This morning I came across an article in Broadsheet on the latest of a long line in products meant to beautify a lady’s intimite parts.  This time, the item in question was “Benetint”, a repackaged liquid blush now meant to rouge ostensibly too pale nipples.  

There was the usual, “it’s empowering” (by the beauty company), and “it’s disempowering” (by the NOW president), but, what most struck me is, such total artificiality is was what I always liked about the naked girl industry.

One of the things I loved about nude modeling and burlesque was that, with relatively little effort, you could make yourself far, far prettier than you had any right to be.  Of course, the illusion is fragile.  Once you unclip your fake hair, un-cinch your corset and wash off your spray on skin, you’re back to the same lumpy, veiny human you always were.  But for those few hours, you’re a goddess.  It’s a very egalitarian vision of beauty, far more so than the elite cannons of fashion, which demand gazelle-like fourteen year olds, or nothing.  But that’s why it’s glamour- the original meaning of which is on par with witchcraft.

During my tour, me and Jen Dziura shared plenty of dressing rooms.  Once, before a burlesque gig, she watched with horror as I used body makeup to erase my areolas, then places the pasties up high enough to just cover the nipple.  It’s a boob job without the surgery, and looks fantastic, though of course utterly impractical for real sex.

If civilian women want to use sex worker trickery to make themselves look better, more power to them.  Though remember, if you want to use lipstick on your nipples, its sexy, but not really sexual.  No man wants a mouthful of paint.

Ivy RedHawks builds his sets himself

Ivy Red: Photo by Aaron HawksI shot with Aaron Hawks a few years ago in San Francisco. I posed in a torturous corset, alternately sprinkled in flour and dowsed in ice water, in Hawk’s freezing cold loft. It was the most brutal shoot I’ve ever done- and I’m insanely proud of the results.

Hawks shoots with film, in room sized sets he constructs himself. His work, darkly fetishistic, is objectifying in the best sense of the word- turning the human body into grist for his disturbing visions.

I’ve never been good at high-art thinky thoughts, so I’ll let this man’s work speak for itself. Check it out.

Moths

Jellyfish Girl

For not always rational reasons, digital art feels like cheating to me. Your eyes ache but your hands don't dirty. There's no final object, no wrangling with coloured mud.

Where crows come from: Art by Jason Levesque Yet, Jason Levesque is one of my favorite artists, digital or otherwise. His work has appeared on the covers of computer design magazines and in international, high art glossies. Dan Savage even had to defend his Dig cover once. Jason's work is a tribute to the eroticism of biology, in all it's wierd, decaying, mucous-ey glory.

If you never thought that scarecrow guts or jellyfish were sexy, think again.

Johnny Depp look a-like: Director Ed Wood failed at everything but failure.Those who cannot do, teach. And those who cannot teach write chipper, angora sweater-obsessed how-to books.

At least that’s the impression you’d get reading Hollywood Rat Race, famously failed director Ed Wood’s guide to being a star. It’s a strange, leering little book, both good natured and cynical, and totally dated by the time it came out in the sixties.

In it, Wood claims that anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood is a Communist (though he thinks Hollywood began before Communism), and brags about his good friend Bela “Dracula” Lugosi. The notorious transvestite also bemoans that boys now look like girls in Hollywood, with their beautiful, beautiful angora sweaters.

The money quote…

Sooner or later you will meet Mr. Sleazy--- probably sooner! He’s got a fast line to convince you and an even faster technique to get your clothes off and get you onto his casing couch. Strange as it may seem, a few of these characters will let you just sat on your back, nude, while they try on your clothes. Your panties, warm with the heat of your body, or your sweater of an expensive, and usually a furry nature, are hot items to them...

That happens at my portfolio reviews ever time.

That's what my mom tells me: The sick-fuck genius of Mr. Wiggles
It’s probably somewhere along the lines of confessing to a social disease to love Mr. Wiggles, but god, I do anyway. Mr. Wiggles is an adorable, fuzzy teddy bear, who love molestation, ultra-violence, and crack. He’s also the brainchild of cartoonist Neil Swaab.

