Tag Archives: sex

When Did HBO Become the Sex Channel?

Television, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
I've been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn't mean I want to see her having sex with other people
I’ve been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn’t mean I want to see her having sex with other people

One of the more popular shows in America right now is Game of Thrones, which airs specifically on HBO. It’s a pretty decent show, has great acting and writing, and can definitely tell a story. Well, I could probably say that about most HBO shows that I’ve watched over the years, and that includes The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, True Blood and the Wire. These were all great shows.

One thing that distinguished most of these shows from regular network programming is that they were on HBO, and as a result, they could sometimes be a bit more risque than your usual show. This usually meant nudity, sexual situations, drug references and possibly violence (although violence is the one area that regular networks have little problem glorifying). But something changed over the years, and I think what has happened is that the programmers at HBO are now more interested in glorifying sex than in actually telling a story that involves sexual situations. I know that sounds like I’m saying the same thing, but I really think there’s something to this.

Let’s look at the time when this started to change. The show True Blood has always been a bit on the edge when it comes to sexual situations. However, a few seasons into its run, the story line, which used to be the center of the show (the underworld of the vampire universe) somehow turned into sex central, to where the main story seemed much more about who Sookie Stackhouse was going to fuck, or who amongst the rest of the cast was going to have sex with someone else. So they started introducing female on female sex, male on male sex, animal on human sex, animal on animal sex, hybrid animals on hybrid animals of different genders having sex, and don’t get me wrong but somewhere down the line I think they were experimenting with mermaids, fairies and werewolves. I’d say they kind of jumped the shark, but so far they haven’t tried to have sex with a shark yet. I imagine that’s in the next season.

Basically, what this has developed is a sense that HBO is on the edge when it comes to sex so that it’s treating it like the new violence variable that network programming used to do, and by that I mean that every season to television around the 1980s was designed to push the envelope on violence to see what they could get away with. HBO, having gone completely over the edge with violence in its shows, is now trying to push the very boundaries of sex with its series.

Last week, HBO crossed the line with Game of Thrones by going way overboard with rape. One of the main characters raped his sister near the dead body of her son in a very nonconsensual rape scene that the director Alex Graves, indicated was his favorite scene he’s ever done.  The problem I perceive is that he’s so enamored with how he’s overstepped the boundary of decency that he believes that he’s taken the show (and the network) in a positive direction, when in fact he’s actually done the entire genre a complete disservice. There was a story a few weeks ago of a woman who was sued by an affiliate of HBO for refusing to do a topless sex scene.  The commentary on that story from the readers is amazing, but I’ll let you read into that yourself. To sum up, basically people are upset at the actress because she signed a contract to appear naked and do sex for a television role.

My question is to ask why a sex scene is all that necessary to a particular story line. As a writer, I understand that sometimes sex is a necessary element to move a narrative along, but I can’t remember ever writing a sex scene because I started thinking “I really need to spice up this book”. And that’s the problem I think we’re running into because I believe a lot of the sex we’re seeing on the screen these days is just bad writing that takes the lazy way out of a plot device that they didn’t want to waste time trying to create. I remember once, in my earlier days of writing, where I actually found myself having to figure a way OUT of a sexual situation in one of my stories because I realized the sex would have been too easy to write for that scene, and I actually reached a far better place for the story by having the sexual situation avoided by the main characters (which brought a lot more drama to the moment than if they did the deed).

What I do know is that quite often when I’m watching a television show and it moves off into sex mode, I often find myself doing other things than watching the show because I find the “sex” in a television show to be very uninteresting. And it’s not because I’m a prude; I’m about as far away from that as possible. It’s because if I want to watch porn, I’ll watch porn. When I turn on the television set to watch drama, I want to watch drama, not ten minutes of young people trying to simulate copulation on the screen (or actually doing it, which is often even worse). I know there are some people who watch certain shows just in hopes of seeing some actress or actor naked, but I’m not one of them. Maybe when I was 13 and hadn’t seen all that many naked women in my time, but these days I need real narrative elements to get me going, and watching sex on the screen rarely does that for me.

Boss: A Show Designed to Make You Hate Politics

Politics, Television, , , , ,

I’ve recently been watching the first season of the television show Boss, which stars Kelsey Grammer, the guy who used to play Frasier. The show is one of those paid television episodic soap operas that involves Grammer as a guy named Tom Kane, who happens to be the mayor of Chicago. As you would expect, a show about Chicago’s inner government is going to be one about the Democratic Party’s control of the city, and as might also be expected, it’s also about the serious corruption of Chicago itself.

