Marie Calloway

June 14, 2013

Here’s how out of the loop I’ve been lately: I had never heard of “Marie Calloway” until this week. She became an It Girl in the literary perv world two years ago after publishing some explicit erotic autobiographical stories online.

“Losing Your Virginity” at Thought Catalog
“How To Make Money In London” at Thought Catalog
“Adrien Brody” at Muumuu House

The stories read like journal entries. “Marie Calloway” reportedly submitted the “Adrien Brody” piece as nonfiction, but an editor encouraged her to label it fiction. It’s based on a real fling, however embellished, and you can easily find out the dude’s real name by googling if you care.

In late 2011 the New York Observer gushed over her and Gawker snark-trashed her. Not surprisingly, she got a book deal. Now the book, entitled What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life (no question mark), is out. Some reviews, commentaries, profiles:

“What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life” at Gnash Nosh
“Marie Calloway Pushes The Boundaries Of What’s Printable” at Huffington Post
“25 Points: what purpose did i serve in your life” at HTML Giant
“Ten Opening Paragraphs for a Review of Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life at The Tangential

For what it’s worth, I like the Marie Calloway stories. One common knock is that they’re just dime-a-dozen LiveJournal entries. I disagree. Apparent simplicity can be the result of craft. And I’ve read enough crappy, barely literate LiveJournal entries to know the difference.

Another knock is that the explicit sexual content represents calculated sensationalism. If you’re a 21-year-old female writer, what better way to draw attention and a book deal than to write raunchy stories about sexual encounters with middle-aged men? As a middle-aged man, I confess it totally worked on me. I especially liked the story in which “Marie Calloway” emails a middle-aged male sex blogger to tell him how much she admires his work, confesses she wants to have sex with him, flies cross-country to meet him, fucks him every way you can imagine, begs him to cum on her face then asks him to take photos. For whatever reason, that one really struck a chord with me. But what the hell, I like her writing and admire naked self-promotion.

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Friday Reads

May 24, 2013

Found around the web:

At Forbes: Susannah Breslin takes a pole dancing class at an all-female gym. “We were like a tribe of Amazons, but with more spandex.” Insane lesbian orgy ensues. Not really.

At The New Yorker: Mindy Kaling promotes free kissing, a limited form of free love. “Enduring, committed relationships are wonderful and sacred things. I hope to enter into a really good one at some point. However, kissing new people is also one of the great joys in life, and I believe the two should be able to coexist peacefully.”

At Chronicle of Higher Education: Camille Paglia disses academic scholarship on BDSM. “It is unclear whether the grave problems with these books stemmed from the authors’ wary job maneuvering in a depressed market or were imposed by an authoritarian academic apparatus of politically correct advisers and outside readers. But the result is a deplorable waste. What could and should have been enduring contributions to both scholarship and cultural criticism have been deeply damaged by the authors’ rote recitation of theoretical clichés.”

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From the New York Post: Stuy Town tenants fume over bikini beauties sunbathing in children’s playground. Busybodies at the Stuyvesant Town apartment complex in Manhattan are outraged that young women are sunbathing (OMG!) in bikinis (OMG!!) on the communal lawn. One resident actually wrote “Think of the children!” on a residents website, with no detectable irony. Another told a reporter, “This used to be a very strait-laced community. The sunbathing is tasteless, it’s not very classy, and it doesn’t belong in a mixed residential development.” One heroic resistance leader responded, “This is so ridiculous. The sun’s out. It’s summer. People are going to be tanning.” That’s the spirit! Fight the power! If cute girls can’t lie out in the sun, the terrorists have won.

stuy-town-bikini-sunbather-nyc

Meanwhile, other busybodies are outraged over a beautiful woman appearing onscreen in a Hollywood movie wearing only bra and panties. The director and screenwriter have been forced to “confess” and “apologize” for this “misogynistic” and “gratuitous” moment of beauty.

alice-eve-star-trek-underwear

First, it’s not “misogynistic” to find beautiful women beautiful. Second, have any of those outraged ever actually watched Star Trek? Gratuitous cheesecake was a staple of the original series, often gratuitous cheesecake featuring intelligent, accomplished female characters. There’s no contradiction there except in the minds of anti-beauty fanatics. Third, please no one tell these people about Game of Thrones.

emilia-clarke-bath-nude-game-thrones-s3e8

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Some perv at Mashable noticed that LinkedIn just barred an entire profession from using its social network.

The social network updated its user agreement terms on Monday, adding an interesting clause, which caught the attention of one of our readers. Under a section entitled “Don’t undertake the following,” LinkedIn now includes this statement:

Upload, post, email, InMail, transmit or otherwise make available or initiate any content that: Even if it is legal where you are located, create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution.

