A Tour Of Graceland Reveals Elvis Presley Was The King Of A Curious Domain

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in September 2017.

If you find yourself in Memphis, Tennessee, you pretty much have to tour Graceland, the nearly 14-acre pastoral estate once inhabited by Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. The residence isn't far from downtown, and sits on a regular road. Across the street from the home, there's a massive complex devoted to all things Presley. But what's curious about taking a stroll around the grounds is that it's less like touring the opulent domain of a once glorified musician and more like taking a deep dive into the abode of a man obsessed with reflections and concealments. At a certain point, in Graceland itself, you might find yourself on a short flight of stairs descending to a basement, and you'll look around yourself to see mirrors have been mounted on the walls and the ceiling, and as you gaze at a vision of yourself reflected back at you, you'll wonder why a man who was adored by so many built a world of his own that was a literal funhouse hall of mirrors.

Before you make your way to Graceland proper and after you plunk down $57.50 (for $5 more, you can tour the airplanes—and how can you not tour the airplanes?), you enter Elvis Presley's Memphis, which is located across the street from Graceland. It is a sprawling complex of Stores That Sell Things Related to Elvis, Museums Devoted to Things Related to Elvis, and Restaurants That Sell Foods That Are Related to Elvis. But before you make your way through it, you are funneled into a room to watch a movie that celebrates The King. When that ends, you are shuttled into a shuttle that meanders and winds its way down and around and across the street to Graceland. There, you wait in line while groups of Elvis Fans and People Interested in Elvis line up to enter the Colonial Revival white and stone mansion. Finally, you enter The House Where Elvis Lived. At which point, you will likely turn to your right and see the peacocks.

This is the music room. Graceland consists of over 17,000 square feet of residence and contains 23 rooms, but the glowing gold of the peacock room is among the most impressive. Simply put, it is incredibly outrageous. Who would put massive stained glass peacocks in their front room? Elvis, that's who. From the start, it's clear that we're not in Kansas anymore, and Toto has left the room.

Being at Graceland makes one—or at least made this one—feel uneasy. Every room is decorated in some outrageous fashion. In the basement, there's a wall embedded with television sets. A retro surveillance camera lurks on a perch. Bizarrely, the billiards room is hung from walls to ceiling with a busily patterned pleated fabric. No one is allowed upstairs to the second floor, which purportedly remains untouched since Elvis died in an upstairs bathroom. In this stuck-in-time place, life is forever frozen, and it's unclear if you are the voyeur or under a microscope.

Arguably, the most outrageous room at Graceland is the den. It is known as "The Jungle Room." The green shag carpet is designed to resemble thick grass. The furniture is made of heavy wood and upholstered in what looks like fur. The red glowing wall where a fireplace would go in the average suburban home features a gently burbling waterfall. The effect is deeply 1970s Polynesian.

One doesn't typically associate Elvis with racquetball, yet if one stumbles from the disconcerting time capsule that is Graceland and strolls about behind the main house, one can peek inside a series of buildings, one of which contains the newly restored racquetball court. According to the Graceland website, one of Elvis's favorite past times was playing racquetball. The Memphis Flyer reveals that Elvis was part of a "racquetball mafia," and the King was no slouch at the game: "Elvis walloped the ball around the court like he was strumming a guitar for the fun of it."

Technically speaking, Elvis still resides at Graceland. He is buried, alongside several family members, in what's called the Meditation Garden. "He became a living legend in his own time, earning the respect and love of millions," his grave marker reads. "God saw that he needed some rest and called him home to be with Him." Tour takers stand nearby, taking pictures of the fallen king.

After touring Graceland, you will be shuttled back across the street. Behold Elvis's plane collection. It includes The Lisa Marie, a Convair 880 jet. "On April 17, 1975, Elvis bought a Convair 880 Jet, recently taken out of service by Delta Airlines, for the then-substantial sum of $250,000," Elvis Australia reports. "After refurbishing, the total exceeded $600,000."

This past March, Graceland opened Elvis Presley's Memphis at Graceland, a $45 million, 200,000-square-foot entertainment complex that includes the Elvis the Entertainer Career Museum, the Presley Motors Automobile Museum, and Elvis Discovery Exhibits. There are white bedazzled jumpsuits. There is a 1955 pink Cadillac Fleetwood. Down the street, Elvis Presley Enterprises spent $90 million to build The Guest House at Graceland to host a few of the 600,000 annual guests Graceland, including those who can afford up to $1,500 a night for a room.

At Gladys' Diner, I ordered the peanut butter and banana sandwich, which was, the sign said, fried in "bacon grease." Frankly, while I had been optimistic about the sandwich, it didn't look like much. I don't know if I spent too much time photographing the sandwich for Instagram, but by the time I bit into it, it wasn't very appetizing. This sandwich was a favorite of the King. It is known as "an Elvis sandwich" or "The Elvis."

By the time I left Graceland, the parking lot was filling, and the fans were funneling in for their turn at the Elvis experience. Personally, my Elvis experience left me feeling uneasy. What was the point of becoming so famous and so beloved if it prompted you to build a house in which most surfaces were reflective? In the end, the king stood alone, surrounded by his mirror image.

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Why Sex Doll Brothels Won't Replace Real Brothels Anytime Soon

This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.

Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?

Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.

At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.

All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.

In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.

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Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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Playboy To Bring Back Its Print Magazine With Annual Edition

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.

Playboy’s print magazine is being resurrected. Today, PLBY Group, Inc. announced it will return to issuing a print version of its legendary magazine, but this time around on an annual basis, starting with a February 2025 issue. In March 2020, Playboy stopped producing its 66-year-old print magazine, which had been published since 1953, citing the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic as the reason. Along with reviving the print magazine, the company is relaunching its Playmate franchise with a worldwide search for both the 2024 and 2024 Playmate of the Year and as of this week a newly designed website at Playboy.com.

In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines. In the ’90s, the internet distributed adult content with the click of a button and explicit sexual images became more risque without the limitations that had been imposed upon print publications. Then came a flip-flop. In 2016, Playboy stopped producing nudity in its magazine; the following year, it brought back the magazine’s nudes.

This time around, media veteran Mark Healy will be at the helm of Playboy. His resume includes senior roles at GQ, Rolling Stone, and Men’s Journal. The February 2025 issue will make its debut in conjunction with Big Game Weekend and Super Bowl LIX, which will take place on February 9, 2025, at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. According to Playboy’s latest announcement, “Original content will be produced with a keen focus on embracing the creator economy, partnering with some of the leading creators today to showcase their unique interests,” suggesting the target audience is young and flush with disposal income.