Now, I could go on a huge bent about politics and how I suspect the show might actually be written by Republicans who hate Chicago and Chicago-style politics, but I’m suspecting that’s not the case. But rather that it’s designed by people who just hate politics and love to throw mud all over the place and laugh at how well it sticks to everything.

A quick run down of the premise: Tom Kane is dying of some degenerative disease, so he has to keep it a secret from practically everyone. At the same time, as the Mayor of Chicago, he’s probably the most corrupt individual to run a city since, well, honestly I don’t know someone as corrupt as this guy in the whole of history. Caligula comes to mind, but even Caligula seems like a nice guy compared to Tom Kane. As we quickly find out, Kane screws over his closest allies, his enemies, his wife, his daughter, a nurse caring for his father in law, union members, the city of Chicago, cities near Chicago, his own senior adviser, his own senior propagandist, and…well, you probably get the idea that there’s not a person Kane wouldn’t screw over if you gave him enough time.

In a show like this, you’re bound to find some characters to care about to juxtapose against the evil Tom Kane, but honestly, there’s not a single one. His department head is probably the closest to someone you’d like or respect, but at the same time this guy has no problem hiring people to beat up other people, or just kill them. And this is literally one of the good guys. Kane’s female assistant (I guess she’s a deputy mayor, although I suspect “sex object” is part of her job description as well) is a beautiful blond woman who has zero problem sleeping with Kane’s new project, a guy running for governor under Kane’s umbrella. I guess we’re supposed to feel some compassion for her as she screws the governor candidate over and over again, even though the guy is married and screwing pretty much anything that moves. I guess she’s the jilted woman on the show?

Speaking of the blond woman and the governor candidate: Look, I’m not a prude or anything. I like a good sex scene here and there, but my god, this show has so much sex going on that at one point I felt I had to pause the playback and seek out a priest to confess. And I’m not even religious. Look, I understand the girl is attractive and foolishly chose “will appear nude” in her contract, but my god, I’ve seen her have sex more times in one season than I honestly think I’ve had my entire life. And I had a good run. I almost fear whenever the two actors end up in the same room together because panties are going to slide off, his shirt’s going to go flying off, and we’ll have porn for the next five minutes.

Anyway, as I was saying, I couldn’t find myself caring about a single character on the show. They’re all a bunch of scumbags that I’d vote out of office the first moment I got a chance. And that’s every politician on the show. It doesn’t matter if they’re with Kane or against him. There’s not a single one that doesn’t look like he or she came from the same crappy cloth as Kane did. They’re all on the take, taking what’s on the take, or just evil, bad people.

You might say it gives a watcher the sense that anyone in politics is a crappy person and not worth respecting.

Part of me wants to say I dislike the show, but it’s got that certain quality that comes to people who are transfixed by an out of control train wreck. You can’t stop watching, even though you’re convinced you’re completely wasting your time and energy.

So, I finished the first season and am apprehensive about season two. There’s only so much corruption and sex I can take in an hour.

The Strange Allure of Jennifer Love Hewitt

Television, Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,
Secretly, I always imagine she's posing for me....

A few years ago, I was teaching English in South Korea. Unfortunately, during this time, I had very limited access to American television shows. Sure, I could pirate them, but I’m not the kind of person who does that, so I was limited by whatever I could purchase from Seoul entertainment stores. And the selection was awful. However, one thing I kept seeing each and every time I went to the store was the dvd collections for Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Ghost Whisperer. Now, I had never seen the show before, so it didn’t really interest me, but I am a science fiction fanatic, so I kept looking at that package every time I went there. Finally, one day the first season was on sale (this is when they were still making the show, around Season 3). So, I figured it wouldn’t be the worst investment ever, and I bought the first season.

Having lots of free time, I diligently watched through the season, and then I was somewhat hooked, so I bought Season 2. And then I kept going until I came home from Korea and continued watching it until it went off the air.

Now, I should probably make a bit of a disclosure for those who have never watched Ghost Whisperer. It’s a quirky show. It’s not going to get any Emmys (at least I don’t think it did during its run). It’s a show about a woman who can talk to the dead, but basically it’s really a show about the woman with a really strange, charmed life, who just so happens to also talk to the dead. Now, I make this distinction because that distinction is necessary. This woman has the most Barbie-like existence in the history of television. She interacts with people in a way that really seems only important to the character played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, and whenever there’s an important conflict, the only real thought the writers and directors were probably thinking was: “How can we make this come out right while still making Jennifer Love Hewitt look really hot and cute?”