Swaab started his comic strip, Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles, while studying art at Syracuse. He landed a spot in the New York Press shortly before moving to the city. For the next several years, Wiggles reigned supreme on the Press’s pages. Over coffee, Swaab told me that, not liking NYC, he tried his best to ruin his good name. Instead he made his career.

The same editor who hired me at the Press gave Swaab the boot, but Wiggles continues to spread havoc in newspapers across the country, staring in two books in the process.

In between gLettuce negates calories: An Applebees' saladorging on raw bacon and red velvet cupcakes, I’m usually on a diet. And never more so than on book tour, when the enforced sitting around (in the car! In your friend’s suburban apartment!) leads to almost certain extra poundage.

Thus, an obsession with chain restaurant salads.

I’m from New York, and thus never stepped into a chain restaurant- an Arby’s or Applebees- until boyfriends started taking me on road trips. The concentrated deliciousness was overwhelming- as if a whole laboratory of scientists was hired to dowse the food in just the right combination of tastes. Which of course they had.

Equally beloved is the chain restaurant belief that anything (from steak to ice-cream) put on lettuce makes something healthy.

Here’s a list of my three favorite chain restaurants, for salads, on tour. Thank you, chains, for convincing me I am eating responsibly.

1. Applebees. To the road-tripper, Applebees is an oasis, a siren song of gargantuan portions orgasmically described. Their menus are pure food porn. And the salads, torso sized, heaped with delicious fried things. My heart, be still.

2. McDonalds. Not as good as Applebees, but way more frequent. The oriental chicken salad is pretty good- the lettuce preservative-pumped into freshness, and chicken vat-tenderized. Without the dressing, its probably only mildly bad for you.

3. Dennys. Chicken McNuggets atop iceberg lettuce does not a salad make.

Fun? Yes. Factual? Sorta: Sacred Drift, by Peter Lamborn WilsonIf you spend a lot of time reading Middle Eastern history, it becomes pretty clear that there’s a plot afoot.  It’s not to blame the elders of Zion, so much as to clamp a squeaky clean face onto the Islamic Golden Age.  Unless you’re a Middle Eastern studies geek, you probably have no idea about the heretical-Sufism-professing, wine-drinking, boy-fucking, satirical poetry-writing strands that run through the history of Dar Al-Islam.  Are you into the radically anti-authoritarian Bektashi Dervishes of Anatolia?  Dig Abu Nuwas’s perverse homosexual wine poems?

How about this ditty…

“Would that all wine cost a dinar a glass
and that all cunts were graven on a lions brow
so that only the generous would drink
and only the valiant make love”

(Courtesy of Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin)

Of course the Islamic world has just as many misfits and reprobates as Christendom.  And that’s where the work of Peter Lamborn Wilson fits in.  Wilson, a former translator for the Shah of Iran and alter ego of ontological anarchist Hakim Bey, is also the author of two books on the sensual, heretical history of Islam.  Sacred Drift:  Essays from the Margins of Islam, and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, hone in like lasers on the freaks of the Islamic world.  I.e.:  the folks like us.  

Is his history accurate?  Hells no!  Wilson embroiders and overstates to make his point, and even calls his work “poetic history.”  But, as a starting point to recommend the names of dissidents and derelicts, you couldn’t ask for a better guy.  And with that in hand, Middle Eastern history becomes a lot more fascinating.

I remember when the NY Press was cool. Back in college, I was an addict, gulping up my quota of Judy McGuire and Matt Taibbi, Jim Knipfel and Mr. Wiggles. The NY Press under Zaichick and Koyan was all anarchic hilarity, a bitter black ink bomb that finally detonated with a few dozen jokes about the pope’s death.

Many of the old press crew continue at the eXile, Moscow’s alt.weekly above a strip club. You should read it for the Dolan’s hilarious book reviews (he busted the Frey scam years before anyone else), or the classic “90 Reasons to Hate the 90s.”

The eXile is everything Vice tries to be, but isn’t.

No Roof Means all Skylight: Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and GirlDorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl is one of the smartest, most smart-aleck web comics around. Her latest strip sums up the plight of the self-employeed and financially responsible.

Ms. Gambrell is now ignoring the rat race and travelling around Outer Mongolia. God bless her.

