Guys Gone Wild?

: Soft-Core Video Professionalism and New

Realities in Television Production

Vicki Mayer

Cinema Journal, 47, Number 2, Winter 2008, pp. 97-116 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2008.0005

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/232174

Access provided at 8 Apr 2019 05:22 GMT from Columbia University Libraries
Mayer.qxp 1/29/08 9:41 AM Page 97

Guys Gone Wild? Soft-Core Video

Professionalism and New Realities
in Television Production
by Vicki Mayer

Abstract: This essay presents an ethnographic perspective on the performance of

cameramen in the soft-core reality video industry. Much like the self-narratives
among television producers, soft-core 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 video refers to a specific set of sexual representations set in reality
video 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 video sales.1 The emergence of soft-core 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, soft-core reality video 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

Vicki Mayer is an associate professor of Communication at Tulane University in New Or-

leans, Louisiana. She is working on a book about workers who produce television, but are
rarely considered in production studies.

© 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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segments, threesomes, orgies, and the like,” but lack penetration or the culminat-
ing “money shot” so common to hard-core content.3 At the same time, the verité
cinematography, nonnarrative editing, and use of unpaid talent performing in pub-
lic places more closely approximates the documentary conventions of reality tele-
vision programs.4 Together, soft-core reality video is a small-screen format that is
neither quite pornography nor quite mainstream television programming—an “in-
betweenness” that led pornography scholars and television scholars to either dis-
miss its authenticity or ignore its existence in the 1990s, even as the industry grew
exponentially.5 Producers of these videos are well aware of the “lowbrow” conno-
tations of their product, making my scholarly inquiries into the production process
initially difficult; research subjects assumed I had a hidden agenda to criticize
them. These assumptions were bolstered to a degree simply by the fact that I am
a female academic, associating me with an antiporn feminist politics by default.
My use of the phrase “soft-core reality video” is an attempt to negotiate these ten-
sions, recognizing the aesthetic familiarity of these videos, while marking the work-
ers’ self-proclaimed differences from either hard-core pornographers or television
studio workers.
This essay begins with a discussion of who these television professionals are,
examining both the sociological literature on professions and critical studies of
media professionals. Then, it addresses the emergence of soft-core reality labor-
ers, their discourse of professionalism, and the transformation in this discourse
evoked by the continued emergence of the genre on television. This work is based
largely on a two-year ethnography of the videographers and their practices in New
Orleans, Louisiana. In conclusion, the article revisits the question of what consti-
tutes a television professional, looking at soft-core’s implications for media indus-
tries in general.

The Television Professional.

“[A] man’s work is one of the things by which he is judged, and certainly one of the
more significant things by which he judges himself.”
— Everett Hughes, Men and Their Work, 19586
The television professional is a conflicted notion at best. Like other media
and arts, television infers the unique talents of the individual or creative team,
while the sociology of the professional stresses the homogeneous community of
uniformly trained members who share a common knowledge and goals. Neverthe-
less, the identity of the television professional permeates academic and popular
notions of television production and media producers. The contradictions implied
in the phrase “television professional” are not exclusive to the medium, but the
ambiguous boundaries of media professionalism permit its extension to increasing
numbers of audiovisual workers.7
In the sociology of professions, television producers do not qualify as profes-
sionals, at least according to many of the formal traits and checklists devised by
sociologists over the past century.8 The market to be a television producer is not

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exclusive, nor does it requires years of training. Producers hold no monopoly over
specialized knowledge. They have no codified occupational ethics or even a manda-
tory membership organization. They are typologically what Amitai Etzioni in his
preface to The Semi-Professions and Their Organization called a “semi-profession,”
one in which the primary goal of the occupation is to communicate rather than
apply knowledge, and whose values do not involve saving lives or serving the pub-
lic good.9 This idea that television workers are not really or not exactly profession-
als permeates even the ranks of production staffers. As Jeremy Tunstall reported
in his book Television Producers, there was no “professional feeling” that could es-
tablish a collective identity to control their occupational destiny.10
Yet one would recognize who a television professional is today. It would be
hard pressed not to think immediately of the men whose names have become
brands for a certain kind of content: Norman Lear, Aaron Spelling, and Stephen
Bochco have given way today to David E. Kelley, Mark Burnett, and Marc Cherry.
Not all television professionals are men, but the discourses of being a professional
conjures competing masculinities in their articulation, as demonstrated in count-
less interviews with producers over the past two decades of critical television
scholarship.11 Horace Newcomb and Robert Alley’s 1982 interview with Quinn
Martin, the late executive for Desilu Productions, is exemplary in articulating
frames for producers’ cultural identities. Mr. Martin was a professional precisely
because he was:
given total control by a network which was looking desperately to get on the boards
and I really pulled it off. I was the only one who did. I had four shows in the top ten
for ABC at the time when it was really tough because we used to start off with fifty
stations short of the first of every year and have to prove ourselves. Be tougher than
anybody. I earned my spurs in a very tough market.
Tough and tenacious, Martin portrays himself as a gunslinger in the Wild West
world of network television. The networks needed him to provide order and con-
trol. In turn, though, he needed the bureaucratic organization of the network to
get the job done:
I’ve set up a system where, honestly, once a script is done and everything’s been talked
out you can put it into the system and it will get made. It will look as if I did every-
thing because I’ve got a head casting guy, a head editorial guy, a head production guy.
I mean we all worked together to a point where the company is the producer … I
think it’s the only way you can have mass produced quality.12
Martin’s primary task was to create a system within a system. His posse supported
him in achieving his goal: mass-produced, quality television. Through the network,
Martin achieved recognition and class mobility. Yet what seems important to him
is his identity as a man among men, and his ability to balance competing masculin-
ities, first as the rugged individualist, and then as the organization leader. Martin’s
self-construction assumes we know that the ideal professional is masculine, tri-
umphing in an exclusive workplace culture while serving the corporate aims of the
industry.13

