So, as I noted last night, my "Sex and the City: The Movie"-related story, "Those Dirty Girls," is online on Salon. I think the most interesting part of the piece is pretty much everything that Susie Bright, the original sexpert, said.
Bright: "[Y]ou know what I feel like? I feel like Trotsky when Stalin airbrushed him out of all the pictures of the Russian Revolution. I feel like the revisionist version of the sexual liberation movement is so stupid and shallow."
I was born and raised in the Bay Area, and Susie Bright was a huge influence on me. She was the reigning sexual intellectual, and I can't imagine that I'd do what I do the way I do it if it weren't for her. When I interviewed her for the story, she talked about how "Sex and the City" had commodified the Sex Revolution 3.0. And she's right. But if we've come a long way, baby, when it comes to sex, Bright has played no small part in that.
Working on a story like this is always interesting. I had a great time talking to Jamye Waxman, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Lena Chen, and Tracie Egan. Egan, I think, is really somebody to watch out for because she doesn't hold back, and that's what this racket is all about, isn't it?
I interviewed one another person for the story, but I ended up not including her in the final piece. That was Emily Gould, whose image spent last weekend spread across the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Since then, everybody's picked apart her anti-paean on blogging. When I talked to her, I asked her if she regretted blogging about her personal life.
"Didn't you read my story?" she retorted in a tone that sounded a lot like, "Don't you know who I am?"
I pointed out that it was hard to know what to think when she had exposed herself all over again by writing the Times story.
She said she guessed I had a point.
