This Is Business
I just got my new business cards. I ordered them from MOO. They're heavy, well-made, and cool. They arrived quickly, and I designed them online in about 15 minutes. Thanks to Len Kendall for the referral.
Femskinning
"We started in Orange County, California, naturally. Robert, a 70 year-old, showed off his new 'femskin.' He had been adding his own hair clippings to make the vagina more realistic. When he looked in the mirror at 'Sherry,' he felt he had taken possession of a more beautiful woman than he could otherwise hope to date. 'It’s very difficult to date when you have this to come home to. Crazy, huh?' Yes."
Nice Bow Tie
The Quantified Writer
Chanel mannequins, Honolulu, HI / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
"I've written for page views," Michele Catalano blogged in May of last year. "I’ve written for hearts and reblogs. And while they are two very different things – the page views were for money, for being published as a music writer and the hearts and reblogs were for personal content – they were really very much the same thing. They were all a form of validation that kept me from enjoying the craft of writing to its fullest."
Previously, she'd been a blogger at Forbes, and she writes of how she checked her stats obsessively while she blogged there -- in part because that's how you're paid at Forbes: by how much traffic you get. Then, after what looks like about five months, according to her archive, she quit. She explains: "I left Forbes for several reasons but one of the main reasons was that it was killing the spirit of my writing, if not my love for the craft."
Of course, as she writes, this modern writerly quest for external validation and/or real payment is not limited to Forbes. Today, if you're writing online, professionally or socially, you're keenly aware of how many views, readers, likes, retweets, hearts, and the like you succeed in getting or fail to generate every time you imprint yourself in the digital space. To reclaim her writing, Catalano ended up moving her blog back to its original domain, "away from the instant validation."
I saw Catalano's post earlier today because my friend Clayton Cubitt retweeted a tweet by Austin Kleon in which he linked to a post he'd written about Catalano's post. And it stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
In a few months, I will have been blogging on Forbes for three years. Generally, I do not keep jobs long. And, in a way, that's what blogging on Forbes is. A job. At least for me. A part-time job, surely, but a job nevertheless. As a contributor, I have a blog on Forbes and am required to fulfill certain requirements every month for which I am paid a certain amount. As Catalano points out, that amount is based on the number of people who read your blog during a given month and how many of those readers return to your blog during that given month. I'm a freelance writer, and this is one of the ways in which I generate income in the gig economy.
That means numbers matter. For someone like me, they have for a long, long time. My first blog was hosted on Salon. It was called The Reverse Cowgirl, and it was often the second most-read blog among the collection of blogs Salon hosted at that time. Back then, in 2002, we talked about "hits," not uniques, and I remember the glee I experienced the first time my blog had 5,000 hits, whatever that meant, in one day. Screw the man! one could believe one was doing at that time. Blogging seemed like something a vigilante did. Not everyone was doing it. Not everyone had bought into it. Now, everything has changed.
Several years after that, I ended up taking a job for a then-Time Warner-owned blog, and part of my job was driving traffic to that Time Warner-owned site. I did so in two ways: by generating content that would bring readers to the site and by sending links to the content on the site to other sites in hopes they might link to the Time Warner-owned blog. I called this "chasing traffic." Readers were like a swarm of wayward ambulances, and I was a rabid dog trying to herd them to our URL. We had aggressive traffic goals to meet every month, and if we were in danger of not meeting them, the GM at the time would get on the phone and let the team know that if those traffic goals weren't met ... No one wanted to be out of a paycheck.
Today, everyone who writes online is a quantified writer. Catalano may have retreated to WordPress and the land of no stats, but she remains on Twitter, where, I would have to imagine that she is aware, she has nearly 900,000 followers. Online, the instant validation or lack thereof cannot be escaped. The quantified self movement has not spared the creative, and who needs quantification more desperately than those who trade in arts that cannot be quantified? The photographer, the painter, the novelist are driven by the maddening reality that no one can tell them definitively if their work is any good. The quantified web has solved all that. 1M uniques = success. 0 Likes = failure. It's all so very clear. Fuck art. This is math.
But the fact of the matter is that this seemingly new system is only an externalized version of the problem that resides within. We all want to be read, we all want to be seen. Why else would be on this stage? To create, one must tolerate the anxiety of the work's reception. To hit publish is to upload a newborn baby for public consumption. You're never sure if your precious, still-wet offspring will be coddled and cooed over, if a cannibal will show up to eat its brains, or, god forbid, it will be left to starve to death in some forgotten dumpster. Without the terror of the unknown (what will they think?), we will be compelled to fall silent. Except for those brave souls willing to write with invisible ink on the wind. And those are few and far between. It's just too hard to create in an empty space. The loneliness is far too staggering.
So quantify me, like me, hit me, click me, view me, pay me. The act of creation is no religion, and there's nothing in this that's worth worshiping. This is an offering from me to you. It's a question, really. "If I give you a piece of myself, will you give me a piece of yourself in return?" Don't leave me hanging. Through this, I can almost let myself believe that we made some kind of connection in the midst of this swirling, incomprehensible, pulsing chaos that's everything around us, here and then gone.
