Guys Gone Wild?: Soft-Core Video Professionalism and New Realities in Television Production

Abstract

This essay presents an ethnographic perspective on the performance of cameramen in the reality industry. Much like the self-narratives among television producers, videographers frame their actions through masculinist discourses, which are then destabilized through the production process and labor conditions in the television economy. Soft-core reality refers to a specific set of sexual representations set in reality format. These videos began playing frequently on late-night cable infomercials beginning in the mid-1990s, and now can be found on network affiliates, pay-per- view, and global satellite programming. They also rake in millions through direct- buy DVD and Internet sales. 1 The emergence of on television owed itself to a number of political and economic factors related to the definition, regulation, and distribution of commercial speech and pornographic production. 2 Started by individual entrepreneurs, reality companies, the largest of which is known for its signature series Girls Gone Wild, multiplied and expanded through synergies with television industries, Web retailers, pornography distribu- tors, and product licensees. Each year, these companies contract hundreds of work- ers, mostly men, to capture women in the act of public sexual display. These laborers are the focus of this article, specifically, the men behind the cameras. Over the course of two and a half years, I met over fifty of these men, observed them working, and, eventually, knew them well enough to assist them in their jobs. Given the political economy for production, I argue that the siren song of the new professionalism in much of the television industry offers little more than the fantasies of masculine consumption, while trying to obscure its material realities. I use the generic designation soft-core reality video to reference the hybrid content of these particular videos and the specificity of their producers. The videos feature series of erotic spectacles associated with pornography, such as striptease numbers, tub or shower sequences, modeling scenes, voyeur numbers, girl-girl