If only he were as hot as she is: The Veiled Bride, by Simeon Solomon.I’ll always maintain that Wilde was no homosexual martyr. Thinking his celebrity would protect him, he brought the Marquess of Queensbury’s lawsuit upon himself. Even his “Love that dare not speak its name” speech spoke about an attraction between men that was both chaste and intellectual -- and had no relationship to his dealings with London rentboys.

A much more genuine martyr to decadence is Simeon Solomon, an 1890’s British pre-Raphaelite who’s career was cut short by his repeated arrests for sodomy. The Simeon Solomon research archive keeps his humid, elaborately detailed, lush lipped work this’away…

Commedianne Jen Dziura has a blog, Jenisfamous, which is often a fount of hilarity.  Today's hilarity is actually Jewcy relevent, and ends with this Martin Luther King like comment...

Can we all please just hate each other as individuals? If she had called him a "fucking dick" and he had called her a "dumb cunt," this blog post never would have happened.

 Words to live by.

It's not a bong: Hookah bars just serve tobacco, you drug fiendIn 2003, Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in New York City bars, and, inadvertently, started a rose scented mania.

Hookah bars, since they made most of their money off of tobacco sales, were permitted to allow smoking on premises. And they did! Two years after September 11th, the Arab-owned shisha parlors were booming. They lined Alphabet City, smelling like incense and rose petals and exoticism. After the smoking ban, the hookah bars were packed every night with bridge and tunnelers. There were belly dancers in the bars, and scare articles in the paper, warning that heavens- hookah bars were right next to NYU.

I was living on 10th street then, studying Arabic at the New School. Hanging out at the hookah bars was a great way to practice. I’d spend hours nursing a pipe and drinking milky sahlab, fantasizing that I was just like Richard Burton.

Tobocco is a drug, of course, but hookah takes it’s drugginess to a new level. It gives it a ritualism, a set of paraphernalia that’s expensive and alien. Making a good hookah is a skill. My coauthor John puts bourbon, ice, and milk in the base, to get a thicker smoke. Taking a drag from the pipe causes water to burble up. Thus the English name- hubbly bubbly.

It’s been a long day, and I’m writing this article under the influence of lemon scented tobacco. Plumes of it. Billows.

The NYC hookah bars remain packed, with the prices inching up each month. Nonetheless, I’d recommend trying them. If you’re going to sabotage your lungs, hookahs are a way to do it with near alchemical refinement.

Nasruddin was an ass-man: Nasruddin Hoja was usually pictured with his donkey- who he sometimes rode backwards.Once, on Si’Djeha street in Marrakesh, I tossed a lump of bread at a boy’s chest. He’d been following me all day, offering me his services as a guide and saying he wanted to be my skirt. After six hours of trying to avoid him, I began to point, laugh and throw things. He quickly ran away.

While the usual Middle Eastern harassment got on my nerves, the street name threw me over the edge. Si’Djeha, you see, is but one moniker of a trickster/funnyman who’s spread from Fez to Bukhara, and left his footprints all over Dar-al-Islam.

Nasrudin Hoja, as he’s usually called, is a folk figure in the Islamic world, a heretical mullah that knows neither time nor place nor logic. He hangs around Ottoman coffeehouses, wields arms for the Taliban, and complains to Stalin about those grain shortages. While a lot of his stories are simple word games, funny for kids and sold in collections at Islamic bookstores, other tales are dark and often violent, deeply critical of the powers that be. In What’s the Matter with Islam, Irshad Manji claims there’s no native Islamic humor. Nasrudin Hoja calls this as bullshit.

Here are two Nasruddin Tales...

The Pot (via Wikipedia)

Nasreddin borrowed a pot from his friend. The next day, he gave the pot back to the friend, and also gave him another smaller pot. The friend looked at the small pot, and said, “What is that?”
“Your pot gave birth while I had it,” Nasreddin replied, “so I am giving you its child.”
The friend was glad to receive the bonus, and didn’t ask any more questions.
A week later, Nasreddin borrowed the original pot from the friend. After a week passed, the friend asked Nasreddin to return it.
“I cannot,” Nasreddin said.
“Why not?” the friend replied.
“Well,” Nasreddin answered, “I hate to be the bearer of bad news…but your pot has died.”
“What?” the friend asked with skepticism. “A pot cannot die!”
“You believed it gave birth,” Nasreddin said, “so why is it that you cannot believe it has died.”