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In other words, television professionals exist because they are recognized as

such. They command prestige, power, and wealth: the holy trinity for occupational
professionalization according to William J. Goode in his essay “The Theoretical
Limits of Professionalization.”14 The image of the television producer refers us back
to the “organization man,”15 who, in the nineteenth century, achieved his identity
by championing unstable economic forces and managing productivity. As David
Noble in his book America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corpo-
rate Capitalism contends: “The bold, confident, and pioneering spirit which moved
him and his associates, and his various concerns … worked to counter the forces of
instability inherent in the evolving capitalist economy.”16 The television professional
operates in a similar semantic contradiction as the individualist, in a corporate cul-
ture under patriarchy. As Keith MacDonald summarizes, being a professional has
been a way to assert patriarchy through socially accepted masculine norms and male
identities.17
Of course, not all men who work in television are considered professionals,
and women have cracked open the door into the ranks of television professionals.18
Yet the masculinist discourses of television professionals continue to permeate the
industry, both above and below the line that traditionally separates creative and
technical labor. Television scholar John Caldwell’s identification of insider narra-
tives that personify technical industry workers as wartime soldiers, daring maver-
icks, and romantic heroes demonstrates that the investment in masculinity is still
present.19 These gendered investments extend throughout media industries, differ-
entiating, for example, masculinized digital technicians, stunt people, and camera
operators, from feminized costume designers, makeup artists, and casting direc-
tors.20 Tunstall reflects that the masculine culture of hiring and employment at the
BBC explains why there are so few females in senior production roles.21
For those who cannot claim the symbolic goods of social prestige, power, and
wealth, professionalism has been the discourse of first resort. Howard Becker, for
example, described how jazz musicians in the 1940s created their own norms dur-
ing performances, such as sitting on a stage, to ensure that others recognized their
special status.22 Norms coded cultural producers as separate from their consumers.
The closer that others perceive the producer to the consumer, the more producer
groups struggle to convince lay people that they are acting professionally.23 Wed-
ding videographers, as studied by James Moran, are a case in point. Located at the
bottom of industrial hierarchies in media production, wedding videographers in-
vest in expensive equipment and join trade associations to distinguish their videos
from an imagined “inept Uncle Charlie,” whose amateur video has no saleable
worth.24 Videographers thus appeal to a “discourse of professionalism to negotiate
their amateur standing in the market at large.”25 Professionalism promises televi-
sion workers the chance to be professional without a recognized profession. It of-
fers a strategy for the weak to safeguard some symbolic status contra amateurs and
a material payoff in the form of exchange value.

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These benefits are precisely the sites of contention in a post-network televi-

sion industry. While television jobs were never a stable path to social or class mo-
bility, the centrifugal push to shift production tasks outside of Hollywood widened
the geographic scope for producers while breaking their monopoly power.26 The
rationalization and outsourcing of labor in television “has worked against profes-
sionalization and craft strategies.”27 Leaner and more mobile independent and
international studios evaded unionized labor, preferring younger and more flexi-
ble workers.28 The shift from permanent labor to freelancers, “multi-skilling,” de-
pressed wages and eliminated overtime for people expected to do more de-skilled
tasks.29 Simpler technologies on the job eliminated the need to provide job train-
ing.30 The erosion of traditional networks of directors, editors, actors, and techni-
cians further made workers more reliant on personal connections, not just to gain
entry to professions, but also for each freelance project and the now-standard un-
paid or low-paid internships that entry requires.31 These forces further stressed
workers’ collective identities while exacerbating industries’ needs for individuals
whose leverage is predicated less on skills, knowledge, or talent, and more on the
ability to do more and earn less for their technical and creative services. Within
this political economy, the soft-core reality video maker is a professionalized non-
professional who must look to pleasures in professionalism other than symbolic
prestige in the industry or social class standing.

