Of Bulwer-Litton and Darwin

The following was forwarded to me by a writer/editor friend, to whom it was forwarded by her mother (a former English teacher). I haven't shown it to my mother (also a former English teacher) yet, but I wonder if she'll laugh, cry or despair when I do.

For the record, I laughed ... before checking my own creative endeavors and falling into despair.

All is lost!!!! Number 14 had to be the result of a math test gone bad. Number 8 was so good, it bore repeating. As we age, we will need to learn to speak another language, and it won't be at all poetic.

Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one ofthose boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes aroundthe country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement likea Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another cityand Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

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What’s Past is Prologue

Trying not to look back in rancor.

This is the third time I’ve written this column. It’s not the third time I’ve started, written a few paragraphs and then decided to take another tack. It’s the third time I’ve written an entire full-page screed and then discarded the whole mess and started over. That doesn’t happen to me very often (although, judging by a few printed faux pas in the past, it probably should happen more often than it does).

I’m one of those writers who writes because she can’t not write, and so-called "op/eds" are among the most enjoyable — if sometimes challenging — things I do every month. I took a page from my father’s book long ago and decided everyone is entitled to my opinion, and I think editorial commentary often brings out the beast … er, best … in me. It certainly keeps my mind agile.

This column has proven to be the most challenging to date. How does one encapsulate 100 issues chronicling the birth of an industry? It isn’t easy, especially since the industry progressed from infancy through childhood and into an awkward adolescence (in which it remains, and probably always will) within a few short years.

For about nine years now, AVN Online has documented the development of the digital side of the adult industry. I think the magazine has done an admirable job. It’s interesting to skim through the morgue (that’s what we media types call a library of back issues) and see how the industry and the magazine have evolved. They have grown in ways both predictable and surprising. It makes me wonder: When future archeologists uncover AVN Online’s morgue (by then, probably worthy of the other meaning of the term) what will they infer about the industry it covers? Will they see it as a bunch of yahoos determined to engage in unadulterated chicanery, a group of victims of political and societal hypocrisy and senseless oppression, a small-but-intense army fighting a sometimes misguided battle for personal liberties, or what? Depending upon how things shake out between now and then, the digital adult entertainment industry’s history may be viewed as a seminal moment in the development of technology and tolerance, or it may be relegated to the “tempest in a teapot” section of history’s footnotes. Depending on the direction of mankind’s next move, industry denizens could be either heroes or villains.

As an industry, adult is a little of both now. There unquestionably are some episodes and people in which the industry should take pride. For example, if the rest of society would just give credit where it hates to admit credit is due, the adult industry would receive at least a few pats on the back for its rapid proof and deployment of new technologies and its efforts to curtail child abuse and prevent children from accessing hardcore material online. (Unfortunately, some bad apples continue to spoil the barrel in the latter two areas, and that reflects badly — and very publicly — on everyone else.) On the other hand, there are some individuals and business practices everyone should hope never to see again. I’ll leave the names out of it, but among the business practices that immediately spring to mind are credit-card “cramming,” affiliate-commission shaving, wholesale intellectual-property theft, unhealthy competition and other willful subterfuge. (Seriously, people, there’s enough revenue to go around for those who are willing to work for it. There’s no need to steal from each other and the public at large.)

It’s the mission of any trade publication to provide its industry the information, advice, analysis and commentary that allow industry members to engage in commerce profitably, safely and ethically (not, as some aggravatingly assert, to help individual businesses shamelessly promote themselves). Because it cleaves to its mission with a vengeance, over the years AVN Online has exposed the bad right along with the good. One tends to forget how much the industry and the magazine have overcome to get where they are … until some zealous cheerleader decides it would be a great idea to publish a retrospective. At times like that, one can only grit her teeth and repeat the immortal words of George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Please, I beg you: Let’s not.

—Kathee “Methuselah” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the October 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Mainstream of Consciousness

All that glitters can be cold.

