Drink Me
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Happy Holidays
From Susan Elizabeth Shepard's "For Black Sheep on Christmas Eve":
"My uncle handed me their present, and I opened it to find a pair of purple-gold-green tasseled, sequined pasties. Nobody else found it funny but the three of us laughed like crazy. It was ballsy of them to make a joke of the family shame that was my topless dancing career and made me feel understood and not utterly alone that morning. Thank god, someone can have a sense of humor, is what it felt like. It was one of the best Christmas presents I’ve ever gotten, and I hang pasties on my tree now because that’s part of what makes it Christmas for me."
In the Mirror
The Porn Convention
Porn convention, Rosemont, IL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
"In the bathroom, it smells like porn stars and strippers: peaches and apricots, sticky body glitter and platform heels with slits for tips, humping unicorns and money shot stardust."
[Forbes]
Gary Player @ 77
Upside Down
I Get Rejections
"Hi Susannah!
I think it's a little too graphic for us to run, but thanks for letting us have a look! We're always open to pitches."
Yes
"O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
[Ulysses]
Sexy & Disgusting
Thug Life
She's Not Doing Porn
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.