Soft-Core Professionalism. When video cameramen in New Orleans,

Louisiana, talked about “the street” they were primarily referencing Bourbon
Street, a raucous strip of bars and nightclubs located in the French Quarter. Pub-
lic nudity has been a localized practice since at least the early 1970s, when a wide
assortment of hippies, nudists, gay activists, strippers, and porn stars exhibited
their breasts, bottoms, and crotches in the name of politics and pleasure.32 Tourists
and soft-core commercial videographers have been essential to both the perpetu-
ation and publicity of these practices. Through their efforts, the call to “show your
tits” in exchange for Mardi Gras beads became a yearlong ritual that spread to
places as far flung as San Diego, California, and Cancun, Mexico.33
Beginning in 2003, I moved from observing these rituals on the street to in-
teracting and, at times, assisting the commercial cameramen in their quest for the
“perfect flash,” a coded phrase for the best nude shot. I met my first contact, a
freelancer, through his Web site, an instructive guide on filming public nudity.34
After shadowing him each weekend for a month, I began meeting others through
him and, by striking out on my own, having conversations with freelance and con-
tracted cameramen. These relationships of participation and observation were
renegotiated over the course of my encounters. My gender, age, and job status pre-
vented any sense of mutuality in our interactions. Some men feared I would “out”
them like a journalist or vice cop. Some were amused, speculating that my research
was an excuse to make an on-camera debut. Some simply enjoyed the company

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Figure 1. Living quarters for a weary Girls Gone Wild video crew (Crystal
Kile, New Orleans, 2003).

and found me useful to their work. I carried equipment, held their beads and
beers, and became a trainee in the arts of working with women who would poten-
tially flash on film. These social relationships formed the basis for my reflections on
their workplace culture and the contradictions that stemmed from our exchanged
voyeurism towards each other.35
The first articulation of cameramen’s identities to me always, and without ex-
ception, came in the story of the party. That is, they came to shoot the party in
order to join it. They were lured by the chance to mix fun and profit, to get paid
and maybe laid. These quotes are typical of the reasons why men enlist in soft-core
companies, and why it was easy to recruit them.
When I started this was a dream job. I mean, I love tits.
—“Elvis,” age 2936
I wanted to party. I went to Lake Havasu and saw what was going on. I just wanted to
be part of the action.
—“Fred,” age 35
I’d been going to Lake Havasu for some years when people told me about Fantasy
Fest. I thought, wow, this is going to be fun.
—“Nick,” age 33
Sunny weather and good times were emphasized as well, though the method of
entering the job differed widely. Those who had entered the business in the early

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Figures 2–5. Woman flirting with a Girls Gone Wild cameraman. She wins a t-shirt for
her performance (Mantra Entertainment, 2003).

to mid-1990s tended to stumble upon the industry or were invited to a shoot by a

friend. In later years, more men were recruited through online advertisements or
directly at shooting locations. Although many of the men had come to Mardi Gras,
Fantasy Fest in Key West, Florida, Spring Break parties, and Memorial Day week-
end on Lake Havasu, Arizona, as observers, the lure of being a participant in the
party presented an ideal to be achieved and relayed to others.
These stories could be interpreted as front-stage performances (in the Erving
Goffman sense), in that they managed public appearances in order to present an
idealized image of the self—in this case, of the fun, party guy.37 Men vigorously de-
fended these stories to people they did not know, concealing current labor condi-
tions as well as possible alternative motivations for money or fame through the job.
At the same time, the idealized story was not simply a misrepresentation of reality.38
As Slavoj Žižek points out, fantasy is merely a realm for intersubjective and antago-
nistic desires.39 The uncanny reappearance of the pursuit of the party achieved a
shared expectation of how reality cameramen were supposed to behave. In night-
clubs and on the street, onlookers frequently had two reactions to the company

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men. Some validated them by approaching and gushing with comments such as,
“Wow, you guys are awesome! I wish I could do that.” Others mocked them, pre-
suming the work was a cover for hidden perversions. The story of the party inte-
grated both of these explanations in a self-satisfying way that legitimated others’
claims while reminding themselves why they were there. When directed at me,
their performance of the story was double-voiced. Exaggerated or couched as a
come-on, the story hailed me as one of the guys, teaching me the bravado needed
to be a voyeur. At the same time, the story reminded me that I was never one of
the guys, and that they would keep their eye on me.
This never felt even the least bit threatening, because the party they chatted
about endlessly never seemed to happen. Partying instead was the alibi for what
men really experienced on the job. Typically men spent twelve to eighteen hours
per day on their feet. The stamina required for the job was exacerbated by the
quick pace of the camera action. Flashing in public is in quick motion: five to
seven seconds per shot. To catch this act spontaneously, workers had to shield their
video equipment while leaping in between trash-filled curbs and street crowds.
Audiences often mobbed the women, leaving the videographer attempting to
steady his shot while being jostled from all sides. Shifting patches of darkness,
long-distance balcony shots, and sudden rain were common challenges. Spilt beer,
flying confetti, and whizzing beads not only distracted, but also potentially dam-
aged equipment—when, for example, a string of Mardi Gras beads hit a pricey
camera light, shattering it and the casing. Given the levels of intoxication on the
streets, fights and shouting matches were frequent. Video cameras could attract
ire from men and women alike, who might want to throw a punch or publicly try
to humiliate the men, as in the case of a woman who liked outing them by chasing
them down Bourbon Street screaming “Perveeeeerrrtttt!” Police officers then
could arrest everyone for disorderly conduct, though this generally meant taking
the flashing subjects away from the scene. After four or five nights of these trials,
most cameramen spoke more of their sore feet and broken cameras than of the
party atmosphere, which by Mardi Gras Day had filled the air with the stench of
beer, piss, and vomit.
The actual material compensation for this labor was also questionable. Men
talked about receiving far less than they were promised or expected. Their frustra-
tion was captured in these quotes:
[Payment] was a gray area. It seemed to change all the time. At times I got paid for
footage, but the editor has full control over what he says is usable and what’s not. I
would supply what I thought was very good material but a girl would get cut out be-
cause that was up to the editor’s personal discretion.
—“Mike”
I get paid differently, depending on the buyer and the footage, but it’s definitely not
based on the hours I put in. I’ve had really short shoots that make more than the
longer ones. So I guess in that case, I’m making money based on content.
—“Fred”