Because that’s what is special about the show. It shows 4 or 5 seasons of the cutest girl on television interacting with everyone else who may or not yet realize she’s the cutest girl on television. There are ghosts, of course, but they really only serve as scenery and distractions, to make you forget that the show is really about the cutest girl on television. And she’ll pout every now and then, which believe it or not, makes her seem even cuter.

What’s fascinating about the show is that it deals with some really heady issues that sometimes go into jump the shark territory of television, like the Buffy-like moments where Jennifer Love Hewitt comes head to head against the evil old guy of evil who seems to want to make all the dead people stay undead instead of go to the happy place that Jennifer Love Hewitt uses her cuteness to send them to. And during that confrontation, instead of just offing her with a big anvil, like any other diabolical evil guy would do, he ends up talking to her, seeing her pout, and then kind of turns into a wishy washy evil genius who then disappears for awhile until rating seasons comes back again.

Essentially, you get the main attributes of Ghost Whisperer. The cute girl wins out all the time.

But I didn’t come to talk about that show itself, but about Jennifer Love Hewitt. You see, during that show, even though (spoiler alert!) her husband dies during the show and comes back as some other guy who dies during the show but is allowed to live as her ex-husband reincarnated until they can find a way to just start using the old actor again (because everyone forgot it was another guy whose body he took over), the whole show manages to be about the angst of the cutest girl on television.

When the show ended, I felt a part of me died, too, because then I realized my cute girl factor of television would be missing input. And then I found out that she had a brand new show, called The Client List. Which surprisingly is about her being a massage therapist who gives happy endings to her customers. You’d think this show would be somewhat gritty, but it’s not. Instead, it ends up being about (surprise) a cute girl who just so happens to be a massage therapist who gives happy endings to her customers. And man, they really push the cuteness factor in this show.

I watched the first episode of the show and found myself laughing out loud because, first, it’s preposterous and, second, it’s equally ridiculous. Her husband left her the day she started a new job at a massage parlour, and instead of moving to cheaper housing, she decides she’s going to keep her kids in the same two parent housing they’ve had by giving handjobs to her customers. Well, I think that’s what she’s doing, as they don’t actually go into detail about what happens after she rubs down the bodies of the male models who serve as her clients. And yes, I did say male models because once she starts giving the “expensive” rub downs, her clientele goes from being ugly old men to being supermodel male models who you’d expect to pop up in a Madonna video. Not exactly sure why these guys would ever need a masseuse like her and in this particular out of the way place, but apparently Hollywood didn’t think the audience really needed realism here.

So, we get to see her pout when things don’t go right, and we get to see her come to work in all sorts of sexy get-ups that you’d expect a female escort to be wearing, if she worked for a high-fashion call girl outfit. But instead, she works for a massage place (that’s next door to a Karate studio) and does the $5000 an hour call girl dressing regardless.

What’s interesting is that they never felt the need to actually point out what she’s doing for this serious bank she’s getting from this job. She’s either giving handjobs (and getting far more money than ANY handjob masseuse EVER got) or she’s having sex with them at the massage parlour, which seems kind of strange as they haven’t made the show out to be “that” kind of show YET.

But in all, what I think really happened was they found another way to bring Jennifer Love Hewitt back to living rooms to exploit that cuteness factor of hers. What’s even funnier is that the hype for the show centered around Hewitt’s interviews where she talks about how it might be about time for her to find a boyfriend, and all I can think to myself is that no man lives in that fantasy world that she has constructed for herself, in which guys are all supermodel guys and all love listening to her and doing things that practically no human is capable of pulling off in a relationship. Her world is constructed just so that Jennifer Love Hewitt fits into it, kind of like that little girl fantasy world of dolls and stuffed animals that someone eventually has to grow out of (or become a real princess in some fantasy land probably located in Eastern Europe somewhere).

In all, I want to thank Jennifer Love Hewitt for letting me explore her world with her again for at least one more hour a week. I mean, it’s not a real world, and the people are never as scripted as they are on this show, but hey, that’s what makes it so much more enjoyable.