A LinkedIn spokesperson contacted by Mashable explains, “In the old [user agreement], we had it covered by saying that one could not use a profile to promote anything ‘unlawful’. However, in some countries, that activity actually is lawful.”

That raises the question, How many other legal professions are barred from using LinkedIn?

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Via Hong Wrong and thousands of other sources comes this photo –

starbucks-vagina-coffee-hk

– accompanied by this angry posting to the Facebook page of Starbucks Hong Kong:

This is my sister’s cuppa from your HKU branch. Fancy your staff not being able to spell an American name like Virginia. Forgiving she has been with every misspelled cup. Her cup was once ‘Virgin’. Every Starbucks experience for her has been coupled with fear and anticipation. But THIS is just UNACCEPTABLE. Starbucks HK, you have to buck up or just not spell your customer’s name anyway. It is a derogatory attitude even if it is unintentional. What do you have to say about this?

I can sympathize with the embarrassed customer, though “coupled with fear” is a bit over-the-top. I can sympathize with the hapless barista too. How many Americans would nail the correct spelling of unfamiliar Chinese names after hearing them once? And I assume that working behind the counter at Starbucks is low-paying drudgery in Hong Kong just like everywhere else.

Because this is the internet, there are sites devoted exclusively to the “funny names on Starbucks cups” phenomenon: starbucks cup love and starbucks spelling and probably others.

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“Love Land” is a sex education theme park on Jeju Island (sometimes spelled Cheju) in South Korea, opened in 2004. Der Spiegel ran a travel piece about the “salacious Disneyland” in 2006, available in English here: Sex Education in Korea: A Phallus Garden in “Love Land”.

Just behind the entrance to Love Land, an acrobatic, oral-sex ensemble greets visitors. It shows a man and two women — one woman has her legs wrapped around the man’s neck and looks like she’s going to break her own neck any minute. The acrobatic threesome is illuminated at night, just like the other exhibits here: the nipple mountain crowned with pink nubs or the sturdy erect penises that rise up from the goldfish pond like a fountain. The sculptures are so explicit you can’t help stopping in front of them with a mixture of disbelief and amusement — even as a jaded Western tourist.

loveland-jeju-island-sculpture

Jeju Island has been a traditional honeymoon spot for South Korean newlyweds since the late 1940s.

During the last few decades, many of these marriages were arranged by the parents of the spouses. The lucky ones might have had a brief chance to meet each other — under the watchful eyes of relatives — before exchanging vows. And then, after their wedding, they were immediately flown off to the south — to Cheju Island. As they got used to the notion of being bonded for life, they spent their wedding night and the following days on the Honeymoon Isle, which thereby also became a kind of “island of sex ed.”

In the evenings, the hotel would offer an entertainment program featuring lap dances and others raunchy or risqué highlights. Its purpose was to help the intimidated, freshly married novices relax — and perhaps to give them some ideas for later.

Love Land fits into this “island of sex ed” theme, though one would imagine that more couples nowadays commence their honeymoons with some sexual experience or at least knowledge.

The Windsor Star website has a gallery of 40 snapshots from Love Land. Most of it strikes me as tacky or silly, not especially erotic, but the visitors all seem to be enjoying themselves immensely.

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Gwyneth Paltrow, Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis

May 7, 2013

People magazine named Gwyneth Paltrow the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World”. Its most recent “Sexiest Man Alive” was Channing Tatum. Meanwhile Mila Kunis has been named the “Sexiest Women Alive” by Esquire, the “Most Fuckable Celebrity” by Details, and the “Sexiest Woman In The World” by FHM. Here’s my question: why always actors? Nothing [...]

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The New Anti-Masturbation Movement

April 26, 2013

New York magazine ran a hot trend piece this month: Why are a bunch of men quitting masturbation? So they can be better men. The article’s research consists almost entirely of browsing the NoFap forum on Reddit, which the article does not link to. The piece is getting much supportive response. Up at The Frisky: [...]

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Topless Girls Reading Books video series

April 25, 2013

Wood Rocket brings whimsy and smarts to a usually crass genre, the porn tube site. And the site produces much original content rather than simply recycling or stealing old porn. My favorite series there is Topless Girls Reading Books. It’s exactly what it sounds like: video clips, mostly around two minutes each, of topless girls [...]

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LA Times runs op-ed, editorial cartoon and poll over condom mandate

April 24, 2013

The LA Times has an op-ed column and editorial cartoon by David Horsey regarding the new Los Angeles County condom mandate for porn shoots. He opens with this unsurprising observation: The new law in Los Angeles County requiring actors in pornographic films to wear condoms seems merely to have pushed the smutty movie industry into [...]

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