From the WSJ.com:
Joe Francis, founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” video company, may be 34 years old, but these days he is barely legal.
The controversial impresario has built a $100 million soft-core porn empire based on filming college students flashing (mostly) their breasts and (at times) other forbidden zones. He now sits in jail on a 35-day contempt of court sentence. Mr. Francis, who had previously been prosecuted for failing to document the ages of the young women he films, was arrested in April after violating a judge’s instruction to peaceably negotiate with seven young women who had filed a civil suit against him. They had alleged that his company, Mantra Films Inc., had filmed them while they were underage in 2003 and visiting Panama City, Fla., for spring break. Since being jailed, Mr. Francis has been charged with other crimes. He has tax problems, too. All told, he is facing felony jail time of up to five years in Florida, and another 10 in Nevada.
Good. Joe Francis is a cultural pollutant. But as he contemplates life in prison, the rest of us ought to contemplate what he has wrought–or what kind of society we have allowed him to create on our watch. “Girls Gone Wild” and its skin-flashing antics–spring break, beach parties, Mardi Gras–may seem relatively harmless artifacts of our look-at-me culture, especially when compared with the mechanical bedroom scenes and stagey embraces of hard-core pornography. But that is precisely why they matter more: Mr. Francis’s cameras have constructed a huge business out of recording the semi-nudity of “girls” who are not in “the business” at all: naïve girls, canny girls, drunken girls, pretty girls and not-so-pretty girls–regular girls, if one may put it that way. Above all, young girls. Mr. Francis has made it socially acceptable for a freshman at, say, Ohio State–living in a dorm room in Columbus like thousands of freshmen before her–to participate in soft-core porn.
If that phrase sounds too momentous for giggling (and often crudely embarrassing) flashes of skin, consider how much has changed in recent years. Once upon a time, a picture was just a picture. Today it can be wirelessly beamed to computers that can email it to networks where, once it is posted, it can be downloaded and endlessly reproduced by anyone who wants it. The detritus of 50 years of television is now available on YouTube, as are highlights from many DVDs. Just as Google transforms us all into archivists of previously fleeting moments, so too does the new digital recording technology give youthful acts a permanent life. In the case of Mr. Francis and his empire of imitators–not to mention angry ex-boyfriends with digital flash cards and a long memory–it can transform the playful exhibitionism of young women into scarlet letters that follow them around for life. …
Read the entire column here!
