Flight

A shot out the window over California on a recent flight. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

I'm Reading at the North Branch Berkeley Public Library This Week

On Wednesday, March 27, 2024, I’m reading from and discussing my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at Berkeley Public Library’s North Branch at 6:30 pm. You can read more about what people are saying about Data Baby here. More event information is here. Hope to see you!

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Humphrey Bogart

A Franklin Village parking lot mural of Humphrey Bogart. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photos.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Listen to an Interview with Me About Data Baby on NPR's The Pulse

I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, for a recent episode of WHYY’s The Pulse, which is part of the NPR Network. The episode is “Discovering Your True Identity,” and the interview I did with host Maiken Scott starts at the 34 minute mark. (Read more about Data Baby here.)

From the episode’s description:

“Identity's a complicated thing — a mixture of nurture and nature, ethnicity, gender, culture, conscious decisions, coincidences, and more. In many ways, though, who we think we are boils down to the stories we tell ourselves; stories based on our origins, our families, and how we came to be. But what happens when those stories change? When we discover that the narrative of our lives is completely different from what we've always believed?”

Listen to the episode here.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Catch Me at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

On Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 p.m., I’ll be on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel is “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” and tickets are required. My fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannan, and M.G. Lord, and the moderator is Amy Alkon. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; you can read more about my book here.

The panel description:

“It seems almost impossible that, in a year where a movie about an iconic doll broke nearly every record for success and female vocalists almost single-handedly boosted the economy with concert tours, there is still so much mystery, debate, contention, and law-making about women’s bodies. These writers share thought-provoking research and personal experience on everything from the role of female bodies in human evolution, to the gaps in medical knowledge about female reproductive systems and a 30+ year lab experiment about human personalities, and finally how all of this plays into the dolls we make to represent women. Though their stories differ, these writers are all experts in one extremely difficult field: being a woman.”

See you there!

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Life in LA

Rabbits, Malibu Canyon, and a dress made of books. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Blue Curtain

A blue curtain at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photos.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Fuck You, Pay Me #7: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Journalism Edition)

This is part 7 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of journalism. In this list, I’ve excluded my books—my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?; and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel.

1. “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?” This is my 2009 long-form investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie industry. Originally it was written for Slate’s Double X, when they were trying to turn Double X into a full-blown magazine that I think was described as something like the original Esquire but written by women. The editor wanted me to change my story in ways that I didn’t, I shopped it around and was unable to place it anywhere else because print magazines were nervous about running adult-themed content (some of it quite graphic) next to advertising that paid their bills, and I ended up self-publishing it (initially it lived on its own website, but I later moved it to my website). See also: “The Numbers on Self-Publishing Long-form Journalism.” I’m so glad I went this route instead of letting some editor trash it.

   Standout quote: “As for the ‘sperm omelet,’ as everyone referred to it in awestruck tones, that was Jim’s idea, she told me.”

   Year published and publisher: 2009, self-published

2. “How to Romance the Taller Woman.” I’m not saying this was my finest hour as a journalist, but this was the first story of mine that appeared in a glossy magazine. This story about how to date tall chicks (I’m six-foot-one) appeared in the December 1997 issue of Details. My editor was Duane Swierczynski, who is now a famous crime writer. The story was illustrated with the poster for the 1958 film The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, which is maybe my all-time favorite movie poster. This story doesn’t exist online, but I bought the print version of the issue on eBay to replace the one that I lost somewhere along the way.

   Standout quote: “Just because we’re tall doesn’t mean our genitals are as big as the Holland Tunnel.”

   Year published and publisher: 1997, Details

3. “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” Speaking of Slate, last November this piece I wrote in conjunction with the release of my memoir appeared on the website. I wrote this story on spec, which is something I hate to do because I think it’s beneath me at this point in my career, but doing so gave me the opportunity to write my story how I wanted to write it. The editor was excellent. She had a light touch and came up with the title, which I think is brilliant and hilarious. This piece didn’t take me long to write; four days, I think. The only thing I don’t love is the image used with it, which is a stock image, that kid is maybe a boy, and I think those aren’t M&M’s but Skittles.

   Standout quote: “Even when I was in a dangerous place, I could feel a connection between the study and me, like a gossamer thread spun from inside of it and wrapped around me.”

   Year published and publisher: 2023, Slate

4. “Extreme Porn Crackdown.” Over two decades ago, I wrote this story for Salon about a series of LAPD busts in Porn Valley. I think this was the first time I wrote a big piece tackling an issue going on in the adult movie business. At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on the east side of Los Angeles. For some reason, various porn companies kept sending me VHS tapes (how one watched porn in those days), and my place was overflowing with them. Also I had a silicone vagina molded off a real porn star’s vagina that I kept in a hallway cupboard. As part of my research, I interviewed Seymore Butts at his home, and it just so happened that I had been on the set of an “American Bukkake” movie that was of interest to the LAPD. I remember seeing the story after the editor went through it and thinking what the fuck did he do, as he had changed it quite a bit, and then realizing he had made it quite a bit better.

