Strippers, sex workers, adult models, and performers, what do they do when they can’t interact with guys in person? It’s no surprise that this lockdown has derailed most peoples’ plans. So many have been getting laid off left and right during this quarantine. This has been leading people to expand their horizons looking for work while we ride out the storm of this pandemic. As it turns out, webcamming on sites like Camster.com is one of the most convenient jobs that was found right through the computer screen.
Thousands of girls around the world have explored cam modeling during the lockdown. With a job like this, no one has to drive to an office. No one needs to worry about social distancing in public. And no one needs a fancy resume. All it takes is a webcam and the confidence to be naughty with customers online.
For the last several months, Camster.com has garnered thousands of more private interactions every day. With nowhere to go, searching for cam girls online is not only fun, but it’s relieving- especially in a stressful time like this.
It works out for both the model and the customers who must stay indoors. This social distancing is no fun. What better way to relieve that tension and have fun than with a stranger online who will live out kinky fantasies? Not only that, but she could also be a good friend for her clients who just want to talk about their day. Considering that we’ve all been doing the same thing since March, that’s already one thing a model will have in common with her client.
Check out some of the hottest cam girls and what their biggest fans are saying about them:
“Her demeanor pulled me in. Her subtle beauty kept me there. I often wondered if a woman like this ever even existed, and here I was looking at her frozen in awe. I tried to find a flaw and couldn’t. I was transfixed, speechless.”
“Maye is a sweetheart. She is full of energy. She gives a great show. She has huge twins and a fantastic body. She has pretty eyes and gorgeous face. She is a fun person you will enjoy being in her room.”
You need not focus on the “die” part of diet. You can eat right, have fun doing so, and look great in your clothes — or, y’know, out of them.
The New Nordic Diet
It’s no secret that the tall, thin, pale people of the Nordic countries don’t have the same issues with over-consumption and obesity that we do here in the U.S. of A. People in the Scandinavian region have been living a semi-paleo lifestyle since their lean, seafood-loving ancestors figured out how to make fire and hunt. The New Nordic Diet promotes all-out Scandinavian specialties like elk meat and rutabaga, but the principle is a back-to-basics approach to cooking that cuts out all the processed crap your body doesn’t need, leaving you with twice the amount of fiber you’d get if you ate like a typical Westerner. In the book The Nordic Way, Arne Astrup, Jennie Brand-Miller, and Christian Bitz outline a strategy and provide simple, delicious recipes to help you adopt this fresh, forward-thinking approach to food and cooking.
Ketogenic
If you haven’t heard the word “keto” by now, it’s probably because you lost your auditory ability in a tragic accident that we don’t want to make you relive. The ketogenic diet is a strict meal plan that has had Americans in a frenzy for the last year. Although many health pros argue that the keto diet can be harmful as a long-term lifestyle change, it will get you fast results if you follow the rules exactly. This means absolutely no carbs, no empty calories, and no sugar. It’s a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that stimulates metabolic changes pressuring your body to use stored fats for fuel, which kicks your body into “ketosis” resulting in weight loss. So, yes, you can have cheesy eggs with a side of Canadian bacon for breakfast, but you have to eliminate everyday staples such as beans, potatoes, pasta, and most fruits.
Paleo (aka The Caveman Eat Right Diet)
Paleo has been popularized by athletes and actors for its simple, farm-to-table approach. The rules? Eat like our cavemen ancestors did back before we had guns, condoms, and toilets. You will munch on tons of meat, seafood, veggies, fruits, and nuts while cutting out dairy, grains, legumes, sugar, and processed foods. One major plus is that the Paleo plan promotes a healthy heart, and studies have shown that this diet has helped those suffering with multiple sclerosis. The pitfalls? It’s time-consuming, causes possible iodine deficiency, and there is no guaranteed weight loss unless you pair this with an exercise routine. The Paleo lifestyle means a lot of home cooking and meal preparation, but your body will thank you as it flushes out all the toxins and garbage you’ve been harboring.