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I haven’t made a cent yet. I mean I have a ton of great footage after three years, but [the
owner’s] got to put money into the marketing. That’s the problem, the distribution.
—“Rick”
I make $200 a day here, but in the industry I make $600 a day. With per diem, it’s
maybe $230 a day, with hotel and flight. That’s for five days. We came Wednesday and
leave Monday. But what I make is probably more than most. See, everyone negotiates
their own contract, so no one knows how much everyone makes out here. I have a lot
of experience and have been doing this for a while, so I think I probably make more.
—“Elvis”
Cameramen put out much of their own money for beads, transportation or per
diem, or lived dorm-style in the cheapest hotel rooms or, more recently, tour
buses. I was surprised to learn that some men I met had put up thousands of their
own cash, hoping they would see a return later. Their contracts did not include any
benefits or retirement pay, in part because no one seemed to stay on the job for
long. Indeed, many cameramen retired after a year. Three years on the job made
a seasoned veteran. A handful of the men that I met stayed in the field up to a
decade.
It was the men who stayed more than a year who insisted on the profession-
alism of their trade. Routines typically develop in any complex occupational or-
ganization.40 With the exception of the now-defunct Web site of filming tips, the
routines of soft-core reality video camera work were largely invisible and uncodi-
fied.41 Instead, newcomers relied on interpersonal encounters with veterans to
learn the tricks of the trade. Veterans passed on their knowledge, creating a shared
language in the field, while touting their own skills as requisites to market entry.
Videographers invested time in mastering skills and insider information, which they
could then display to their internal networks on the street. Like other semiprofes-
sionals in Etzioni’s parlance, or arts workers in Becker’s, claims of professionalism
could be seen as mere justifications to gain social legitimacy or even empower-
ment among the competition. Yet they were also more than this.
The practices that surrounded professional discourses revealed a masculine
performativity that allowed cameramen to embody identities that I suspect were
rarely possible in their daily lives. On the street, their routines ritualized claims of
mastery and control. The repetition of the stories about these acts put them in a
gendered and heterosexual context; the men shared tales of mastery and control
over the ability to capture women on tape. Professional performativity, adapting
Judith Butler’s insights in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion
of Identity, thus naturalizes gender binaries of male dominance and female sub-
mission through heterosexual exchange relations.42 None of the cameramen talked
about their day jobs with the same clarity in terms of gendered power divisions. In
fact, the most experienced cameramen I met worked in service industries, sales,
and education, all occupations that are feminized by their heavy reliance on emo-
tional labor and serving others.43 Shooting soft-core gave them the opportunity, al-
beit temporally and spatially limited, to construct a professionalism that drew on

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some of the same masculine discourses that have formed television professionals’
narratives past and present.
Cameramen prided themselves on being much like Quinn Martin, the para-
digmatic television professional and rugged individualist who worked within a male
workplace culture to create successful content. Men typically called the street a
war zone where they battled to beat the competition, or a jungle where they alone
explored the darkness of human nature.
This is a battleground out here. I’m just fighting for survival through Mardi Gras.
—“Tom”
It’s hit and miss out there today.
—“Steve”
When you’re in the dog pack, it’s every guy for himself.
—“Tip”
We’re all hunting for our own content. I hate it when some motherfucker is trying to
steal what’s mine.
—“John”
Cameramen’s self-appraisal as warriors and pioneers brought them success when
they achieved their company’s goals: to capture the content that they perceived
would be marketable soft-core content.
“Rick” embodied this professionalism for me, in both the way he talked and
the way he performed his role of gathering footage for a new production company.
Hailing from Texas, he drove the circuit of Spring Breaks and New Orleans’s events
in search of content. He always framed his practices as “all business,” beginning
with market research of the field. Rick traveled to New York to purchase soft-core
videos and study their conventions and defects. “I looked at everything that was
out there. Not for myself but to see the market. I knew I could do better,” he said,
echoing Martin’s pioneering spirit. His careful planning relayed a personal invest-
ment in internalizing the market standards and the limits of the genre so crucial
to television production.44 Rick’s expertise was then evident in the attention he
paid to whomever he chose to record for the video.
R (“Rick”): I used to shoot everything, but because it’s a business I’m more selective
than the other guys out here. See, like [the competitors], they’ll get everything: fat,
skinny, old, young … They don’t discriminate. We go for just the college coed type.
VM (Vicki Mayer): Why is that?
R: Young guys like it. It has a broader appeal. There’s a market out there for older
women and fatter women, but it’s small compared to college students. Older guys will
look at girls younger than him. But young guys want young women. That’s just the way
it is. I don’t even have to like the girls.
VM: What’s the cut-off?
R: It just depends. I’ve seen attractive women into their thirties. It also depends on
their bodies. My personal preference is natural tits. But I shoot fake tits too. It’s a busi-
ness. See, that’s a good example, I don’t even shoot only what I like. But fake tits on