But the big question is not whether consumers will read still Playboy for the articles or the pictorials but whether or not it’s too little too late for an iconic brand that’s taken a beating in the marketplace and in the town square. PLBY Group’s second quarter report was released today, revealing total revenue for the second quarter was $24.9 million. The same period last year total revenue was $35.1 million. That’s a year-over-year decrease of $10.2 million or 29%. Meanwhile, a 2022 Secrets of Playboy 10-part A&E docuseries raised questions about what had really happened at the Playboy Mansion while other former Playmates rallied in support of Hefner.

Regardless of the history, PLAYBOY'S Playmate and Bunny Open Casting Call is underway. For those who aspire to don the bunny ears and tail, they can apply online. Wanna be Playmates and Bunnies must attend a casting call in a nearby city and submit an application with photos. But users of filters beware when it comes to sending your best shots. “Please avoid harsh lighting, skewed angles, and no filters,” the application advises. “The photos you submit can be professionally taken but should remain largely unfiltered and unretouched.” If you get picked to be in the magazine, that might change. But for now, they want to see you fully clothed.

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Etsy Banned Sex Toys, But It Can’t Ban Sex

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.

Etsy, the e-commerce platform, prohibited the sale of sex toys as of July 29, 2024. In a June 27, 2024, public letter entitled “Strengthening Our Approach to Mature Content on Etsy,” Etsy Vice President of Trust and Safety Alice Wu announced the platform had updated its Adult Nudity and Sexual Content policy. The updates included limiting the sale of adult toys sold on the site, prohibiting realistic depictions of nudity, and imposing stricter criteria for listings featuring mature content. According to Etsy’s updated policy on adult content, pornography (including Playboy magazine) is prohibited, human models cannot expose their private parts (which includes their “gluteal clefts”), and the sale of sexual services and custom “content that sexualizes a specific body part” (“‘e.g. foot pics’”) are not allowed. Perhaps most impactfully, Etsy prohibited the sale of adult toys except for “non-insertable and non-penetrable adult toys and sexual accessories.”

For sellers who specialized in selling sex toys, the potential consequences were catastrophic. On X (formerly Twitter), Simply Elegant Glass, which sells, among other products, glass adult toys, lamented the decision in an open letter to Etsy. “It's hard to run a business oriented around adult products,” the thread noted. The “blanket ban” was “the lazy solution.” Now, they added, “Everything we've built on your platform will be completely nullified in 30 short days.” Free Speech Director of Public Policy Mike Stabile, wondered: “Do adults get to exist on the web or nah?” In Wu’s public letter, she asserted: “Our policies are designed to protect our global community, and maintain our position as the destination for truly special, creative goods.” But for Etsy sellers of adult toys and mature product who had long seen Etsy as a sex positive marketplace, the revised rules felt like a personal betrayal.

So, what does the new supposedly de-eroticized Etsy product landscape look like? With some sellers pivoting in how their more mature wares are sold, the platform’s products aren’t exactly wholly G-rated. A search for “sex toys” produced a plethora of listings for miniature “dong” adult toys for use in dollhouses ($4), a 7-inch carved obsidian “penis model” ($64.08), a black silicone head hood with a silicone vagina where the mouth would be ($337.69), a rainbow-colored Nicolas Cage “penis figurine” ($8), and a “Ceramic Dildo Sensual Sculpture” ($91.73). While Etsy had expressly prohibited “Materials produced by pornographic publishers (e.g. Playboy, Brazzers),” including “vintage adult magazines and films,” there were numerous Playboy magazines for sale on the platform. As for a search for “porn,” that yielded no listings at all. “We couldn't find any results for porn,” the productless-product page read. “Try searching for something else instead?”, it suggested helpfully.

Ironically, as a New York Times article, “Etsy vs. Sex,” pointed out, celebrities are having better luck hawking their erotic wares to consumers. On Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop platform, one can buy a double-sided wand vibrator ($95), a “TEACH ME A LESSON” ruler ($20), and a bottle of something called a “sex serum” ($24). According to a July 31, 2024, Etsy Inc. investor relations report, the company’s second-quarter consolidated net income was $53 million, which was down $8.9 million from last year. So far, it remains to be seen how the removal of the platform’s once copious adult and mature product listings will effect the bottom line.

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How The Hardest Working Director In Porn Gets The Job Done

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in July 2024.

On a recent Saturday morning, the adult movie director Ricky Greenwood was busy overseeing the production of a big budget pornographic feature entitled Project X. A couple dozen crew members were buzzing around the office space that previously housed a biotechnology company. For now, most of the action was taking place in a hallway where a hospital gurney had been rolled into position. Soon, a sex scene starring veteran performers Mick Blue and Cherie DeVille would be shot.

These days, Greenwood is one of the most in-demand directors in the adult business. At 42, he has made, by his estimate, over 500 porn movies, among them Grinders (a skateboarding movie), Talk Derby to Me (a roller derby movie), and Machine Gunner (a war movie). Originally from Montreal, Quebec, he is tall, bearded, heavily tattooed, and speaks with a Québécois accent. His favorite movies include The Exorcist, Point Break, and High Fidelity. Among the directors he most admires is Michael Bay: “He’s doing commercial movies that are like a big cheeseburger.” Greenwood says this is not unlike what he does. “I know when I’m making porn, I’m making a sort of entertainment. I go with that and play with it. He’s that type of guy.”

Before he got into the adult business, Greenwood worked in television in Montreal. At a certain point, he took a job directing a porn movie. It wasn’t a positive experience. So he went back to television. A friend had a boss looking for a production manager in adult. So he gave it another try. This time, things went better. He moved to Los Angeles. He wrote and directed adult movies. He won some awards. The story for the movie he’s directing today came from its producer, Digital Playground. It’s about what happens when the government finds an alien ship that has crashed on earth. DeVille plays a biologist. When Blue arrives on set, the wardrobe supervisor hands him a white lab coat with a name tag that reads: “Dr. John Harding GENETICIST.”

