2017
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How to Fix Your Life
My latest newsletter is “How to Fix Your Life.” An excerpt:
As I expected, men were more likely to respond to my email than women, and men were more likely to respond with an actionable response, while women were more likely to respond with an emotional response. If only emotions paid the bills! Ha-ha. I’d be a billionaire, bitches.
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America Must Change
An amazing cover from TIME. Art by Charly Palmer. Story behind the cover here.
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Yellow
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The Gender Role Test
I took this online gender role test today, after seeing it on a friend’s Facebook page. I’m sure it’s very unscientific, but, that said, it was no surprise to me that I scored very high on the masculine traits and very low on the feminine traits. I suppose the most problematic aspect of the test is what traits it identifies as masculine and what traits it identifies as feminine. Competitive? You’re masculine. Empathetic? You’re feminine. Surely, who we are is more complicated than that.
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In-N-Out
A shot from my Instagram feed: the In-N-Out in Westwood. From LA Observed:
“One of Steve's proudest projects in the Village and his personal favorite was his playful design for the IN-N-OUT Burger on Gayley Avenue, the only drive-through restaurant in the Village and a tribute to Southern California's car culture, which won a National AIA Honor Award in 2002. This was a conversion of a former Kentucky Fried Chicken drive-through and a tired and dreary Sizzler steakhouse. Designed with IN-N-OUT's signature palm trees popping through a round opening in the roof, this was Steve's three-dimensional homage to the classic IN-N-OUT boomerang logo, and embraced the company's vivid ketchup red and mustard yellow colors. Steve once described this as "building as signage.” This contemporary version of the "programmatic architecture" made popular in Southern California in the 1930s, 40s and 50s remains a modern and enduring Village landmark (and achieved status as the third best performing unit in the entire IN-N-OUT chain).”
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The Story the Body Tells
If you’re at all confused about where you should stand regarding Confederate monuments, read Caroline Randall Williams’ “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.” It’s a searing, blistering indictment of America’s penchant for myth-making. She writes:
“You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.”
Read it here.
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8 Years Ago
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Not long ago, Facebook started sending me reminders of “memories,” and as of late they’ve been featuring posts from eight years ago, when I’d just finished chemotherapy for early-stage breast cancer. After I went through treatment, I’d sometimes remind myself on bad days that, well, hey, at least it ain’t chemo! (Chemo is the worst.) In any case, this was one of those not-so-good days, and I’m glad to have been cancer-free every since.
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Bob's
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Ron Jeremy Charged with Rape
Today on my Forbes blog I wrote about Ron Jeremy, who’s been charged with forcible rape and sexual assault. You can read the details here. Since Jeremy is a fixture in the porn industry, I had various interactions with him over the years. When I was working for Playboy TV, I went to cover an “extreme porn vacation” In Mexico, where Jeremy was one of the performers. I seem to recall he’d had his chest hair waxed into the shape of a heart. I was also present when he performed in “The World Biggest Gangbang III.” At a certain point, he was brought in to have sex with the film’s star, Houston, and he was able to pop on command, per the director’s instruction, as the crowd surrounding him counted him down to ejaculation. In 2009, I pulled into the Roosevelt Hotel, where I was about to check in for a week to write about how the porn industry had been impacted by the recession, and Jeremy was walking in the back of the hotel. I’ve talked to him at various times. Mostly, he seemed like a narcissist and an egomaniac. That doesn’t make him a rapist, of course. Rumors have long been around that he’d sexually assaulted women. In all likelihood, some of those early allegations were dismissed or ignored because the victim was a sex worker or a porn star.
To exactly no one’s surprise among those who know him, he denied the allegations today on Twitter.
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All the News That's Fit to Newsletter
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In my latest newsletter, I talk about writing blocks, the Warren Ellis controversy, and racism in the porn industry.
An excerpt:
There’s been a lot of conversation lately about racism in the porn industry. It is true: There are ways in which the porn industry engages in systemically racist practices. That is not a good thing at all, and I hope that the porn industry works to rectify that wrong. At the same time, I’ve spent over 20 years writing about the porn industry, and the one forever truth in porn was told to me years ago by a producer: If there wasn’t a demand for it, it wouldn’t be made.
Read the rest here, and subscribe here.
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5 Years Ago
Five years ago, I attended a storytelling conference at Yale University; visited the “China: Through the Looking Glass” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and stayed at The Algonquin Hotel, where I met Matlida, the cat who worked the front desk. I miss those adventures. Hopefully there’ll be more someday soon.
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Working from Home
Image via NYTM
As someone whose worked remotely for most of the last two decades, I was fascinated by this New York Times Magazine article on the future of remote work: “What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?”