Nasrudin talks to the Commissar (via a Lonely Planet guidebook-filtered through my shoddy memory)

Once upon a time, Nasrudin was fired from his job as a mullah in Bukhara, and had to go work on the grain collective. After several months tilling the fields, he received a visit from the Commissar of Wheat Management, who came all the way from Moscow.
“How much wheat, have you grown, comrade Nasrudin?” asked the commissar.
“I’ve grown a reservoir of wheat as big as God’s thumbs”
The commissar puffed his chest. “Foolish peasant! We live in the Soviet republic! There is no god!”
“That’s exactly how much grain there is” Nasrudin responded.

I must admit to being deeply suspicious of the “Anti-Raunch Culture” warriors. I’m reading Pornified now, but all author Pamela Paul seems to prove is that men are, gasp, masturbating. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs is a bit more likable (who doesn’t want to slam Girls Gone Wild Pioneer Joe Francis, both figuratively and literally, in the gut?), but completely lacks subtlety. While Levy insists that she’s not anti-sex worker, she spends less time skewering male pornographers and more those sluts who won’t shut up.

Besides, she claims we can’t like thongs since they come from the sex industry. I wonder how Levy feels about those brothel imports- jazz and tango.

Author Tracy Quan sums up my problems with Levy and co in this Fifth Estate article.

In America, for example, the anti-raunch consensus seems to be that society is going to hell in a hand basket — and college girls are getting rowdier — because sex workers aren’t cowering in their shame-filled closets. Recalling that Vanessa Williams lost her Miss America crown because Penthouse photos had resurfaced, Ariel appears to be nostalgic for the good old days when “being exposed in porn was something you needed to come back from.” Now, to her dismay, being in porn is “itself the comeback.” Though she urges her readers to remember that sex workers are, indeed, working, you get the eerie sense that we’re like black people moving into a previously white neighborhood.

Well said.

Hypnosis by Pastie: Brooklyn's tribute to early animation. Photo by Dale HarrisLittle Brooklyn is one of the lights of New York’s burlesque revival. As gifted a comedian as she is a peeler, Brooklyn’s numbers include a stripping Rosie the Riveter, a pre-Hayes code-inspired black and white clown, and a glittering, disco-ball covered tribute to Abba’s Dancing Queen. I catch up with Brooklyn during a very brief gap in her performance schedule.

Molly: By day you're a corporate animator. What led a girl like you into burly-q?

Brooklyn: The original inspirations that peeked my interested in burlesque/vaudeville were: the Muppet show...oh to have my own theater just like Kermit the Little Rascals...all those episodes where the gang decides to "put on a show."

Tex Avery... Had me titillated those early Saturday mornings, from strip teasing shoes to a-peeling lizards.

Benny Hill, Lucille Ball, Pee Wee Herman, MGM, the list goes on. Fast forward 20 some odd years and I started to discover a variety of burlesque related events going on around me in NY: Ducky Doolittle had her weekly "dirty bingo" at what was then barmacy, the show included two go-go gals who sometimes did little striptease skits.

I caught the Pontani sisters doing their thing at Burlesque at the Beach in Coney Island and was immediately taken with the old school charm. And I had the good fortune of seeing the VaVaVoom Room, which included the three biggest modern influences on me... Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz and Tigger. I loved the entertainment at these events, the humor, the body types and the charm. I loved how I felt and I wanted the opportunity to make other people feel the same way.

Yep, I’m a designer by day and I love my day job just as much. I'm quite lucky to have so many creative outlets. I think both jobs teach me problem solving skills that I can relate to each other.

Molly: Despite being extremely un-lucrative, burlesque is a passion (bordering on addiction) for hundreds of women around the world. What do you think makes the lifestyle so popular?
Peewee's Playhouse: Photo by Dale Harris
Brooklyn: In this oversexed day of celebrity-flesh-internet-porn-etc I cant help but think people are attracted to the slow burn, the tease, the wink and nod. Some come for the humor, some come for the glamour, but everyone comes for the cleverly hidden flesh carefully revealed.