Finally an app for studs like me who get way too much sex

News, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , ,

How many times has this happened to you? You’re in the middle of a series of dates, just ran out of condoms during the last orgy you were attending with Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, and suddenly Angelina Jolie turns to you in the heat of passion and says, “Duane, please tell me you have a condom on you right now, you great big sexy beastyly man of a stud.” And you do the math, remembering that the pack of Trojans you bought that had 30 condoms in it was supposed to last all day, but you’ve already used up 20 or so during that run in with the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders when their bus broke down and only you, in your Penthouse letter-like encounter, required you to service them, which should have meant changing their tire, but you know how these things get out of hand. Anyway, as I was saying, you suddenly do the math and realize that you had planned to save one condom, but Paris Hilton kind of went nuts and then Bjork showed up and needed one to make balloon animals (or whatever the hell she was doing in the corner by herself), so you now have to turn to Angelina and say, “I might not have any condoms left.” And of course, Brad Pitt didn’t bring any, even though he knew he was bringing the two of them to a wife-swapping orgy party you were throwing this weekend, and he had all week to prepare beforehand. So, now you’re left without options.

But out of nowhere a solution has arrived. It turns out that MTV has always had my back. First there was that whole explanatory video about how video killed the radio star, and now they’ve come along and created an iPhone app that tells you where the nearest place is that you can find a condom. So, thanks to MTV, you can now make sure that you never have to say these tragic words: “I’m sorry, Angelina Jolie, but I have no more condoms.”

Too Much Information About the Sex Lives of Creepy People

News, Relationships, Religion, Television, , , , ,

Today, on the front page of CNN.com, I saw stories that wanted to tell me that Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriend reveals that Hugh could only last two seconds, and then a follow-up story where Hugh says women think he’s a great performer in bed. Uh huh. Right under that, there’s an in depth interview with a young 16 year old girl who talks sex with her 51 year old, creepy husband actor who dated her when she was way too young to even know how to spell the word “consent”. Personally, I think she probably still can’t but that’s another story completely.

Why is the news constantly trying to push stories on me that are designed to creep me out? Yeah, I can ignore these things, but I can’t seem to escape them because they come on the news constantly, and they show up everywhere else I look. And then people want to talk about them. At what point do people start to realize that an aging, oversexed man whose claim to fame is smut magazines isn’t a story because he somehow bamboozled yet another 21 year old blond bimbo into thinking he’s the cat’s pajamas, or that he wears cat’s pajamas, or she wears cat-like pajamas because they turn him on, or whatever.

Look, I understand the media in the United States is overly consumed with sex information and somehow thinks that the fact that they don’t have any relevant news to report means that somehow they’re going to have to run with the “sex sells” as a substitute. But some of this stuff is really inappropriate, and I don’t even mean on a prurient level. I just mean that some stuff really should be private and left in that area. When I first discovered that some aging actor married a 16 year old girl, I was somewhat disgusted, but I pushed the story aside, thinking, “well, it really doesn’t have anything to do with me, and people do what people do.” But then the media keeps throwing it back at me, as if I’m supposed to care, or that somehow because I’m human I’m supposed to be involved, or get involved.

Please stop. I don’t care. I don’t want to be an accomplice to this story. I understand that sex sells, but at some point somebody in the media has to be able to tell a colleague, you know maybe we shouldn’t be running this trash as news. If it’s news, great. But if the purpose is to try to shock people who were minding their own business, it’s the news equivalent of terrorism. It’s done to disrupt, shock and cause people to change their normal routines for the sake of some hidden profit. If I was interested in stories about older men with children, I’d seek it out on the Internet like everyone else, at least until Chris Hanson caught me and embarrassed me on national television. If I seek it out, let me be ashamed. If you throw it in my face, don’t be surprised if more and more people who were oblivious don’t start seeking it out themselves because you helped them get used to it.

Why Do Men Cheat?

Relationships, Uncategorized, , , , ,

I was reading today about how Arnold Schwarzeneger cheated on his wife, Maria Shriver and ended up having a child with one of the members of his staff. Now, I’m not going to get into the pro or cons of Arnold, or any of that. I’m not even really going to comment that much on that affair and the child he had with someone else while married. What I will say is that I always found Maria Shriver to be a beautiful woman who is extremely intelligent, and any man should have been as lucky as he could ever be to have been married to her. I don’t care that he’s Arnold and could have probably any supermodel he wanted. He had the one any man would have killed to have had as a wife, and he threw it away on something stupid. That’s all I’ll say on Arnold. That’s not what I wanted to talk about here.

What I did want to talk about is the very nature of cheating itself. It’s something I just don’t understand. I mean, I understand psychology and all of that, but what I don’t understand is why someone would do it when it serves no purpose other than an immediate, stupid need. Now, I’m not the most experienced individual when it comes to relationships, but when I’ve been in them, they were exclusive for me (at least for me), and while I may have had bad thoughts at the time, especially when someone else who was extremely attractive seemed quite interested in me, I never considered cheating as an actual, viable alternative. Yet, I know without a doubt that I”m a rarity at this. People cheat all of the time.

