It’s time to return to an occasional series I’ve subtitled ‘Doing it so you don’t have to’ - this time round inspired by Fox ‘reality’ show ‘My Bare Lady’.
I don’t like TV much and I abhor Rupert Murdoch so watching his take on porn isn’t high on my list of priorities, but when iTunes offered me the first episode of ‘My Bare Lady’ for free, I decided to take a peek.
The set-up is simple (because it’s reality TV - not entertainment for Nobel laureates). Every reality show is a version of the Stanford Prison Experiment, dumbed down till people who think ‘24′ is a realistic look at the struggle against terrorism can understand it. This one takes four porn stars performers and gives them three weeks to become classically trained actors.
The show then humiliates them by making them fake orgasms and takes great pleasure in showing off the clear heels, mini-skirts and hair extensions they’ve all worn to a Shakespearean audition.
Three weeks isn’t enough of course. In London it takes about three years to be considered barely adequate, but suits a reality show packed with dramatic failures followed by a pat happy ending. The title, a riff on ‘My Fair Lady’ which was itself a take on ‘Pygmalion’, makes the premise clear - these sluts are going to be saved by honest theatrical work. A parable filmed for the congregation of Wal-Mart.
The first, free, show covers the selection process and Fox scores points immediately. I’d expected a group of actresses who’d been topless on Cinemax pretending to be in porn in return for shot at a staring role on a major network show. Instead we get real pornsters. A coked out Mary Carey (that might be unfair - real alcoholics have no speed control and her rambling might just be the Red Bull leaving her system), a functionally illiterate Sunset Thomas and Gia Paloma - who you don’t instantly know is a tranny only if you’ve never seen a six foot woman with an adams apple, no hips and hands like spades before.
The show then humiliates them by making them fake orgasms and takes great pleasure in showing off the clear heels, mini-skirts and hair extensions they’ve all worn to a Shakespearean audition. All of this is accompanied by bow-chika-bow-wow music in case you’ve forgotten what these ladies do for money.
Sunset Thomas tells us she thinks Shakespeare’s a woman and we’re given glimpses of the wannabe thespians ‘esteemed director’ who turns out to be Christopher Biggins - a fat Brit who does a lot of light-comedy on the BBC. Fair enough, compared to Michael Ninn, Christopher Biggins is Shakespeare.
After much more bad acting (Spoiler Warning) Sasha Knox, Kiersten Price, Chanel St. James, Nautica Thorn make the cut and fly to London. We’re given a chance to laugh at Chanel’s Beverly Hillbillies lifestyle - pink luggage wrapped in clear plastic? 100% class - and encouraged to root for Sasha Knox as the-girl-next-door (who your dad might be banging). Then the troop arrive in London, the catfights start, and the show devolves into ‘The Real World (fucking) London.’ Enjoy.
It’s fun to see Fox forgetting to obscure ‘Wicked’ and ‘Club Jenna’ logos, and sad to see another show limit its view of porn to a pre-1995 world when video was king. If they’d gone after web-based performers they would have gathered a smarter bunch of people less easily portrayed as victims. You can’t cast a show like that by phoning Club Jenna’s PR though.
Will ‘My Bare Lady’ feels be a hit? Not if watching pornsters not doing porn is as boring as watching athletes not doing sport is, and not if women who look best digitized cease to remain desirable when all the plastic’s on display (Chanel St. James looks almost animatronic). On the other hand it’s cheap TV, it’s packed with almost explicit shots from porn sets, and Fox can riff on it till the end of time (’My Bare Lady 2′, ‘My Bare Lady: First Night’, ‘My Bare Lady: Loves Flava Flav’…)
Worth watching if only to demonstrate why being in porn, being famous and crossing over are all still such different things.
This best of the sex blogs from the bloggers who blog them.
This Week’s Picks The Other Side of Hotwifery (http://junohenry.wordpress.com)
“Since he had been so cavalier about it prior to my ever actually going through with such an event, I had given almost no thought to how it might affect him.”
The Blender (http://radicalvixen.com/blog)
“You want to pick me? Did I win a contest?”
Meeting in a Car - part one (http://emergingontheotherside.blogspot.com)
“His tongue teased hers, and her lips teased his in retaliation”
Journalist Jeff Wozniak asks Hillary Scott if she can squirt. “I can piss,” she replies, “and make sounds like I am coming. So yeah, I can squirt.” - via Lukeisback.com
Some of you may have noticed that the latest trend in adult industry copying is copying Digg. The idea is that instead of posting lists of links to photo galleries as pioneered by the original Thumbnail Gallery Posts, visitors submit links to galleries themselves and then edit the submissions by voting on what they like most.
This is a shitty idea.
The jizz-bizz is know for ethics that’d make a politician blush and one of the biggest problems faced by all TGP’s is fraudulent links. Webmasters love to bait-and-switch, re-routing links in order to steer users to suit their ends. Pop-ups are another well known problem and to maintain the quality of their sites TGP owners spend hours screening links.
User submitted content will have to be screened by readers. While at Digg that’s an editorial process, for a porn site most of the editing will involve trawling through spam, pop-up graveyards and images that would make a butcher puke.
So we’ve tried to be a little smarter at TGP.
TGP - which now stands for ‘Team Gallery Post’ - takes the user submitted content idea and voting but skirts the problems that causes by hosting the content in a central location. That means you don’t have to worry about clicking links that take you to the wrong place and you don’t have to worry about pop-ups.