Getting on the same page Prior to shooting the scene, DeVille, Blue, two talent liaisons, and Greenwood convene in a room. As a camera records, the group goes over a “Pre-Shoot Discussion & Boundary Checklist.” (The performers are given time to complete the consent checklist prior to the meeting.) Here, the actors identify what they are willing and not willing to do in the scene. DeVille takes the lead, noting her dos and don’ts among the 30-plus items listed in the “Sex Acts” column (said acts range from the vanilla—say, kissing—to the not-so vanilla—say, bondage). “The goal is to make the talent comfortable, to create a safe space for the talent and make them feel heard and respected by production,” Greenwood relates later.

Make it look good High production value is something of a Greenwood signature. Unlike the low-budget, lo-fi “gonzo porn” of yesteryear, his productions are saturated in deep colors, preoccupied with story, and look more like a movie produced by A24 than garden variety smut. “Real porn back in the day used to be cinematic, used to be a movie,” he recalls, nostalgic. “Now we want to go back to it: big production, big budget, something that is entertaining.” In the hallway, DeVille and Blue, clad in white lab coats, await the call for action. The lighting is tweaked. In a dimly-lit adjacent room, Greenwood takes a seat and strokes his beard thoughtfully as he surveys the video feeds from the three cameras displayed on the monitors.

Catching the sex “And, action,” Greenwood announces. The cameras move in and out, following the actors’ lead. There isn’t a lot of direction. When it comes to filming sex, this director takes a mostly hands-off approach, preferring to let things unfold organically. “I like to let them do what they want to do,” he shares. “I barely direct them for sex because I feel I want to have a more natural sex scene. I want to be a fly on the wall watching them. I don’t want to give them tricky angles and positions. I want us to witness and not have them working. If you create that safety zone, they will forget the camera. You will get those nice moments and scenes. If you direct them, it become like a job for them, and it become like a fake scene.”

Work against stereotype “As performers, we are like athletes,” Blue, who has pale blue eyes and an Austrian accent and is canonized in the AVN Hall of Fame, opined earlier when asked what it’s like working with Greenwood. “Not a lot of directors who haven’t performed understand that stuff. The better the director understand what we do, the better the outcome will be.” As Blue and DeVille do their thing on the gurney, Greenwood watches, his face bathed in the green glow of an EXIT sign. He’s good at his job, he says: “Because I care.” He knows that some people don’t respect what he does for a living. “‘It doesn’t matter, it’s just porn,’” he parrots the critics saying. But it matters to him. “We want it to be good. We want to make it interesting and different. If we give them a regular porn movie, what’s the point of doing it?”

Know your niche A little over an hour later, the first scene of the day is completed. “I love working with Ricky,” DeVille, an award-winning MILF performer who ran for president in the 2020 election, says in a bathroom afterwards. “I like being extremely organized,” she adds, something they have in common. Meanwhile, Greenwood is getting ready to film a dialogue scene with other actors. He’s busy, but thankful for the work. His friends who direct mainstream movies make a movie every five years. He makes nine or ten movies in a year. Still, there’s a stigma with which to contend. In Europe, “People see a porn director as any type of director. They see it as the same thing as a regular movie director.” In America, it’s taboo. To him, porn is “just another genre that people like and can watch.” That said, he believes public perception is changing—for some, at least. “The younger generation don’t see it so much as bad.”

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Meet The Artist Turning Blowup Dolls Into Fashion Designs

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in July 2020. It has been lightly updated.

Nicole Daddona, who goes by Friday, is 32, lives in Los Angeles, and is, as she puts it, “an artist, comedian, fashion designer, filmmaker, and toy designer” who’s created a popular line of blowup doll fashions. If you’ve ever dreamed of owning a handbag with the face of a vintage blowup doll on it or a coat covered in blowup doll faces, Friday has you covered. Here, Friday, who’s also the editor of FRIDAY Magazine, explains how she got into blowup doll fashion and why her designs are so coveted.

Susannah Breslin: How did you come up with the idea of turning blowup dolls into wearable products you could sell?

Friday: Last year I was living in a retirement community with my dad in Connecticut for a few months. I found a vintage blowup doll at the thrift store and immediately purchased it. I've always been drawn to blowup dolls. I just think they're such a fun part of pop culture. I've always made things out of other things. I used to go to the dump with my dad a lot as a kid and turn little trinkets I'd find into accessories I could wear. When I was in high school, I made a chair out of recycled plastic bags. I like upcycling and turning things into other things a lot. After having Judy—which is the official name of this style of blowup doll—around the house for a few days, I knew that I wanted to keep her with me always and that the best way to do that was to turn her into something wearable. I cut off her face—which sounds terrible, but was oddly cathartic—and assembled a very poorly made prototype of what is now the Blow Me Judy Bag.

Breslin: Where do you source the blowup dolls from?

Friday: At first I was getting them from eBay and thrift stores when I could find them, but after posting the bag as a pre-order for sale and getting a larger and more positive response than I anticipated, I knew eBay's blowup doll supply was going to run dry quickly. I found a manufacturer who makes blowup dolls, and now I source the blowup dolls from them directly. 

Breslin: How do you manufacture the blowup doll products?

Friday: At first I was making them myself, but each bag was taking hours to make, and I was getting injured a lot by my sewing machine, so I knew I needed to find some manufacturing help. After a lot of research I was able to find an amazing manufacturer to help with production.

Breslin: Are the items made entirely from blowup doll materials, or do you add other materials?

Friday: The original prototype was, but after wearing it out a few times I realized that the vinyl material of the blowup doll's body wasn't going to be sturdy enough for longtime wear. I like a bag that's sturdy and can fit a lot or a little while also being great for casual or classy events. The Blow Me Judy Bag is all of that and more. When it came time to manufacture the bag on a larger scale, I did a lot of research. It was important to me that the bag, like everything I sell, was made of all vegan materials. I found a great vegan leather material that was the same color as the original blowup doll's hair, and that's what I use for the bag, which is essentially supposed to be the rest of the doll's head.

Breslin: The Blow Me Bag is $89 $150. How did you settle on that price point?

Friday: $69 seemed too obvious. I wanted to pick a price point that would cover my expenses, labor, and time. I run Magic Society completely on my own. I do all the marketing, customer service, shipping, web design, photography, product design—you name it—myself. The price point is on the lower end in the world of designer handbags, which was important to me because the Blow Me Judy Bag is definitely a designer piece, but I wanted the price to be something I'd be willing to pay for a designer bag. I also see it as a piece of collectible art and myself as an artist, so hopefully the value will go up over time. My dream is that one day it will be in a museum between Pedro Friedeberg's hand chair and Warhol's paper dress.