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an older woman are out of the question. If they’ve got fake tits, I’m less likely to shoot.
See, I can be selective.
In other words, the cameramen’s definitions of professionalism rehearsed routines
of identifying marketable content, while setting themselves apart as unique men
in the industry.
These routines meant interacting with women whose bodies fit into explicit
sexual and age categories. Cameramen preferred females who looked younger and
amenable to displaying themselves for men’s pleasure. The norms for selection
support David Andrew’s read of soft-core as a genre of “post-feminist consumerism”
in the way it represents women’s sexual desire as inoffensive and apolitical for easy
consumption.45 The search for the perfect flash further implicated class identities
by excluding bodies that could not represent youthfulness or heterosexual desire.46
Rick’s sensibility guided him to pursue young and thin women, with noticeable
breast enhancement being a variable that marked class by separating those who
could afford the best plastic surgery. This kind of distinction also extended to ex-
clude women he believed were dancers or strip artists, two other types of wage
workers outside of middle-class respectability. Although Rick tried to distinguish
his selections from others, all cameramen competed to select a relatively narrow
range of women on the street, combining their personal tastes with the standards
for what they thought would sell. Like the studio producer who defends sex be-
cause it sells, the soft-core reality videographer’s code of professionalism separates
him from the subjective pleasures of enjoying his own clips.
Once the right women were identified, professionalism dictated the norms
for interactions. Here, the narrative of the producer as a romantic hero framed the
ways they understood their performances. In their code of chivalry, men saw
themselves as protecting the ladies, both from groping mobs and overzealous po-
lice. They showered women with gifts and compliments. I saw them spending con-
siderable time gauging the right beads and script to use to make each individual
feel special, beautiful, and desirable. As Rick explained after a prolonged interac-
tion with two tipsy women for a strand of pink bunny beads:
She won’t do it for other guys because she knows she just wants the bunnies. It’s that
fantasy of theirs that I have to maintain. She’s got all the other beads, but she likes
pink. I mean everything she was wearing was pink. So she sees the bunnies and has to
have them, but she won’t show for anything. For a while, she was trying to get them
for free but then she understood I needed the shot. She was just afraid about her par-
ents seeing it, but I convinced her that was unlikely.… At that age, it’s all about
parental approval. I had to know how to close the deal.
By closing “the deal,” cameramen and the women would be rewarded. Rick saw
himself as satisfying women’s desires to engage in shopping or collecting, already
gendered practices, while protecting them from breaking their inhibitions. Each
man carried with him the memories of interactions when his professional skills
achieved this mutual ego satisfaction, which, in turn, would satisfy the imagined
male market.

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When their foolproof techniques failed to provide the content—as they often
did—professionalism encompassed other technological knowledge. Although it
was not immediately obvious to me, my pages of field notes about camera model
numbers, zoom capacity, light repair, and battery strength were central to the con-
struction of professionalism, precisely because these objects were the easiest to
exert control over. The cameramen took pride and pleasure in rebuilding their own
cameras and adapting the machinery to local conditions. One forged his own bead-
proof light out of an iron case, while another developed a hair-trigger arm for get-
ting shots quicker than anyone else. Light diffusers constructed of tissue paper,
and duct-tape rain covers, displayed last-minute ingenuity for the men, who then
boasted about the invention to other cameramen they encountered. This mascu-
line sense of mastery was visually demonstrated to me when one of the producers
demonstrated his light power by focusing it on my covered chest. His light was his
only alibi for looking directly at me, and it made me step back in recognition of his
power at that moment.
The construction of professionalism among soft-core cameramen reproduced
narratives of masculine dominance without professional status. This was fine for
the long-time videographers who saw shooting as a part-time hobby. Shooting
babes was like a sport, and, as one of them told me, “even the worst day fishing
[for babes] beat going to work.” For the veterans, video professionalism idealized
independence, individualism, entrepreneurialism, and tinkering—traits common
to the discourse of film amateurism in the nineteenth century.47 These traits, by
the mid-twentieth century, were emblematized by Hugh Hefner, the self-made
ladies’ man whose “Playboy philosophy” distinguished his individual prowess in
business and his libertine carousing in consumption.48 Forged in contrast to a ho-
mogenized and dependent corporate man of the 1950s, the Playboy man put the
values of free enterprise in the service of a youthful “masculinity secure in its con-
sumerism.”49 It is interesting that this identity has resurged today among men who
lack both Hefner’s capital and career potentials, reinforcing Steven Cohan’s argu-
ment in Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties that masculine
performances frequently mask real social differences.50 Soft-core reality workers
reproduced representations of a masculine hedonism, from talking about the party
to walking on the street, even though the actual practices more ambiguously
served both postfeminist and homosocial male consumer desires. Other masculine
identities supplemented this hedonistic one, but no matter how false the fantasy
of the party animal was, it returned every time new recruits hit the streets and
talked to anyone for the first time. It was this identity through performance that
was central to the needs of the companies that hired them.