And that drives me nuts. I’m not married, mainly because I’ve never found anyone that could stand me long enough to ever consider doing so. Okay, there were a few in the past that probably could have made that leap with me, but let’s just say that I’m more of a loner, being a writer and all that, so I’ve never succeeded in making something like that work long term. But not once has a relationship ever ended because I decided I wanted someone else. The logic of that completely baffles me.

Which then brings me to the belief that if I ever do get involved with someone, she’s probably never going to be convinced that I’m legit and not cheating, and my supposition of that falls on the obvious fact that so many guys cheat, especially guys that should have no reason to do so whatsoever. You’ve got people like Hugh Grant, with someone like Elizabeth Hurley, and he goes and cheats with a skanky hooker. I mean, I just don’t understand it. The logic makes absolutely no sense.

There’s an argument that goes that men are only as loyal as their options. I hear this one a lot. At first, I used to hear it from comedians, but then I started to hear every day people using the phrase. And if it’s true, that really says horrific things about the average guy, because it basically means that we aren’t to be trusted AT ALL, EVER. I could understand if you’re in some loveless marriage, or that your wife has suddenly decided to become anti you, but those cases are very specific ones, and for all other logical reasons, the marriage should be ended there anyway. Even in those cases I don’t advocate cheating; I advocate divorce. I figure that if someone is going to be that upset by his current circumstances that he’s going to cheat, he needs to be brutally honest and then just end the relationship completely. Living a lie has to be a horrific experience, and I can’t imagine myself ever doing it. How others could do it is beyond me, yet so many people don’t seem to have that much of a problem with it.

Over the years, I’ve come across a lot of people who have stretched the boundaries of relationships. At one point, I hung with a open marriage crowd, and I was fine with that. I mean, in these situations, no one is cheating on anyone because everyone is aware of what is going on, and everyone is consenting to the relationship dynamics. It’s the sneaking around and deceit that I completely do not understand.

I come across it every now and then in my normal daily life, and from time to time, I find myself getting drawn into circumstances that drive me nuts. I’m talking about where someone is a friend who happens to be cheating on his wife or her husband, and then I’m asked to lie because the spouse might bring up a question that could reveal the dishonest behavior. People don’t seem to understand why I get really upset whenever I’m brought into something like that without my approval and any previous discussion. It’s literally asking me to cheat in a relationship where I get absolutely nothing out of it for doing the bad behavior, which not only goes against every fiber in my being, but also doesn’t get me anything out of the dynamic as well.

But back to the question. Why do mean cheat? Is it because they constantly want something forbidden to them? Is it because of a need to constantly fulfill a sexual desire? Is is because they feel a need to do something immoral, dangerous or wrong? I would hate to think that answer is that it’s because they had the oportunity, which makes us nothing less than Pavlovian beings, capable of being manipulated so easily by any manner of incentive. There’s an old joke where a woman claims she’s not a prostitute, but then some businessman offers her an absurd amount of money to have sex, and she relents. He then asks her to do it for the original offer or some nominal amount of money, and she says, “Sir, what do you take me for?” And he says: “Madame, we already established what you are. Now we’re just negotiating the price.” In other words, it only takes one time to be a cheater, and once you are, you are forever condemned to be one, no matter how much you might tell yourself otherwise.

What bothers me is that there are so many people out there who have no qualms about this. And yes, I understand that gender is not necessarily the distinctive factor either, as women cheat as well. That doesn’t make me feel any better, however.

When it comes to issues of sex, America does not understand redemption

Education, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m not one to latch onto another story and then write about it, although I admit there are a lot of bloggers who do that sort of thing. But this was one issue that I found to be so significant that I felt that it needed further attention, and perhaps even more perspective. An article appeared today in Salon.com that contained a personal narrative from Melissa Petro, a woman who had previously outed herself as a former sex worker and stripper before becoming a school teacher. As a result, she was hit hard by the conservative channels of the press, and then right after that by practically every other channel of the press as well. Even the governor felt it necessary to chime in demanding that she be fired. In all, she was completely railroaded out of the teaching profession, and by reading her personal story, you can also get the sense that she pretty much has a difficult time today of getting a job anywhere.

Now, I’ve written before about how I used to go to school with a lot of women who were sex workers while paying their way through school. At San Francisco State University, in certain disciplines, it was practically a right of passage. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I had who used to ask me to come see them dance as a stripper because at the time they were actually proud of what they were doing. Not all of them were, of course, but at one point in someone’s life, there is a sense that this is a perspective of freedom that not many other occupations can allow.

