Pam's Coffy
A movie poster on the wall at the very cool Pam’s Coffy. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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A movie poster on the wall at the very cool Pam’s Coffy. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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I’m super happy that The Morbidly Curious Book Club has chosen my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment—you can read more about my book here—as the April pick! The Morbidly Curious Book Club is very cool, and I’m honored that Data Baby is in the company of their previous 2024 selections, which include Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom, Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton, and Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy. You can join TMCBC here, check out the rest of their 2024 selections and follow TMCBC on Instagram here, follow TMCBC on TikTok here, and find various other relevant links for TMCBC here, including a link to the podcast, for which I’ll be doing an interview later this month. Thank you, TMCBC!
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On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, at 1 pm, I’ll be doing a brown bag book talk in conversation with Cecilia Lei at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. (You can read more about my book here.) I’m really looking forward to this event for several reasons. I grew up in Berkeley, my father was a professor at Cal, I graduated from Cal, my memoir is about my 30-year participation in a research study conducted at U.C. Berkeley, and as part of my research for my book I was at Cal for a year as an academic fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program. Event info here.
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This is part 9 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
You wrote a book! Congratulations! That was the easy part! Ha-ha, just kidding. Oh, wait, no, I’m not. If you live under a rock, you may not have heard that these days publishing houses are very, very busy and can only do so much when it comes to promoting the book you wrote. That’s where you come in! If you want anyone to read your book, you better figure out how to promote it. Not good at promoting stuff? Too bad. Don’t like to promote your work? Tough shit. Would rather hire an independent publicist to promote your book for you? Good luck finding a good one for less than five figures to push your book properly and well to all the appropriate media outlets with no return on investment guaranteed. Luck for me, I was a book publicist a long time ago, so that helped when my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, came out last fall. (Read more about my book here.) Here are a few ways that your book can get visibility in a crowded marketplace and some strategies and non-strategies that worked for me. Will these avenues and strategies and non-strategies work for you and your book? Who the fuck knows!
The Publisher Did It My memoir was published by one of the big publishers. This has its upsides and downsides, some of which I’ve written about in previous editions of Fuck You, Pay Me. I was paired with a publicist at my imprint. One of the single most important things your publisher should do for you is get galleys of your book to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. These trade reviews come out before other reviews and probably before your book comes out. They’re important because everyone in the book business reads them and also because they’re the first thing you can use in your own book promotions. My book got a starred Publishers Weekly review and a Kirkus Reviews review, and I used quotes from those reviews to promote my book on my website and across my social media platforms. If you find sharing positive reviews of your book challenging, pretend You the Author is a consulting client you’re working with and you’re promoting their book for them.
Publishers Weekly: “Unpicking thorny questions about determinism and the ethics of human experimentation, Breslin attacks her subject with verve and wit, resisting woe-is-me solipsism without defanging her critiques of the study that rocked her life. It’s gripping stuff.”
Kirkus Reviews: “An intelligently provocative memoir and investigation.”
Networking Did It Because I have been a writer a long time, I know a lot of writers. That came in handy when my book came out, and my publisher sent out review copies of my book to people I know who are journalists. In one instance, that led to a two-page spread in The New York Post. This feature came out about a month after my book did and generated a sales spike. It also involved a photo shoot, which was fun to do. If you don’t have any writer friends, you should think about making some. They will be of use when your book is published. If you don’t have any writer friends or the writers you attempt to befriend spurn your efforts, you can send fan letters to writers about their work and see if they’re interested in checking out your book because it aligns with their professional interests. Please bear in mind that writers are busy, so if they don’t write about your book, it’s nothing personal.
The New York Post: “Breslin had long been aware she was a ‘human lab rat,’ in her words, but it wasn’t until adulthood that she started to wonder what it was all about.”
The Agent Did It That same month, my memoir was selected to be the December pick for actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club. This opportunity came through my agent at CAA, who is amazing. Belletrist is a celebrity book club, they promote your book throughout the month, and they have you do various things on their platform, like create a video of your personal library and write about your favorite literary things for their newsletter and also do an Instagram Live interview. It was such a cool experience. I got the chance to connect with readers who had spent a lot of their developing years online and since my book is about, among other things, not having a private life, it was very relatable for them. By this point in the promoting one’s own book process, I was getting a bit more in the flow of things, and I had reached a certain point of resetting the bar, which is to say not everything you do to promote your book may be up to your perfectionist standards, but at least you are out there doing it, dammit.
Belletrist: Here’s the interview with me and Emma and Belletrist co-founder Karah.
A Book in Motion Did It According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: “A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.” One thing you may discover while promoting your book is that while promoting it may or may not get easier over time, the book may develop a motion of its own. The Belletrist stuff happened in December, and in early January my memoir got a great review in The Globe and Mail, which is basically The New York Times of Canada. A couple weeks later, I got an interview request from CBC Radio’s “The Current,” which is, like, let’s say, the NPR of Canada. The interview I did with “The Current”’s host Matt Galloway was fantastic, and they had me record it at the NPR West studio so the audio quality was excellent. When this interview aired, it led to a sales bump, which was nice. I definitely felt like this was Newton’s first law at work, with the book club leading to the review leading to the interview. If I told you that you can feel when something is generating its own momentum, would you believe me? I ain’t lyin’.
