Post Human

I took this photo today at Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #5

Welcome to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, a behind-the-scenes look at my life as a sex writer and all the weird shit that entails. From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies. In RCD #5: I get obsessed with inmates who are looking for love, you can read the first paragraph of my porn novel-in-progress, and what happened when a guy offered me thousands of dollars to promote a sex-related company. Read this week’s newsletter here.

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Why Sex Doll Brothels Won't Replace Real Brothels Anytime Soon

This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.

Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?

Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.

At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.

All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.

In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.

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12 Years Breast Cancer-Free

1 diagnostic mammogram

+ 1 bilateral breast ultrasound

+ 1 stereotactic breast biopsy

= 12 years breast cancer-free

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Anna for August

Love the gender play in this video featuring queer icon Anna Shumate for Playboy. Directed by Brooke James.

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Buck House

Yesterday I went to go check out the Buck House, which was designed by Rudolph Schindler in 1934. According to the LA Times, “The Buck House may be the most beautiful house in Los Angeles.” Previously, I visited Schindler’s own house in West Hollywood, which is phenomenal. What a lucky thing to live in LA.

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Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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Happy Hump Day

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Body Parts

I took this photo in Burbank on Magnolia Boulevard. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #4

I know as a “serious” creative, which I’ve never really considered myself to be, you’re supposed to hate AI, but I had so much fun when I used Meta AI to create my latest newsletter. With prompting, Meta AI made up sex toys and virtual erotic poetry readings and fiction it claimed I wrote. There were some fascinating exchanges between me and Meta AI along the way, too. I also really had fun using Substack’s somewhat limited but whatever AI image generator to illustrate the newsletter. In any case, check it out here and subscribe.

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I Get Email (You Will Die Soon Bitch)

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Books I Read in 2024: Atomic Habits

My god, how did Atomic Habits by James Clear sell over 15 million copies? I really don’t like books like this. A bunch of research gleaned from other sources compiled together with a theory of how you can live your life better without going to therapy. If you think buying a book about habits will solve all your problems, you are sorely mistaken. Pretending humans are animals that can be trained, not intuitive beings, is pointless.

Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #3

Welcome to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, a behind-the-scenes look at my life as a sex writer and all the weird shit that entails. From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies. In RCD #3: What happens at a virtual strip club? Why is my short story called “The Scopophiliac”? Would you or someone you love wear a lip gloss called Pussyhole Pink? You can find the answers here. Don’t forget to subscribe, like, and share.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #14: Cranking the Flywheel

This is part 14 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

What am I working on these days? A good question. When you’re a writer, you tend to have a lot of pots on the stove. Here are a few things I’m doing, may be doing, am going to be doing, should be doing, want to be doing. The point is to generate momentum and get the proverbial word-based flywheel turning.

“A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed.”

In early October, I’ll be attending the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s 2024 Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones Course for Freelance Journalists in New York. From the course description: “While most hostile environment training for journalists deals with ducking crossfire and kidnappers, this course will teach you how to avoid unnecessary peril through preparation and planning before, during and after assignments.” I’m really looking forward to doing this, and I’ll share how it went afterwards.

In late November, I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. From KHN’s website: “The mission of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts is to support established and emerging writers, visual artists and composers by providing working and living environments that allow uninterrupted time for work, reflection and creative growth.” I can’t wait to do this and will report back on the experience when I return.

I’m continuing to post on Forbes.com, where I cover the business of sex. So far this month, I’ve written about the return of Playboy magazine as an annual print publication and what happened when Etsy banned the sale of adult toys on its website. I’ve got stories in the pipeline about strippers, AI smut, and escorts, to name a few.

“In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines.”

I changed the format of my newsletter to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries. “From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies,” pretty much sums it up. It also includes weird pitches I get from publicists trying to get me to promote their sex products. And other things.

Lately, I’ve been writing a new short story. By the end of today, it’ll be two-thirds done, and it’ll likely be finished by Monday or not long after. The main character is a man, and suffice to say it has a pornographic element to it. The entire tale takes place in the San Fernando Valley, which is my Yoknapatawpha County.

“To the sympathetic critics Mr. Faulkner dealt with the dark journey and the final doom of man in terms that recalled the Greek tragedians. They found symbolism in the frequently unrelieved brutality of the yokels of Yoknapatawpha County, the imaginary Deep South region from which Mr. Faulkner drew the persons and scenes of his most characteristic novels and short stories.”

Speaking of porn, I’m working on two books: “a novel set in the adult movie industry and a nonfiction book about the pornography business.” The novel has a male main character, and the nonfiction novel has a female main character who is me. Both are set in the present day. The novel is funny, and the nonfiction book is more serious. The novel will be around 250 pages, and the nonfiction book will be around 400 pages.

This fall, there are a handful of sex-related books coming out, so I pitched a story about them and what it means that they’re all by women and in some ways about the female gaze. I sent that to the Los Angeles Review of Books and will probably pitch it a few other places, as well.

“Last month's New Yorker profile of Anderson revealed that the book is in part a modern-day version of Nancy Friday's 1973 best-selling anthology My Secret Garden. But Want's publisher has "placed off limits" any confessors' erotic fantasies that were too extreme. What happens when the outer limits of female sexual fantasies end up on the cutting room floor?”

