Girls gone Wild

Proof that I read entirely too much…about pretty much anything…GGW founder Joe Francis assaulted LA Times reporter, Claire Hoffman, as she was attempting to do an honest piece on the empire built on candid shots of women pulling up their shirts in public.

Amanda Marcotte, via Jessica, quotes:


Joe Francis, the founder of the "Girls Gone Wild" empire, is humiliating me. He has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: "This is what they did to me in Panama City!"

While Hoffman is present, Amanda writes: "[Francis] appears to rape a teenager." (Go HERE if you want to read more about that).

The more important part of Amanda's post is the subtler point she makes about a "throwaway" clip from the article.


But the women are changing, Francis tells me, and that makes him sad. In the beginning, when “Girls Gone Wild” cameramen first popped up in clubs, the women who revealed themselves seemed innocent—surprised, even, by their own spontaneity. Now that the brand is so pervasive, the women who participate increasingly appear to be calculating exhibitionists, hoping that an appearance on a video might catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame.

Amanda writes:

"To rephrase this bluntly, Francis doesn’t like working with women who are getting something out of it... The fantasy is not just regular girls getting naked, which is something I have exactly zero problem with. It’s a little more complex than that. The idea is to bend a usually unwilling woman to your will and enjoy the submission. Women who march up to the camera and say they want to be filmed in sexual situations are not bending to anyone’s will and that takes the fun out of it. Very, very telling."