Breslin: Is the Blow Me Judy Bag your bestseller? How many have you sold?

Friday: It sells really well. So far I've released two pre-orders of 100 pieces each. I'm just about to sell out the second pre-order.

Breslin: Why did you choose this model of blowup doll?

Friday: Judy's the one! Out of all the blowup dolls out in the world, she's the most iconic. She has a classic design that's been around for decades, so she has a warm nostalgic feeling about her. I like that she plays it classy with her closed mouth, but we all know what she's really got on her mind.

Breslin: Is working with blowup doll materials easy or challenging?

Friday: It's 1,000% challenging! The mask part of the doll is flexible plastic, which is very thick and difficult to sew, but makes for a sturdy bag. The vinyl the body is made of is difficult to wrangle in the Los Angeles heat, but it's all worth it when I catch Judy's hypnotizing gaze.

Breslin: Your blowup line is amusing, but it's also sort of disturbing. In the product description, you even refer to the Blow Me Judy Bag as a potential "relationship ender." Do you think your blowup products are beautiful? Terrifying? Art?

Friday: I definitely think of it as all of the above. The blowup line is pop art personified. It's high fashion and lowbrow all at the same time. Magic Society's slogan is "Lowbrow High Fashion.” I don't think anything sums that up better than the Blow Me Judy Bag. The good thing is that the blowup line is a great conversation starter. It also makes uptight people uncomfortable, which is always fun. Gotta love scaring Karens. 

To quote Delia Deetz, "This is my art and it is dangerous," kind of sums up most of the work I do. From the films I make with my directing partner Adam Shenkman to the clothing I design, I like to make things that dwell in the subconscious, touch on surrealism, and most of all amuse me. I know in a world as big as the one we live in that there are like-minded people out there who will get it and get something positive out of my creations.

Breslin: Have you gotten any interest in carrying the Blow Me Judy Bag yet from, say, Nordstrom?

Friday: Not yet, but hit me up, Nordstrom! I'm ready to take this line all the way to Fashion Week and confuse the masses. London. New York. Paris. Milan. Retailers, drop me a line! Magic Society will cast a spell over you!

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Sex Sales

Today on Forbes.com, I wrote about Etsy banning adult toy sales, among a host of other new constraints imposed on people who hawk mature wares on the e-commerce platform. You can read it right here.

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August Is the Hottest Month

In August, I’ll be posting more frequently on Forbes. Got a story suggestion or a tip? You can email me here.

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The Porn Director

After a little over a year hiatus, during which time I published and promoted my book, I’m back as a senior contributor to Forbes.com. In my latest story, I spend time with Ricky Greenwood, a very popular, very busy porn director. Ricky is a big bear of a guy, and I enjoyed watching him work. The scene I saw him direct features two award-winning veteran performers: Cherie DeVille and Mick Blue. Read the story here.

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Porn Star 3.0: This X-Rated Social Media Influencer Makes Seven Figures A Year

This story was written by me and originally published on Forbes.com in May 2020.

She goes by the moniker Lena the Plug. Never heard of her? Well, you’re in the minority. She has 3.5 million Instagram followers, nearly 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, and 1.1 million Twitter followers. And she’s built this empire herself.

At 29, Lena is a new kind of adult performer. Once upon a time, adult actresses signed exclusive contracts with adult production companies. Today, influencers like Lena create their own adult content and use their social media platforms to promote their content and score paying subscribers.

Lena didn’t set out to disrupt the porn business. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Her family is Armenian, and she grew up in Glendale, California.

Think she’s an amateur?

She earned seven figures last year.

Susannah Breslin: You have millions of followers across your social media platforms. What do you think is your appeal?

Lena the Plug: My YouTube fan base has transformed a lot. I think my appeal at first was purely sexual on YouTube. People showed up to subscribe to my content because they wanted to see me make a sex tape when I reached a million subscribers. Mostly men were watching, but some women showed up as well to see the train wreck they thought I would be. I ended up just sharing the most real and raw, most honest parts of myself on my channel. I sort of treated my videos like they were diary entries for a while. It was an outlet for me. I cried on camera. Yes, I shared the exciting party life I was living with my boyfriend, but I also talked about my eating disorder, losing a good friend to suicide, and how I struggled with the hate that comes with sex work. I went from a 5% female demographic to a 45% female audience, which really stood out to me. I think my YouTube channel has done a lot to really flush me out as a “whole” person, if that makes sense. People see a sex worker, and to them, she is purely a sexual object. It is hard for the consumer to see past that, but when you open up and show “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” you’re humanizing yourself to an audience. They can relate to you in a way that they couldn’t have imagined before. I think that’s my appeal. Getting a person to say: “Okay, she has a totally different type of occupation than the one I do, but I can relate to her. I can see myself befriending her. We are not so different, in a way.”

Breslin: Some people might be surprised to learn that you're bringing in seven figures annually. What are your revenue sources?

Lena: I have a big YouTube and Instagram following, but 95% of my revenue stream comes from selling access to my premium Snapchat and OnlyFans subscriptions. The other 5% is a combination of YouTube revenue, Instagram and YouTube brand deals, adult tube sites, and merchandise. It’s hard to get brand deals when you do 18+ work, or earn a high amount of revenue on Youtube when you are a sex worker—videos get demonetized even if they abide by YouTube community guidelines—so I have always relied on creating and selling quality adult content. It is the bread and butter of my business. 

Breslin: Was being an entrepreneur something you planned or did you more fall into it?

Lena: I’ll be honest. I didn’t think I had an entrepreneurial bone in my body until I started doing this work. I began selling access to my premium Snapchat back in 2016 when it became very apparent that because of my high follower count on Instagram and Snapchat, I would have guaranteed financial success with it. A few different people who ran sites that girls could sell access to their Snapchat on had reached out to me to join their sites. They wanted 50% of the revenue for me showing my entire body online, while they just hosted the site that processed the credit cards. It struck a nerve with me, and I couldn’t get myself to take any of those deals. I decided to have a site built for myself, where I could keep a majority of my earnings. I’ve since moved to larger, more mainstream sites—like OnlyFans—because they offer a reasonable revenue split, but I think that experience with creating my own website is what started me out as the entrepreneur I didn’t know I could be. 

Breslin: Even though adult content is ubiquitous on the internet, there's still stigma attached to sex work. How do you navigate that?

