Your Sunday Zen
All The News That's Unfit To Print: 12.21.13
The year in butts. [The Cut]
8" chocolate penis filled with "perverse fluid." [United Indecent Pleasures]
One day, your iPhone will tell you if your relationship sucks. [Co.Exist]
Don't be a dirtbag. [Twitter]
Abandoned brothels are the new haunted houses. [Slate]
Danica Patrick will kick your ass. [Daily Mail]
You're doing naked social media wrong. [Romenesko]
"Deep Throat" should be in the National Film Registry. [AVN]
Al Goldstein was the anti-Hef. [Hazlitt]
"So I walked on the set, and the first thing I saw was a 50-foot yellow ass." [Vulture]
I guess she likes scallions. [Sander Dekker]
Well, this is just disturbing. [The Dish]
A clip from "Nymphomaniac." [YouTube]
Aspiring porn star, 19, gets busted. [Journal Star]
Hey, girl. [иван перец via Indie Nudes]
The human body has been fragmented. [Amazon]
NPR listeners are a bunch of perverts. [Galley Cat]
Pinsex is the Pinterest for porn. [The Kernel]
"'It's f---ing Bigfoot,' hissed Shelly. 'He's real, for f---'s sake.' Horror filled her eyes. 'With a huge c---.'" [BI]
ICYMI: What porn stars do when the porn industry shuts down. [Forbes]
Porn Industry Shutdown
What happens when the porn business shuts down? I found out in my latest post for Forbes: "What Porn Stars Do When the Porn Industry Shuts Down."
"'The moratoriums are always very difficult for a majority of the performers in the adult industry,' says Chanel Preston, a four-year veteran who’s slated to co-host the 2014 AVN Awards — otherwise known as the 'Oscars of porn' — next month in Las Vegas.
For stars with exclusive contracts that guarantee regular paychecks from big production companies, the money is steady. For the rest, not so much.
'Despite the amount of money that performers make, most still live paycheck-to-paycheck, so having your income cut off for a few weeks is a huge damper financially,' Preston says."
[Forbes]
How Much I Got Paid: #7
Title: Digital copywriter
Publication: N/A
Date: N/A
Word count: N/A
Payment: $100/hour
Notes: In February of 2011, I was downsized from a full-time job I had as an editor for a popular Time Warner website for women. That day, I wrote a post on my blog titled "Hire Me." Not long after, I heard from a man who worked for a big PR company in New York. He talked to me about doing some social media copywriting. He offered me $100 an hour. I took it. Over the next year and a half, I wrote digital copy for some of the world's biggest brands. My favorite assignment was pretending to be a product that talked to its fans on Facebook. I wrote scripts for commercials, became a celebrity tweet ghostwriter, and billed thousands and thousands of dollars. I was good at it, I liked it, and I could generate the online engagement the billion-dollar companies with which I worked wanted so desperately. I was a kind of Facebook whisperer. As a writer, it was the best-paying job I've ever had. One might suggest that marketing copy is thin and meaningless compared to journalism, but the reality is that every writer is in the entertainment business. The question is: How much do you want to get paid for what you do?
Conclusion: There's no shame in paying the bills.
Jennifer Lawrence Talks Sex Toys
Best Sex 2013
The Daily Beast has a roundup of the best movie sex scenes of 2013. This one from "Spring Breakers" was a standout for me, as well.
"In addition to being one of the best films of the year—sorry, haters—Harmony Korine’s fever dream contains one of the year’s most indelible scenes. Mind you, this is not your typical sex scene. Alien (Franco, in corn rows with a grill), a fugazi crime lord, has just taken a quartet of nubile collegiate girls under his wing (played by Benson, Hudgens, Selena Gomez, and Rachel Korine). Two of them depart, and Franco engages in three-way sex with Benson and Hudgens in a pool. But the more impactful sex scene occurs when they two girls expose Alien for the goofball he is by sticking a gun deep into his mouth. For a moment, Alien looks terrified … and then he starts fellating the gun."
The Teutonic Brothel
Party Boy
How Much I Got Paid: #6
Title: "The Last Real Porn Star"
Publication: Hysterical Literature
Date: July 15, 2013
Word count: 939
Payment: $0
Notes: In April, my friend Clayton Cubitt asked me to write an essay for a site he would be launching, Hysterical Literature, which would be the digital home of a wildly successful video project he'd undertaken in which he was shooting women reading and orgasming at the same time. The site would feature all the videos and several essays about the project. Did I want to write an essay? Yes, I did. We decided I would write about Stoya, whose video session features the porn star reading an excerpt from Supervert's Necrophilia Variations (as of this writing, Stoya's video has been viewed 10,399,221 times). The essay I wrote features commentary on Stoya, a review of the book, and the answer as to whether or not the man who wrote the book that Stoya reads while orgasming had masturbated to the video of the porn star orgasming while reading his book. I wrote this piece for free. Cubitt is a friend, it gave me a chance to use my brain, and when someone asks if you would like to write an essay about a porn star orgasming while reading a book, you say yes.
Conclusion: Freedom is perception.
Smell Like Hova
[via Vice]
Just Blow
Gender Wars, Blogger-Style
Famous-for-being-crazy working mommyblogger Penelope Trunk has found the competition. It is male, unburdened, and married to a yoga teacher. The blogger gender war has driven her to drink, apparently.
"And here’s another fear I have: Fear of competing with middle-aged men who abandon their family and marry someone younger. Really. I am sick of it. James Altucher married his yoga teacher. He has two kids he does not live with. My fear is that I am the one living with my kids and I’m competing with men who left their kids behind with their mothers."