Here’s an excerpt:
“There may also be innovations that let us use video but avoid the fatigue of decoding one another’s faces. One example is Loom.ai, a new chat app that lets you use a regular videoconferencing app — Zoom, Microsoft Teams — except you appear as an avatar. Stylistically, the avatars have the approachable, cartoony style of Apple’s ‘memoji,’ except here they have a torso and arms. Users can customize their onscreen cartoon to resemble themselves if they want.”
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The Wannabe Woodsmen
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Two or three times a week, I get an email from someone somewhere in the world who wants to be a male porn star. I don’t respond. My advice? Pick another profession. The woodsman’s job isn’t an easy one. He must get it up and get it off on command while a semicircle of bored male crew members and the camera watch him. God forbid he should have “wood problems,” as it’s known in the business—he might never work again. On top of the pressure, the pay isn’t that great. In this line of work, his female costar is likely making more than he is.
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Green
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The New Blogging
My theory: Newsletters are the new blogs. In this week’s newsletter, I talk about using Substack, the platform I use to send out my newsletter. Fun fact: You can make money writing a newsletter. Read my newsletter here. Subscribe here.
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Substackin'
Substack is the platform I use for my newsletter, and I wrote a short Twitter thread about it today. In short, Substack is a novel platform for writers in that it doesn’t cockblock writers from their readers but serves writers by empowering them to directly engage with, monetize, and transfer their audience. Good stuff.
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100
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As of today, my newsletter reaches 100 email in-boxes every week. Originally, my newsletter was called “The Valley,” but then I realized someone else on Substack already had that name, so I changed it to “Valleywood.” That’s a compound word that combines The Valley, where I live (the San Fernando Valley, that is), and Hollywood, where everything happens. So far, I’ve written about posing naked, making money, and how to flourish when the world is falling apart. In any case, you can subscribe here. You’ll get one newsletter from me a week, every Friday.
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Growth
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The Hustler Diaries Part 8: How to Get 100,000 Unique Monthly Visitors
One of my goals for May was to reach 100,000 unique visitors a month on my Forbes blog. In fact, I surpassed that. My total unique monthly visitors for May was 114,867. Here’s how I got there.
Catch a ride on a beast
The Forbes website is a digital traffic juggernaut. According to Forbes, the entire site’s monthly visitors for April 2020 was 115 million. That is what is referred to in the digital traffic business as an absolute fuckton of traffic. I actually didn’t realize the traffic was that high. Last time I checked, however long ago, the site’s traffic was something like 80 million monthly visitors. In any case, think of your blog’s platform as you, a person, trying to get across the desert to a fresh water lake with water fountains and a water park. What’s the fastest way to get there? By foot? Or by catching a ride on a chimera that moves as fast as a cheetah, has the size of a woolly mammoth, and is as comfortable as a flight on Singapore Airlines? I am climbing on the chimera, thanks.
Grow your long tail traffic
I have a lot of long tail traffic on my Forbes blog. For me, that means stuff I wrote a long time ago still gets a lot of traffic. I’ve written some very popular posts over the years, ranging from the hardships of male porn stars to how to sell yourself. I still get emails about those posts. It’s all well and good if you want to vomit out seven posts a day on whatever is ranking high on Google, but most of that crap isn’t going to get you much long trail traffic. While trends may change, people generally remain the same. They want to be not bored, they want to find out how to better themselves, and they want to see shit they haven’t seen that makes them feel some kind of way they want to feel. Whatever Jake Paul did recently probably doesn’t fall into that category a few years from now. How to sell yourself does.
Write interesting stuff that’s on brand
Currently, my beat on my Forbes blog is the business of sex. I’ve been writing about sex and the porn industry for over 20 years, so I have a lot of ideas and a lot of connections. But this is Forbes, so it’s not like I’m going to be doling out blowjob advice. In my mind, my content on my Forbes blog is like a Venn diagram. If, very broadly put, Forbes is about business (it’s also about other things, like the economy, work, women, entrepreneurship, and money), that’s one circle. If, very broadly put, my brand is about sex, that’s another circle. The content that appears on my Forbes blog is the intersection of those two, the place where business and sex overlap. That’s my brand. So when I wrote about Lena the Plug, who is an X-rated social media influencer making seven figures a year, that’s about her business. Or when I wrote about how the coronavirus is impacting strippers, that’s about how the pandemic is impacting their bottom line. In this way, I straddle two worlds: The world of sex, in which things are always interesting and engaging, and the world of business, which tends to be covered by boring people in boring ways. Imagine making something boring sexy! It works for me.
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