January 2009
If Dating Were Like Business
patriciahandschiegel:
I’m not sure how it is for other women entrepreneurs but dating for me and most of my friends who own start-ups is usually tough. It got me thinking. What if dating were handled more like a business deal? Tonight, because I am so overworked I can’t sleep, and so overtired I feel slap happy, here is what dating would look like if it were based on how I handle most of my...
Anaïs Nin's website inspires Sony e-reader...
From Crain’s New York Business:
Women’s erotica fan Mireya Orsini discovered the appeal of e-books when she was stuck at home with an extended illness and unable to get to a bookstore
A link on the Web site of classic erotica writer Anaïs Nin led the legal secretary to Ellora’s Cave, a popular publisher of erotic romance novels in the e-book format.
The books were cheaper than...
Get Known Before the Book Deal by Christina Katz
Actually, an interview with Christina Katz:
Is there a single most important thing authors need to do to build a platform?
When you think about the fact that about 500 books are published each day in this country, you realize that writing a book isn’t going to set you apart. So, the first thing you need to know is what makes you and your expertise unique and communicate that. If you don’t know...
“It wasn’t hard to find the people who led me on this inward journey. I met...”
– The Other Side of Desire author Daniel Berger, at Powell’s
Porn, feminism, and me in the East Bay Express →
Bussel’s transformation reflects a larger paradigm shift in feminism and pornography. Once the domain of prudish, anti-smut crusaders like Andrea Dworkin, the feminist movement has given way to a generation raised with Good Vibrations and Internet porn. Yesterday’s forms of exploitation are now considered hip and progressive — a woman who lands a strip club gig to put herself through...
“Brother Rickman, for example, was a man who knew how to comment. He was concise...”
– Kyria Abrahams, in her hilarious forthcoming memoir I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing (thank you, Amazon Vine!)
“Rachel — you slay me. Two seconds before I shot this, you picked up your...”
– Stacie Joy, on my favorite photo from our hotel erotica book trailer shoot.
My last Dating Drama column for The Frisky →
For what it’s worth…wouldn’t have gone out with this if I’d known it would be the last one but it’s what I had. I will still be writing (I hope!) for The Frisky, but not the Dating Drama column, which is really okay. I love the site but dredging up my personal life every week is good in some ways, but challenging to my dating life. We shall see. Now I can write about...
Oh Hells Yeah We Did! Obama t-shirt photo essay →
via Crucial Minutiae
"Shiksa Means 'Awesome,' Right?" →
Jennifer Wright at Jewcy:
Here are words I recall using and largely mispronouncing within the first five minutes of meeting his parents which caused everyone’s eyes to widen with horror “kibbitz, goyim, bupkes, tref, mensch, putz, chutzpah, mitzvah.” If I could have found a way to incorporate all of those words into one sentence, I would have. I also proposed a toast “to Israel” which caused my...
Humpday and "beyond gay"
Who do I have to fuck to get to watch this movie? Seriously, already. I’d do it, too.
From TheStar.com:
While it is often very funny, Humpday isn’t an exploitive film by any stretch of the imagination and it doesn’t denigrate homosexuality. What was most revealing to the actors and the director was how much the film challenges homophobic fears that somehow people can be...
Above the Law on my alternative to lawyering... →
Hilarious, especially cause they redacted the nipple on the cover of my book Dirty Girls, as shot by Merkley??? Wait til they see the book trailer for Do Not Disturb. Sorry, I will shut up about it soon, I’m just really excited. Also wish I could stay in a hotel room every weekend, it was SO freaking nice to be wasted on champagne, which I never am, and get to pass out in the comfiest bed...
A Defense of First-Date Sex →
By the awesome Diana Vilibert at Marie Claire, responding to another Marie Claire blogger, Rich Santos:
You know, I don’t think I want to date a guy who pats himself on the back when he finally wins the “prize” of having sex with me. Newsflash: women like to have sex, too. We don’t begrudgingly disrobe after you’ve passed a series of tests during a...