The Flexitarian
Even though the Flexitarian trend gained traction back in 2008 (with Dawn Jackson Blatner’s The Flexitarian Diet), it has grown in popularity the last few years thanks to an endorsement by acclaimed food journalist and former New York Times columnist Mark Bittman. The Flexitarian approach to meal planning includes tons of organic, unprocessed fruits, veggies, and whole grains—basically, a vegetarian who thinks of meat as an indulgent side dish, not the center of his dinner. (For example, if you eat 21 meals, then your goal is to have 9 to 14 of those without meat.) The best part? Super strict (and insanely annoying) vegetarians will shun you based on principle.
Eat Right … and DASH
DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) makes sense if you want to live a healthy life and combat high blood pressure (which is probably why it’s supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute). DASH promotes eating the foods nutrition experts have always told us are going to keep us healthy—fruits, veggies, whole grains, lean protein, and low-fat dairy—while avoiding refined sugar and foods with high levels of saturated fat. You have to cap your sodium intake at 1,500 to 2,300 milligrams (for every 2,000 calories per day), but you’ll be amazed at how easily herbs and spices can flavor foods as you watch your flab and high blood pressure disappear.
We call them Bogus Health Trends because our lawyers would not let us call them worse. You may call them whatever you wish, depending upon the company present, but you might not want to call any of these your own.
Activated Charcoal
Believers claim ingesting activated charcoal scrubs your innards and purifies your blood. But in truth? It doesn’t do shit. You’d have to swallow an ungodly amount for it to create any gut action, and it doesn’t even circulate in your blood. Doctors do administer mega-doses if someone swallows poison or too much of a drug, but you don’t want to go that route. For one thing, you’d be constipated for a week.
Just Silly: Gluten-Free Diet
Gluten avoiders can talk your ear off about what ridding their diet of wheat has done for them. But for anyone not suffering from celiac disease, or from gluten sensitivity (maybe five percent of us), avoiding gluten makes no sense and can actually hurt. For the vast majority of humans who tolerate gluten just fine, we need not fear the G. Gluten-free products (a $5-billion industry) are often fattier, saltier, more sugary, and regrettably low in fiber.
Unbelievable Bogus Health Trends: Extreme Fasting
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey eats once a day during the week, and fasts all weekend. Believing it’s a “biohack,” he claims it enhances focus and sleep quality. Health pros say Dorsey’s routine could expose practitioners to dizziness, headaches, and fatigue, with possible liver and kidney damage. Experts also suggest Dorsey might have an eating disorder. He and his Silicon Valley bros may want to rethink the starvation lifestyle.
Potentially Dangerous Bogus Health Trends: Detoxing
The wellness industry promotes the lucrative myth that we need to rid ourselves of “toxins.” Its representatives extol juice cleanses and having a water-blasting tube stuck up your ass. Want to purify? Keep hydrated, exercise, sleep, and eat foods with fiber. Our livers filter a liter of blood per minute, the kidneys work their own detoxing magic, and fiber naturally scrubs the gut.
Worst of the Bogus Health Trends: Copper-Infused Sportswear
Brett Favre and Jerry Rice are pitchmen for copper-infused compression sleeves for your joints, and a belt for your back. Montel Williams, who suffers from MS, has pitched for a different copper-touting clothing company, claiming, “Tommy Copper truly is pain relief without a pill.” Well, Tommy Copper recently settled a lawsuit with the FTC for exaggerating what its garments do. In reality, these products don’t offer special health benefits. They add some warmth, a bit of support, but no more.
[Yep. Somebody call the Coppers. (Apologies. -Ed.)]
