One

Late on a balmy Friday night in March 2004, a crew from Girls Gone Wild sat on the porch of the Chesterfield Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami, preparing for the night of filming ahead of them. An SUV passed by and two blonde heads popped out of the sunroof like prairie dogs, whooping into the night sky. If you ever watch television when you have insomnia, then you are already familiar with Girls Gone Wild: late at night, infomercials show bleeped-out snippets of the brand's wildly popular, utterly plotless videos, composed entirely from footage of young women flashing their breasts, their buttocks, or occasionally their genitals at the camera, and usually shrieking "Whoo!" while they do it. The videos range slightly in theme, from Girls Gone Wild on Campus to Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style (hosted by the rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg), but the formula is steady and strong: Bring cameras to amped-up places across the country—Mardi Gras, hard-partying colleges, sports bars, spring break destinations—where young people are drinking themselves batty and offer T-shirts and trucker hats to the girls who flash or the guys who induce them to.

"It's a cultural phenomenon," said Bill Horn, Girls Gone Wild's thirty-two-year-old vice president of communications and marketing, a shaggy-haired young man in a T-shirt and Pumas. "It's like a rite of passage."

A couple of girls with deep tans in tiny, fluttery skirts were chatting across the street from the Chesterfield. "Ladies, throw your hands up!" a guy hollered at them as he passed by. They giggled and complied.

Horn said, "It's the next step."

Girls Gone Wild (GGW) is so popular they are expanding from soft-core videos to launch an apparel line, a compilation CD with Jive Records (of GGW-approved club hits), and a Hooters-like restaurant chain. GGW has a celebrity following: Justin Timberlake has been photographed in a GGW hat, Brad Pitt gave out GGW videos to his Troy castmates as wrap presents. And the phrase "Girls Gone Wild" has entered the American vernacular… it works well for advertisements (Cars Gone Wild!) and magazine headlines (Curls Gone Wild!).

Puck, a surprisingly polite twenty-four-year-old cameraman, was loading equipment into their van. He wore a GGW hat and T-shirt, which seemed to be enough to draw women to him as if by ensorcellment. Two stunning young women who were already very close to naked asked Puck if they could come along with him if they promised to take off their clothes and make out with each other later for the camera, possibly even in a shower. There was no room for them in the car, but Puck was unconcerned; there would be other such offers. "It's amazing," said GGW's tour manager, Mia Leist, a smiley, guileless, twenty-four-year-old. "People flash for the brand." She pointed at a young woman sitting on the other end of the porch. "Debbie got naked for a hat."

Besides her new GGW hat, nineteen-year-old Debbie Cope was wearing a rhinestone Playboy bunny ring, white stilettos that laced in tight X's up her hairless calves, and wee shorts that left the lowest part of her rear in contact with the night air. Body glitter shimmered across her tan shoulders and rose in a sparkling arc from her cleavage to her clavicle. "The body is such a beautiful thing," she said. "If a woman's got a pretty body and she likes her body, let her show it off! It exudes confidence when people wear little clothes." Cope was a tiny person who could have passed for fifteen. On the preceding night she had done a "scene" for GGW, which is to say she pulled down her shorts and masturbated for them on camera in the back of a bar. She said she felt bad for "not doing it right" because for some reason she couldn't achieve orgasm.

"People watch the videos and think the girls in them are real slutty, but I'm a virgin!" Cope said proudly. "And yeah, Girls Gone Wild is for guys to get off on, but the women are beautiful and it's… fun! The only way I could see someone not doing this is if they were planning a career in politics." Then a song Cope liked came on the radio inside the hotel and she started doing that dance you sometimes see in rap videos, the one where women shake their butts so fast they seem to blur.

"She calls that vibrating," explained Sam, another cameraman. "She told me, 'I can vibrate.' "

"Crazy Debbie," said Mia Leist. "I love her! She gets so many girls for us."

Everyone piled into the van and followed Crazy Debbie to a dance club in nearby Coconut Grove, where she knew all the locals. "Fun girls," Cope promised.

It was a vast, multilevel place and every song had a relentless, throbbing beat. Bill Horn surveyed the scene and landed his eyes on a cluster of blondes in tops tenuously fastened by lots of string ties. "Now those are some girls who should go wild," he said. "Jesus, listen to me… this job is turning me into a straight guy." Horn, who briefly pursued a career in academia before taking up with GGW, talked about his boyfriend constantly and was the second in command at GGW.

Puck and Sam, the cameramen, passed by with three young women who'd volunteered to do a "private" out on the balcony.

"Here we go," said Horn. He gave a little laugh. "There's some part of me that always wants to shriek, 'Don't do it!' "

But he didn't, and they definitely did… the trio started making out in a ravenous lump, grabbing at each other's rears and rutting around while trying to remain upright. Ultimately, one girl fell over and landed giggling on the floor—a characteristic endpoint for a GGW scene.

Later, the girl, her name was Meredith, said she was a graduate student. "It's sad," she said, with only a slight slur. "We'll have Ph.D.s in three years. In anthropology."

A few weeks later, on the telephone, she was upset: "I'm not at all bisexual… not that I have anything against that. But when you think about it, I'd never do that really. It's more for show. A polite way of putting it is it's like a reflex," she said. "My friend I was with felt really bad, the one who told the first girl to kiss me, the one who started it. Because in the beginning, I felt so dirty about the whole thing. I hate Miami."

"It's a business," said Mia Leist. "In a perfect world, maybe we'd stop and change things. But we know the formula. We know how it works."

"If it gets guys off…" said Bill Horn.

"If it gets girls off!" Leist interrupted. "It's not like we're creating this. This is happening whether we're here or not. Our founder was just smart enough to capitalize on it." GGW's founder, Joe Francis, has likened the flashing girls he captures on his videos to seventies feminists burning their bras. His product, he says, is sexy for men, liberating for women, good for the goose, and good for the gander. Francis estimates GGW is worth $100 million. He owns a mansion in Bel Air, a retreat in Puerto Vallarta, and two private jets. That weekend in Miami, ABC had just finished shooting a segment on Joe Francis for the show Life of Luxury.

Copyright © 2005 by Ariel Levy