As a webmaster, model, exhibitionist, publisher or blogger exploiting TGP simply requires you to upload your photos and information. You don’t have to build webpages and you don’t need an affiliate program to promote your stuff (or yourself all you camera-phone exhibitionists). If your content’s popular you’ll win lots of votes and get promoted to our frontpage and RSS feed. The cover of Time is then just decades away. Use it for fun, business, or as a way of making money. Affiliate links are no problem and thus you can get paid cash for converting users sent directly from TGP’s pages.
The only thing TGP is missing right now is submissions. We’re in beta - which means some stuff is going to break, and we need a few brave and patient pioneers to use the site and break it some more. I don’t want to shout too loudly until we’ve had a few days to see what happens. Hence this personal invitation to try our new stuff out for yourself. Upload, vote, and comment away. There are only a few hundred thousand people watching. Interested?
The best of this weeks blogs by the bloggers who blog them.
This Week’s Picks 6 weird things about me (http://hard-and-fast.blogspot.com)
“I’ve masturbated to completion more than 13,000 times.”
Polygamy, chastity, and sexual pragmatics (http://www.realadultsex.com)
“Lest you think the “sister-wives” could always take matters into their own or each other’s hands…”
What a woman wants (http://junohenry.wordpress.com)
“Tell me about the couple who would have you fuck the wife, and the husband watch.”
Mr. Sugasm Himself My Bare Lady (http://sugarbank.com)
“…companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.
Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.”
That means making an official statement about any link on your website or blog which you can get paid for.
This isn’t new law, just a clarification of the law as it stands. It means tactics to make ads look like content could be illegal in the US. Review sites, ‘friends’ lists and ‘advice’ will all need to be labeled as advertising.
Interesting times…
DISCLOSURE: This post was brought to you by the Federal Trade Commission
Shortbus, John Cameron “Hedwig” Mitchell’s new movie and Hollywood’s latest attempt to marry explicit sex and entertainment, has garnered mixed reviews in the UK. In the US it was universally loved and at Cannes it received a standing ovation. All of that’s pretty easy to explain.
American society’s still prudish enough to think any glimpse of cock is a blow for the counter-culture. The French applaud anything which suggest US culture is reaching sexual maturity, and the UK loves and loathes the US in such perfectly equal measure its citizens consume and deride all things American without thinking.
I haven’t seen the movie having ditched an invitation to the premiere with a friend, and failed in an aborted attempt to catch up later when the gang of women and gay men who’d arranged the tickets called me too drunk to travel an hour before showtime.
Having decided I’ll never see the thing I have been catching up on the reviews and I’m increasingly bothered by the number of them which state “This isn’t pornography because it’s about more than simple arousal”.
Who said arousal was simple? Arousal is porn’s only task and most of it fails to clear the hurdle. If Shortbus is capable of arousing audiences and making them think that doesn’t mean it’s not porn. It mean’s it’s good porn.
A while ago I reported hearing from people who should know that Playboy was making plans to buy AVN. As I heard it the deal was effectively done.
Now the same people who seemed so sure are backing off the story and Luke Ford (who’s listened to by the movie folks - despite their often genuine claims to hate his guts) has published an apology.
I won’t apologize, it goes against my Klingon upbringing, but I will say I have less confidence in the deal going down than I did. It’s not going to happen.
My guess is that after some initial interest Playboy discovered AVN’s not the cash-cow they imagined, or perhaps wiser heads prevailed and realized magazine publishing’s not the future.
…cuts through the saccharine sentiment of the season cleaner than a bullied teenager with a machete
I normally avoid double-posting items which have been covered at bigger blogs (like ‘World of Carp’ and ‘Furniture Inquirer’) but this video was sent to me personally and cuts through the saccharine sentiment of the season cleaner than a bullied teenager with a machete. Enjoy.
I don’t play poker but I do like cards. If anyone has £10 to spend and the desire to make me happy, invest in this new set of playing cards by Lascivious, Londons hip panty manufacturer, featuring design and illustration from some of the UK’s finest new talent (with special props to David Foldvari of ‘we-went-to-school-together’ fame).
The illustrations are pan-sexual and range from tame to ‘wood’. They’re universally beautiful and doubtless this deck will become collectible. At £3 for an unboxed set they’re cheap to the point of stupidity. I’ve already invented an interesting twist on snap involving this deck and a willing partner but, I’m deviant so what did you expect?
Seth Finkelstein "Well, I can’t prove a negative, but it’s hard to see the trademark dispute being treated as any sort of secret or private matter. If it were the cause, Xeni Jardin could just...…" on Violet Blue [more]
B&K "The author, real name Wendi Sullivan, did not warn the actress, it appears, but did brag to friends that she was going to do this. Wendi has pro-bono legal representation, and the actress could not...…" on Violet Blue [more]
Tom B "I would have thought that if it was the full reason Boing Boing took the action they did they’d be public about it as their stance on copyright/etc. seems to be their rallying call. Oh well....…" on Violet Blue [more]
Seth Finkelstein "While for a while I thought the trademark case might indeed be the reason, it doesn’t hold up on further investigation. The “unpublishing” ; took place late July? August?...…" on Violet Blue [more]
rich "I’m confused - why wouldn’t the dissimilar industry clause kick in and allow one Violet Blue who was a writer and another who was a sex performer?…" on Violet Blue [more]
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