Fitness buffs/comedians/hosts Eugene Cordero and Ryan Stanger riff about “training dirty, eating clean, and living in-between” on this weekly show. Like many podcasts, there’s a lot of inane banter, poop jokes, and product plugs; once it gets going, though, their conversation runs the gamut of fitness-related issues: diet vs. exercise, weight loss, nutrition, choosing a gym, motivation strategies, sleep, injuries, lifestyle changes, and specific sports like boxing, basketball, running, and weightlifting. It’s chit-chatty and fun, appropriate for both gym rats looking for advice and couch potatoes in need of encouragement.
These days we all need a bit of self-help, and this is the perfect accompaniment to any hourlong workout. Author/entrepreneur Jonathan Fields interviews guests who’ve found success in their respective fields (chefs, writers, musicians, actors, doctors, athletes), but are not necessarily household names. He engages them in philosophical conversations about their “good” lives, though unlike many podcast hosts, Fields is refreshingly hands-off, letting his guests do most of the talking. Their stories are fascinating and inspiring, filled with insights on how they achieved professional success, personal fulfillment, and physical and mental health.
“Love people, use things” is the motto of podcasters Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, both former corporate wonks, now diehard minimalists. Together with their guests they tackle the subjects that all conscientious consumers struggle with: how to buy less, get rid of stuff, pay off debt, and make time for what’s important, like friends, family, creativity, and physical and mental health. Each episode broaches various facets of our culture of excess: living sustainably; diet, fitness, and self-care; finances and debt; depression, anxiety, and stress; relationships and sex; smartphone and internet use; minimalist travel; and sleep.
Each week, ex-slouch-turned-ultra-marathoner Rich Roll takes a deep dive into issues regarding health, fitness, nutrition, and spirituality with various authors, health gurus, and adventurers. Launched in 2013, the podcast has a massive following (60 million downloads and counting) and holds steady on the iTunes top-ten list. His interviews are relaxed and conversational, and some clock in at more than two hours—perfect for a long training run. Roll (a former substance-abusing entertainment lawyer) tackles heavy subjects like addiction, climate change, and endurance sports, and is a strong advocate of plant-based diets.
Yeah yeah, we know: Oprah. But this is a great podcast for anyone just getting started with a wellness regime, physical or mental. With her trademark no-nonsense likability, the Big O interviews the kinds of gurus you’d expect: Dr. Phil, Eckhart Tolle, Elizabeth Gilbert, Deepak Chopra, Suze Orman, and Malcolm Gladwell, to name just a few. This slickly produced show is laden with catchy Oprahisms, and is touchy-feely to the max, but let’s face it—Oprah is still the shit. That woman gets the message out, and the message is good. She advocates bringing about positive change in the world, starting with ourselves.
Bora Zivkovic is a Belgrade-born scientist and writer who settled in North Carolina after doing research at NC State. Slightly built, with round wire-rim glasses, poofy graying hair, and a prominent nose, he’s friendly, energetic, and passionate about science and science writing. Photographed from certain angles, he has the look of a cartoon owl.
A man who helped organize the popular ScienceOnline conferences in the Research Triangle near Raleigh, Zivkovic earned the nickname “Blogfather” for his role as editor of the Scientific American blogs network. He also served as series editor of a yearly anthology of the best online science writing. Well-known for promoting science journalism, Zivkovic assisted numerous young science bloggers, and took pride in his efforts to encourage and support women interested in writing about science.
One day Zivkovic was having a smoke outside a Manhattan bar with writer and Scientific American blogger Hannah Waters. He bought a rose from a street vendor for his wife, who was waiting for them inside. The vendor handed him two.
“What’s that, one for the wife, one for the concubine?” Zivkovic joked to the vendor.
I find that funny. It made Waters uncomfortable. She said nothing at the time, but later, in a 2013 blog post on Medium, she deemed this and similar behavior sexual harassment. The article subhead read: There wasn’t any touching or overt sex talk. But it was still harassment.
That same year, two more Scientific American bloggers, Monica Byrne and Kathleen Raven, published posts accusing Zivkovic of sexual harassment, citing interactions from previous years they said made them uncomfortable.
