This Is for the Ladies

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day on freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

Yesterday, I blogged about art, and the other day I came across this comic I did years ago, "My, My American Bukkake Too."

There's a "My, My American Bukkake" comic I did somewhere, I just need to find it. Then I should scan it and upload it.

I can't really draw, so I made this comic using photos I took on the set of a bukkake porn movie shoot that I went to in the San Fernando Valley.

Reading the comic today is pretty weird. It's sort of terrifying, and in a way still totally relevant, and makes me appreciate my ability at that time to not really give a fuck.

There's this idea floating around that women aren't funny -- at least in part because they're not willing to make themselves look stupid.

Sometimes, I suffer from this problem. I know there are times when I've done improv and hesitated because I was thinking, Are my pants going to fall down if I do that? Or some shit like that. That gap = awkwardness = The Not Funny Valley.

After I took the photos from the bukkake shoot, I uploaded them onto my computer, and I ran them through this Photoshop process called Stamp, and then I did what I referred to at the time as "messing with them," which is to say I took out some of the white, and I shaped some of the shapes, and I added back some of the black. Then I added the text. And, voila, a comic.

Of course, today, I can see all the things I would've done differently. The images are sort of too small and squished in some ways, and the white on black writing is practically unreadable, and I don't like how some of the prose is sort of poetry-ish.

But whatever. When it comes to bukkake comics, it is what it is.

I think if a young female journalist asked me for advice -- mostly, I just hear from guys in India who want to be porn stars -- I would tell her to make a lot of mistakes in public.

Be dramatic. Do insane things. Imperil yourself. Lose your mind.

Don't be this guy. Be this guy.

Or, better yet, be this chick.

Stop worrying about content and what your dipshit peers will think and who you may or may not offend on social media and whether or not someone will google you in the future and give you or not give you a job because those jobs will kill your soul anyway.

All of those things are things you don't need in your life. They are the things that come from without, not from within. And that's what matters: What's inside of you. That is the stuff of you.

Everything else is bullshit and a waste of time in a short road that we call life that dead ends in the cul de sac of death.

Go bravely to it, not as a coward.

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