Lena: It used to be really hard, at first. I was overwhelmed with negativity when I first gained notoriety online. I felt I had truly made a mistake in choosing this work and should have never entered this space. I wasn’t used to the repeated name-callings back then. I’ve since gotten used to it and grown thicker skin. If someone calls you a whore thousands of times, it just doesn’t hurt anymore, you know? I see the same negative comments all the time. They lose their meaning after a while. The commenters of these words don’t feel like real people anymore. I basically just block and ignore now. Internally, I acknowledge that whoever is commenting is coming from a very different world than the one I know. They haven’t been exposed to the same things that have allowed me to be open-minded about sex. I try to be forgiving about their hatred and remind myself that there was probably a time where I was more close-minded and would have probably thought poorly of sex workers too. It doesn’t make it right, but it helps me to put it into perspective and try to understand them better. 

Breslin: Years ago, adult performers had exclusive contracts with production studios. What role has the internet and social media played in your career?

Lena: Without the internet and social media, I would have no career. Without Instagram and Snapchat, I would have never known that selling adult content online was even an option. I would have no clue that you can make an entire career off of it. I only got into this business because so many of my followers kept asking me if I had “premium” content. Now I use my social media platforms as marketing tools for my business and [as a way] to meet other creators to work with. I owe everything to the internet and these platforms. 

Breslin: How has the pandemic impacted your business?

Lena: The pandemic has affected a majority of businesses in a very negative way, but my business has been growing steadily during the past couple of months, in terms of selling memberships to my OnlyFans. Also, I always worked from home, so the pandemic hasn’t changed that for me. The one difference in my business is that the type of content I create is a little different. I can’t meet with other performers to shoot content, so I mostly film solo content or shoot videos with my partner, who I’m quarantined with. I have shot a couple of Zoom orgies, which are fun, but I look forward to when I can physically work with other beautiful women in person again. 

Breslin: You announced not long ago that you're pregnant. What was the reaction like from your followers? How has being pregnant impacted work?

Lena: Yes, I am currently 17 weeks pregnant! I made my announcement on social media a few weeks ago, and as with most things, it was good and bad. I was overwhelmed with beautiful messages from many of my followers who are excited for this new chapter in my life. However, many people felt the need to vocalize their opinions about the mistake they seem to think I am making. The number one concern is that my child will be bullied because of my career choice, and that it is selfish for me to bring kids into this world. Others believe that if I’m choosing motherhood, I should leave sex work behind. It’s apparent that these people subscribe to the idea that women cannot be both maternal and sexual, they must choose one or the other. I’m ignoring everyone and continuing to do my job and live my life. I shouldn’t have to leave my career, especially while my success is constantly growing at a steady rate, just because I am having a child. I’m a business woman, just like any other business woman, and I’m in the very fortunate position where I don’t have to give anything up. So far, my pregnancy hasn’t affected my work. People still love my content, even with the extra weight. As I grow and look undeniably pregnant, I am sure I will lose some amount of subscribers who miss my smaller frame, but I will surely gain some new ones who prefer a big-bellied body. 

Breslin: Who's your role model? Kim Kardashian? Steve Jobs?

Lena: I wouldn’t really say I had any role models when I came into this business because I sort of fell into it without even realizing what was happening or how big I was getting.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Porn Rules The World In This Provocative New Art Installation

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on August 7, 2018.

It's a pity that I can't share photos here of the best part of Pornhub Nation, an art installation created by artists Maggie West and Ryder Ripps and underwritten by Pornhub, a massive adult video streaming site. The immersive experience sprawls across a series of dark rooms in Union, a nightclub in central Los Angeles, but the most interesting portion can be found in a small and intimate room at the top of a flight of stairs. There, a visitor can wander around and peer through the glass at a series of what look like plants from some oversexed nature of the future. From the leaves grow large adult toys in the shapes of phalluses. The effect is terrarium like, and the mood, to use West's word, is "ethereal." The pieces are artfully painted and luminous in the blacklight. Who knew that something so lovely could be found on a Wednesday morning in a near-empty club where the art has been funded not by the National Endowment for the Arts, but by a company devoted to profits and which delivers graphic content to the masses?

The 3,000-square-foot, tongue-in-cheek conceit of the art show is that you have been transported to the year 2069. Apparently, a group has fled the ... country? the planet? for somewhere else, maybe an island, maybe something that looks like the moon, in order to live a more sexually free existence, one that is controlled by an adult company. In the press materials for the show, Pornhub claims "90 million daily visitors," and its vice president, Corey Price, ventures: "Considering the exponential rate at which we are growing, maybe it wouldn't be totally out of the question to see a Pornhub-themed utopian society formed by the year 2069." I am dubious. But I'm not in the porn business. So maybe he has a point.

In total, Pornhub Nation is a clever send up of what a pornified utopia might look like and a gentle smack to the face of our joyless bureaucracies of the present. The first room — the "National Gallery” — features West's photos of this X-rated nation's presidents, and they're all porn stars: Asa Akira, Riley Reid, and Abella Danger among them. In the next room, the "Domination Masochistic Vroomvroom," which is lit red with neon and boasts a stage upon which stand mannequins clad in fetish garb, we are greeted with a challenging proposition: What would a sexy Department of Motor Vehicles look like? Whips and paddles are affixed to the walls, and one driver safety sign reminds: "Don't whip your whip or you'll be whipped." Apparently, when the club is open, visitors have been trying to remove the fetish tools from the walls, despite the fact that they're firmly anchored there. After all, this is art, not a sex dungeon.

My favorite part of the show was the ball pit — or the "National Silicon [sic?] Reserve." It was filled with flesh-colored balls that reminded one of breast implants. A sign on the wall cautioned against diving or removing one's pants. West instructed me to remove my shoes. Once in the pit, I found myself sinking into the balls. Momentarily, I lost my balance and wondered if I would drown in the porn pit. After extracting myself, I realized that in my disorientation I had put my shoes on the wrong feet.

The next room — "This is our space program," West said — offered a send up of NASA, and while their new acronym is not suitable for publication here, it's not difficult to guess. Overhead, two astronaut suits copulated in space. Their nearby spaceship was phallic in shape. From there, we went upstairs to the dildo plants room, which West described as a "sanctuary." It connoted the surreal beauty of Matthew Barney's work and the wacky futurism of the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen's 1973 movie, "Sleeper."