But none of Zivkovic’s behavior came close to meeting legal standards for sexual harassment. There was no quid pro quo promise of advancement for a sexual favor, he didn’t issue a threat (such as warning of professional trouble if sex was not granted), and what he did wasn’t “severe and pervasive,” leading to a “hostile work environment.”
In the incident Byrne referenced, she said she’d known Zivkovic for about a month. She invited him to coffee in September of 2012, looking to interest him in her writing. Seated at the cafe with him, she mentioned visiting a strip club. Zivkovic then “began describing his own experience of going to a strip club,” she wrote.
After that, he got personal, talking about sex in his marriage and how he nearly had an affair with a younger woman. Byrne later emailed Zivkovic to tell him she was uncomfortable when the talk turned to sex. He emailed her an apology, and that was that. Or so he thought.
Something worth noting when it comes to Bora Zivkovic: He exhibits symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, which involves difficulty reading and decoding social cues and understanding appropriate responses. Though he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, his wife and a psychiatrist who knows him, along with many in the science-writing community, have expressed the opinion that he does suffer from it.
Zivkovic has the Aspie’s tendency to laugh at the wrong moments and natter on endlessly about whatever’s on his mind. He doesn’t always seem to sense when his presence is no longer wanted. For example, he and Kathleen Raven were attendees at a science journalism conference in Helsinki, Finland. He’d arrived at the hotel late in the evening and texted, “Can I come by and see you now?” Raven texted back, “No, I’m afraid we have to wait until tomorrow morning. My husband is already in bed, sorry.”
Shortly afterward, there was a knock on their door. Zivkovic said, “Hi!” and marched into the hotel room. Her husband “sat shocked” in their hotel bed, Raven wrote. She added, “Bora grabbed me in an embrace, picked me up, swirled me around, and kissed me on the cheek. After a few minutes of small talk, he left.”
Weird, awkward, and annoying behavior? Sure. But sexual harassment? In some other zeitgeist, no. But in our current moment, many people would say yes, it qualifies.
After the women posted their accounts in 2013, an unfortunate number of those trained in careful, evidence-based thinking — science writers who knew Zivkovic — credulously and without compassion accepted that he was guilty of sexual harassment.
He was pushed out at Scientific American and ostracized by the science-blogging community he loved and helped build. In Zivkovic’s terms, he lost everything.
Of course, he’s just one of many men recently deemed guilty without legal or even social due process. What his accusers have in common — and they’re not the only women today to demonstrate this quality — is a festering passivity that can turn poisonous.
Such behavior did not emerge in a vacuum. In fact, it’s a product of twenty-first-century feminism. Feminists have gone from fighting for equal rights to demanding that women be treated like eggshells. Feminism is now a movement that disables women, ruins men’s lives, and destroys professional and romantic relationships between the sexes.
Understanding this is the single-best way for a man to avoid social and professional disaster.
AMERICAN women had some seriously legit grievances back in the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth. They were denied voting rights, and once married, they had all the legal and financial autonomy of their husband’s hat or his goat.
Pioneering feminists rose up in the mid-1800s and began a battle that led to women getting the vote in 1920 and gaining greater legal recognition of their personhood.
Second-wave feminism — aka the women’s liberation movement — took off in the sixties and carried onward until the late eighties. But women no longer had a single unifying goal, like getting the vote, and feminism eventually splintered into factions.
There was a well-to-do white-lady feminism, famously embodied by Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-seller The Feminine Mystique, a socio-ballad of frustration capturing the existence of the cocktails-and-tranquilizers set: middle-class and wealthy housewives, bored and dissatisfied by traditional marriage, homemaking, and child-rearing.
Black women — already busy being ignored for leadership positions in the civil rights movement — were not happy that Friedan claimed to speak for a sweeping feminism yet excluded their experiences and interests. This led them to form their own feminist faction in the sixties and seventies. Latin women and other female minority groups did the same.