Professionalizing Professionalism. Even as media industries have cheap-

ened their labor, they demand their workers’ professionalism. While the camera-
men developed their own internal standards of professionalism, the industries that
hired them imposed external standards as well. The professionalization of soft-

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core brought the workers for the denigrated genre into line with other corporate
media workers.51 The corporations’ impetus to professionalization is clear. Profes-
sionals were easier to control from a distance. Companies wanted video profession-
als who would discipline themselves when they were far away on location shoots.
There, company standards or ethics channeled each employee to work independ-
ently within the limits of whatever increased the bottom line. In soft-core, this
auto-policing was reinforced through the companies’ formation of video crews,
which surveyed each other in the guise of teamwork and mutual camaraderie. “We
drink and party together, but on the job you have to be in control and get it done,”
as one crew leader summed it up. The party that seemingly drew recruits to the
field was now limited to the rewards of not partying on the job, making soft-core
little different from any company with the evening happy hour. Professionals who
partied on the job were given pink slips before Mardi Gras Day even ended. Other
moves to professionalize soft-core had as much to do with the product as with the
practices. By calling their videographers professionals, soft-core companies stressed
the respectable quality of their products, in much the same way as the phrase
“professional-grade camera” implies. This new kind of professionally made prod-
uct through producer performance reversed historical alchemies that detached
objective producers from their objects of production, such as in the case of news
journalists.52 These two definitions of professional—as in a professional product,
and professional self-control—coalesced in the bodies of the cameramen they
hired. Soft-core reality industries recruited camera operators who could both
produce and embody the brand. The struggle for a masculine identity demon-
strated so prominently on the street now attached itself to a self-making project
that men could market to their employers, and subsequently to their perceived
consumer base.
In advertising on college campuses and on Web-savvy sites like Craig’s List,
companies sought college graduates, preferably with film school or television pro-
duction experience.53 Postings requested cameramen who could control the party
while acting as the life of the party, as was the case in one listing for the company
that produces Girls Gone Wild:
MANTRA FILMS is looking for dedicated, professional cameramen with fun outgo-
ing personalities to travel to several locations around the world to shoot Girls Gone
Wild events. Must have at least 1 year DV or BETA experience. If you are interested,
please send photo and resume to: shooters@girlsgonewild.com.54
DV and BETA referred to a professional video grade, also known in the market as
pro-sumer (a product that gives consumer access to the professional technology).
This technological distinction was important, separating a MANTRA cameraman
from the skills associated with a craft-based, and thus union-represented, industry
position. Instead, companies defined professionalism visually. The photo, a require-
ment normally reserved only for people meant to be in front of the camera, helped
select employees with the right look or style. Attitude also mattered in contracting
a video crew. “Sunny,” a veteran who had become a crew leader, said he wanted

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people who believed in teamwork, shedding the more individualist associations

with professionalism. He nevertheless noted the importance of dressing fashion-
ably urbane and hip.55 His handpicked crew resembled a catalogue of multicultural
Benneton models, each representing a market segment of youth culture trends.
As he described them, they were an Asian-American grommit, a buff African-
American athlete, a light-skinned African-American with Rasta dreds, a clean-cut
Latino, a large Anglo football player, and himself, a blond Anglo beach bum,
though he was actually from Philadelphia.
The emphasis on looks and attitude, characteristics associated with women
in front of the camera, now extended to men behind the camera. Both were to per-
form and to be looked at, though men would still be the professionals controlling
the action. This was clear in the various nightclub shoots, where the video crew
became celebrities. In one, a college club commandeered by a soft-core reality
video company, a disclaimer to shoot in the club mimicked those used on the
videos or Internet sites to sell the videos:
Disclaimer:
Videotaping Inside!
By coming in here,
you consent to be on tape.
You must be 18 to enter.

Inside the bar and dance floor, the video crew was the center of attention. A disc
jockey inside announced, “Let’s give it up for Ladies Gone Loca!” every so often,
while promotional materials for the company littered the club walls.56 Crew mem-
bers dressed in tightly fitting and matching outfits, making them highly visible in the
crowd. Male college students strode up to their faces, shouting, “You have the best
job, man!” or “I fuckin’ love you guys!” while females tried to negotiate with the
crew for company-logo trucker hats, a reward for compliance to be on camera
while interacting with the men behind the camera. In numerous instances, women’s
five seconds of fame was an attempt to flirt with the celebrity videographer, while
dozens of men cheered them on. The video crew knew their own allure was part
of the product, and few of the public spectacles were actually caught on tape.
Sunny never even turned his camera on as naked and kissing women paraded in
front of him. As he explained to me, “We do this for them,” pointing to a row of
the male fans. “Like I said, we’re recruiting. Someone here will see us doing this
and want to join us.”
According to Donald Lowe in The Body in Late-Capitalist U.S.A., the human
body today has an exchange value no longer bound to identities.57 Commodified
body parts tap into sexual fantasies that transgress binaries of female passivity and
male activity, offering a new sexual semiotics for consumption.58 Conversely, peo-
ple manipulate their gender and sex, producing a simulated self that is more mar-
ketable. Soft-core video companies demand a body already manipulated to have a
particular look. In a reversal of the striptease scenes in the videos themselves, the