The show's conclusion was an homage to money and a sexual redux of the Internal Revenue Service. Large neon dollar signs glowed against one wall. In a far corner, visitors could don virtual reality glasses and throw virtual sex toys at a virtual Harvey Weinstein. Outside, there was a place where minglers could sit amidst more plants blooming sex toys, but there was a problem. "People just like stealing them out of the garden," West shared. In this porn world, you can look, but you can't take it home with you.

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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.

“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.

You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.

“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”

So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.

“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.

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How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money On OnlyFans

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on January 22, 2023.

Iggy Azalea is the latest celebrity to join OnlyFans. Once dominated by sex workers seeking to boost their brands and monetize their relationships to their fans, the subscription-based content service has seen a rise in mainstream stars joining its ranks, including Bella Thorne, Denise Richards, and DJ Khaled. Amber Rose, another celebrity on OnlyFans and a former stripper, has described the platform as “a digital strip club.” So it only makes sense that Azalea, an Australian rapper who has proclaimed that she is, in fact, the strip club, would sign up, too.

But Azalea’s OnlyFans isn’t just any old OnlyFans. It is a year-long, collaborative multimedia project entitled Hotter Than Hell that will feature music, photography, video, art, and, according to a press release, content from “her upcoming fourth studio album.” For $25 a month, subscribers will get a front-row seat to the project as it drops, before the rest of the world sees it. The concept was inspired by Pamela Anderson, 90s supermodels, and Madonna’s controversial book Sex and culminates with a coffee table book to be released in December 2023.

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

The first post was the aforementioned cherry-licking photo and the words: “The sweetest angel”; below that, it noted how many likes the post had and the dollar amount of tips it had garnered from her fans. (Tips are another way OnlyFans creators can generate revenue.) At the time of this writing, that post had 2,501 likes and $233.20 in tips. There were more images to come: Azalea in green lingerie, Azalea getting her makeup done, Azalea posing seemingly nude next to a swimming pool while eating a cherry with her nipple discreetly hidden from view. One post featured a nine-second audio clip of Azalea — “Hey, babe,” she purred to me? us? her anonymous fans? — offering an enticement to be “a part of my VIP for a year by tipping $250 and receive a one-year link subscription and a free photo that’s just for my VIPS.” That post had 685 likes and a staggering $15,690 in tips. (OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of its creators’ revenues.) Maybe I should be on OnlyFans, I mused.

So it went over the days that followed. There were more images. There were more audio clips. There was a video clip of a scantily-clad Azalea that had been filmed through a window as if the viewer (me) was spying on her; the text with it read: “Working my angles [butterfly emoji, fire emoji].” When I didn’t check Azalea’s content stream, I got emails from OnlyFans telling me that I had unread messages from her, as if I had left her on read. When I logged back into OnlyFans, I discovered those messages contained locked content, another way the site’s creators can make money. With the Pay Per View feature, members must pay more to access locked content. One was $40. Another was $28. Yet another was $35. Each message had a come-hither note, but the visual content was behind an image of a padlock.

I thought about unlocking the rest of Azalea’s content, but I didn’t. By that point I had read that she had “sold her master recording and publishing catalog to Domain Capital for an eight-figure sum” late last year. She didn’t need the money, I figured.

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Death of a Pimp

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on October 18, 2018.

Dennis Hof was a pimp. Perhaps he would've preferred the term "brothel owner," for that he was, too, at the time of his death earlier this week at 72. He was found dead in bed at his Love Ranch Vegas brothel in Crystal, Nevada, on Tuesday morning by adult performer Ron Jeremy. An autopsy will be conducted to identify the cause of his death, but foul play wasn't suspected.

It was a busy time for Hof, who was in the midst of a campaign to get himself elected to the Nevada State Assembly. Ironically, he may well be elected, despite the fact that he's dead, because, according to the New York Times, in the 36th District in which he's running, 45% of those registered to vote are registered as Republicans, compared to 28% who are registered to vote as Democrats. His Trumpian political platform included lowering taxes and defending gun owners' rights.

In June of 2017, I interviewed Hof for an article I wrote for this website in the wake of a news report that former FBI director James Comey had used the term "hookers" in a Statement for the Record released one day prior to testifying in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Hookers" appears in Comey's summary of a March 30, 2017, call he received from Trump. "[Trump] said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia," Comey wrote. Was "hookers" Comey's word choice or Trump's? Interested to hear what sex workers and their minders thought of the high-profile disparagement, I reached out to Hof and his employees.

As it turned out, Hof had a Trump story of his own. "I met him 27 years ago," he told me. "I was in the timeshare business. He wanted to timeshare the [Trump] Taj Mahal, and he wanted me to come aboard to do that. I didn't do that. I said there's not enough money in the world to make me live in Atlantic City." It was hard to know whether or not to take Hof's claim seriously. Instead, Hof recounted, he became "the pimp master general of America," anointed as such by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. He'd voted for Trump and liked the guy—"We need a businessman," he said—but he preferred the term "working girls." Either way, Trump was good for business. "Business is humping," he told me. "We feel the difference with Trump in office."

It wasn't the first time I'd connected with Hof. Over the prior two decades, I'd encountered him at various events, from adult movie sets to X-rated conventions. The first time I'd met him was on the set of an adult movie being shot in the San Fernando Valley, the content of which was so outré that I won't detail it here. On another occasion, I talked with him at the Hustler Store in Hollywood. And he was a regular presence at the AVN Awards—the so-called "Oscars of porn"—in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He wasn't the first pimp that I met, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he was like many pimps that I've encountered over the years. He was charismatic, likeable, friendly, a consummate showman, and the sort of person who could make you feel comfortable about anything, including, one presumed, showing up at one of his brothels in hopes of paying one of the women who worked for him a few hundred dollars, or more, to share some intimate time, in the parts of Nevada where that's legal.

In a way, he wasn't that different from sex workers I've known. For providing a service in demand across the country, they'd been publicly vilified and systematically ostracized. Hof was a larger-than-life character—a pimp, you bet—but he was also a businessman who knew well that if someone will pay for something, there's money to be made, and that's the American dream.

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I, A Middle-Aged Woman, Went On A Sugar Daddy Dating Website

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on June 2, 2022.

I, a middle-aged single woman, have spent the last several years looking for love, a connection, something on dating websites and apps. You name them, I’ve been on them: Bumble, Tinder, Hinge. Over that period I’ve gone on 30 or so blind dates, with pilots and attorneys and one carpenter, most of them somewhere between mildly boring and temporarily entertaining, but nothing has really stuck. So the other night, after I’d deleted another dating app in frustration—Bumble, probably—I wondered what would happen if I signed up for Seeking Arrangement, a so-called “sugar daddy” dating website that earlier this year rebranded itself as Seeking and announced itself “the largest dating website for successful and attractive people.” (The unsuccessful and unattractive need not apply, one imagines.)

