of power and exploitation that have been in place for centuries. As women internalize chauvinistic attitudes about their own sexuality, men have every reason to hold onto the same attitudes.

Along with male chauvinism, female chauvinism had an impact on the Jane Doe case. For one thing, a woman pulled Jane Doe’s top down for the GGW camera, an action that technically constitutes assault. For another, the jury that decided against Doe was comprised of both male and female jurors.

Girls Gone Wild and others like it will continue to have unchecked influence until society’s attitudes change. But for society’s attitudes toward exploitation of women to change, women’s attitudes toward exploitation of women need to change. When young girls look to Hillary Clinton instead of Paris Hilton as a role model, it will be much more difficult for a jury to fall back on the “she asked for it” defense in cases like Jane Doe’s. Exploitative industries like Girls Gone Wild might exist forever, but the chauvinist attitudes that grant GGW unbridled power don’t have to.