Points of Entry

I'm confused by Virginia Heffernan's latest column: "File-Sharing Fetish."

"The Internet is for porn. Since I spend days and nights watching online video, people frequently remind me of this maxim from 'Avenue Q.' A little too rapidly, I protest that YouTube, the Web’s most comprehensive video site, where people watch around three billion videos a month — fertile territory for pornography any way you look at it — has somehow kept itself (relatively) clean and outstripped the video-sharing competition."

Well, OK. So, her thesis statement is... Thank heavens there's no porn on YouTube? I just don't know how compelling that declaration is, especially considering "one in four search engine requests on an average day is for pornography." What all those searchers are really looking for may generate more interesting questions and answers.

Daily Intel contemplates the broohaha over the Christie Brinkley/Peter Cook sex--I mean divorce trial of the moment, especially considering the revelations regarding Cook's purportedly excessive porn watching practices.

"Is porn really still something that's regarded as for deviants only? You'd think we all would have been tipped off to the fact that it's not — that all guys masturbate..."

Well, I'm not a guy, so I can't verify the veracity of that statement, but I think that "all" is probably in the ballpark.

Instead, Heffernan gets turned on by watching popcorn pop. "I was skimming thumbnails as usual when the popcorn video arrested my attention. I watched four times, transfixed... As I kept clicking and watching, I began to feel excited, even turned on."

To each his, or her, own video fetish, I suppose.

The Rise and Falll of the "Digital Pimp"

New York Times reporter Matt Richtel has written a great expose of the man behind The Erotic Review, David Elms, who is currently in jail and has been accused of extorting sex from sex workers who are listed on the site.

"Ms. Link, the deputy district attorney, said the criminal charges against Mr. Elms stemmed from a night in 2006 when the police were called to a hotel where they found him with 3.8 grams of cocaine and a loaded semi-automatic weapon. A prostitute was there and said Mr. Elms had forced her to perform oral sex at gunpoint, but there was not enough evidence to press charges on that accusation, Ms. Link said."

You can read more sex worker testimonials here.

Playboy Takes a Dump

The New York Times reports that Playboy Enterprises has taken another financial dump with another losing quarter. Christie Hefner, Playboy's current CEO, states the loss is due to "'the dual challenges of structural transformation in our traditional media business and a difficult U.S. economy,' while also citing 'unprecedented changes in the way consumers access and use media content.'"

And by "unprecedented changes in the way consumers access and use media content," she means: "Everyone's looking at porn on the internet now. Oops. I guess we really fucked up." Gee, Christie, you think?

I worked for Playboy TV from 1998 to 2003. I was, shamefully, a reporter on a show called "Sexcetera" that was like "60 Minutes" on Viagra. (Wow. The thought of Morley Safer on a little blue pill is a scary thought. Isn't it?) At the time, the story inside the bunny machine was that Playboy TV, which is basically porn, was carrying Playboy financially. Hef hates porn--his enterprise was built on the premise Playboy is everything porn is not--so he hated Playboy TV, even though that's what was keeping him in red satin robes.

As the Times states near the end, burying its lede once again: "Although Playboy Enterprises owns some cable channels that show X-rated material, like Hot Network, Hot Zone and Vivid TV, those are not presented as Playboy brands (though they do turn a profit)."

In recent years, Christie, a self-described feminist, has tried to drag her father into the future, seeking to compete with the World Wide Web of smut, buying up properties like ClubJenna in 2006.

Now, of course, it's far too little too late for Playboy.

(Also? I went to the Playboy Mansion three times. It was awesome.)