Much is made of the significance, importance and — some might say — necessity of adult entertainment being accepted as just another component of modern society. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that as pornography becomes more “mainstream,” anti-porn crusaders and their government lackeys will have fewer fronts on which to attack a commodity that is as old as society itself. After all, John Q. Public wants his porn, and not much is considered “obscene” by juries anymore. And since adult entertainment makes up a healthy percentage of mainstream-industry profits, doing away with the adult industry conceivably could compromise the economy as a whole.

On their faces, all of those arguments are valid, but in the larger picture, they’re part of an enormous — and very sharp — double-edged sword.

I’m sure I’m not telling readers anything they don’t already know when I opine that part of what has made the creation and distribution of pornography an immensely profitable endeavor is its subversive, clandestine nature. There’s an element of danger and taboo that clings to the material. In some cultures, public nudity and physical manifestations of desire are accepted as normal, natural components of the human experience. But in most societies, hardcore sexual behavior and its accoutrements are regarded as “dirty,” shameful pursuits that belong in dark, private spaces out of the public view (with the notable exception of titillation in advertising, of course). Consequently, the adult-entertainment industry traditionally has attracted entrepreneurs who revel in rebellion and resolutely cling to a general disdain for the rules of polite society. Even today, with porn consumption at an all-time high, many of the people who work in the industry strive to present shocking, “in your face,” “bad boy/girl” images that would not be tolerated in any mainstream industry – except, perhaps, Hollywood, music and professional sports. They take great pride in being as poorly behaved and defiant as possible, often because it brings them and their products the notoriety they crave yet otherwise might not be able to garner.

Like it or not, the U.S. retains a puritanical culture that makes the adult industry a difficult milieu in which to operate. (How many pornographers' family members, friends and neighbors know what they do?) That atmosphere promotes a community ethos in which deviance often is applauded. The problem with that is once the behavior becomes comfortable, it’s difficult to see it for what it is: an unpopular, uncomfortable veneer that serves a temporary agenda. Once the goal is attained, the actor can drop the charade — except by then the behaviors may be ingrained, much like the way a pet dog sits up when offered a treat because he’s learned sitting up gets him what he wants. When people use antisocial, misogynistic behaviors to get what they want, they probably won’t stop relying on those tactics when they’ve achieved the goals that spawned them.

And there’s the rub. If porn becomes “mainstream,” at least two things are likely to happen: The material will become just another mainstream commodity, and “bad boy” pornographers will become mildly interesting pariahs like Barry Bonds, Paris Hilton and Hank Williams Jr. Those people are famously arrogant, petty and generally unpleasant, and nobody really wants to be around them unless there’s significant, immediate benefit to be gained. Bonds remains in baseball because he’s still slugging (although observers condemn his relationship with the truth), Williams occasionally releases a worthwhile song (although he’s notoriously abusive to almost everyone around him, including his audiences), and Hilton’s still tabloid fodder (mostly because everyone seems to be trying to figure out what they found so fascinating about her in the first place). Is this really a fate to which anyone aspires?

So I wonder: Is the “mainstreaming” of porn really a good idea? Yes, mainstream acceptance of adult content would make producers’ and distributors’ lives easier, but it also would bring more well-funded competition into the marketplace and might lessen demand for the product. And it’s likely that porn would "go corporate” and pick up all of the baggage that entails: Small operators would be forced from the field, boards of directors would take control, and the adult-industry insiders who now take such glee in rebellion would have to clean up their acts and behave or get out.

As the saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

—Kathee “Wet Blanket” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the September 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Age-Appropriate Content

Youth is wasted on the young.

“Age is a state of mind.”
“Never trust anyone over 30.”
“Life begins at 40.”
“Forty is the new 30.”

As human beings, most of us are preoccupied with chronological age. We spend the first part of our lives looking forward to doing all sorts of fun things we’ll be allowed to do and understand “when we get older,” then we spend our prime years being too busy to do the fun stuff we looked forward to being old enough to do, and finally, we become too old and physically infirm to do the fun stuff we didn’t make time to do in our youth.

It happens faster than one may think. Suddenly, in one’s second half-century of life, he or she finds himself or herself looking back and thinking, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time acting my age!”