The 1960s also saw that mass uncrossing of women’s legs — the sexual revolution — and before long, up popped some female authoritarians with their sex-panic feminism. The most prominent? Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, a man-hating neo-prude who insisted that the male sex lived to oppress, degrade, and dehumanize women.
Dworkin saw heterosexual sex as an act of violent aggression perpetrated by a man on a woman. (“Penetration is Violation,” a classic Dworkin-inspired slogan goes.) The purpose of pornography, Dworkin argued, was not to get off but to make women “inferior, subhuman.” (How porn for gay men might do that she never got around to explaining.)
Dworkin characterized women who didn’t share her views as dumb bunnies — basically idiots “colluding in their own oppression.” The argument involved a broad-brush diminishing of women, foreshadowing the infantilization of women by today’s feminists.
The nineties launched a third-wave feminism, a movement still with us. Once again there was factional splintering. However, the most powerful third-wave strand — still extremely influential today — is what I call “women as weaklings feminism.”
It grew out of academic feminist theory — the stuff of women’s studies and gender studies classes. Its intellectual foundation was a convoluted bullshit-osophy known as “postmodernism,” a body of thought as easy to grasp as a greased goldfish in a bathtub.
In truth, there wasn’t that much to accomplish after the European Enlightenment philosophers did their thing, rebutting superstition, embracing reason, and questioning how we know what we know. But in the 1970s, French philosophers tossed science and reason in la poubelle — the trash can — and announced there’s no real knowable truth. They wanted to out-radical the Enlightenment’s revolutionary thinkers. And they came up with a pronounced relativism. They argued, essentially, that whatever someone says is true is true — though it’s even truer if it comes from an oppressed class.
As pointed out by England’s Helen Pluckrose, a literary scholar turned critic of these French-spawned modes of thought, in postmodernism the intention of the speaker — what the speaker means to say — “is irrelevant. What matters is the impact of speech,” or how the listener feels after the communication is made.
Yes, welcome to the origins of “Sexual harassment is whatever we say it is!”
In postmodernism, you can pin a crime of thought, speech, or social behavior on anybody. You simply claim that something a person wrote, spoke, or did made you feel harmed or “unsafe.” And once you take offense, you can run with it.
Postmodernism has a race-based intellectual sister — “intersectionality.”
In a celebrated 1989 law journal article, African-American law professor and social theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw argued that black women get extra scoops of discrimination. Like white women, they’re discriminated against because they are women. But they’re also discriminated against on the basis of race.
As Crenshaw explained it, the intersection of these two marginalized identities compounds the discrimination black women experience.
As a legal point, this claim had enormous potential significance. In discrimination suits, taking both sex and race into account could increase the redress received by black female plaintiffs. But Crenshaw additionally called for “expanding feminist theory and anti-racist politics” by “embracing the intersection” of forms of discrimination.
Women’s studies and gender studies faculty jumped at this. They turned intersectionality into an identity-politics cudgel — one swung in the direction of white people, especially white men. In a reversal of Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to judge people “by the content of their character,” intersectionality became a pissing contest of victimhood and oppression. Under intersectionality, high status is not earned — it’s granted through one’s group membership. How many boxes can you check on the “marginalized” groups ledger? Lesbian? Black? Missing a limb? You get to talk. White women, shut up and “check your privilege.”
Of course, this is a kind of social original sin. You can’t control your color or whether you’re born with all the usual limbs — you can only control what you do.
For feminist academics, victimhood has become the new hustle, a way to have unearned power over others. They’re pushing a viewpoint (ironically, a paternalistic one) that effectively tells the world women cannot make it without coddling and special treatment. It’s why contemporary feminist activists feel it’s their mission to force men, governments, and businesses to provide for women.
But for this argument to fly, women must be viewed as weak, fragile, and easily victimized. So, like a rehab facility maintaining its patient base by giving away bags of heroin at a table in its parking lot, academic feminism has become a force for female disempowerment. It pushes women to identify as victims — an identity formed not by what they’ve done but by what’s been done to them — and to demand not equal rights but special rights, perks, and protections. (Notice us coming full circle, anyone?)