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men behind the cameras became the objects of a female gaze, to be consumed like
the representations of the women in the videos themselves.59
This instability of sexual identities was somewhat disconcerting to the men
who worked in the video crews. Some were clearly embarrassed by the women
who stared at them, pointing and giggling. This discomfort registered at times in
initial ethnographic contacts, when potential research participants avoided me be-
cause I might know their college professors. In one jarring experience, “Elvis,” a
three-year crew veteran, burst into tears in front of me. He told me he felt guilty
playing the playboy in the club, now that he had a girlfriend at home:
E: When I started, this was a dream job. I mean, I love tits. But about six months ago
I fell in love. I mean hard. I’m crazy about her and I can’t stand what I’m doing. You
probably want to talk to people who know what they’re talking about. Well, I don’t
know anymore. I come here supposed to do a job [sic] and all I can think about is
going home. I miss my girlfriend.
VM: Is it that the women here don’t interest you anymore?
E: No, the opposite. That’s the problem. Women throw themselves at me. I get a hard-
on, then I feel guilty. I mean, my girlfriend doesn’t deserve that. She’s completely
clean and this isn’t fair to us.
VM: Is she unhappy with it?
E: No, she’s completely cool. In fact, she would like to come with me. It’s me. I’m the
emotional wreck. I got the company to pay for her for Spring Break this year so I’ll
like that because then she’ll be with me.
VM: That’s nice. Kind of a spousal benefit.
E: Yeah, I should have brought her here. I mean the girls come after you. And I’ll allow
them to kiss me on the cheek, but that’s not enough. Some of them will go for your
dick and rub it. I think kissing on the lips though is off limits. That’s just for my girl.
Revealing his own insecurities around his own objectification on the job, Elvis said
he could not be either the romantic hero or the sex toy that women desired. This
crisis impeded his own sense that he was a professional in the industry.
Now, I’m just an amateur. I mean, last year I was a total pro. Chicks were crawling all
over me and doing everything. This year my heart isn’t in it. I can’t even fake it and
chicks can sense that.
Elvis’s painful disclosure revealed how professionalism was both a project to make
a certain kind of self and a product to entice consumers to that self. Blurring the
lines between television work and sex work, the only dirty secret in soft-core real-
ity video was the one that exposed the cameraman to the objectification and sale
of his own professionalism.

The Future of the Soft-Core Professional. There are few female soft-core re-
ality videographers.60 Like the men, they confront discourses of masculinity that
still organize these fields with narratives that frame individuals’ self-perception
and performances.61 People, whether male or female, found themselves needing

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to adopt and embody these narratives if they are going to succeed in the industry.
The older generation of video veterans, those with five years or more experience,
have been displaced by a more corporate-minded team player, whose profession-
alism imbricates a more tightly controlled and objectified masculinity. Those who
cannot embody the brand often leave, or are terminated for not being “profes-
sional” enough.
The trajectory of this story of reality video professionalism is, by all accounts,
a reversal of Patricia Zimmerman’s account of amateur filmmaking.62 Whereas
amateurism integrated the traits of an aspired professionalism in filmmaking, in
this case, paid video workers integrated the lost values of amateurism. This, in some
ways, made up for lack of material benefits or status in the job market, but also be-
came a source of pleasure and a space for play at work. At the same time, profes-
sionalism was a discourse of the weak. Their denigrated status and low wages in
relation to more mainstream media workers were rendered visible on the street
when women publicly emasculated them as perverts or trash. In this sense, mas-
culine performances became so important to the cameramen’s definitions of pro-
fessionalism because they were the only stakes left to negotiate. This leaves media
scholars to reflect on the seemingly seamless narrative that read masculinity and
professionalism as coterminous in Hollywood production industries and came to a
more nuanced sense of a struggle among masculinities and professionalisms, not
just between producers and the industry, but among producers themselves.
As for the industrial organization of television production, soft-core reality
video continues to encroach upon mainstream programming through mutual fi-
nancial aims. Company infomercials are now standard fare during late-night cable
and network affiliate programming, while the “soft-core featurettes” regularly ap-
pear on “premium” channels HBO and Showtime.63 To the degree that the tele-
vision industry has accepted soft-core video companies, both as low-cost content
producers and as easily available advertisers to salacious content, the soft-core com-
panies have modeled themselves after the studios. They are part of Hollywood’s
organizational networks, and their selection of self-maintained and disciplined
film students and television industry workers has perpetuated that idea. Ray, a
production manager for one of the companies, believed that their employees
would be the future producers for mainstream reality television programs: “This
is actually a great résumé builder. You get so much managerial experience. You can
go to Dreamworks, but here more people know about you. This is great prep for
reality TV, right?” There is no direct line between soft-core and prime-time, real-
ity video and reality programming, but in the drive to cut costs, hire cheap labor,
and produce content, Ray suggests, perhaps there will be.