The Globe and Mail: “If, as Socrates contended, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ then Breslin is living hers to the fullest. Lucky for us, she’s written a thought-provoking, ridiculously propulsive book about it.”
The Current with Matt Galloway: Here’s the interview with me and Matt.
Serendipity Did It The amount of stuff I’m leaving out of this process is sort of ridiculous because I spent a huge amount of time pitching my book to many media outlets which led to various other things, but I’m just trying to highlight a few of them here. One thing I did myself was pitch my book to The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is in the city where I live and the biggest book festival in the country. By happenstance, someone at the festival shared my book with a woman who was to be moderating a festival panel that would be a fit for my book. That woman and I were on a TV show together years ago, so thanks to serendipity I’ll be on that panel at the Festival of Books later this month. I’m really excited about that. All of which is to say, pitch, pitch, pitch away, because you just never know.
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: “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.”
The other thing I would like to add is that—well, a few other things. I wrote my own press release for my book, and I could probably write a whole other post about that. Also, there was a lot of struggle over not having full control over this promotions process that involved the publisher that was very challenging that maybe I’ll talk more about at a later date. Additionally, I would highly recommend that you create a page on your website—if you don’t have a website for yourself, I don’t know what to tell you other than get one—that’s about your book or books and all the reviews and promotions and speaking engagements and such. I created mine here. If you let things sit here and there on the web, no one is going to see that. If you put it on one page and update it regularly, more will come from that. For example, my memoir was published five months ago, and I have more speaking engagements and interviews this month than any other previous month. Keep flogging it or nurturing it or pushing it, and it will start to spin forward of its own volition.
In closing, I guess I didn’t really directly tackle the how to do all this without going crazy part, but I should talk about that in a future post. All I know is that for me it’s all about control, and if you don’t believe you have control, you are controlling one thing: your own wrongheaded delusions about control.
If you liked this post, buy my book. If you liked my book, write a review of it on Amazon or Goodreads or the social media platform of your choice. If you’re interested in interviewing me or having me speak at your next event or querying me about promoting your book or other creative project, contact me.
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Clouds over a black mirrored building in Encino. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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For the month of April, I’m undertaking a new project: 30 Days of Smut. Every day this month I’ll be writing and posting an approximately 200-word flash fiction that is in some way related to sex. If you know my work, you know this isn’t porn, or, let’s face it, smut, and it certainly isn’t (*gags*) erotica, but, well, IYKYK. In any case, I partly got inspired to do this because I had been reviewing some of the work I’ve written over the years on my blog as part of my Fuck You, Pay Me series on writing, editing, and publishing. As I wrote Fuck You, Pay Me #7: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Journalism Edition), and then Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition), I noticed a few things. Some of my best work was written outside of any institution and self-published. That meant that my creativity was best served when I had control over the process, I could do what I wanted, and no one else was involved. So this morning, as I sat in the underground parking lot of the Burbank Whole Foods, I had this idea of a guy who was a porn addict, who was sitting there, trying to figure out how he had gotten there and what he was going to do next. So I thought it would be good to write this as a flash fiction, to share it, and to do that every day for a month. And there you have it. I guess it was also informed by the fact that I spent a lot of time Sunday night looking at tentacle porn for an upcoming newsletter, but you’ll have to wait to hear more about that. Anyway, go read The Porn Addict and then tell me what you think happens to him next. Does redemption await him?
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In addition to writing books and producing journalism, I’m a creative consultant. As The Fixer, I do a little bit of everything that has to do with words. From ghostwriting books to editing manuscripts to crafting website content, I help my clients with their word-based projects. Are you a busy CEO who needs a ghostwriter? I can do that. Are you a writer who needs someone to assist you in getting your writing where it should be? I can do that. Are you a marketing company in search of someone who can create compelling copy? I can do that. Book a one-hour introductory consultation here or email me to schedule your session here, and let’s get started.
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A parking lot mural at Circus Liquor in North Hollywood. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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This is part 8 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 fiction. Obviously, I’ve excluded my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. But I’ve included 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-in-Progress.
You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In 2003, I published my short story collection through Future Tense Books. The collection is comprised of fourteen stories, among them: “Apartment,” “He Was Probably in Jail,” and “Hey Doll.” These stories were written when I was in graduate school, after I graduated, and during the course of my writing career. The subject matter is nuts and often about weird sex fetishes, dysfunctional relationships, and things that happen when you find yourself working in Porn Valley. You can buy it on Amazon for $80.
Standout quote: “You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his own penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket.”
Year published and publisher: 2003, Future Tense Books
Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress Currently, I’m working on a novel that’s set in the adult film industry. It focuses on a single character and is a real pleasure to write. As I have shared in interviews, writing my memoir was a slog, and I really wanted to undo that experience and create something that was amusing and exciting and fresh. I’ve written nearly 25% of this novel so far, and every time I re-read it I laugh out loud. It’s a delight.
