Guys gone wild? Soft-core video professionalism and new realities in television production

Cinema Journal

Volumn 47, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 97-116

  Mayer, Vicki ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949832512     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2008.0005     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Exact figures are difficult to ascertain in this arena, as demonstrated by Chuck Kleinhans, "The Change from Film to Video Pornography: Implications for Analysis," Pornography: Film and Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 154-67. My estimate is based on figures provided in a recent Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against one of the larger companies in the field
2. Vicki Mayer, "Soft-Core in TV Time: A Political Economy of Girls Gone Wild," Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 4 (2005): 302-20
3. David Andrews, Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in its Contexts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 2
4. There are many overviews of reality television's conventions. One concise review of the diversity of program types and conventions can be found in Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, "Introduction: Understanding Reality TV," in Understanding Reality Television, ed. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1-32
5. The dismissal of soft-core in pornography studies is well documented in Andrews, Soft in the Middle, and Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)
6. The absence of soft-core infomercials and videos in television studies is critiqued in Mayer, "Soft-Core in TV Time," and Karen Pitcher, "The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild," Critical Studies in Media Communication 23, no. 3 (2006): 200-18
7. Everett Hughes, Men and Their Work (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958)
8. Compare the development of a television professional with other communication professionals described in David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage, 2002)
9. and Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1990). Television professionals share more commonalities with photographers or journalists than with telecommunications or software engineers. Whereas the former professions also merged autonomous and collective definitions from their beginnings, becoming more inclusive, the latter professions framed creativity as a science, becoming more exclusive over time
10. Many of these can be found in literature reviews in Eliot Freidson, Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy, and Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
11. and Keith M. MacDonald, The Sociology of Professions (London: Sage, 1995)
12. Amitai Etzioni, "Preface," The Semi-Professions and Their Organization, ed. Amitai Etzioni (New York: The Free Press, 1969)
13. Jeremy Tunstall, Television Producers (London: Routledge, 1993), 204
14. This literature in the United States alone includes: Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley The Producer's Medium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)
15. Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
16. Gary Burns and Robert Thompson, eds., Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process (New York: Praeger, 1990)
17. David Marc and Robert Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995)
18. and James Longworth, TV Creators: Conversations with America's Top Producers of Television Drama (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000)
19. Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley "The Producer as Artist: Commercial Television," Individuals in Mass Media. Organizations: Creativity and Constraint, ed. James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, vol. 10, Sage Annual Reviews of Communication Research (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982), 69-90
20. This articulation of the professional has existed since its beginnings in the United States, as related in Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate: 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
21. William J. Goode, "The Theoretical Limits of Professionalization, " The Semi-Professions and Their Organization, ed. Amitai Etzioni (New York: The Free Press, 1969), 266-314
22. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)
23. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 52
24. MacDonald, The Sociology of Professions
25. This recognizes the continuing divisions in the industry, both in terms of types of work and in terms of gender. Although more women work in television and film industries, the majority of them still work below the line that separates creative professionals from trade work. This is the subject of a conference paper presented by Miranda Banks, "The XX Factor: A Critical Reappraisal of the Gender Gap in Film/TV Production Labor," International Communication Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, May 2007
26. John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film/Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)
27. This groundbreaking work is currently being done by a bevy of professors and graduate students who will be contributors to an anthology on cultural studies of film and television production
28. Tunstall, Television Producers, 174
29. Howard Becker, "The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience," American Journal of Sociology 57, no. 3 (1951): 136-44
30. Hughes, Men and Their Work
31. James M. Moran, in There's No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002), 65
32. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005)
33. Jeremy Tunstall, "Introduction," in Media Occupations and Professions: A Reader, ed. Jeremy Tunstall, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15
34. Tunstall, "Introduction," and Graham Murdoch, "Back to Work: Cultural Labor in Altered Times," Cultural Work: Understanding the Cultural Industries, ed. Andrew Beck (London: Routledge, 2003)
35. Lizzie Thynne, "Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age," Feminist Review 64 (2000): 79
36. Gillian Ursell, "Labour Flexibility in the UK Commercial Television Sector," Media, Culture and Society 20, no. 1 (1998): 136
37. Thynne, "Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age," 80
38. Tunstall, "Introduction," 22; Gillian Ursell, "Television Production: Issues of Exploitation, Commodification, and Subjectivity in UK Labour Market," Media, Culture and Society 22, no. 6 (2000): 813
39. Wesley Shrum and John Kilburn, "Ritual Disrobement at Mardi Gras: Ceremonial Ex-change and Moral Order," Social Forces 75, no. 2 (1996): 423-58