THE jihadi feminists of academia have had help spreading their dogma — from phenomena such as overparenting, the decline of religion, and the rise of the internet and social media. Academic feminists’ rejection of science has also played a major role.
Helicopter parenting — the perpetual parental hover — took off in the early nineties, galvanized by TV news-driven paranoia that every stranger who said hello in the mall was plotting to kidnap their kid. And now it’s given way to “snowplow parenting” — adults clearing every possible obstacle in their child’s path — in school, at work, and beyond.
Young people who’ve grown up having all conflict in their lives magically removed by an authority figure are, as you might guess, proving to be less independent and self-sufficient than previous generations. Yes, in 75 years, we’ve gone from the Greatest Generation, storming the beach at Normandy, to the Gripey-est Generation, with Mommy calling her grown child’s boss to complain on their behalf. Not surprisingly, today’s young women are ripe for a feminism acting in loco parentis.
Contemporary victim feminism operates like a fundamentalist religion without the God stuff. Women’s attraction to it is understandable, given the sharp decline in organized religion in America. Like traditional religions, this kind of feminism offers comfy, pre-chewed black-and-white beliefs — us and them, right and wrong, good and evil.
It also seems to fill a major psychological hole in people. We appear to have an adaptation pushing us to join groups — behavior probably coming out of how there were distinct survival advantages to living cooperatively in ancestral times.
Behavioral scientist Clay Routledge, who studies the evolutionary roots of what motivates us psychologically, theorizes that secular movements now function as a substitute for religious belief. He cites studies finding that “people who score low on commitment to a religious faith” are more likely to turn to “extreme political tribalism.”
As for how they’ll wave the flag of their allegiance — how they’ll signal their tribal affiliation — in lieu of religious worship and church socials, well, there’s…social media.
SOCIAL media platforms are today’s stages for communicating a belief system. It can be done quietly by posting a photo of oneself complying with a group dress code — such as when a woman dons a pink pussy hat and circulates the image on Instagram. But it can also be done aggressively by attacking a common enemy online. Within minutes on Twitter, hundreds, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of ideological fellow travelers can be mobilized against a perpetrator of wrongthink.
As a bonus, this virtue signaling — conspicuously displaying your moral righteousness, your commitment to the cause — requires little actual effort or commitment of time. Why get all sweaty marching when you can just tweet?
Welcome to the Age of Endarkenment.
Like many actual religions, victim feminism rejects certain forms of scientific knowledge. Most consequentially, it denies research identifying basic differences between male and female psychology and behavior. Its argument, boiled down, is basically, Sex differences? That’s bro science. Without evidence, academic feminists insist that differences between men and women are largely (if not entirely) socially constructed. They claim that a “toxic patriarchal culture” determines sex differences in societal outcomes, such as how women tend to be kindergarten teachers and not oil rig workers.
But in reality, research shows men are far likelier to take physical risks — such as working on an offshore oil platform. Findings on sex differences like this are some of the most robust in behavioral science. The fact that these differences show up across cultures (and even in apes and other nonhuman primates) demolishes feminist arguments.
While overall, men and women are more alike than different, the sex differences we do see align with men’s and women’s differing physiologies. The late psychologist Anne Campbell explained that women seem to have evolved to avoid physical confrontation, which could damage their reproductive parts and leave them unable to fill their role as an infant’s primary caregiver.
Campbell believed that female self-protectiveness led to women’s tendency to be indirect — using hints and manipulation, instead of assertive speech, to achieve their goals. She likewise believed it was why women score much higher than men in “agreeableness” — a personality trait manifesting in being kind, generous, warm, and motivated to have positive interactions with others.
