1) I was interviewed last night for a piece on You Are Here, a slice-of-life radio program that airs on 88.9 WERS in Boston! The topic for the program was the economics of porn, and I somehow got called as a person who knows about this stuff! No word yet on when the show will air, but it should be available online as a podcast after the fact, so you can all hear my melodious tones whether you live in Bahston or naht.
2) ZOMG I saw the pictures from Natasha Gornik and they’re SO rad! Can’t wait to show them to you when they’re ready! Probably next week sometime. Don’t hold your breath, but do get excited!
3) A tidbit: I work for a book publishing company during the day, and I really love it. One of the big publishers. We’ve got a billion different imprints (ok, not really a billion, but a whole lot) that publish different types of books, and I am in the imprint that does sci-fi, fantasy, westerns, mysteries, and romance novels. Basically all the mass market paperbacks. Lately, after the massive success of Fifty Shades of Grey, we’ve been doing a lot of erotic romance. We spend a good amount of time around the office making fun of these: their covers, their titles, their usually-very-bad writing, etc.
Well, today, in a meeting, the title of one of these got brought up and we riffed on it for a while, giggling about variations of the title that were more and more explicit. Needless to say, I felt right at home in this conversation, so I went on making randy jokes with my coworkers for a while. The original title is quite explicit in itself, so none of us were taking it “too far,” or so I thought. But then the girl next to me started loudly vocalizing how the original title was “Gross.” She asked, “Who would read that? Ew. Disgusting.”
We all shut up and continued the conversation in another direction to make her more comfortable, but I was frankly appalled. Ok, yes, the conversation had gotten very sexual in nature for a work meeting, but the subject matter at hand was an erotic romance book with a dirty title. We were hardly going far off the rails by joking about it. But how do you get to be an adult, and especially an adult who works at this book company, for this imprint, and be so utterly grossed out by discussions of sex? The conversation had something to do with, shall we say, the depth of penetration (hahaha, fuck euphemisms!), and this woman seemed to be totally disgusted by the idea. I wanted to turn to her and say, “What, are you trying to tell me that when you’re going at it, you’re like, ‘No, please, not so deep! That’s gross!’?” Obviously that would have been way over the professional line, but seriously. GROW UP. Everyone in that room has sex, and hopefully enjoys it. Why is it gross to talk about something we all do?
Sometimes prudery astounds me.