Things I’m waiting to hear back on: if a panel I pitched to the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair has been accepted, if any of the six other writing residencies I applied to earlier this year have accepted me, and if I got a writing grant I applied for.

Last year, I read exactly zero books, so this year I made it a point to read at least a book a month. Follow along at Books I Read. The books include fiction, nonfiction, memoir, photography, and graphic novels. So far my favorite has been Victory Parade.

“It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul.”

And, as usual, I’ll be taking lots of photos along the way.

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The Shine

This story was originally published on This Recording in September 2010.

Maybe a year or so ago, or maybe it was closer to two, I got a phone call from Ari Emanuel. In case you’ve never heard of him, he’s a famous agent in Hollywood and the inspiration for Ari Gold, who is played by Jeremy Piven on Entourage. When I picked up the phone, a woman who sounded like she was Asian and maybe in an elevator said, “Will you hold for Ari Emanuel, please?” I said, “Yes,” because that’s what you do when Ari Emanuel calls, or so I assumed. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time. Probably nothing. I was probably wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt with food stains on it. I am sure it was not glamorous.

I can’t remember what Ari said, but it was something like, “You’re the porn writer?” This was not exactly true. I had been writing about the adult movie industry on-and-off for a decade or so. I wrote about porn, but I was not a “porn writer,” per se. I think I said, “Yes,” because it seemed like the easiest answer I could think of. Then Ari started to speak very quickly about people named Mark and Lev and a famous director, and I had no idea who he was talking about or what he was talking about. I listened to him talk on at this speedy clip. I imagined him barreling out of an elevator with his frantic, frightened entourage of small, insignificant people in tow, and him climbing into a large car with blacked-out windows. He paused. I said, “Mark, who?” He said, “Mark Wahlberg.” 

Ari explained that Mark Wahlberg and his production company partner Stephen Levinson, who is at least part of the inspiration for Eric “E.” Murphy, who is played by Kevin Connolly on Entourage, had a development deal with HBO, and they all wanted to make this TV show for HBO about the porn business. The way that Ari told it, they wanted to make it with this famous director, and, Ari said, the famous director, who I had the vaguest connection to on account of knowing one of his siblings, would only do the show if I was the one who wrote it. This seemed quite odd. It was hard to imagine that anyone important in Hollywood would only do something if they did it with me. I was not even fully dressed, or at least not dressed properly. 

The reason Ari was calling me, or he had my number, was that at the time I was represented by Endeavor, which is what Ari’s agency was called before it became William Morris Endeavor. Maybe six months or so before the phone rang, I had sent the first 30 pages of a novel that I was working on to a literary agent there, and he had signed me. The novel was about — well, frankly, it is hard for me to recall now. It was based in Porn Valley, of that I am sure, and I believe it was about a detective trying to find a killer on the loose in the porn industry. My agent thought it was brilliant. 

After Ari stopped talking at me, I got off the phone, and I called up my agent. Ari had been wanting to do a TV show about porn “forever,” the agent said. He was always shouting at people about it, telling people to go out and find him something that he could turn into a porn movie or TV show or what have you. Ari was into porn, from what I gathered. His interest seemed more than professional, to me. It was like a mission — it mattered. My agent got off the phone and called Ari. My agent called me back and said I had to write a treatment for my TV show about porn that I would be writing for Mark Wahlberg and the famous director. So I did. 

Somewhere along the line, I sent an e-mail to the famous director who was maybe going to direct my TV show. I told him what Ari had said. He e-mailed me back and told me to call him. Basically, what Ari had said the famous director had said was not exactly what the famous director had said, although the famous director had said my name when he was speaking to Ari about said project. I felt kind of stupid. It didn’t matter, in a way, in that we kept working on my TV show. The famous director said Ari does stuff like that all the time. The famous director said that he, himself, had done stuff like that too. I guessed that I had forgotten that this is how it works in Hollywood. Like: The way you can tell an agent is lying is if their lips are moving. That sort of thing. 

I wrote the treatment, and I sent it to my agent, and he sent it to Lev, and then I had to call Lev, because Wahlberg was too busy, and I was to pitch the show. This wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. I called Lev, and it was pretty clear that he had not read the treatment. It sounded like he was at a kid’s birthday party, which made talking about a show about porn awkward, what with small children screaming in the background and such. The whole thing didn’t last very long, but it seemed like it lasted forever. It did not go well. In the end, they didn’t make my TV show, and when I finished my novel and sent it to my agent, he said it didn’t make any sense, and after that we stopped working together. And that was that. 

Last month, I read online that James Frey, who wrote a fake rehab book called A Million Little Pieces, had been hired to write the porn movie show that I had failed to make. According to Page Six, "The plot will focus on a giant video company under siege from Internet competitors and a girl from the Midwest whose boyfriend convinces her to move to Los Angeles to become a star." Which I guess is one way to do it. I don’t know if the famous director is attached to the project being written by Frey. Reached by the New York Post, Frey said, “We're going to make a sprawling epic about the porn business in LA. We're going to tell the type of stories no one else has told before, and go places no one has gone before.” Reading that made me want to vomit, partly due to the fact that it wasn’t me saying asinine things to the Post, and partly due to the fact that James Frey is a total tool. 