   Standout quote: “These days, it seems like the Los Angeles Police Department has got a thing for porn.”

   Year published and publisher: 2001, Salon

5. “To the Max.” I find a lot of people who work in the porn industry pretty interesting, even people who do things other people would think are indefensible, but Max Hardcore was a pornographer I did not like. I use past tense here because he died last year. Back in 2008, I wrote a post about him on a blog I had at the time. That post, which I reposted here because people kept asking me about it, was entitled “To the Max,” and I wrote it a few days after Hardcore was sentenced to 46 months in prison after being found guilty of various obscenity charges brought by the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. In the wake of the sentencing, the liberal and libertarian and independent-minded people of the internet were bellyaching about Hardcore’s sentence, wailing about their First Amendment rights being threatened. Glenn Greenwald was one of the loudest complainers, so I wrote him an email asking him if he had bothered to watch any of the Hardcore-created porn he was so busy defending (spoiler: he hadn’t), and then I wrote about why if you’re going to defend various types of extreme porn you might want to bother watching it first. I wish I could recall why years prior to this Hardcore had gotten pissed at me at some party in downtown Los Angeles or what he said to trash me to some reporter who visited him in prison, but I can’t. Anyway, my passion made the piece sing.

   Standout quote: “Because if you're going to talk about how far we've come when it comes to porn, if you're going to posit Paul ‘Max Hardcore’ Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you're going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like.”

   Year published and publisher: 2008, my blog

6. “How the Biggest Strip Club in American Grinds.” For some time now I’ve been covering the business of sex on the Forbes website. In 2015, I was living in Southwest Florida and drove to the other side of the state to go to Tootsie’s Cabaret, which bills itself as the biggest strip club in America. Holy shit! I have been to a lot of strip clubs in my life, but I had never and have not since seen a place like this. I guess in Miami they just strip different. It’s 74,000 square feet! It has a 30-foot stripper pole! In a 24-hour period it might entertain 1,500 customers! On a weekend night, there may be 150 dancers working there! Anyway, it was fucking nuts, and I really enjoyed it, and I would like to go back someday.

   Standout quote: “‘I like dancing a lot,’ she says. ‘I'm not shy. I have a lot of spunk.’”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, Forbes.com

7. “Blood Sacrifice.” Around the same time, I wrote a story for the now defunct website The Billfold about how I flew from where I was living, Naples, Florida, to Chicago, Illinois, to have a $350 dinner. My friend had invited me, and the restaurant was Grant Achatz’s Next, and what was I going to do, say no? (I was not.) The tale involves the consumption of canard à la presse and getting over breast cancer and fantasies about meeting your heroes. This took place during a period in my life that feels so far away now. I was married, and now I am divorced. I was living in Florida, and now I live in California. I was fresh out of having survived breast cancer, and now I am a decade-plus survivor. Sometimes it’s good to write about things that are complicated because you can see how far you’ve come later.

   Standout quote: “He would smile knowingly at me, and I would smile knowingly at him, and then he would disappear into the kitchen, and he would emerge with a plate of something that looked like a tumor splattered across porcelain, and I would eat it, and whatever it was made of (rhubarb? venison? something else entirely?), it would be delicious, and I would have eaten the tumor that had tried to eat me, metaphorically, of course, and the cycle of life would close upon itself, completing itself, like Ouroboros with his tail in his mouth rolling down a street like a wheel.”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, The Billfold

8. “Porn’s Uncanny Valley.” How has tech transformed porn? I’m sure I seemed like the perfect writer to write this story which is why an editor at The Atlantic reached out to me to write it. I can’t recall what was asked of me, but it was something about like the landscape of (Virtual?) Porn Valley? Anyway, I ended up experiencing virtual reality porn for the first time, and, man, was that weird. I don’t mention it in the story, but when I was at the VR porn guy’s office, and I was watching the VR porn with the VR headset, I had this weird, visceral urge to punch the VR porn performer in the virtual world in the face. After I took off the headset, I related this to the VR porn guy, and he said something to the effect of, yeah, a lot of people have that experience. I have no fucking idea why, but there you go.

   Standout quote: “‘It’s a phantom-limb penis syndrome,’ said a tall, British man who goes by the name Adam Sutra.”