Burlesque also gives people permission to look and laugh at ourselves. The opportunity to see real bodies, and by real I mean thin, curvy, flat, tall…freckles, dimples, stretch marks and all. For ladies to see woman who look like themselves and for men to see what happens to a real body when it hasn't been airbrushed.

Molly: Your acts really embody the two meanings of burlesque (comedy and striptease), and I've sometimes heard you describe your performances as funny rather than sexy. Want to talk more about your use of humor?

Brooklyn: Funny is sexy to me.

Molly: There are enough Jewish ladies in burlesque to make a stage show (Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad). Has being Jewish inspired any of your acts? And would you like to talk about the legacy of Jewish dames in burlesque?

Brooklyn: Of course! Who else but a Jewess from New York would do a burlesque routine to a Richard Simmons workout? You can’t help but do what you know.

I have a soft spot for my mechanic act, cause it was written for my grandpappy – also a Brooklyn Jew. And I am sure my mothers cleaning OCD highly inspired my housewife act. Both acts include faux fan dancing (hubcaps and dirty dishes in place of fans)

The second part of this question opened up a Pandora's box filled with glitter and rhinestones. I am aware of the strong influence American Jews have had in the history of burlesque, playing off our stereotypes as quirky and manic. but I did not have a list of female names offhand who I was sure were in fact of Jewish descent and paving the glittery way. I was doing a little research and one in particular stands out, Fanny Brice “One of America's great clowns.”

Born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1891, she appeared in burlesque and vaudeville, drama, film, and musical revues (including nine Ziegfeld Follies between 1910 and 1936)
But get this line...

She refined her craft as a comic artist, describing herself as "a cartoonist working in the flesh." I have said that very same thing about myself, on account of my “day job”. It’s in the blood I tell you!

Molly: Right now you're running two weekly shows, at Riffifi and Lotus, plus performing constantly around town. Do you have any future plans for Little Brooklyn world domination?

Brooklyn: Ha, I just want to get through tomorrow. One day at a time sister.

Molly: Got any shows coming up?

Brooklyn: Come watch me fight off the Plague of Lice as well as my clothes at KOSHER CHIXXX PASSOVER STYLE: GET LIBERATED. Presented by the 14th St. Y. Thu. Mar 29 (9 PM) at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction 34 Avenue A , New York, NY

They can check out info all about me at www.littlebrooklyn.com and the shows I co-produce with Creamy stevens, Starshine Burlesque at Rififi on Thursdays and Gold Rush Burlesque at Lotus on Tuesdays at www.starshineburlesque.com

Snippy, isn't she?: Dorothy Parker in wax at Madame Tussaud'sIf you’re a certain type of bitter, intellectual female, you like Dorothy Parker. The smart-ass 20's writer is an all ages tonic- consoling you through bad love affairs and high-school unpopularity. Originally born Dorothy Rothschild (not those Rothschilds!), Dottie claimed to have married just to acquire a waspy last name. Without ever offing herself, she made suicide stylish way before Kurt Cobain.

So, imagine my glee when I discovered there was a whole society devoted to resurrecting Dorothy Parker. The Dorothy Parker Society throws drunken parties throughout the year, including the Gin Bowl and Parkerfest! I met president Kevin Fitzpatrick at the NY Comiccon, where he won my heart on his choice of convention sketch. Instead of topless WonderWoman, he wanted St. Dottie in a suit. The Society is also working on returning Dorothy's ashes from Baltimore to New York City. Who wants the provinces as their eternal resting place?

Check out the Dottie Parker Society at www.dorothyparker.com. And, if attending their parties, remember that, even in the 1920’s, Alexander Wolcott got booted for vomiting in the Ming vase.

Remember when Jessica Cutler signed a 250,000 dollar book deal, and when Tucker Max’s smarmy grin was plastered over airport bookstores coast to coast? Well, it seems that 2005’s mania for internet content providers is finally trickling down to those artistic martyrs- comics artists.
Persimmon Cup: Nick Bertozzi's web comic on Act-i-vate. Bertozzi has not one but two books coming out in April.
On Monday, the AP Wire ran a story on Act-I-Vate, the free, daily webcomics blog that’s the coolest thing to come out of Livejournal in years. Full disclosure: I’m friends with two of the Act-I-Vate creators. Ryan Roman shoots photos for Dr. Sketchy’s, and me and Dean Haspiel have been trading one-liners for years.

