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DEAN'S LIST - 5/25/2008
(by Dean Naddeo - OpEd Columnist - May 25, 2008)
The ‘Girls Gone Wild’ Generation
Maybe the time has come for society to be concerned about the sheer volume of young women dropping their drawstrings and “going wild” in front of video cams, cell phones and digital cameras these days.
As a father of a young woman-to-be, I have naturally grown more and more anxious about this topic each year. But the breaking point may have come last week when the Comedy Central show I was watching was repeatedly interrupted by a commercial for the newest “Girls Gone Wild” video to hit the market, audaciously entitled “Finally 18.”
Needless to say, there are now countless forums in both print and cyberspace where just about anyone can discard their inhibitions and display every single stitch of their birthday suits for the viewing pleasure of the entire universe. And the most recent advances in Internet and wireless technology have virtually guaranteed that an endless collection of pictures and videos depicting young women engaged in all levels of sexual activity is readily available for anyone who owns a computer or a cell phone.
As a result of this constant bombardment, it seems as though a whole generation of kids has become desensitized and successfully conditioned into believing that it’s an acceptable rite of passage to engage in at least one pornographic video or photo shoot (reference Paris Hilton and company), and that doing so is merely “innocent” and “harmless” fun.
When shows like “The Girls Next Door” that dignify and encourage pornography are considered mainstream, and programs such as “Dance Off, Pants Off” and MTV’s “A Shot of Love 2” are deemed acceptable and inoffensive, the mindset of an entire generation becomes painfully evident.
Greed-driven and unscrupulous producers and publishers have cleverly enlisted the common man in an effort to convince young women that getting naked for the camera is not only acceptable, it’s very cool. And, judging from the massive numbers of girls proudly participating in such activity, these benefactors of smut are fully succeeding in their conditioning efforts.
Consider the highly successful “Girls Gone Wild” video series that has made millions of dollars by swapping cheap t-shirts and free beer in exchange for a young woman’s dignity. On Dec. 13, 2006 the US Department of Justice announced that producer Joe Francis’s company, Mantra Films, had been ordered to pay $1.6 million in criminal fines for failing to create and maintain age and identity records for films it produced. This makes it very likely that many of the girls that appear in these exploitation videos were underage, further compounding the damage done.
Unfortunately, what these young women are failing to recognize is that once an explicit home video or alcohol induced party photo finds its way to print, video or to the World Wide Web, it is public, and it is forever.
This means that an employer, or mom, dad or grandma, may come across it some day, and there had better be a defibrillator charging nearby. Worst of all, these explicit images and video clips can potentially fall into the hands of their children or grandchildren, and a lifetime of parenting can be erased in a single, degrading moment.
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