Seeking Arrangement had long been the dating site of choice for young women and older men hoping to find a connection that involved the exchange of money; what that money was exchanged for was up to its users. Now Seeking, which claims it has over 36 million users worldwide, was trying to sell itself as one more dating site. Was Seeking comprised of mostly forty-something sugar daddies searching for twenty-something sugar babies? Or could I, a middle-aged women, find something more romantic than transactional on the site? There was only one way to find out: gonzo journalism. “Start Dating Up,” which Seeking has trademarked, the website beckoned. I paid $19.99 for a 30-day subscription and created a profile.

In a way, Seeking isn’t that different from other dating websites. In fact, I recognized some of the men’s profiles from regular dating websites and apps I’d been on. Many of the men were younger than I’d expected. I’d thought the male users would be middle-aged, moneyed types on the prowl for young woman that appreciated the simplicity of a tit-for-tat exchange. Instead, I found a mix of tech nerds who’d struck it rich and whose screen names occasionally underscored their love of the blockchain and bitcoin, average Joe types hunting for something quick who figured it was easier to find it on Seeking than at a bar, and successful executives who seemed to be interested in a relationship they believed they could control through money.

But were these guys as wealthy as they claimed? On their profiles, they could share their net worth and quite a few claimed to have a net worth of $100 million or more, which seemed unlikely, given that a 2015 report from the Boston Consulting Group found that there were over 5,000 households in the U.S. worth $100 million or more. Some of the men wanted a sugar baby and said so. Some wanted something that might start out transactional but would turn into something more, even marriage, down the line. One, who was married, was looking for a woman who would move in with him and his wife. Another, a handsome young man who related he’d done well when he’d sold his last company, no longer had to work and wanted to find a girl who would travel the world with him on his dime.

I got a few messages, but only a handful. While the site had been rebranded, it was clear that most of the guys were looking for women who were far younger than me. Then I came across the profile of an older man who was looking for tall women with big feet. I’m 6’1” and wear a size 11 shoe. He was looking for The One, he wrote. Was I it? I tried to picture how it might work, me with my tall body and my big feet, and him, far away, with his interests and his self-proclaimed successes.

It was easy to get sucked into thinking about romance as transactional on Seeking, a place where it was normal to calculate one’s worth and then try to sell it. But something stopped me. Seeking was one more dating website, but one where sex and love were commodities. I began to feel grim and a bit cynical, which wasn’t how I wanted to feel. So I deleted my profile.

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The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on April 23, 2012.

You might think being a male porn star is easy. Have sex for a living? That's a piece of cake.

So, what can some of the biggest woodsmen in the porn business teach us about work?

As it turns out, guys who get it up for a paycheck have something to offer when it comes to career advice.

I heard from seven of Porn Valley's biggest studs via email and got the secrets to becoming a successful working stiff.

TIP #1: Get your coworkers to like you.

In the porn business, it's doubly important your coworkers like you.

According to Brandon Iron, star of "Perverted Planet 7" and director of "Sex Crazed," getting along with your costars is the key to getting ahead in porn.

"The hardest thing about being a male porn star is convincing your female co-workers that you are an interesting, well-rounded, fun guy who they might consider dating in a parallel universe after a few drinks," Iron says.

TIP #2: Don't confuse the professional with the personal.

For male porn stars, the line between professional and personal can get blurry. If you think keeping the professional professional and the personal personal is tricky in your line of work, you should talk to a male porn star, who may have a wife waiting at home for him to finish his latest scene with another woman. 

Jeremy Steele, star of "Naughty Neighbors" and "M.I.L.F. Money," says the hardest thing is what happens when he's not working.

"[The hardest thing is] having a relationship with a significant other," Steele says. "The first time I told a girl I was in porn she disconnected her phone number the same night, and I never saw or heard from her again."

Not only that, changing career tracks can be tricky, especially if you leave the adult business and try to reinvent yourself.

"The second hardest thing is having a post-porn career that doesn't make you 'infamous' if or when it is discovered that you were a sex worker on film/video," Steele reports. "You can lose a job or not find one if you're too well known for having been a whore on camera, in spite of it being legal."

TIP #3: Be cognizant of how others perceive you.

Whether you're a twentysomething or fiftysomething, your age can impact how management perceives your abilities. Are you too young to be getting the salary you're negotiating for? Or are you perceived as too old to be promotable?

Dave Cummings may be the oldest working porn star on the planet. At 72, he's appeared in "The Sopornos 2" and directs his own series, "Sugar Daddy."

On the one hand, Cummings owns a niche market. On the other hand, his age can be an impediment.

Sometimes, Cumming says, he worries his coworkers would "prefer working with a younger guy than me."

TIP #4: Rise to the occasion.

Seymore Butts has had in his own Showtime reality series, "Family Business," and he's directed and starred in adult movies for years.

According to Butts, it's not the porn starlet, the director, the producer, the cameraman, or the production assistant who has the toughest job in porn. It's the guy who has to get wood -- or else.

Butts opines:

The most difficult part about being a male porn star is the hard-on. They have to get it up and off on cue essentially and all the while in between maintain [it] for two to three hours. This must be done under the most difficult of circumstances, including not being attracted to their female co-star, having sex in the most uncomfortable settings, i.e. on hard surfaces, cold/hot weather, etc., and/or having to stop frequently for direction or shot setups. They have to be in great shape in order to perform. It all adds up to being the most difficult job in porn, in my opinion.

TIP #5: Successful negotiations are key.

You may have seen Richard Mann in "Freaknic 2" and "Big Mann on Campus," but Mann says he and his brethren are getting stiffed when it comes to getting paid what they should.

"I'd say dealing with the fact that you don't get any royalties" is the hardest thing about his job, Mann says. "When you shoot, they pay you once, and that's it."

Will male porn stars unionize? Unlikely.

TIP #6: It's all about confidence.

Zak Smith is an artist, author, and male porn star. With his unique resume, he's found porn is a tricky industry because it breeds insecurity.

"Everything that happens [on a porn set] affects whether people will want to sleep with you," Smith says. "The stakes could not possibly be higher. Every other thing -- including things that might lead to losing the job -- are just subthings of that thing."