Says Tobi Elkin on the AP…

ACT-I-VATE is the brainchild of Dean Haspiel, whose pathos-packed "Immortal" appears in weekly installments on the blog. The story chronicles the misadventures of Billy Dogma and Jane Legit, a pair of star-crossed lovers "who don't know how to love each other right," he says. Haspiel's "Fear, My Dear," the sequel to "Immortal," features Billy discovering the eighth deadly sin. "I do super-psychedelic romance comics with a boozer/dame sensibility." These are not your father's comics.

Haspiel's vision for ACT-I-VATE was to create "a space where people can parlay and talk to each other about the comics they're making" in real-time. ACT-I-VATE members include a mix of up-and-coming artists and veterans like Haspiel, Nick Bertozzi, Dan Goldman, Josh Neufeld and Leland Purvis. The members consider themselves auteurs who both write and draw their own comics.

Apparently, Act-i-Vate members have been getting book deals like an FIT dormitory gets herpes- a lot. Dan Goldman, who won my eternal respect for standing up to the security Nazis at Comiccon, is having his graphic novel Shooting War published by Warner Books. Two of Act-i-vate artist Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novels, The Salon and Houdini: Handcuff King are coming out in April.

Providing free content for the digital maw is a noble task, but often a thankless one. It always make me grin when it’s rewarded with cash as well as comments.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Szyk because famous skewering the Axis on paperRuth and Naomi: Szyk's Haggadah now goes for a quarter of a million

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Whether making the desert bloom or fighting Nazis, Szyk's Jewish men were hot.Did you know illustrators used to be big stars? Norman Rockwell could buy a house on his fees from doing one magazine cover. Little Nemo creator Windsor McCay got to trod the boards on the vaudeville stage, just cause of his overwhelming celebrity.

It's like how we let Britney Spears act.

Now, illustrators are mostly underpaid drudges, being rapidly edged out by stock photography. But I  still pine for our lost status.

At the Holocaust Museum, I found another star of illustration’s Golden Age. Arthur Szyk was a book illustrator and anti-fascist, Zionist artist whose work drips with such exoticism, such sensuality and venom, that I’ve got to show it to you now.

SkintimatesStigmaYou're My FlameLate into the night on G-chat, me and artist Genevive Zacconi bitch about our hair and the gallery world in equal measure. Her constant refrain is that very few people understand her conceptual, classically painted art.

So, Jewcy readers, here's your chance to prove your superiority to art world movers and shakers. Tell me what Genevive's work means.

And no, it's not a wombat.

At 24, Lux Nightmare is already on her second career. As a nineteen year old, she was creator and operator of That Strange Girl, one of the first altporn sites (i.e. a site with naked, unconventional-looking models) online. Now, Lux, along with San Francisco vlog queen Melissa Gira, is running the sexuality mega-blog Sexerati. Thanks to the wonders of 2AM g-chat, Lux and me catch up on press, entrepreneurship, and who killed alternative pornography.

Molly: By the time you were 19, you were the CEO of your own porn site. How'd you make the transition from cam girl to adult entrepreneur?
Geeky girls are hot: Lux Nightmare can eat your soul, and your harddrive.
Lux: The tale of my transition from altporn model/cam girl is a sordid story of betrayal, bad business ethics, sex, lies, and adultery—okay, mostly just the first two (and some of the third—it was porn, after all).

Like so many altporn models, I entered the adult industry wide-eyed, naive, totally dedicated to the idea of progressive porn...and completely clueless about things like fair compensation, contracts, and what I was really getting myself into. After about a year in the industry, I started to realize that the woman running the site I was working for was completely screwing me over: I was getting paid less than other models (and doing more work, to boot), and was repeatedly pressured into doing things for free (not to mention getting heavy guilt trips if I ever tried to work with another site: apparently, unbeknownst to me, I was "exclusive" to the site I'd started on.).

I got sick of this shabby treatment pretty quickly, and decided that the best way to avoid shitty bosses was to become my own boss. And so, with a handful of models, some basic knowledge of HTML, and a whole lot of moxie, I set out to change the face of altporn.