   Year published and publisher: 2017, The Atlantic

9. “Everyone Has a Pervert Hidden Inside of Them.” A few years ago, I started going to estate sales. My maternal grandmother was a very successful antiques dealer, so maybe that is part of why I do this. Pretty quickly I noticed that when you’re pawing through the things the dead have left behind, you get a very intimate view of them. Sometimes you get to see what they kept hidden from the rest of the world. Occasionally, those secrets are sexual in nature. In this edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, I wrote about what that’s like and some of the things I’ve found, among them: small handmade penis sculptures, binders of autographed porn star photos, forgotten sex toys. It’s like nostalgia, but X-rated.

   Standout quote: “A woman had spent her days painting these penises, sculpting these phalluses, drawing these nudes.”

   Year published and publisher: 2022, The Reverse Cowgirl

10. “The Graduate of Porn Star High.” This was such a fascinating story to write, back in 2001. An editor at Arena magazine in the UK had heard about this Staten Island high schooler who had gotten a famous porn star to go to his prom with him (thanks to Howard Stern), and then the high schooler and the porn star had started dating, and the editor wanted me to write a profile of them and their relationship. For some reason, I wrote this piece in a more experimental way, using the second person and also interweaving block quotes and the text of the story itself. The editor was so enthusiastic about what I had written; it was such a delightful experience. I believe I sold the story to other markets that approached me, as well, in Europe, I think, and maybe Australia or Asia or something.

    Standout quote: “It was like he was in the porn star twilight zone.”

    Year published and publisher: 2001, Arena

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Bukkake Boy

A performer on the set of a bukkake shoot, early 2000s. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Data Baby in Fuchsia

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hannah (@bookswithbrady)

Love this Instagram post from @bookswithbrady featuring my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Buy my book here, order a signed copy here, and read what people are saying about it here.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Origin Story of a Sex Writer

This week in my newsletter I share an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. This episode takes place early on in the book. I believe it was 1997 or thereabouts. At the time I was living in the Bay Area, where I grew up. On this particular night, I ventured out to the strip clubs in North Beach in San Francisco. It would prove to be a fateful series of events.

I thought it would be interesting to write about the strip clubs in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. I was curious about these enigmatic clubs on Broadway that I had seen but never entered. As a kid in the back seat of my parents’ Dart, I had been driven through San Francisco and spotted The Condor (which, in 1964, became one of the country’s first topless bars). Out front, a towering sign featured a supersized blonde, impossibly busty. Her name, I would find out later, was Carol Doda. On the sign, she wore a black bikini with blinking red lights for nipples.

Doda was the opposite of my mother and her friends, who considered makeup, heavily styled hair, and revealing clothes tools the patriarchy used to subjugate and objectify women. But Doda wasn’t anyone’s tool; she was a legend. She was America’s first topless dancer of note, and her surgically enhanced breasts were billed as “the new Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” When I was in graduate school, I had seen an episode of HBO’s Real Sex about strippers, and I was struck by the revelation that strip clubs were places where intimacy was for sale. Sure, it was transient, transactional, and most often conducted between a guy with a handful of dollar bills and a dancer in a G-string and not much else who twirled seductively around a pole on a stage, but there was something real about it. The strippers reminded me of the girls I had hung out with in high school, whom everyone else had deemed slutty.

“Oh my god, Susannah, make up your mind!” Anne laughed as we stood at the corner on a Saturday night. Broadway was teeming with drunk guys, sailors on leave, and couples on the prowl for something more interesting than what they had already. I scanned the glowing signs. Roaring 20’s. Big Al’s. The Hungry I.

“This one!” We ducked inside. As we moved down the black hallway toward a red velvet curtain, I worried what someone else in the club might think. I, a woman, was in a strip club. As I pulled back the curtain, it dawned on me that wasn’t going to be an issue. There was one thing the men scattered at the small, dimly lit tables around the room were paying attention to, and it wasn’t me. It was the half-naked girl on the stage.

Nonchalantly, we took a seat at a table near the back. We ordered a couple of overpriced drinks. I took a sip: It was straight orange juice. The cocktails were alcohol-free, thanks to a California law that prohibited the sale of alcohol in fully nude strip clubs. It didn’t matter; my head was buzzing from the drinks we’d had at the bar around the corner.

In one smooth movement, the statuesque brunette dancer teetering on the highest heels I had ever seen peeled off her dental-floss-thin neon-green thong. She tossed the thong to one side, grabbed the pole, climbed up it. High above the crowd, she wrapped her thighs around the pole and bent over backward, throwing her arms open like an inverted angel.

The academic world in which I had grown up was right across the Bay, but it may as well have been a million miles from where I was. I studied a solitary businessman sitting at the next table. His tie was untied. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair. His eyes were glassy. He had been hypnotized. In this world, women had all the power, and men were at their mercy. I didn’t want to be a stripper; I was too shy, too insecure, too inhibited to take off my clothes in front of strangers. But I wanted what she had: the stage, the audience in awe, the men gawking at her. As a kid, I had longed for attention. This was an orgy of attention. As a pubescent teen, I was left to figure out my sexuality for myself because my mother was so unhappy. Here, sex was on parade, for sale, everywhere I looked. In the Block Project, I was the object, the one on view, the child studied by researchers from across tables in Tolman Hall’s austere experiment rooms. Now I was the voyeur, the looker, the scopophiliac. It was intoxicating.