Congratulations, LA Times. You Are Retarded. [Updated] [And Updated Again]

The other day, a writer for the LA Times interviewed me for a story about a new book by Melanie Abrams, the wife of novelist Vikram Chandra--both teach at my alma mater--and the author of Playing, a novel in which the central character explores her inner-submissive by getting spanked. I wouldn't have known the book existed, but this journalist was calling to ask me about it, so I weighed in with some commentary about how nobody writes about sex in literature--except, you know, for the time Joyce called his wife "fuckbird." I yammered on about not liking erotica, said this book looked like erotica with a pedigree to me, and pondered the pending cultural significance of Snuff. The piece, "Literary Fiction Gets Kinky," ran in the paper today, and they got the URL of my blog wrong. They directed LA Times readers to ReverseCowgirl.com, which redirects to Condom Country. I just really hope that someone buys the Trojan Her Pleasure Vibrating Touch Massager because of me. While several other sites run by so-called sex writers were linked to not only correctly but directly in the article, my blog was not, continuing a legendary history of such incidents that began years ago with MSNBC.com and, I thought, had ended recently with Time.com. I'm not surprised, and the bottom line is that I don't really care, but it underscores that when it comes to publishing and sex, they never get it right. In other news, Bookslut Jessa Crispin attended the London Book Fair and wrote a very funny piece about what happens when people who write try and get sexy.

Update: So, later I went back to the LA Times website to see if they'd corrected the URL. And they had. They'd even linked it. To a new wrong URL. The link goes to ReverseCowgirl.blogspot.com, which would be great if you were looking for a fake blog entitled "Florida Lifestyle," filled with non sequitors and written by "faizal." Sigh.

Update #2: The link has been fixed. Hello, Hollywood. You're hot.

We are gathered here together in the conference center at 9:30 a.m. to “start a conversation on how to make publishing sexy.” At least that is how the London Book Fair Daily explains a panel titled “The Publishers Association Keynote: The Value of Publishing to Society.” And when the panelists shuffle in — some government wonks, a physicist, and the head of Random House, the least sexy conglomerate publisher I can think of — it’s clear I should have gone to the panel on the Romanian book market instead.

The Craigslist Virgin

I am a Craigslist virgin. Or, at least I was, until a few minutes ago. This morning, I posted two solicitations for Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls in Craigslist's New York erotic services section. Craigslist sure doesn't make doing so easy. I couldn't include URLs, so I had to write them out, and then I couldn't post similar ads in Los Angeles, because of some rule or the other about all that. Of course, I didn't have any problem finding close up photos of penises I could have lived without seeing or stumbling across a shot of some poor soul's prolapsed colon. God help me. The thing I found mildly interesting was the code language Craigslist solicitors use. Not the usual GFE stuff everyone knows already, but this whole "I have 300 roses for you" and "I have 500 reasons why you should come over." Roses and reasons being dollars, that is. Interesting. Guy solicits girl for sex by promising her roses and gives her greenbacks instead. Life is an eternal mystery. "Are You a John?" & "Are You a Working Girl?"

I search from town to town but I can't find my boo
I got so desperate that I sent a rocket to the moon
In New York City, someone said they saw you singing the blues
But it was a man from Nowhere Land that looked like you
I will keep searching on
This feeling's much too strong
My heart is ringing and I'm singing this song for you
-- Shop Around If You're Horny

I Got My Boing Boing TV

Yesterday, Boing Boing launched Boing Boing TV, the first blog-based video channel destined to crush traditional TV networks like Godzilla crushed Tokyo. Xeni is a dear friend of mine. It's thrilling to see her having transformed herself into a living, breathing, awesome idoru.

Update: Check out the latest episode as Xeni goes gonzo vaginago.

[A] lot of people in Hollywood have this idea that the web is just something you mine for hits, and that the ultimate endgame for anything internet-video-related is that you get a cable pilot or movie deal out of it. But maybe the web is the endgame. We're not in this to make a killing; we're in this to make a living, and to explore things in a freer way than we would be able to on network television. The economics and nature of the traditional television medium do not foster the kind of free-wheeling exploration that we've been spoiled to have on the web. If you can just keep on doing that, but with video, why would you say no? -- Xeni Jardin

Porn.com Domain Sells for $9.5 Million

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