Unfortunately, that occupation is now competing against the sense that mainstream America has that anything involving sex is bad. And if you happen to work anywhere near children, it’s almost a given that you should be tarred and feathered and run out of town like the wandering gypsy you are. I won’t even get into the dichotomy issue of how most of the clients of these women tend to be the same men whose wives are horrified that these women did what they did; there’s always this sense that these “bad” women come from some place that has no interaction with the rest of society. And once they show up, they have to be run out quickly, or little Johnny might grow up to be a bad person, or might be forced into sex with her, or whatever bizarre hyper-fictious ridiculousness seems to be the fear that emerges in these situations.

The simple fact of the matter is, these women are all products of our society and civilization. They were churned out by the system at one time or another, and if we all want to go into this “they’re all bad for doing what they did” then we should take some sort of responsibility for putting them into those positions in the first place. We can’t have the luxury of just assuming that people are bad by nature, and therefore it was their fault that they chose to do those kinds of jobs that the rest of ridicule and condemn.

But even saying that, there’s an immediate assumption that stripping or sex work is bad. Is it really? What is so wrong about someone who does that sort of activity? What makes that person any less “moral” or less worthy of normal civilization than any woman who has carnal knowledge with a man as part of a relationship? Discounting the whole “it’s only okay in marriage” sort of nonsense that predates 1950, “moral” people don’t really make all that much of a fuss about people who engage in sex in relationships with each other. Granted, they don’t wanted specific details, but they really don’t care. So why is someone who is engaged in this activity on a normal basis considered someone to be less worthy of belonging to our daily civilization?

Over the years, I’ve known a lot of women who existed as sex workers. For a time, I got my start creating web pages for professional dominatrices, mainly because they were the ones who really fed the business back then when the Internet was started. Strangely enough, my main clientele were professional dominants and churches. And quite often, the references I received crossed both demographics (meaning that quite often my professional dominants contacts came to me from the web sites of churches I created or maintained, and the other way around as well). We’d like to think there’s a serious disconnect or separation between both avenues, but there isn’t.

What’s really concerning parents these days is not the sex worker “problem” but the belief that sexual activity is starting with people at a younger age, and they need a criminal to point to in order to feel better about the situation. But the reality of the situation is that by compartmentalizing sex outside of acceptable parameters, we make it so that younger people see it as something to explore out of the attention of parents, and then families pay for the consequences. Most young people are getting their sex information by watching Hollywood and the music industry sexualize every woman who has anything to do with entertainment so that the expectation is that it’s something good and to be pursued. There is absolutely no connection between a stripper and a music starlett, yet conservative media condemns the stripper and hypes the product of industry. Yet, if you really think about it, the stripper caters to a clientele that is strictly adult, whereas the music industry and Hollywood will take anyone with access to an MP3 player or a dvd player.

And with all that said, I’ve kind of wandered off the topic of the original person herself, Melissa Petro. In her own words, she actually felt herself empowered by her experience as a stripper and sex worker (well, more as a stripper than as a sex worker as she didn’t seem to say too many good things about the latter). Unlike most stories of sex workers, we’re told of horrible conditions and how they were forced into the experience. She came to it on her own, and it was a productive environment for her until she found her way out. And then she made something of her life, becoming a teacher who works with children.

We should have been congratulating her, not condemning her. If we accept the erroneous argument that sex work is bad, she got out of it and came back to us to live a more productive life. She should have been the poster child for how to win through horrible circumstances. But she wasn’t treated that way. She was eventually fired, and she has little recourse of ever working again, in any job. Her own narrative explains how she moved in with her boyfriend to survive.

What bothers me most is that no one else seems bothered by this. We’ll go on with our lives and criticize her for having made the mistake of revealing her past to the rest of the world. In other words, her was a teacher giving us a teaching moment, and none of us learned a thing.

Trying to Get Established with the E-book Markets

Books, Business, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately exploring the whole e-reader market. My reasons for doing so are probably obvious, as I’ve pretty much given up on ever getting sustainable establishment from the main publishing markets, as everyone seems to be a writer these days and trying to get an agent to even read a manuscript is like trying to get Charlie Sheen to act responsibly.