Press from my former employer
Gotta say, I honestly think I’m best known for my working writing for, uh, The Village Voice, but that’s cool. Our sex blogger calendar got some buzz in Bonnie Ruberg’s Click Me column, with a little blurb about all of us. (For the record, I think Bonnie’s awesome and am a fan of her writing, just found that strange wording.)
Sad that I still cannot read Tess’s blog...
News flash: Blogs are for linking
Yes, we all have Google, but it’s more than a little messed up that this Greg Mitchell Huffington Post post links to his own book on Amazon, but not to the New York Times Magazine cover story on female desire he’s writing about (and including an image of the cover). WTF people? How hard is it to add one little link. I’ll go ahead and do it for you. Cause, you know, it’s...
Elizabeth Spiers interview by Mike Geffner
Read the whole thing here
Mike: How long have you been interested in gossip? And what makes good gossip and good gossip writing? Spiers: I was never interested in gossip personally. (I assume you mean celebrity gossip.) Gawker was like any other publication—it has an audience and it’s designed to cover a specific range of topics. Gossip just happened to be one of them, so I learned what I...
Humpday sold to Magnolia; VOD first, then...
from Gaywired:
Magnolia Pictures won the bid for writer-director Lynn Shelton’s low-budget indie Humpday. The dialogue heavy flick features winning performances by Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Joshua Leonard (The Blair With Project) as old friends who drunkenly decide to star in their own amateur gay porn to win a contest. As the shoot draws near, the two friends humorously delve...
Sex Sells, But Who's Buying? →
The lovely Emily Farris quotes me and a bunch of other people in the “sex industry” about the economic impact on our livelihoods.
"Why I'm Selling My Virginity" by Natalie Dylan →
When I learned this, it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation, and turn my virginity...
“Most impressive is the generosity with which Bussel and his wife Melanie now...”
– (I corrected “horrified” from “horrifed” though, just can’t bear to see that)
Piece on my grandfather and his memoir in Eugene Weekly
The Playgirl Pose by J.R. Taylor →
If you were a woman in a seedy Manhattan bar during the summer of 1997, you might have been approached by a smooth operator who seemed overdressed. He’d sidle up next to you, casually notice your presence, and politely get your attention. “Excuse me,” he’d say. “What do you think of this tie? I’m thinking about wearing it for my Playgirl shoot next week.”...
“This week, the British press has been writing about a Moscow expat lawyer,...”
– from The Moscow Times
Her ongoing novel is here.
Best Women's Erotica 2010 CFS by Violet Blue
I don’t know why, but I couldn’t seem to finish the stories I planned to submit to the last two years’ Best Women’s Erotica anthologies, both of which are stunning. This year, I have a perfect (imo) story. Fingers crossed!
Guidelines from Violet Blue, via Erotica Readers & Writers Association
Call for Submissions Best Women’s Erotica 2010 Editor: Violet Blue ...
What do you eat on a first date? →
Obama Presidential Suite at Fairmont Chicago
From Hotel Chatter - Obama Presidential Suite at Fairmont Chicago:
The Presidential Suite will feature an illustrative montage of the incoming President’s life and the 43 Presidents prior, displayed in chronological sequence throughout the suite, along with various Obama memorabilia, including campaign buttons, newspaper headlines, and seals of the various offices President-elect Obama has held...
“When I was in LA, I had about four Lohan sightings. Seeing Lohan was always a...”
– “Lindsay Lohan, Meet My Shrink” by Jessi Klein (miss her shows in NYC, though that feels like a bazillion years ago, ah Rififi…)
"What if Judd Apatow Was a Woman?" by Karina...
Interesting piece on women at Sundance and Humpday (I really must must see this now!) by Karina Longworth at The Daily Beast:
This scenario may sound like prime grist for the Judd Apatow factory, and as far as it’s hilariously raunchy and also sincere and bittersweet, it is. But there are two things that set Humpday apart. Shelton shot the film without a formal script, putting her actors through...
“Secularizing its message allowed the religious right to repackage repression as...”