TIP #7: Perspective, perspective, perspective.

Arguably the most famous male porn star of the moment, James Deen's work can be seen in "This Ain't Ghostbusters XXX," "Simpsons: The XXX Parody," and "Batman XXX: A Porn Parody."

Deen's secret to success: a positive attitude.

"I guess the hardest thing about being a male performer is ... um ... I don't know," Deen says. "My job is pretty easy."

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How HBO’s "The Idol," With A Little Help From Valentino, Rewrote The "Pretty Woman" Playbook

In the third episode of the controversial HBO series “The Idol,” Jocelyn, a pop star played by Lily-Rose Depp, and Tedros, a slimy wannabe Svengali played by Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, head off for a shopping spree at the Valentino boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. After bypassing a gaggle of adoring Jocelyn fans out front, the duo undertake some retail therapy. “You see that young lady over there?” Tedros asks a store employee. “Got anything in this store as beautiful as she is?” Jocelyn tries on a series of Valentino outfits as Tedros eggs her on, threatens to “curb stomp” an employee he believes his ogling his girl, and dismisses one top as “trash.”

Eventually, the pair end up having sex in a dressing room. When Jocelyn exits before Tedros can finish, he finishes himself off alone in the dressing room while holding onto a rack of Valentino clothes. Afterwards, he looks at his soiled hands. Then his gaze turns to the very expensive Valentino red dresses hanging nearby. The camera cuts away, but the implication is clear: he wipes his hands off on the dresses.

Did Valentino sign off on this? I wondered as I watched the scene. After all, Valentino is a venerated luxury fashion brand. Founded in 1959 by Valentino Garavani, its designs have been worn by Jackie Kennedy, Princess Diana, and Oprah Winfrey. Had Valentino cosigned on what appeared to be the bespoiling of its brand—or was this was what product placement looked like in 2023? In search of an answer, I reached out to Valentino for comment. I didn’t get a response back.

For an expert’s take, I sent an email to Stacy Jones, the CEO of Hollywood Branded, a pop culture marketing agency. She didn’t know if there was any brand partnership between Valentino and “The Idol,” but she did offer her take on the provocative Valentino scene, which had generated some debate on Twitter.

“While the scene in the Valentino store was certainly explicit, there isn’t damage to the brand,” Jones opined. “Even the derogatory mentions made by Tedros about some of the styles and the store’s stylist had no lasting negative impact. Tedros is shown to be the not-so-nice character he is, and it was in fact Tedros who came off looking poorly, not Valentino. The growing spotlight on Valentino dressing Lily-Rose's character and having her model their clothing on screen feels like a win regardless. The saying that you can’t pay for media worth that is true. This particular product placement is over delivering on brand awareness big time. There is not a lot of risk in offending older Valentino consumers as they simply won’t be watching the series. They are not the target audience.” These days, Valentino may be more interested in targeting millennials and Gen Z as potential customers. According to Bain & Co.: “These generations are expected to account for as much as 70% of the global luxury market by 2025.”

Not only that, it seemed I had missed the point entirely. As Jones pointed out in her email to me, the Valentino scene from “The Idol” was a redux of a scene from the 1990 film “Pretty Woman,” starring Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward, a Hollywood escort, and Richard Gere as Edward Lewis, a wealthy businessman, right down to the “Do you have anything in this shop as beautiful as she is?” line. “I googled to see where [the boutique shopping scene] in ‘Pretty Woman’ was filmed as I thought it had a high likelihood of being Valentino,” Jones added. “This article states ‘Pretty Woman’ filmed the Rodeo Drive scene specifically at Valentino. There are a lot of similarities in the scenes, just taken up many adult notches with an edgier, modern touch.”

Is “The Idol” “‘torture porn’”? Has it “set back the feminist movement by at least a decade”? Is it “anti-feminist spectacle”? Or is something more complex at work? At least in the case of the Valentino scene, the subtext is resolutely feminist. In “Pretty Woman,” Vivian says: “I want the fairy tale.”; she wants a man to rescue her. In Sam Levinson’s “The Idol,” the fairy tale is over. After all, it’s Jocelyn who denies Tedros his own pleasure, who is the star, and who, we presume, foots the bill for their shopping trip. In this retelling, the woman holds the power, not the man.

On a recent Friday afternoon, I made my way to the Valentino boutique. Since it was late June, the well-heeled shoppers making their way up and down the sidewalks had to share space with groups of tourists. In the Valentino store, I was met by a security guard. A salesperson followed me around as I admired a pair of $1,800 see-through platform pumps that reminded me of the strippers’ shoe brand of choice, Pleaser Shoes, and a red dress that looked like one Jocelyn had worn. On the second floor, the salesperson indicated the dressing room where the racy scene for “The Idol” had been shot, supposedly. I opened the door. No one, much less Tedros, was there.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com.

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Forbes by the Numbers: January 2023

I’ve been writing for the Forbes website for forever, it seems. Over the years, I have held several beats: self-employment, vices, and sex. Currently, my tagline is: “I cover the business of sex.” In January 2023, I started posting again after a hiatus, and I thought I would track my traffic numbers progress here.

Stories published: 4. My goal was to publish five stories, but various things led that to not happening. Next time, I will get more of the posts done earlier in the month.

Total page views: 42,956. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 22,353. That’s an increase of 91%. So, not bad.

Total visitors: 39,011. My goal was to double my page views from December 2022, when I wasn’t posting. My page views in December 2022 were 20,155. That’s an increase of 93%. So, not bad.

Most popular post, by views: How Rapper Iggy Azalea Is Making Money on Only Fans: 19,381 (as of this writing). If the question is what works, the answer is the intersection of celebrities and sex. Other reasons this post performed well: It was tweeted multiple times by Forbes and ForbesLife, the top image featured Iggy preparing to lick a cherry, I had read something recently that reminded me that headlines that explain “how” something is done are more likely to generate higher engagement and so I used that construct.

The month’s highlight: Iggy is #1: At one point, my story about Iggy was the number one trending story on Forbes.com, beating out stories about Tom Brady and Elon Musk.

My goals for February 2023: 5 posts, 50,000+ page views, 50,000+ visitors. Check back early next month to find out if I hit my targets.

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Me & Iggy

For my latest post on Forbes, I wrote about how rapper Iggy Azalea is making money on Only Fans.

An excerpt:

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

Read the rest here.

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