Anyway, so some months ago, I put up one of my previously published books onto Amazon for the Kindle, and it has had a few sales, but mostly, it’s a lot like standing on a corner and trying to get people to read printout copies of a manuscript. People just don’t seem interested. And I don’t think it’s that their not interested in me or my writing; they’re just not interested in purchasing books from someone they’ve never heard of. It’s the same dilemma writers have always had, except there’s a lot more of us these days, and practically the only way to establish a career as a writer is to be famous for doing something else. So, if you can cook and have a cooking show, you might make it as a writer. If you’re a reality show star and have gratuitous sex with people who live in your reality show house, you might have a career as a writer. If you were a famous baseball star who took performance enhancing steroids, football star who beat up your girlfriend, musician girlfriend who got beat up your musician boyfriend, washed up movie star who seems to get arrested for practically everything written on police blotters, or some older guy who lived through abuse by your evil stepmom, well, you might have a career as a writer. But if you’re actually a writer who writes novels, and that’s all you really have to share with the rest of the world, your chances of making it as a writer are about as good as you making it as a millionaire by winning the lottery. Okay, maybe a little less.

So, what is a writer to do, if he’s not interested in starting a gunfight with the local police department in hopes that he might live long enough to write about it while in prison, well, the answer seems to be “write an e-book and get famous that way.”

The funny part of that solution is that making it as an e-book star is just as ludicrous as making it as a professonal blogger. Unless you have a gimmick, or you get seriously lucky, your chances aren’t that good. Even if you’re a great writer, it appears that everyone seems to be a great writer these days, so you really have to have something else working in your favor.

So, in actually trying to get established as an e-reader writer, I started with Kindle, and like I said, so far I’ve sold a few books and seem to be as popular as Pee Wee Herman at a stripper’s convention. Okay, I’m wrong on that one. He’d probably be a bit more popular than I am right now.

But what I have been doing is reading everything I can find on how others have actually made it. And what I’ve discovered is that everyone talks about how e-readers and e-books are the solution to the current glut in writers out there, and how it is the solution to getting past the impossible gatekeepers of publishing (even going around the publishing industry itself), but what no one really seems to do is point out exactly how that success is supposed to happen. I’m constantly reminded of the Southpark episode with the underwear gnomes, when the kids ask the underwear gnomes why they’re stealing underwear, and they point out their master plan, which reads a lot like:

1. Steal all of the underwear

2. ????

3. Profit

Yep, that seems to be the consensus of everyone who talks about success as a writer in the e-book market. Somehow, you are supposed to go the same way:

1. Write a novel and e-publish it.

2. ????

3. Profit!

Yeah, I don’t see any logic behind it either. What seems to be missing is how do you actually market yourself as an e-book writer? How do you get traffic to your blog so that people pay attention to you? Whenever I read a book on marketing your blog, it says to first create interesting content and then moves onto capitalizing on that traffic that will then come. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of people who do read my blog, and they tend to agree that I create interesting content, but at the same time, the masses aren’t showing up to read it. A few people do, and a shitload of spam also seems to be paying attention, but that’s about it. Somehow, I’m missing a step here, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is.

It is that same step I believe I’m missing that somehow makes it possible for e-books to actually be attractive to people and sell the mass load that everyone seems to think will happen “naturally”. Well, I’m still working on that one, and I haven’t come up with a solution yet.

So, if real people actually seem to be following this blog, PLEASE COMMENT ON THE BLOG at my actual blog, and I’d love to hear from you. But right now, I get nothing but spam comments (do keep in mind my blog gets imported to Facebook and Open Salon, so if you’re commenting that you actually read it, I’m not talking about those places; I’m talking about my actual blog…the one linked here). It’s really frustrating. I mean, REALLY frustrating.

Is Craigslist Really the Enemy They Claim It Is?

Politics, Religion, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

Craigslist recently announced that it is going to be suppressing its listings for sex ads. Instead of the adult listing, it now shows up as “censored” on their site. Public interest groups are now high-fiving themselves because they seem to have won some sort of Quixotic victory that they believe has somehow made things better. Others, of course, still say that it’s not enough and want pretty much the universe when it comes to compliance. I thought it would be interesting to examine this and see what’s really going on.

First off, let’s look at the original problem. Craig Newmark started Craigslist back in 1995 in San Francisco. The idea was to give people a one stop marketplace where they could take care of their every need. You could find an apartment, get a job, sell that old TV you could never get rid of, and yes, even hook up with a potential partner, if that should be your current desire. Not surprisingly, that latter option has opened up all sorts of controversial issues with the online distributor of trade.

In 2002, according to Wikipedia, because of complaints, Craigslist started adding warnings to some of their personal ad areas, such as “men seeking men”, “casual encounters”, “rants and raves”, and “erotic services”. Already, these areas were causing problems with the mainstream segments of the population.

From this point forward, Craigslist has been on the attentions of quite a few public interst groups, and not surprisingly, law enforcement officials.

