KBTV

KBTV::Girls Gone Wild!

It’s dark out. It’s freezing (forgot to turn down the AC again), and my hands are stiff and sore from my new keyboard. Ouch. Girls Gone Wild! pours out of my television. It’s 4:30 a.m., and I’ve simply got to get in the shower.

Mute? St. Anthony, St. Anthony… where is the remote? I look up at the 54-inch flat screen.

Why isn’t that guy in jail?

I’m shooting at sunrise. Barry will be walking in the door in 90 minutes, and I have to be OUT of hair and makeup, dressed, fed, alert, and I have yet to edit two scripts. Please Kate, you don’t have time this morning to take apart Girls Gone Wild! I fumble around with the remotes in an attempt to shut off the noise – more evidence that American culture has become an oxymoron – but instead I find myself slowly sitting back down onto the space-foam pillow top mattress.

Girls Gone Wild! It streams like an MTV music video cum late at night, infomercial, showing bleeped-out snippets of utterly plotless videos, composed entirely from footage of sorority-type teenage girls flashing their breasts, their booty and often much more.

The formula is simple: bring hand-held video cameras to hard-partying, sex-charged, notorious “Spring Break” locales and – by offering the wildly popular brand’s T-shirts, baseball caps and short shorts to clearly inebriated girls seeking a answer to issues of low-self esteem – assemble the ultimate Traveling Titty Bar.

I continue to sit, transfixed by this extreme example of the disintegration of American culture. It’s demoralizing, humiliating, insidious, persistent and enveloping. If you need hard evidence of how Britney Spears has changed the way teenage girls think (or don’t), take a look at the ubiquity of thongs. According to NPD Group, a market research firm, the tiny garment’s sales rose to $780 million in 2005, up from $570 in the same period in 2001.

Meet Joe Francis, the creative mind behind this depressing debauchery. Eight days ago, Francis was granted bail in a federal tax evasion case in Nevada, but he decided to remain in jail to avoid the possibility of being sent to Florida and arrested on another charge.

Francis, a sleazy yet handsome Benjamin Bratt look-alike, is now 34. He earns an estimated $29 million a year from the videos he personally choreographs. The charge in Florida sums it up nicely: “Using minors in sexual performances, conspiring to use minors in sexual performances and prostitution.”

Apparently, Francis did not behave so well during the resolution talks with one of his accusers. A federal judge ordered Francis to settle the case or go to jail and sentenced him to 35 days after lawyers for one of the women said he became abusive during settlement talks. Finally, Francis is also charged with misdemeanor sexual battery in Southern California for allegedly groping an 18-year-old woman at a birthday party in Hollywood.

It’s now nearly 5 a.m. Kate, c’mon on!

My internal voice, my conscience – the voice of the Protestant work ethic pounded into me by my father – tells me to get in the shower and go to work. This was not the time to dissect the evils in America today – the thinly-veiled pornography, the sexism, the glorification of alcohol and drugs, and why people like Joe Francis make $29 million dollars a year when the public school teachers in Florida woke up last month to read in the local newspapers that their bonuses had just been nixed from the 2008 State budget.

posted by INSIDE FAU @ 4:57 PM