Mr. Condom
The LA Times has a profile of Michael Weinstein, the guy who's been leading the charge to get the adult movie industry to require the wearing of condoms on porn sets.
"Porn mogul Larry Flynt, who also opposed the condom mandate, said Weinstein had 'played the press beautifully' on the issue.
'If the whole industry had to respond to his demands, the whole industry would just shut down. But that's not going to happen,' Flynt said. 'He'll get his 60 minutes of fame, I guess.'
Weinstein maintains that protecting porn workers is the right thing to do. But he also concedes that the campaign is a public-relations windfall: 'We got more publicity for safer sex and condoms than we ever could have gotten any other way.'"
[LA Times]
Porn for Women
FX
"Fact: Dylan McDermott Is the Hottest 52-Year-Old Currently Living."
The first time I was on TV, I did an episode of "Politically Incorrect," and Dylan McDermott was on it. He was wearing a buttery suede jacket, and he was as smooth as margarine. It was years ago, but it appears he hasn't changed much since.
[BuzzFeed]
Fuck the Wolf of Wall Street
Variety reports the word "fuck" is uttered 506 times in "The Wolf of Wall Street," setting a new record in cinematic swearing.
"According to Wikipedia, the word 'fuck' is used 506 times over 'The Wolf of Wall Street’s' 180-minute running time. Previously, the record for a non-documentary was Spike Lee’s 1999 film 'Summer of Sam' with 435 instances."
[Variety]
Say What?
Your Sunday Zen
All the News That's Unfit to Print: 1.4.14
Mannequin or Manson follower? [Twitter]
Just say no to boners. [Scientific American]
That girl with that butt. [NY Post]
This tree is obscene. [Romenesko]
From Pizza Hut to Porn Hut. [Used to Be a Pizza Hut]
She likes broccoli. [Darling House]
Zip it, fairy. [This Isn't Happiness]
Will Pussy Riot win an Oscar? [NYT]
Hey, girl, wash my car. [NIF]
Peekaboo Beyonce. [Tumblr]
That woman with that big butt. [Gawker]
My favorite video of the year. [Vimeo]
POW POW. [Instagram]
"All chance for romance is dead." [Jodi Taylor]
Now that's a dirty martini. [New Yorker]
You can see the whole world in her. [NOWEAR LAND]
Dr. Manny gets ill trying to get off to medical sex show. [Fox News]
Ceci n'est pas un peep show. [Laurenn McCubbin]
A brief history of the nude body stocking. [The Cut]
Nice clams. [Curbed]
They Shoot Porn Stars, The Sequel
Porn stars, Canoga Park, LA / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin / Illustration: Chris Bishop
Reddit picked up "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" again recently, which has been sending some readers here. It's a long-form investigation of how the Great Recession impacted the adult movie industry I wrote in 2009. You can read more about the project here.
This year, I'll be returning to the Valley to write a follow up, revealing how the porn business is faring five years later.
An excerpt from the original piece:
"To date, he has produced and directed over 500 adult movies. But, this isn’t your father’s porn. Equal parts freak show, horror movie, and Russ Meyer-on-crack, his X-rated visions are deranged, demented, mind-boggling expeditions into the dark, unexplored continent of human sexual perversity. Fascinating, horrifying, and amusing—oftentimes all of those things at the same time—Powers’ celluloid world is one populated by midgets, bald chicks, and crazed men outfitted with monster-sized papier-mâché phalluses which spew torrents of goo onto the naked bodies of supine women, movies in which everyone has sex all of the time, and in which, most of the time, no one appears to win."
Trouble in China
Massage parlor, Shanghai, China / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
The New York Times has an interesting story on prostitution in China: "For Prostitutes Jailed in China, Forced Labor with No Recourse."
"The last time she was hauled into the local station house, Ms. Li was sent without trial or legal representation to a detention center in neighboring Hebei Province, where she spent six months making ornamental paper flowers and reciting the regulations that criminalize prostitution. Her incarceration at the Handan Custody and Education Center ended with a final indignity: She had to reimburse the jail for her stay, about $60 a month."
[NYT]
Rump Shaker
Death Becomes Her
The Men of Victoria's Secret
Photo credit: Madoff Productions
Fashion Copious asks an interesting question: Do only men work on Victoria's Secret video productions? Judging by this photo, that would appear to be the case.
That Girl
Porn star Jesse Jane, Las Vegas, NV / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
I Get Email
"I am not familiar with your work, however, I enjoyed reading this article since it displays a rigorous background in the discipline of Journalism. There is a nice breadth of interviews, combined with a skill at clean rhetoric for the intended audience. Interestingly, there was a slight undercurrent of zeal for sexual, perhaps dark topics. It was akin to coming across a trade publication such as 'Current Advances in Mortuary Science,' written by Ed Gein.
In any case, a beautifully rendered piece of Journalism.
Regards,
[redacted]"
