May 2007

At the gym, on the monitors they play CNN. Today CNN showed the video of the girl being stoned to death in Iraq. I really wish I hadn’t seen that. I mean, it needs to be seen, but a big NSFW or some kind of text warning would have kept me from almost passing out on the treadmill. Thanks, Wolf Blitzer.

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I’ve spent the past couple days working on my next book and my thursday column Lara Is Not A Porn Star: Or, How to make it in porn before you were even born. I actually called the people who used her (underage) image, and boy, taking to Texas Bob and learning “ALL WE KNOW” (which did not, unfortunately and to the great disappointment of my editor, include the recipe for vegan creme brulee) was the, er, highlight of my week. Yup, it’s another week like *that*. Snip:

Some porn lovers wax romantic about the good ol’ days of so-called classic porn. Made in the 1970s and ’80s, the classics, they say, exude a sexual playfulness and enthusiasm not found in today’s going-through-the-motions releases. They say film quality was higher, taboo topics were explored and bodies were more realistic, more natural. Others, like me, will simply wish they waxed, period, and we’re more likely to think that “Deep Throat” should have really been called “Hair.” Few of us wish we were stars in porn’s golden age — especially U.K.-based photographer Lara Jade, who discovered her image was being used to sell the repackaged 1982 porn release “Body Magic” last November. Lara isn’t exactly eager to line up for her long-awaited AVN award.

It’s not just that Lara didn’t want to be associated with green doors and deep throats and the “fun-loving” days of zero STD testing. Nor was it simply the violation of image use that capped the problems associated with becoming the unknowing face of a Sven Conrad (?) star vehicle. Perhaps one of the problems is that Lara is 17 and was only 14 when she took the self-portrait (with help from her mum). Or maybe, just maybe, that the porn film whose cover she’s on was made about eight years before she was even born.

Link.

Update: Lara Jade emails me saying,

Hey Violet, just reading the article when this popped up

“We e-mailed back and asked to talk on the phone to her parents to verify any of this stuff, and we did talk to someone who didn’t have a British accent but we still don’t know exactly who is involved here.”"

I never recieved an e-mail of TVX about phoning or ANYTHING like that… this is a total lie.

Reader responses to the column are after the jump.

[SATISFY your CURIOSITY and CONTINUE READING…]

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David just emailed me The Celebrity Breast Conspiracy over at (friends) 10 Zen Monkeys, where they try to convince us that there’s a real celebri-boob media conspiracy that makes a whole huge post about celebrity boobies somehow super-justified. Like we care about such petty legitimacy concerns at Fleshbot. Tinfoil bra, anyone?

“Public diplomacy” in Hollywood isn’t exactly an exercise in subtlety. But sometimes, publicists, studio executives, or whoever dreams up these boob-headed propaganda schemes, actually try to trick us by presenting “authentic” incidents of titillation. Which are totally not authentic.

In fact, call us paranoid, but we strongly believe there is a well-established, but never openly-acknowledged, plan among movie marketers and star handlers to manipulate the constituencies of female celebrities. Shocking? Yes.

However, here’s five tabloid examples that make the case.

1. Dead Man’s Chest?

Three franchises compete this weekend over the biggest box office in movie history. Pirates of the Caribbean 3 is the big contender, and suddenly its lead actress starts jabbering about… well, here’s the resulting headlines.

Keira Knightley Wants Bigger Breasts
Keira Knightley Wishes She Had Larger Chest Size
Knightley Not Happy With Her Breasts, Wants Them Bigger
Knightley: ‘I don’t have tits!’

Link.

I mean, at least show Keira Knightley like we do on the ‘bot…

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Arrrgh, there are too many HOT stories to choose among… That’s what I did until 5am last night (along with agonizing over tomorrow’s column) and my whole day/night today: making final selections on Best Women’s Erotica 2008. I have too many good stories. Too many. It’s interesting to see the themes this year; last year it was sex with priests, war/military sex, and fetishes I noticed lots of. This year it’s m-m-f threeways with bi male action (!!), gay male sex fantasies, lots of female submission, female voyeurism, plenty of pegging, nonconsensual and anonymous sex (lots), and more black (Af-American *and* Brit) characters than I’ve ever seen — which is very, very welcome and refreshing. It’s the most diverse selection so far, even with a drop-dead sexy dominant Asian male in the mix. Yummy.

Midnight update: I’m sipping sake and nibbling grapes, still editing the book. In the course, I have discovered and am completely enraptured by the erotic writing of Peony.

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Mired in column and book deadlines, and a massive upcoming post about Maker Faire, posts will be a bit sparse for a few days. First:

* Readers will remember the Chronicle tech writer I got in an internet fight with after SXSW, who wrote about vlogging and called it “vcasts” among other great hits (and sent me intimidating emails when I posted about it). Underscoring the need for embedded tech journalists and tech journies that take proper nouns as seriously as people in 2.0 tech, oops he did it again. Check out the story of Dan Fost‘s misreported Zune sales meme on Business 2.0, via Gizmodo.

* Over on Consumerist we see that Lara is not a porn star: it looks like Texas porn company TVX Films (um, who?) snagged a self-portrait of (then) 14-year-old British photographer Lara Jade and used it on a recent porn cover, without consent or permission. The company was so uncooperative, insulting and all-out rude in response to her requests to please stop it already, that she took her need for help to this Flickr photo post and her DeviantArt page. The company’s super-lame and rude responses to her are in the Flickr post and they also responded in the Consumerist comments — but they’re either not web savvy at all, or just don’t care enough to truly clean up their awful mess, which is still in distribution all over the web. Plus, how about a serious apology? Nope. So porn goes on with a few assholes making a shitty reputation for the many. (thanks, Jackson!)

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