40. Arthur Hardy, "The History of Mardi Gras," in Arthur Hardy's Mardi Gras Guide (New Orleans, LA: Arthur Hardy 2004), 27-32
41. Some of the companies involved historically in recording and selling soft-core reality video include Albedo, Rex Productions, GM Video, Dreamgirls, Tahi, Wild West Videos, and Mantra
42. This practitioner removed his Web site from the Internet in 2005 to preserve his anonymity. All human subjects cited in this article have been given pseudonyms in accordance with requirements stipulated by the Tulane University Institutional Research Board
43. The sexually charged notion of a shared voyeurism in ethnographic studies has been developed in Margaret Willson, "Afterword: Perspective and Difference: Sexualization, the Field, the Ethnographer," in Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Willson (London: Routledge, 1995), 251-75
44. There are many sources in which to look for the increasing use of anthropological methods in media studies of production. Although one of the earliest studies of Hollywood production was indeed grounded in anthropological imperatives-for example, Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at Movie-Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1950)
45. - their invisibility relative to textual methods has made participant observation a marginalized methodology in media production studies, as argued in Mark Allen Peterson, Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003)
46. and media production research a marginalized subfield in anthropology', as argued in Kelly Askew, "Introduction," in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, ed. Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 1-13. Ironically, this shift towards ethnographic observation and participatory interviews developed more closely in tandem with the increasing use of anthropological methods in qualitative audience research
47. For a historicization of this shift, see Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999)
48. Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption (London: Sage, 1993)
49. and Virginia Nightingale, Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (London: Routledge, 1996)
50. All names of cameramen have been changed in accordance with my university's institutional review board procedures for research with human subjects
51. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959), 46-48
52. In Žižek's explanation of Michael Jackson's identity for example, the fantasy of being a celebrity does not obscure the reality of the individual complete with flaws and perversions; rather, it was the personal and public desires for celebrity that were already based on the knowledge that Jackson was flawed and perverted. In this analysis, the desirable ideal and the horrors of reality are mutually constitutive in the intersubjective fantasy of self. See Slavoj Žižek, "The Seven Veils of Fantasy," in The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 3-44
53. D. Charles Whitney and James S. Ettema, "Media Production: Individuals, Organizations, Institutions," in A Companion to Media Studies, ed. Angharad Valdivia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 157-86
54. This lack of a textual community differentiates soft-core reality producers from other professionals who use trade journals and a specialized language to exclude outsiders. On textual communities and professionalism, see Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New
55. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), xv
56. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
57. This attention to market standards within genre limits has been explored in terms of the television industry' in general. See Gitlin, Inside Prime Time, and Whitney and Ettema, "Media Production: Individuals, Organizations, Institutions," 166
58. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, 12
59. The politics of race in the selection of video content was more complex, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of women who engaged in public nudity on Bourbon Street were white or performed whiteness in the signifying practice of turning their breasts into sexualized objects. Whether few African-American women participated in this ritual because of the already hypersexualized or labor connotations of their breasts as metonymies for "Hottentots" or "Mammies" is rich material for another article. Suffice it to mention here that women of color who did flash on the street were highly sought after by the cameramen, who saw them as adding both diversity and exoticism to their content. This is explored in greater depth in Vicki Mayer, "Letting It All Hang Out: Mardi Gras Performances Live and Video," TDR: Theater Drama Review (2007)
60. Patricia Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)
61. Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 135
62. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
63. Journalists, for example, have been a prime example of an occupation wrestled into a professionalist mentality, despite the old vestiges of individi Talist and anticorporate attitudes that still attract people to the field. See Meryl Aldridge and Julia Evetts, "Re-thinking the Concept of Professionalism: The Case of Journalism," British Journal of Sociology 54, no. 4 (2003): 547-64
64. In fact, many of the cameramen I met had graduated from the most prestigious film schools in the United States, including USC, UCLA, NYU, and the University of Texas
65. Posted on Craig's List, Los Angeles, May 6, 2005
66. This is described in more detail in Vicki Mayer, "Fieldnote," Con/texts: A Journal of the American Sociological Association 5, no. 4 (2006): 58-59
67. The brand name has been changed so as not to implicate any particular company in this series of standard production practices
68. Donald M. Lowe, The Body in Late-Capitalist U.S.A. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995)
69. Discussions of the gaze in film studies have a long history. Most germane to this discussion is the interpretation of the female gaze, as found in Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
70. In the four years I have witnessed soft-core reality production, I have met three women doing this work, all contracted specifically for a 2005 video series featuring men exposing themselves to female camera operators. While this is an interesting new development in a male-dominated industry it will take time to see if this becomes a generic trend, and its implications for the other companies that hire exclusively men
71. On the social organization of masculinity in occupations and institutions, see R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
72. Zimmerman, Reel Families