Guys Gone Wild

I often appreciate half-assed attempts by our sexist, pop culture driven society to level the playing field and offer up something as equally degrading to men. For example, the talk shows that discuss young men’s bulimic troubles or the MTV profile of the male slut who no one wants to socialize with, or the latest sickly, wilting olive branch, Guys Gone Wild.

From the smut meisters that brought you those $19.99 DVDs of college girls “willing to bare it all” for a t-shirt comes the male version. When I first saw this commercial I was expecting the Geico tagline to come up at any second, after all, they parodied the Old Navy ads, so why not corner the market on young, drunken, college drivers in need of insurance. However, this was actually a series of DVDs showing young, buffed college guys flashing their schlongs for, you guessed it, $19.99 per video.

After realizing that these were legitimate and probably some sort of strange offering to get the feds off the back of the guinea running the “flash your tits” empire, I laughed for at least 30 minutes about the potential customer base. Unlike the Girls Gone Wild discs, their male counterpart tapes will not be purchased largely by members of the opposite sex wanting to see young, hot bodies, because most women can see dick whenever they want to. That’s right, we may not run the world, or control the wealth, but nearly all of us can see naked male genitalia without even asking twice.

I’ll never forget an experience I had in college during the weekly event known as “Porno Night on the 5th Floor.” About a dozen women and nearly two dozen men would cram into a small dorm room watch porn, eat chips, and then go back to doing homework. One night, after an intense lesbian scene, us gals began bitching about the lack of cock in the evening’s movie selection. We turned around to find a row of naked male members aligned like faucets in a group shower all attached to the same smiling, young college studs featured in the Guys Gone Wild tapes.

Now, being older and married, my exposure to the male member is far less glamorous, and is mainly limited to catching my husband during his morning shower, but again, I see penis without having to pay for it.

Sorry, young, hot college guys, but the bulk of the people getting off to your naked antics won’t be the girls at the Pi Delta Pi house; they will be the boys on Christopher Street. All I could think of as I watched this commercial was how excited gay men everywhere must be to have something new to look at. In fact, if I was a gay man, I would have had my credit card ready, because these young men were indeed hot, and men, gay or straight, obviously don’t mind paying to look at something sexy or the first Gone Wild series would have tanked.

I wonder though, if the creator of these discs of college-age exploits will truly level the playing field and continue to do more Guys Gone Wild tapes. Will he take the boys to a tropical island and have them competing naked on the beach in front of a midget dressed in a referee uniform? Will he take it further and tap into the queer audience with Gays Gone Wild (as if the Guys Gone Wild weren’t gay enough)? How long before the Italian Stallion of reality porn gets his own Apprentice show?

Over the next few months, I’ll be curious to see how long these commercials run. With the natural Italian male tendency towards homophobia, it will be interesting to see if Joe Francis continues to expose the raw side of frat boys after he figures out who his customer base for the DVD series actually is. Until then, I’ll be like every other girl out there; I’ll look at these beefcake commercials, smile when they show the boys dropping trou with an oversized Bahama Mama drink in one hand and a Guys Gone Wild hat atop their young heads, and forego the opportunity to squander away $19.99. After all, if I can’t have any real political power in the country I live in while being continually exploited sexually in the media, and go to an equally hard day’s work for just 70 cents on the dollar of my male co-worker, then I’d better be able to see as much naked dick at will as humanly possible without having to shell out a dime.