Update: I woke up for some reason at 2AM and was eating some potato salad in my pajamas when I found that Time.com has declared the Reverse Cowgirl one of the "best blogs in the world" in their 2008 Top 25 Blogs First Annual Blog Index, and I'm their choice for sex blogger. Gulp. A big thank you to whatever closet pervert at Time managed to pull that one off. You are awesome. I'd send you some porn as a thank you, but I don't have any. Sorry! If you're interested in reading Letters from Johns, it's here, and Letters from Working Girls is here, and the story that I wrote for Newsweek.com in the wake of Spitzergate about what I've learned from doing Letters is here. If you'd like to look at some of my photographs, they're here. Oh, and if you want to check out my stream-of-consciousness style sex blogging, my obsessively updated Tumblr is here. Or, if you'd like to check out my favorite sex blogs, do pay a visit to Melissa Gira and Debauchette, two smart women who take sex writing to a whole new level. If you want to vote for Reverse Cowgirl at Time.com's poll, you can do so here. And thank you for reading the Reverse Cowgirl. It makes me happy. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, starring my relentless preoccupation with the weird world of pornography. SB
Every so often over the last five years or so, literary agents have approached me about writing a nonfiction book about Porn Valley. Over the years, I have approached my share of literary agents about the same idea, something I have detailed in various posts here. For some reason, it never really seems to work out, agents and me. I like the idea of agents. You know, like agents of change, or something like that. But I've never really needed one that badly, and, frankly, I've never really gotten along with any one of them all that well, and there's this way in which I think it's like I just don't get it. It's like, what do they do exactly? I mean, I know. But, you know. Anyway, they always have a new! totally! different! idea for this porn book. One thought it should be like Nickel and Dimed. One told me I should write nonfiction and not fiction because I was better at telling than showing. (Um, thanks?) The most recent one wanted me to be the one writer who finally told the "truth" about porn. And that's the rub, isn't it? I can't think about me, agents, and a nonfiction book about porn these days and not think of this crappy line: "You can't handle the truth!"--and I don't even like that movie. I am loathe to think of how many ways I've tried to spin the realities of Porn Valley in who knows how many proposals, for how many agents, for how many editors, for what? My mind always goes back to a meeting I had with one agent in a bar that rotated in a circle around the bartender. That's what this enterprise is like. Going around and around in a circle. Trying to tell the truth about Porn Valley to people who do not want to hear it. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as bad would sell. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as good would not. I am inclined to believe a book that posits porn as neither good nor bad disturbs people. I can't say porn is good. I can't say porn is bad. I can tell you this disturbs people. So, after banging my head against that wall, I let that go. I began writing my novel. In writing it, I've come to believe I was unable to tell the truth about porn in nonfiction. Facts are not enough. As I wrote here recently, Happy contains elements of noir, cyberpunk, and sci-fi. It's like I've created a kind of alternative universe, parallel to our own but wildly exaggerated, because it's the only world I could find in which I could tell the truth about porn. By creating a world that doesn't exist. Sometimes I think that's the only way people can tolerate the true story of porn. Either way, I don't know what I know, but I have come to the conclusion the opinions of agents, editors, and publishers are like assholes. They all have one.
A masterpiece is like pornography: it is difficult to say what it is exactly and yet, as the Supreme Court judge once said of porn, I know it when I see it. I know that a masterpiece, like porn, excites me when I see it. I know that, like porn, it reveals something to me. I know that, like porn, it tends to avoid sentiment, which is another way of saying that it has deep connections to truth. I know that, like porn, a masterpiece can often be shocking or scandalous. I know that I not only know porn when I see it, I know the difference between good porn and bad — and a masterpiece is always like good porn. And above all I know that, just as porn makes me want to fuck, a masterpiece makes me want to create. It’s a stimulant, an incitement that does to the aesthetic sense what porn does to the libido. -- Supervert