Age is a fairly concrete concept, serving to mark the passage of time and allowing people to measure their lives, successes and failures in years (and gray hairs and wrinkles). Maturity, on the other hand, is relative. It represents a combination of education, experience, and chronological age, and it most often manifests itself in attitudes and abilities. At the age of adulthood — 18, or (legal disclaimer) 21 in some jurisdictions — some people are ready to venture forth and make their marks on the world, while others live at home with their parents until they’re 30 (or older). Although it doesn’t happen as often today as it did in previous generations (thanks to the invention of “assisted living facilities” and “retirement communities”), the process completes a circle when elderly folks lose their mental acuity or physical integrity and wind up living like children in their children’s homes.

But I digress. (Perhaps you can forgive me for that, as in entertainment industry terms, I’m about ready for a nursing home myself.)

More than any other, entertainment industries put a premium on youth and idealized appearance. For the most part, audiences don’t want to see old, out-of-shape people behaving in ways the audience fantasizes about behaving. That’s too much of a mortality jolt, and no one likes to be reminded his or her time on this mortal coil is limited. When it comes to sexual activity, in particular, the ravages of time and hard living are terribly unattractive (which, one may suppose, explains at least part of the “May-December romance,” “trophy wife,” and “boy toy” phenomena). Chronological age is particularly poisonous to entertainment-industry denizens, and many of them go way out of their ways to hide it from what they view as nosy members of the public (who may, in fact, only be trying to reassure themselves there’s still time for them to do something worthwhile before they’re too old to matter anymore).

—Kathee “Dorian Gray” Brewer

(A longer version of this column originally appeard in the August 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Yee-Haw!

Whip out the brandin’ irons, boys! We got us a herd!

If there’s one thing Texans know a lot about, it’s branding. From the time we’re the youngest of younguns, born-and-bred Texans are besieged with tales about our rip-snortin’ collective past. A large part of that past, as anyone familiar with Western movies knows, was cattle. The Old West still is a living, breathing thing to young Texans, even to the point of studying cattle barons and their brands in school.

Branding in the Old West was more than a way to make a mark on society: It was a matter of survival. Empires were built (not always legitimately) on the strength of a good horse, a bale of barbed wire, and a branding iron. Under the laws of the day (some of which remain in effect in Texas), rustling branded horses or cattle was a hanging offense; however, any bovine found running loose without a brand was fair game and usually quickly found a mark of some kind on its hide.

Most livestock brands, like modern trademarks, were registered, and many remain in use today: The King Ranch’s “running W” (patterned after either a diamondback rattlesnake or the sweeping horns of a Texas Longhorn bull, depending on whom you believe) and the Four Sixes’ stylized four sixes (which actually do not, as legend has it, represent the winning poker hand that decided the ranch’s ownership) are two examples.

Livestock brands played a larger role in the lives of ranchers than just protecting their herds. In many cases, ranches that began with one name eventually became so closely associated with their livestock markers that the ranches began to share the brand’s name. Such was the case with the Four Sixes, which began as the Burk Burnett Ranch (a rather mundane moniker for a one-third-million-acre spread). If a nearby hamlet (Burkburnett, Texas) hadn’t been named for him, the original owner of the Four Sixes might have slipped into history’s footnotes, but everyone in Texas knows the Four Sixes to this day.

That’s the genius of branding, and in most cases, it happens almost outside the general public’s consciousness. It is not, as some seem to think, slapping their corporate moniker on everything in their universe (including employees). The essence of a brand is much grander than that. A brand is a larger-than-life icon that pervades the human experience.

What strikes me most about almost all industries is how few people have an honest, straightforward understanding of what the term “branding” actually means. It’s more than just a name or a look; a logo (McDonald’s golden arches) or a catchy marketing phrase (“You deserve a break today”). True branding goes to the heart of human psychology, causing the tiniest trigger to conjure associations that are so ingrained in the culture as to be synonymous with everyday objects or experiences. Are we more likely, after a sneeze, to ask someone to pass a facial tissue or a Kleenex? When watching kids zip along the beachside boardwalk in Santa Monica, are we more likely to yell, “Look out for the guy on the in-line skates!” or “Look out for that idiot on Rollerblades!”? In the South, we don’t recognize Dr. Pepper, Pepsi, Mountain Dew, or Sprite — to us, every sugary, carbonated beverage is a Coke. (“Jake, y’ont a Coke?” “Naw, but I’ll take some sweet tea if ya got it.”)