Up until this time, erotic services were pretty much an entity you had to search through some pretty creative methods, often involving a lot of bait and switch circumstances that one had to navigate solely on the hope that the next time would be better than the last time. Massage parlours were often a place men would go to seek prostitution, and after a lot of false leads and deception, it was not unusual for a man to pay hundreds of dollars to receive absolutely no desired experiences. Some got lucky, but most didn’t, and it was quite often a very discouraging experience.

The Internet was supposed to change all of that. At one’s fingertips was now immediate access to all sorts of information. Craigslist jumped into the game, and people were now following want ads for what they were seeking, and in conjunction with a lot of other erotic services on the Internet, people were actually finding what they were seeking. It was not unusual to see someone’s want ad on Craigslist, then check out the profile on one of the other erotic feedback sites, and then decide whether or not to book a session with that person. Very hard to find erotic services were now being much easier to find because they could now be found on Craigslist. Many people may not realize it, but there are a lot of people out there looking for some very specific types of encounters, and having everything in one place made it much easier for these people to connect.

Well, this didn’t bode well for the industy when there were people who would do everything possible to make sure that such people could never make any such connection. But this probably wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if another entity did not show up, which made things even worse. I’m talking about the scammer.

People may not realize it, but the entity of the scammer has pretty much destroyed every good thing that has ever come across on the Internet. Porn didn’t hurt the Internet, as the fuddy duddies would like you think it did (it actually served to fuel the Internet in its infancy, which is somewhat ironic if you think about it). Scammers did. Most of your email is now pretty much worthless because scammers found out they could profit off of naive people. You are required to buy special software to protect your computer because scammers discovered they could infect your computer just by hosting evil programs on sites where you wouldn’t expect them to be. Ebay used to be a great place to buy things; scammers and thieves put a wrench in the trust factor of that entity. So it is not that much of a surprise that scammers showed up and pretty much destroyed Craigslist.

Some of the biggest crimes that have rallied people against Craigslist have been people who have been cheating other people on the Internet. Call them scammers. Call them thieves. Call them the mob. Or whatever, but it’s this group of people who have caused all of the problems that have made Craigslist the cesspool that it can often be.

Because face it. Women being prostitutes has never caused all that much of a problem, unless you’re Tiger Woods. But people forcing women into prostitution has. Child predators looking for children for sex causes problems. Again, those same people are the ones that make this sort of thing available. These people are criminals who care little for the activity but everything for exploitation and making a quick buck. Unfortunately, they serve to diminish an activity that others might be providing in a more positive way, and unfortunately, there’s often very little way to separate the two.

There are a lot of honest people who are into the sex business who aren’t trying to steal from other people or to hurt other people. They easily get pushed aside whenever the bad class of people show up, and unfortunately that bad class shows up way too quickly and way too often.

All of the issues that have caused public interest against Craigslist have come from these bad elements of our societies. No one rallies around a leader seeking to stop prostitution. But everyone rallies around anyone seeking to stop child exploitation and people who wish to develop nonconsensual slavery circumstances.

This is the problem that Craigslist has fallen into because the owners of that site really didn’t care who was posting on the site. They were more interested in developing a site that brought in money. I can’t see that I blame them, but because of this, they have become the victim of their own success. With great success comes great responsibility, to steal and destroy a great line from Spiderman, and unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t really come up to the plate for the responsibility thing. It played a lot of shell games in hopes of getting people to think it was on the right side of morality, but when it came down to it, it was really only thinking of itself. When the public finally started to become a hammer to be used against them, they censored themselves and then tried to act all First Amendmentish and posted “censored” where they censored themselves.

The fact is: They could have dealt with this a lot easier by actually policing their ads in the beginning to see how much exploitation was going on. Instead, they dropped the ball and lost the whole game. But for lack of stupid analogies, I’ll take this one step further and say that they haven’t lost the whole season yet. They can still do something about cleaning up their site without destroying what they set out to do in the first place.

There are a lot of sex workers who do rely on Craigslist, and unfortunately because of this action, they are forced to start using more exploitive sites out there that are much worse, and that’s sad. Craigslist could step back up to the plate and decide where it wants to be in this debate. It can kowtow to the Bible thumpers and give in completely, like it’s doing right now, or it can bite back and work hand in hand with the communities that have grown up with them, making sure that the evil ones are ostracized, but the ones who are there for the right reasons still have a forum in which to do what they do best.

Unfortunately, it looks like Craigslist may take the easier road because it is filled with fewer obstacles. In the end, it may be a road that leads nowhere.