Standout quote: “Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”
Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD
“The Tumor“ In 2015, I self-published this short story. It’s about an anthropomorphic tumor, a troubled marriage, and a bad man. I had the cover designed, the layout designed, and the formats designed. I really enjoyed this process, as it gave me the ability to control the process from soup to nuts. You can buy it on Gumroad for $1. To date, I’ve earned a total of $884.50 selling this product through Gumroad, using the Pay What You Want option.
Standout quote: “My original idea was that we take her out in the yard, and that I, an expert marksman, shoot her in the breast at the site to which she had pointed, thereby destroying the tumor.”
Year published and publisher: 2015, self-published
“Spike” In 2020, Bending Genres published this short story of mine which is about a male porn star who is struggling with performance anxiety. I wrote this story some years earlier, and I submitted it many times to many literary journals, and no one wanted to publish it until Bending Genres came along. I love this story and think it’s hilarious.
Standout quote: “Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said.”
Year published and publisher: 2020, Bending Genres
“Necking Team Button” In 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to write a short story for their Significant Objects project, which was a literary experiment that involved pairing writers with found objects. The experiment prompted the interrogation of how narratives shape the perceived value of objects and culminated in an auction. (You can read how the project worked here.) The writers of these stories included Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti, and Colson Whitehead. Eventually, the project became an anthology, which you can buy on Amazon. My story combines fiction and nonfiction.
Standout quote: “Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether—a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.”
Year published and publisher: 2009, Significant Objects; 2012, Fantagraphics
“She Is a Girl” I wrote this story in 2005, when I was living in New Orleans. It was published in the very cool Maisonneuve. Like a lot of my fiction, this story interweaves fact and fiction, and in some ways it exists as a very early draft of my memoir. Also like a lot of my fiction, and some of my nonfiction, including my memoir, it has surrealist elements. The story is about what it’s like to be a girl and what it’s like to be a woman and the stuff that happens in between. I think this story is kind of sweet.
Standout quote: “The tectonic plates of her ribs lying protectively over her heart can hardly contain whatever it is thumping inside her.”
Year published and publisher: 2005, Maisonneuve
“The Flesh Eaters” This story was published in 2018 on Construction, which was a literary magazine, but maybe that publication no longer exists. Anyway, you can read the story by clicking the title, thanks to the Wayback Machine. This story is one of a series of short stories I’ve been doing over the years that take place in Porn Valley. In case you haven’t noticed, Porn Valley is my Yoknapatawpha County. The tale features Dolores, who works for a company in the San Fernando Valley that makes silicone vaginas. I think the idea came to me after I visited an adult toy manufacturer in North Hollywood and also because I used to own a silicone vagina, although I lost it.
Standout quote: “Dolores didn’t expect to spend the last year sewing pubic hair into a disembodied silicone vagina, but that’s the way it happened.”
Year published and publisher: 2018, Construction
“Hey Doll” If you’re looking for Susannah Breslin brand fiction, this is it. It was published by Nerve in 2002, if you’re old enough to remember that site. Thanks again to the Wayback Machine for providing a link to it in archived form. I don’t want to say too much about this story other than to say it was inspired by real events, and dating in Los Angeles is crazy, and in Hollywood truth and fiction are one and the same.
Standout quote: “All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do!”
Year published and publisher: 2002, Nerve
“The Boy Who Wore His Heart on His Sleeve“ This is a charming bit of flash fiction that appeared on A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction. It dates back to 2010. A Shaded View on Fashion is the brainchild of Diane Pernet, who is the coolest. I was really delighted to have anything of mine associated with anything of hers.
Standout quote: “The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen.”
Year published and publisher: 2010, A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction
“Revenge of the Cum Dumpster” It’s hard to believe that a story I wrote with this title has struggled to find a publisher. The story itself focuses on a pornographer who is not a very nice guy, who says something mean about the young woman who finds herself the subject of his current film project, and the swift consequences of karma on a porn movie set. I think it has yet to find a publisher because it has cum dumpster in the title and because people are so afraid of being cancelled these days for who knows what reason. Anyway, if you’re interested in publishing this seminal work, let me know.
Standout quote: “The men had surrounded her in a half-circle, their penises a forest of trees in which she was lost.”
Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD
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Last Wednesday, I did a reading and talk for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, at the North Branch of the Berkeley Public Library. I had such a nice time, especially because this was the library I went to when I was a kid, and I was reading from my book about growing up in Berkeley. It was a bit like time travel with a literary twist. Thank you to the library for having me and for all those who came out to listen and ask questions. If you’re interested in attending an event, I’m going to be doing several events during April for the book, which are listed here, and which include the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books; the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; and Book Passage in Corte Madera.
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A shot out the window over California on a recent flight. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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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!
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A Franklin Village parking lot mural of Humphrey Bogart. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photos.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Rabbits, Malibu Canyon, and a dress made of books. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photographs.
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A blue curtain at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photos.
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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.
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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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.
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