Molly: One of the things we both found is that fame, while beguiling, has no necessary relation to money. As the recipient of lots of loving media attention, what do you think press is good for?

Lux : It's definitely true that press doesn't necessarily equal money, but getting press can certainly help with the whole money-acquiring thing. More than anything, press is free advertising. It provides an aspiring artist/writer/businessperson/whatever with access to an audience; what you then do with that audience is your call. When I was younger, I mistakenly thought that one big press push would leave me set for life (or at least a couple of months)—what I now realize is that press is a mere window of opportunity, one that closes pretty quickly if you don't take advantage of it.

Getting lots of press functions similarly to paying for a lot of advertising: the more people hear your name, the more they learn to associate you with whatever it is that you're doing.

Molly: What lessons can businesspeople learn from the altporn world?

Lux: Don't be afraid to question the status quo: before altporn, a lot of people assumed that porn stars looked a certain way because they had to—that no one would be interested in porn that presented an alternative look. Clearly, altporn proved that idea to be very wrong.

The fact that something hasn't already been done isn't a sign that it shouldn't be done.

Molly: Despite Suicidegirls’ omnipresence, you've written in Sexerati that altporn is dead. What factors led to its collapse? And why are altporn pictures of men such an unmitigated failure?

Lux: I got some flack for declaring altporn to be dead: to a lot of people, altporn is still a thriving industry, with VividAlt and Burning Angel regularly putting out movies, and Suicide Girls still chugging along. I don't see that as altporn, however. At its core, altporn was about independent porn producers creating pornography that was wholly unlike anything being put out by the mainstream: porn that challenged standards of beauty, porn that dared to present a wide range of body types, porn that questioned common conceptions about sex and sexuality.

Altporn thrived because it was cheap and easy to create a website—far cheaper and easier than to, say, create a zine (which, I suppose, would have been my path if I'd been born about ten years earlier). There wasn't much financial risk in me creating a website (and there was the potential for a lot of payoff), so I didn't have a lot of qualms about taking a leap and doing something different. That's no longer the case, however; an increase in fees and regulations (thanks to Visa/MC and your friendly, anti-porn government) have made starting an adult site a complicated, expensive process, something which, not surprisingly, acts as a pretty big deterrent to wannabe indie porn producers.

To be fair, there are still some good altporn sites in existence (No Faux and Veg Porn immediately spring to mind)—but they're sites that began back when I was still working in porn. New sites are pretty few and far between, and they usually have a different back story (and better business sense, and more start-up cash) than I did back when I started my site.

The men issue is one I've often wondered about, and it's not quite something I've been able to answer to my satisfaction. I think it's a combination of a few factors: straight girls aren't (usually) raised to think of porn as something that's accessible to them, so a lot of them don't even think to look (or pay) for it, and altporn is too "straight" to really attract a gay audience.

There's also the fact that no one's really invested all that much money or effort into producing porn of boys—pretty much across the board, they've always been tacked on as an afterthought, a nod to equality. If someone actually cared enough (or was independently wealthy enough) to invest a lot of time and money into really trying to create good, heavily marketed, thoughtfully produced porn of boys, it might actually be successful. I just don't think there's anyone really willing to jump beyond the assumption that girls are the cash cow of porn and actually try to figure out how to really make good porn of boys.

Molly: Care to talk about Sexerati, and its sinister plans for the future?

Lux: I started making porn because I wanted to have a conversation about sexuality: to question society's assumptions about what's sexy, about how we have sex, about how we think and talk and write about sex. Porn was a good way to begin the conversation, but after a while it started to feel too limiting -- it wasn't a broad enough medium to really support the conversation I wanted to hold.

Enter Sexerati, a blog I co-run with Melissa Gira (another altporn expat). Melissa started the site in 2005, and—after a whirlwind week of bar hopping, blogging, and bonding in San Francisco last December— invited me to come aboard earlier this year. Sexerati picks up where porn left off: it's smart talk about sex, culture, and everything in between (with a bit of tech savvy and snark thrown in for fun). With a whole lot of smart posts and a hot video podcast ("The Future of Sex," put out weekly and hosted by Melissa), we're aiming to become the source for smart commentary on sexuality.