That’s branding, and it goes far beyond “baby, remember my name.” The best brands ubiquitously manifest themselves long after the cute advertising slogans have faded and the swag has worn thin. Like a symbol burned into the hide of a steer, the best brands are so burned into our consciousness as to be unforgettable, even if we’d love to forget them. (In most cases, in fact, forgetting a prominent brand is a bad idea, as usually it results in the absent-minded individual receiving a polite-but-firm reminder that he or she has violated a trademark belonging to the client of a firm with the names of an entire graduating class at Harvard Law scrawled down the side of a very imposing piece of letterhead. Trust me.)

How does one create a brand? Reputation and longevity have much to do with the process. True “brands” don’t happen overnight (ask Hugh Hefner). When they do, it’s because the right set of circumstances occurred at the right time in the hands of the right individuals, and it’s magical.

Much like wrangling cattle, also it also requires one heckuva lot of work.

—Kathee “Tex” Brewer

(This column originally appeard in the July 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Strangers in a Strange Land

When I was a kid, my family moved often. We moved so often, in fact, that somewhere along the way I lost track of the 21 places we lived before I graduated high school. That sort of nomadic existence teaches children two things: (1) how to mimic almost any regional dialect or accent with a great deal of accuracy and very little practice, and (2) “foreigner” is a terribly pejorative word.

In most dictionaries, the first definition given for foreigner is “someone who is a native of another country; an alien” (another pejorative term, considering the most common synonym for alien is “strange”). More broadly, though, foreigner (from the Middle English) means “an outsider; someone who is not a member of a particular group or community; someone who is excluded.”

Ouch. That definition resonates with me, because no matter how hard military brats of the Cold War era tried to fit in wherever our lots in life consigned us, we were doomed to remain foreigners. To this day, I have a hard time using the word to describe others, because I quite vividly remember how it felt to be foreign myself.

Thankfully, things have changed monumentally in the past 20 or so years. The military no longer shuffles personnel just because it can every time the wind changes direction, and the Web has taught many residents of the global village that there are more things uniting us than dividing us. We may not have a common language, common currency, common religion, or common culture, but increasingly we’re developing common frames of reference. Ways of life that used to seem terribly foreign to us now hardly seem strange at all.

Perhaps one of the most universal frames of human reference is sexuality. After all, almost everyone older than 18 at least thinks about sex, whether or not they care to (or are allowed to) participate in erotic activity. Sex, at least insofar as it relates to procreation, is a biological imperative, and with rare exceptions, all of us are prisoners of our genetic code. That man has elevated sexual activity to the level of recreation (or, in some cases, spectator sport) is one of the things that separate him from other animals.

It’s also one of the things that draw people together. Regardless of one’s language, currency, cultural, or religious framework, sex benefits from a universal language all its own. Very few would fail to recognize a sexual “come-on” regardless the nationality or language of the tease. A naked body posed suggestively or “caught in the act” seems to mean just about the same thing to everyone. That’s part of what gives the adult entertainment industry an edge when it comes to international commerce.

The experiences of adult entertainment producers worldwide really aren’t that different, either. Whether they’re in what Americans consider the sexually wide-open spaces of California or operating on the continent or in the Far East, porn producers face a surprisingly similar collection of restraints, challenges, and blessings. Adult-entertainment-specific laws — considered at best intrusive and at worst inane — impinge upon the professional and sometimes personal lives of producers around the globe, as do economic and social forces beyond their control.

