Girls Gone Wild @ Jakes. 9p-2a.

Update: This event has been cancelled due to pressure from the city and IU’s Gender Incidents Team.

From a HT article about the cancellation:

This time, complaints to the IU Gender Incidents Team spurred an investigation into “Girls Gone Wild,” Mantra Entertainment and owner, Joe Francis. Quickly, a petition began circulating this week, urging the nightclub owners to cancel the event. It mentioned numerous criminal complaints filed against Francis and Mantra Entertainment and threatened a remonstrance against Jake’s liquor license for failing to “maintain a high and fine reputation in the community” when the license comes up for renewal.

In an e-mail circulated among the petition’s carriers, Mayor Kruzan wrote that he considered the booking of “Girls Gone Wild” to be “unfortunate” and pledged to have Safe & Civil City Director Beverly Calender-Anderson and Economic Development Director Danise Alano meet with Kubiak to discuss the appropriateness and desirability of hosting such an event. Kruzan attended the meeting as well.

McCord said the Gender Incidents Team routinely reviews allegations by students who complain that they got drunk unintentionally from free-flowing alcohol provided to them and were taken advantage of. She worries that “Girls Gone Wild” fosters that kind of atmosphere and that women who participate in a moment of bad judgment could be haunted by the videos as they pursue jobs or other endeavors later in life.

Before the event was canceled, Melanie Castillo-Cullather, another member of the Gender Incidents Team, said, “What we’re saying to Mr. Kubiak is, of course you are free to do this, but you should be conscious about your responsibilities to the community. Do you really want this kind of business to infiltrate this town?” she asked. “What kind of Bloomington do you want to live in?”

 

Corinna posted this on K.I.T:

“Girls Gone Wild” is going to be at Jake’s in Bloomington this Friday.I first heard about this on Sunday night, but since then I’ve been inundated by postcard sized flyers featured gape-mouthed girls in tiny tank tops all over campus.

A little background: there was a very illuminating article in the LA Times about Joe Francis, the creator of “Girls Gone Wild” videos, over the summer. The article exposes him as being a very aggressive sexual assaulter who preys on vulnerable (mostly young) women. Here’s the link:

Joe Francis: ‘Baby, give me a kiss’

Additionally, he has since been charged for not documenting the ages of the girls in his videos. He is on probation, but apparently that doesn’t stop him from producing new videos.

It has been suggested that folks go out and hand out information on consent and sexual assault at the taping. It has also been suggested to dressas a “girl-gone-wild” and infiltrate the crowd to get people talking about what a sleaze he is. Both sound like good angles.

Anyway, just a head’s up…

The LA Times Article linked above is pretty disturbing and paints GGW founder Joe Francis as a creep at best, and is documented as actually physically restraining the journalist who wrote the article by pinning her to the hood of a car.

The article gives some interesting insight into the motivations of two of the women featured in the videos:

When I turn to the flock of pretty girls, Jillian Vangeertry, a 21-year-old student, offers me a warm smile. I feel as if I’m in a bed of kittens. Why, I ask, is she here?

“Anybody enjoys the attention. T-shirts, hats—we got all the accessories,” she says. I ask if she plans on going wild for the cameras later. She shrugs. “If you do it, you do it,” she says confidently. “You can’t complain later. It’s almost like your 15 minutes of fame.”

and

I follow Francis and his bodyguard through the crowd to find Kaitlyn Bultema. She’s dancing on a podium and leaps off at the sight of Francis. She’s wearing a skirt-and-shirt ensemble that exposes her stomach, most of her breasts and much of her bottom. I ask her why she wants to appear on “Girls Gone Wild” and she looks me in the eye and says, “I want everybody to see me because I’m hot.”

It’s then that it hits me: This is so much bigger than Francis. In a culture where cheap and portable video technology lets everyone play at stardom, and where America’s voyeuristic appetite for reality television seems insatiable, teenagers, like the ones in this club, see cameras as validation. “Most guys want to have sex with me and maybe I could meet one new guy, but if I get filmed everyone could see me,” Bultema says. “If you do this, you might get noticed by somebody—to be an actress or a model.”

I ask her why she wants to get noticed. “You want people to say, ‘Hey, I saw you.’ Everybody wants to be famous in some way. Getting famous will get me anything I want. If I walk into somebody’s house and said, ‘Give me this,’ I could have it.”

though the article offers some broader social analysis:

I call Vicki Mayer, a sociologist and Tulane University assistant professor, for guidance. Mayer teaches a class on the nudity rituals that take place on New Orleans’ infamous Bourbon Street. She has studied and written about “Girls Gone Wild,” and she contends that it’s simplistic to say that Mantra takes advantage of women. “For some women this is liberating, for some women this is something they do on a goof or for a lark to show friends they can, for some it’s a way of flirting with the cameramen,” Mayer says.

Francis and his staff maintain that it’s the “girl next door” they seek out for their videos. In reality, the “Girls Gone Wild” girl is almost always slender and young, with nice teeth and very carefully groomed private parts. At the same time, Mantra recruits hard-working and attractive young men who will be able to sweet-talk women into taking their clothes off for the cameras. (Mantra has released several “Guys Gone Wild” DVDs filmed by female camera crews, but they have not sold as well.)

Mayer has studied the young cameramen, who, she says, often sign up because they hope to break into Hollywood. Usually, she says, they end up disillusioned after spending night after night with women who lose their inhibitions for a T-shirt. “As much as it would be easy to see this as a simple relationship of men treating women a certain way, there are mutual relations of exploitation. I kind of feel like both sides could be seen as exploited.”

She’s concluded that the winners are “the owners of these companies who are contracting cheap labor and free talent for a media product.”