This is vital information for women. But thanks to feminist academia’s dissing of evolutionary research, women who might recognize the need to override their natural inclinations are instead flying blind — hinting and hoping men will suss out what they want and comply. Combined with women’s internalizing of feminist notions about their supposed powerlessness, this makes for a toxic stew. It can lead to things like young women, experiencing morning-after sexual regret, deciding they were a victim of rape.
WE’RE now living under two new norms — a pair of academic-theory-driven expectations for thinking and behavior dictated by our intersectional feminist overlords. Perniciously, these standards are secret. Yet those who don’t adhere to them put themselves at risk — of losing their job and being exiled from their social world, as Bora Zivkovic was, or being bullied by countless people on social media.
(Academic Feminism) Secret standard No. 1: Women Are Children
Women must now be treated like they’re very young. They cannot be expected to assert themselves or tend to their own needs, including their need for personal safety.
For good reason, we don’t let 4-year-olds act without supervision. We don’t let young children ride their Big Wheel solo to the ice-cream parlor. Instead, we make decisions about what our children need.
But today’s academic feminism conveys the idea that adult women lack autonomy when interacting with a man on a date, at a party, or over business drinks, and hence it’s up to the man to guess what the woman would be comfortable with. It’s up to the man to be the parent in the interaction — even with a woman he’s just met.
And just as we don’t use adult language around children, it’s no longer appropriate to use such language around grown women. A University of Utah professor, Nick Wolfinger, discovered this after committing the speech crime of telling female colleagues over drinks that he’d proposed to his wife at a strip club. Mere mention of an adult-entertainment venue led to a complaint filed against him with his employers — a decade after he told the story. It cost him five months and $14,000 in attorney’s fees to clear himself.
Finally, women, like children, cannot be expected to be personally responsible for their safety. Simply suggesting a woman take steps to prevent sexual assault (like not getting blackout drunk) is now a thought crime. Propose this and you’ll be angrily countered by how men “should” behave, which changes how some do behave (rape-ishly) not in the slightest.
(Academic Feminism) Secret standard No. 2: Men Are Sex Predators — Even In Their Sleep
A male Amherst College student, drunk off his ass, was accompanied to his room by his girlfriend’s female roommate. He passed out. While he was passed out, this female student gave him a blowjob. After her roommate discovered what she’d done and this friend found herself ostracized, she then accused the male student of sexual assault, claiming she withdrew consent at some point during the sexual act. Yes, that’s right, she said she withdrew consent for the act she was performing on an unconscious man. Since he’d been conked out, he couldn’t contest the claim and Amherst expelled him.
When we widen the lens to consider the behavior of (conscious) men and women in the sexual arena, we come up against a reality: Male sexuality is more variety-seeking, while female sexuality, generally speaking, is more commitment-seeking. One is not better than the other. They’re just different.
Because women can get pregnant from sex, they evolved to prefer men who are willing and able to “invest” in any children. But under this new “men are sex predators” standard, classic male pursuit — which is not the same as rape — has been demonized.
Men are horny mofos in a way most women are not. They evolved to “spread their seed,” not, oh, “save it for that special someone.” Truth be told, I suspect Bora Zivkovic would’ve catapulted himself into bed with any of his three accusers, had they given him the thumbs-up.
Ultimately, I think Zivkovic was a lonely guy hungry for human connection, willing to take whatever these women were willing to give. It’s like my dog. If you’re offering bacon, she’ll eat bacon. If you’re offering a dental chew bone, she’ll eat that. Whatever you’re serving, she’s eating.
A cloud of suspicion now hangs over male-female romantic interactions. Men are would-be perps and women are would-be accusers. This has led to “affirmative consent” policies on college campuses (and there’s talk of states making it law).
The edicts require that people ask for and receive verbal consent each time they move on to some new form of sexual activity. “May I kiss you? May I rapidly lick your clitoris?” Such protocols fly in the face of how sexual activity works in the real world — with adults sensing what move to make next. Personally, my boyfriend is my boyfriend because, three hours after we met, he walked me to my car, grabbed me, and kissed me.
