"Guys Gone Wild"--further complicating the discussion

I've been watching the Logo network lately (because you cannot see Queer As Folk too many times), and one of the recurring commercials is for "Guys Gone Wild," a knock-off of the infamous "Girls Gone Wild" videos. Like "Girls Gone Wild," "Guys Gone Wild" promises a series of peeks at actual college boys who are just hanging out, doing very sexual things. The videos and DVDs include such titles as Heat Stroke, Frat Boys and my favorite, Dude, Where's My Pants?.

Does objectifying young men in any way make it less horrid to objectify young women? Before we can attempt to answer that question, it is important to realize that by far, the overwhelming purchasers of all of these videos and DVDs are men. I cannot imagine any self-respecting lesbian or bisexual woman being turned on by the women in "Girls Gone Wild," and I doubt if many straight or bisexual women are going to buy DVDs showing young men in obviously gay situations (which is not to say that women cannot find gay male encounters erotic, e.a. Queer As Folk).

From what I can tell, the DVDs do not fall into the Gloria Steinem-defined category of pornography, so they are, shall we say, uninspired erotica. Tasteless erotica, to me, is in its own category, and more related to pornography than to real erotica since it relies on stimulation via exploitation. On the other hand, I do not know of any suggestions of submission or humiliation in these DVDs, so the exploitation is perhaps more of the yuk-yuk variety than anything else.

America is a very prudish society, and I, for one, do not want to encourage prudery. On the other hand, America is also a very sexist society, and I do not wish to encourage the exploitation of women and girls, either. Discussions of pornography invariably get tangled up in discussions of prudery, which is why I like to make a distinction between pornography and erotica, as Steinem did.

"Girls Gone Wild" and "Guys Gone Wild," however, present us with further complications in this never-ending discussion. One of the aspects of the fallout from the Mark Foley scandal is that some homophobic people have suggested that "gay men like boys." I can assure these people that, in the privacy of their homes, heterosexual Congressmen are not downloading pictures of Helen Mirren and Susan Sarandon. Rather, they are downloading pictures of Britney Spears and Fergie. Both the gay and the straight worship youth, and that is unlikely to change.