Playboy Thief
How Much I Got Paid: #5
Title: "Great Expectations"
Publication: Marie Claire
Date: November 2012
Word count: 803
Payment: $1,400
Notes: If you've never written for a women's magazine, Sarah Miller brings to life vividly what it's like on The Hairpin in "What If a Women's Magazine Editor Edited a BBC News Story About Syria?" I pitched several stories to a Marie Claire editor in 2012, and I ended up writing a back-of-the-book personal essay on dating as a tall woman. (I'm 6'1".) There was a lot of back-and-forth editing. The final version is not my proudest moment as a writer. In Hollywood, some directors make "one for them" (for money) and "one for me" (for love). For me, this was the former. In the magazine, the essay appears under a photo of short preteen boys awkwardly dancing with taller preteen girls.
Conclusion: If you're going to sell out, consider the price.
Startup Ideas
Threeway
Blankets, Chicago, IL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Nymphomaniac Reviews
The reviews of the first version -- two parts, four hours, less explicit, to be followed by a longer, uncut version -- of Lars von Trier's "Nymphomaniac" are rolling out this week. So far, the movie has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
"Still, if von Trier means to challenge the depiction of sex onscreen, the truth of the matter is that people can find far more explicit imagery with a simple Google search. And when it comes to the potency of ideas, his script doesn’t uncover anything that wasn’t previously addressed by Anais Nin, Henry Miller or the Marquis de Sade. In fact, given the film’s overall tendency to describe rather than depict specific memories — the exception being the 'Silent Duck' chapter, in which Jamie Bell disciplines and degrades Joe oncamera — 'Nymphomaniac' might actually have been more effective as a novel."
"There are flashes of hard-core action during the initial two hours -- the odd angle here and there, some insert shots -- but mostly the sex scenes look like pretty standard simulation. Volume two gets down in ways the first half doesn't, although anything resembling real sensuality remains MIA. Among the more vivid and/or extreme moments are Joe (now played by Gainsbourg) stuffing as many long spoons as she can up her vagina in a fancy restaurant, then letting them noisily drop to the floor as she walks out, to the astonishment of the waiter (Udo Kier, onscreen for less than a minute); a vividly shot three-way with two African men she's spied outside her apartment window; and in the film's most intense and protracted interlude, her venture into pain as pleasure at the hands of a professional S&M practitioner, played with withering coldness by Jamie Bell in scenes that are startlingly raw (as is, invariably, Joe's backside) and disturbingly transformative."
"How was it for you? How was it for me? Nymphomaniac doesn't care. It goes about things its own way, in the service of its own pleasure, manhandling the audience from one position to the next, occasionally snickering at its own private jokes and daring us to decipher them. Personally I found this a bruising, gruelling experience and yet the film has stayed with me. It is so laden with highly charged set pieces, so dappled with haunting ideas and bold flights of fancy that it finally achieves a kind of slow-burn transcendence. Nymphomaniac annoys me, repels me, and I think I might love it. It's an abusive relationship; I need to see it again."
"There’s plenty of flesh (much of it belonging to porn doubles), although the film is rarely, if ever, what most people would call erotic or pornographic. It’s neither deeply serious nor totally insincere; hovering somewhere between the two, it creates its own mesmerising power by floating above specifics of time and place, undercutting its main focus with bizarre digressions (fly-fishing, maths, religion), a ragbag of acting styles and archive footage. There’s humour too, not least when the wife (Uma Thurman) of one of Joe’s lovers turns up at Joe’s flat with her three young kids in tow. Enormous penises flash across the screen; tragedy sits next to comedy. It feels like an X-rated farce, a circus of genitalia."
"Because there is so much going on in these two films it is almost impossible to take a broad view of Nymphomaniac. Yes it is provocative, funny, smart, wry and challenging (though never sexy) but it is also a remarkable project brimming with bold and often thoughtful performances. It is Lars von Trier at his best and his most frustrating at the same time (he even pops in a rather self-reverential scene of a small child tottering on a snowy balcony that take audiences back to his Antichrist opening), but is always watchable and intriguing. Longer cuts of the films are due…which should be interesting to say the least."
#teledildonicsfail
How Much I Got Paid: #4
Le Sex Shoppe, Hollywood, CA / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Title: Le Sex Shoppe
Publication: Dead by Charles Saatchi
Date: Not yet available
Word count: 0
Payment: $150
Notes: In July, I got an email from a woman doing research for a forthcoming book by ad kingpin and art collector Charles Saatchi to be called Dead. She had found a photo I took of a sex shop -- through Google Images, perhaps -- and she wanted to include the image in the book. She offered $100. I forwarded the email to a photographer friend of mine and asked, "Should I do this?" He responded, "Sure. See if you can get $150." I emailed the woman, "For $150, we can do this." I added, "If so, send me a contract, and I'll get that back to you. Thanks." This is a strategy I use often in negotiating. I assume the sale and make it easier for the co-negotiator to say yes than to say no. The co-negotiator doesn't necessarily want to pay you the least amount of money. They want to close the sale. They will pay more to not have to deal with you anymore. The amount here is small, but I found it works just as well when negotiating bigger sums. As for the photo, I took it over 10 years ago, and Le Sex Shoppe, which was purportedly beloved by Charles Bukowski, has since been demolished, according to a report.
Conclusion: When you're a freelancer, everything is for sale.