A couple weeks ago I sent Alex Carnevale, who is the editor of this site, an e-mail. I asked him if he wanted me to write something for the site. He e-mailed me back something like that he would like nothing more, but that he didn’t have the budget to pay me. I said, I’m offering to do it for free. He said something like, great. I sent him a few story ideas. The first one was about porn, and the other ones were about other things. He picked the porn idea first, because editors always do. I said I wanted to write about this dead porn star whose name was Missy. She was really blonde, and she was really beautiful, and she was really tiny. I met her on a porn set 13 years ago. She had this high little voice, and she was married to a male porn star who was having sex with someone else in the same movie, and she had this inarguable angelic quality to her, which is not something you see a lot of in the porn business: angels. She was one of those people you never forget. I think she had that thing Dick Hallorann, who was played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining, called the “shine.” In the movie, Dick says to the boy, “Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind. Say like, if someone burns toast. Well, maybe things that happen leave other kinds of traces behind. Not things that anyone can notice, but things that people who ‘shine’ can see.” Missy had the shine. She kept on making porn movies after I met her. Eventually, she left the business and her husband, and she found God. She told the porn industry’s version of Variety that she “had a mental breakdown and went crazy.” She said, “Lord God and Jesus never left me and now I will never leave them.” Of her time in the porn industry, she said, “I met something that was pure evil in that industry,” and, she said, “I'm having premonitions of the end of time.” In 2008, though, Missy died. She was 41, and she was living alone. Her family said it was an accidental overdose of her prescription drugs. They withheld the news of her death for a month so no one in the porn business would come to her funeral. I think about Missy sometimes. Mostly, it makes me sad. When you’re in the porn business, you have to see the shine amidst the shit. Some people can’t see it, though. There’s a lot of shine if you know where to look, but if you can’t see it, you don’t. 

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Red

Brittney Leeanne Williams’ The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses show at Anat Ebgi is phenomenal. Thru Oct. 5.

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Data Baby 50% Off at Barnes & Noble

My memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, which recounts my 30-year tenure as a research subject in an unprecendented University of California, Berkeley longitudinal study that sought to predict who over 100 Berkeley kids, including me, would grow up to be, is 50% off for Barnes & Noble Book Haul 2024.

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Playboy To Bring Back Its Print Magazine With Annual Edition

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2024.

Playboy’s print magazine is being resurrected. Today, PLBY Group, Inc. announced it will return to issuing a print version of its legendary magazine, but this time around on an annual basis, starting with a February 2025 issue. In March 2020, Playboy stopped producing its 66-year-old print magazine, which had been published since 1953, citing the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic as the reason. Along with reviving the print magazine, the company is relaunching its Playmate franchise with a worldwide search for both the 2024 and 2024 Playmate of the Year and as of this week a newly designed website at Playboy.com.

In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines. In the ’90s, the internet distributed adult content with the click of a button and explicit sexual images became more risque without the limitations that had been imposed upon print publications. Then came a flip-flop. In 2016, Playboy stopped producing nudity in its magazine; the following year, it brought back the magazine’s nudes.

This time around, media veteran Mark Healy will be at the helm of Playboy. His resume includes senior roles at GQ, Rolling Stone, and Men’s Journal. The February 2025 issue will make its debut in conjunction with Big Game Weekend and Super Bowl LIX, which will take place on February 9, 2025, at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. According to Playboy’s latest announcement, “Original content will be produced with a keen focus on embracing the creator economy, partnering with some of the leading creators today to showcase their unique interests,” suggesting the target audience is young and flush with disposal income.

But the big question is not whether consumers will read still Playboy for the articles or the pictorials but whether or not it’s too little too late for an iconic brand that’s taken a beating in the marketplace and in the town square. PLBY Group’s second quarter report was released today, revealing total revenue for the second quarter was $24.9 million. The same period last year total revenue was $35.1 million. That’s a year-over-year decrease of $10.2 million or 29%. Meanwhile, a 2022 Secrets of Playboy 10-part A&E docuseries raised questions about what had really happened at the Playboy Mansion while other former Playmates rallied in support of Hefner.

Regardless of the history, PLAYBOY'S Playmate and Bunny Open Casting Call is underway. For those who aspire to don the bunny ears and tail, they can apply online. Wanna be Playmates and Bunnies must attend a casting call in a nearby city and submit an application with photos. But users of filters beware when it comes to sending your best shots. “Please avoid harsh lighting, skewed angles, and no filters,” the application advises. “The photos you submit can be professionally taken but should remain largely unfiltered and unretouched.” If you get picked to be in the magazine, that might change. But for now, they want to see you fully clothed.

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I Get Email (I Am Required)

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #2

Welcome to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries, a behind-the-scenes look at my life as a sex writer and all the weird shit that entails. From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies. In RCD #2: Why are AI nudes so creepy? Is ethical smut a thing? Is it porn mail or porn male? Read it here. And don’t forget to subscribe, like, and share!

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