Notes
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,” Pornogra-

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phy: 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,” Criti-
cal 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 Televi-
sion, 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). 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.
6. Everett Hughes, Men and Their Work (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958).
7. Compare the development of a television professional with other communication pro-
fessionals described in David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage,
2002), and Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Elec-
tric 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, becom-
ing more exclusive over time.
8. Many of these can be found in literature reviews in Eliot Freidson, Professionalism Re-
born: Theory, Prophecy, and Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and
Keith M. MacDonald, The Sociology of Professions (London: Sage, 1995).
9. Amitai Etzioni, “Preface,” The Semi-Professions and Their Organization, ed. Amitai
Etzioni (New York: The Free Press, 1969).
10. Jeremy Tunstall, Television Producers (London: Routledge, 1993), 204.
11. This literature in the United States alone includes: Horace Newcomb and Robert
Alley, The Producer’s Medium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Todd Gitlin,
Inside Prime Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Gary Burns and
Robert Thompson, eds., Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process
(New York: Praeger, 1990); David Marc and Robert Thompson, Prime Time, Prime
Movers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995); and James Longworth, TV
Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000).
12. 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.
13. 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).
14. 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.

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15. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
16. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate
Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 52.
17. MacDonald, The Sociology of Professions.
18. 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.
19. John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in
Film/Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
20. This groundbreaking work is currently being done by a bevy of professors and gradu-
ate students who will be contributors to an anthology on cultural studies of film and
television production.
21. Tunstall, Television Producers, 174.
22. Howard Becker, “The Professional Dance Musician and His Audience,” American
Journal of Sociology 57, no. 3 (1951): 136–44.
23. Hughes, Men and Their Work.
24. James M. Moran, in There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2002), 65.
25. Ibid.
26. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global
Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2005).
27. Jeremy Tunstall, “Introduction,” in Media Occupations and Professions: A Reader, ed.
Jeremy Tunstall, vol. 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15.
28. Tunstall, “Introduction,” and Graham Murdock, “Back to Work: Cultural Labor in Al-
tered Times,” Cultural Work: Understanding the Cultural Industries, ed. Andrew Beck
(London: Routledge, 2003).
29. Lizzie Thynne, “Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age,” Feminist Review 64
(2000): 79; Gillian Ursell, “Labour Flexibility in the UK Commercial Television Sec-
tor,” Media, Culture and Society 20, no. 1 (1998): 136.
30. Thynne, “Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age,” 80.
31. Tunstall, “Introduction,” 22; Gillian Ursell, “Television Production: Issues of Exploita-
tion, Commodification, and Subjectivity in UK Labour Market,” Media, Culture and
Society 22, no. 6 (2000): 813.
32. Wesley Shrum and John Kilburn, “Ritual Disrobement at Mardi Gras: Ceremonial Ex-
change and Moral Order,” Social Forces 75, no. 2 (1996): 423–58; Arthur Hardy, “The
History of Mardi Gras,” in Arthur Hardy’s Mardi Gras Guide (New Orleans, LA:
Arthur Hardy, 2004), 27 – 32.
33. 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.
34. 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 Re-
search Board.
35. 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 Anthro-

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pological Fieldwork, ed. Don Kulick and Margaret Willson (London: Routledge, 1995),
251–75. There are many sources in which to look for the increasing use of anthropo-
logical methods in media studies of production. Although one of the earliest studies of
Hollywood production was indeed grounded in anthropological imperatives—for ex-
ample, Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist
Looks at Movie-Makers (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1950)—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), 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. For a historicization of this shift, see Ellen Seiter, Television and New Media
Audiences (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The
Ethnography of Media Consumption (London: Sage, 1993); and Virginia Nightingale,
Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (London: Routledge, 1996).
36. All names of cameramen have been changed in accordance with my university’s insti-
tutional review board procedures for research with human subjects.
37. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959),
46 – 48.
38. Goffman’s analysis presumes the possibility of misrepresentation, or a false front, that
performers conceal in public but may reveal in private. See ibid., 58–76.
39. 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 perver-
sions; 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 de-
sirable 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 Fan-
tasies (London: Verso, 1997), 3 – 44.
40. D. Charles Whitney and James S. Ettema, “Media Production: Individuals, Organiza-
tions, Institutions,” in A Companion to Media Studies, ed. Angharad Valdivia (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), 157 – 86.
41. 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.
42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 10th anniver-
sary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), xv.
43. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
44. 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.
45. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, 12.
46. 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

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as metonymies for “Hottentots” or “Mammies” is rich material for another article. Suf-
fice 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).
47. Patricia Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995).
48. Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern
America (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 135.
49. Ibid., 139.
50. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997).
51. Journalists, for example, have been a prime example of an occupation wrestled into a
professionalist mentality, despite the old vestiges of individualist 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.
52. Ibid., 559.
53. 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.
54. Posted on Craig’s List, Los Angeles, May 6, 2005.
55. 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.
56. The brand name has been changed so as not to implicate any particular company in
this series of standard production practices.
57. Donald M. Lowe, The Body in Late-Capitalist U.S.A. (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995).
58. Ibid., 132.
59. Discussions of the gaze in film studies have a long history. Most germane to this dis-
cussion 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).
60. 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.
61. On the social organization of masculinity in occupations and institutions, see R. W.
Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
62. Zimmerman, Reel Families.
63. Andrews, Soft in the Middle, 82 – 86.

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