– Best Sex Writing 2009 contributor and Sex in Crisis author Dagmar Herzog at Utne Reader; read the whole thing for the bit on “Christian vibrators, Christian clit-ticklers, Christian jelly rings” with cool illustration by Koren Shadmi).
Hip-Hop Magazine No Longer Accepts Ads for Lewd... →
Interviewees needed: Do you prefer sex in the...
That’s pretty much what I want to know: Is sex better at a certain time of day? Or does it depend and if so, on what? I’d love to hear your answer and why (and if you have a good story to go with it), along with your name, age, and occupation to rachelravenous at gmail.com by Saturday at 10 pm EST. Feel free to reblog, it’s for my column at The Frisky.
As for me, I’m...
“Men: If you want to get some action, it’s time to take some action. Maybe you...”
– Ian Kerner as quoted in “9 Ways to Reclaim Your Sex Life,” Foxnews.com
Okay, I don’t have any kids or a significant other and I live in a pigsty of an apartment (trust me). But still…helping around the house is not hot in and of itself to me. I feel like this is one of those...
I'm a victim of intercest with Emily Farris →
She so rocks, at Scanner, at Casserole Crazy, and IRL. Can’t wait to read her article about me and Cupcake Take the Cake in SXSW World!
Alcoholics, sexaholics, shopaholics →
Laura Miller on America Anonymous by Benoit Denizet-Lewis and The End of My Addiction by Olivier Ameisen, interesting reading because both come at addiction from very different angles (with different aims).
The Rumpus interview with Margaret Cho (by Stephen...
I’m so loving The Rumpus. NYC launch party February 5th
Here’s the interview, which is also where I got the above photo:
Rumpus: But with your humor, and especially in your book I’m The One That I Want, there’s a lot of not funny. There’s a lot of sad.
Margaret: Yeah. There’s a lot of really awful and sad. But then I think that brings what is funny more quickly into focus. It’s...
Six-Word Memoirs from SMITH on Love and Heartbreak →
I have one in this book too but can’t remember what it was. Will find out as soon as I get my copy!
However, and I say this hesitantly cause my friends are the editors, but still - I find it highly disturbing that in the latest issue of O. several six-word memoirs appear, uncredited, from the book and apparently these t-shirts with the published memoirs also don’t get bylines. Is it...
Fox News as a verb!
How much do I hear this plug of my movie date column from Tom Miller at YourTango? I should try to use “Fox News” as a verb sometime myself!
Rachel Kramer Bussel, ubiquitous and intimate as always, writes for The Frisky about the choice of taking in a movie your first date. She’s fer [sic] it and Fox Newses the idea (i.e. using a “fair and balanced” approach but...
“I would like the image better if Obama was wearing no shirt and that line was...”
– Susannah Breslin at The Frisky on the awesome Obama Ms. magazine cover (that some feminists not only find not awesome, but offensive, because, like, “Women First” - I don’t have time right now to get into the umpteen reasons Siskin’s The Daily Beast piece horrified me):
Best/Worst cities for dating
Via Emily Farris at Scanner, who laments that she just moved to Kansas City! She likes bearded guys. I have been kicking around the idea of tackling the age-old, “Is New York a horrible city for dating?” topic for my column at The Frisky, so maybe now is the time. If you have a strong opinion one way or the other, write me at rachelravenous at gmail.com
I moved to NYC when I was 20,...
Craigslist prostitution arrest in Des Moines
from The Des Moines Register:
Investigators say an Albany, N.Y., woman who placed an advertisement on Craigslist for “erotic services” offered to have sex with an undercover Des Moines officer for $150. Shameeka Huber, 31, was arrested Monday at the Econo Lodge Inn and Suites, 4755 Merle Hay Road. Police charged Huber, who allegedly used the pseudonym Alexus, with...
Nominate Cupcakes Take the Cake for Best Food... →
There are also tons of other worthy nominees/categories. In case you need it, we’re at http://cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com - deadline is 10 pm EST Tonight!
To Movie Date or Not to Movie Date? by me at The... →
Yes, I love movie dates, even though I’m apparently in the minority.