Yet, they persevere in a field often viewed as foreign (if not much, much worse) by polite society, thereby bringing much joy, I’m sure, to the loins of grown-up boys and girls worldwide. What’s actually foreign (as in “alien” or “strange”) about that is how eager some foreigners (as in “not members of the adult entertainment group or community”) are to ostracize denizens of adult as though they were doing something completely foreign to the human experience. They’re not; however, the moment foreigners recognize their own (over)reactions to pornography are part of what makes the medium such a profitable pursuit probably will be the exact moment at which pornography’s market value plummets — so perhaps pornographic détente is not the best idea.

Nonetheless, a little diplomacy wouldn’t hurt.

—Kathee “Jubal Harshaw” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the June 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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Avast, Me Hearties!

2006 may well go down in the books as the year in which the adult entertainment industry “suddenly” became interested in content piracy.

It’s not that brigands suddenly figured out how to steal what they didn’t want to pay for, or even that producers suddenly noticed part of the reason their profit margins were shrinking was that people were stealing content instead of purchasing it. In fact, quite the opposite is true: Pirates have been sharing content on the peer-to-peer networks since the Web was a pup, Hollywood and the music industry have been beating their chests and suing teen-age thieves for quite a while now, and some adult-content producers (notably Titan Media and Falcon Foto) have been trying to warn their compatriots about “the piracy problem” for several years.

In late 2006, however, it suddenly seemed almost everyone in adult began ranting about piracy. Perhaps the outcry was occasioned by the equally sudden perceived reduction in the political threat level when in November the Democrats retook Congress. Any community functions more cohesively when it faces an outside threat, and when one threat wanes, the community will seize upon another in an attempt to increase bonding by focusing combined energy and wrath toward a malevolent “other.” (Remember how much the U.S. and the USSR used to glare at each other, and how at loose ends everyone seemed to be when the Cold War thawed? Of course, all became right with the world again when those evil terrorists showed up.)

Content pirates, as it turns out, make an excellent target for community-building contempt. In the eyes of people who make their living creating and distributing entertainment, they’re loathsome. They’re also faceless, mostly anonymous, and sneaky, the cheap bastards. They cost entertainment industries of all kinds millions of dollars every year because they’d rather stab some hardworking stiff in the back than carry their fair load of the economic burden—and, dammit, that’s just not right. Why, we oughta keel-haul ’em! Make ’em walk the plank! Feed ’em to the sharks!

Before we blow the men down, however, perhaps we ought to consider what we can learn from pirates (other than how to wear eye patches and silly hats with panache, pronounce “arrrgh” correctly, and balance parrots on our shoulders). Some adult-content producers continue to view a modest amount of piracy as viral marketing. They do their best to tag everything so it will lead back to their revenue-producing outlets, and then they hope for the best when it’s ripped off. Others spend copious amounts of time and money in legal machinations designed to curb the flow. But although piracy is condemnable, it’s also a predictable response to markets that cling stubbornly to business models that refuse to shift with the tides. While no one would begin to call the current state of adult content distribution irrelevant — yet — consumers are beginning to look for something new. Something less expensive that requires less commitment. Something more personalized. Something that puts consumers, not producers and distributors, in the captain’s chair when it comes to acquisition. When the right model is found, pirates will be able to get their booty affordably without the hassle of burying the treasure, and content owners will be able to make a tidy sum—albeit probably in smaller increments.

Although it is foolhardy even to suggest turning a blind eye to wholesale theft, there is significant worth in the argument that instead of battling it out on the high seas, content producers and distributors may be better off devoting their resources to knocking pirates’ wooden legs out from under them by making piracy a waste of time. The pirates of yore didn’t disappear because they were hounded to death by lawyers and courts; they disappeared because they were outgunned, out-sailed, and outsmarted. They disappeared because it became financially disadvantageous to be pirates.

How does one outsmart modern-day pirates? I don’t have the definitive answer to that question. That’s why I’m a poor-but-earnest writer, not a wealthy shipping magnate.

Still, the answer is out there, and the sorry son of a moldy biscuit-eatin’ seadog who deciphers the map to it will have found a fine treasure, indeed.

—Kathee “Scurvy Dog” Brewer

(This column originally appeared in the May 2007 issue of AVN Online.)

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