As we sped back to the East Bay in the early-morning hours, I watched the city get smaller in the side-view mirror. My father was dead, but for a few hours I had forgotten about that. I could write about this. I could be a gonzo journalist, like one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, and immerse myself in it. Sex would be my beat.

Buy Data Baby here. Read more about my book here. Listen to an interview with me here.

(This post originally appeared in my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl: “What Carol Doda Taught Me.”)

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Asian Mannequin

An Asian mannequin on Hollywood Boulevard. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Me and Brad Pitt

My breakfast, including a Brad Pitt celebralatte. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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."

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Unicorn Love

This afternoon, I decided to go to an adult toy store. Awhile back, I had read about a line of sex toys that were, well, out of this world. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Creature Cocks, but they’re billed as “The Original Fantasy, Sci-Fi Monster Dildos.” If you’ve ever wanted to get intimate with a Radioactive Reptile Thick Scaly Silicone Dildo, a Gargoyle Rock Hard Silicone Dildo, an Orion Invader Veiny Space Alien Silicone Dildo, a Monstropus Tentacled Monster Silicone Dildo, or a Hydra Sea Monster Silicone Dildo, this product line is for you. In fact, I had seen Creature Cocks in the silicone flesh before. A few months ago, I had gone to an adult store in Sherman Oaks, and I had stared at a display of Creature Cocks, but I hadn’t bought one. I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. I had this idea I would keep it on my desk as a sort of talisman, but ultimately, I couldn’t decide on which one and left.

Recently, I read on AVN—which one could argue is the Variety of the adult business—that XR Brands, the company that produces Creature Cocks, was releasing even more Creature Cocks in new enhanced designs. These Creature Cocks were even more out there, among them a Sea Stallion Vibrating Silicone Dildo with Remote and, the one that really caught my eye, a Centaur Explosion Squirting Silicone Dildo. As a long-time watcher of “Shark Tank,” I had to wonder what need was being met. Was there really a demand for not just centaur dildos, but centaur squirting dildos? The answer was clear: Yes. In any case, I was curious to check out the new models.

When I arrived at the adult store, I was the only customer there. I said hello to the guy working behind the counter and found the Creature Cocks display between two doors marked Employees Only and under a sign that read DO NOT OPEN PRODUCT. (I wasn’t going to, but duly noted.) I scanned the boxes, considering the Swamp Monster Green Scaly Silicone Dildo (disturbingly, it had eyes), the Space Cock Glow-in-the-Dark Silicone Alien Dildo (were those blue … testicles?), and a Makara Glow-in-the-Dark Silicone Snake Dildo (I shuddered at its 18-inch length). A woman walked into the store and inquired about a remote-controlled sex toy. The guy behind the counter explained the cheapest one they had was $130. This was more than she expected to spend, she explained. I handled a large black box that contained a Mystique Silicone Unicorn Dildo. The toy’s rainbow color was aesthetically appealing, and it seemed like it would be hard to go wrong with anything unicorn.

At the register, I inquired about the new Creature Cocks products, but he explained they weren’t in stock at the store yet. “Do a lot of people buy Creature Cocks?” I asked, passing the unicorn dildo to him across the counter. “Yeah, people get them all the time, actually,” he told me. So, I wasn’t the only one. After I paid, I headed for the door. “Have a great night!” he called after me cheerily.

When I got home, I pulled the box out of the bag. YOU’LL BE ENTRANCED AS THE RAREST OF CREATURES, THE UNICORN, PENETRATES YOUR PLEASURE GARDEN! the front of the box promised. I opened the top and withdrew the dildo; it was nestled in a plastic container. I touched the dildo’s bottom tentatively (according to the box, this was the STRONG SUCTION BASE); it felt like rubbery flesh. I removed the dildo from the plastic shell; the toy was heavier than I had expected. I stood the dildo on my desk. It was thick and tapered, tan and blue and purple, covered in spiraling ripples. For some reason, I had expected it would do something, but this wasn’t a vibrator. Instead, it sat there, listing slightly, next to my keyboard.

RIDE THIS UNTAMABLE BEAST ALL THE WAY TO FANTASTICAL PLEASURE, the box demanded. I attempted to pick up the dildo, but it had suctioned itself to my desk. With a tug, it came loose. I waved the dildo around. It wagged pleasantly. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I was sure of one thing.

I had a unicorn dildo.

This post originally appeared on my newsletter: The Reverse Cowgirl.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email