In eliminating this spontaneity, we lose a good bit of the sexiness of sex, and for women, the feeling of being wildly desired. That’s gone when a guy brings in a notary with consent documents for you to sign. That sounds absurd, but it’s on the mind of many men, worried that they’re one unwise choice of sex partner away from life in prison on a rape charge.
For men right now, the best defense is a good offense.
Take precautions. Don’t be alone in an office with a woman with the door closed. Think twice about drinks with female coworkers. And finally, seek women as friends, colleagues, and romantic partners who don’t seem to go for the women-as-eggshells feminism.
Real change has to come from women.
There are women — like me — who refuse to buy into the victimthink. We speak out, despite the potential social and career costs. In time, I hope we can persuade other women that academic feminism’s denial of innate differences between the sexes is doing harm to women. As anthropologist Jerome Barkow puts it, “Biology is only destiny if we ignore it.”
Imagine if women were told that they might have an evolutionary propensity to be “pleasers” and that this is nothing to be ashamed of — it’s simply a function of what worked for the females of our species in ancestral times.
If a woman knows she might have a tendency to say yes when she means “Hell, no!” she’s prepared to stand up for herself in a way she isn’t when guided by empty girl-power talk like “The future is female!” and other such slogans (interspersed with complaints about how the patriarchy is keeping women down).
Unfortunately, feminist activists keep focusing on the wrong people, telling men, “You can’t say this,” or “You can’t do that.” We can’t control others’ behavior — we can only control our own. Until feminism — on campuses and everywhere else — stops being blame-oriented and starts being truly empowerment-focused, the future will not be female. It will be feminism’s future — at the expense of all the women it claims to be advocating for and all the men it criminalizes in its wake.
Amy Alkon is an award-winning columnist and author who specializes in turning the insights of science, especially behavioral science and anthropology, into practical advice. Her latest book is Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence. Check out her podcast, HumanLab, where she interviews experts on human behavior. You can also follow her on Twitter at @amyalkon, and find her columns at advicegoddess.com.
Nikki Shriver and I met while working at a Daytona Beach strip club in 2009.
I was dancing my way through my bachelor’s degree and Nikki, like a lot of people, was searching for a more financially comfortable life that didn’t come at the cost of the 9-to-5 grind.
Every weekend we shared the stage, gyrating in the neon haze before captivated men waving dollar bills. Every night, we followed the same routine when we weren’t onstage: walk the floor in our heels, pick a table, take a seat, shake hands, and bat our lashes. Find something in common with the client and build on it. Close the sale.
Sometimes a fight would break out among dancers in the dressing room. Fights tended to be triggered by accusations of someone stealing money or doing “extras” for patrons. Management would lock the dressing room’s door and let us go at it. They believed we needed to “get it out of our system,” like some deranged version of Bad Girls Club meets Cage Wars.
After a scrap, a dancer would straighten up, pat some foundation on her bruised nose, and return to the floor like nothing had happened. The worst thing I ever did was throw a Heineken bottle at a dancer when I found out she’d been fucking clients in the VIP room. We were all wild back then. It could be a pretty rough club. But I never saw Nikki participating in any of the fights or wildness. She seemed to glide above this stuff.
When we’d sit at the same table, dishing out charm to get a lap dance, I’d watch mesmerized as the light hit her face just right, bouncing off her sapphire eyeshadow. She had blue eyes and brown hair, stood just a little over five feet tall, and had a quiet personality to go with her unimposing physical frame — she was different from the rowdy, more boisterous dancers. Most nights at the club, she dressed in blue lingerie and knee socks, her long hair swept to one side of her face, often pinned with a girlish bow.
As Nikki moved through the club, sometimes a look would come onto her face that I could decipher, since I was familiar with the feelings behind it, as were other dancers. It was a look saying, “I might be working at this club now, and there’s a reason for it, but I won’t be here forever.”
That said, some of the dancers had been taking that stage for a while. It was the kind of club where you could get stuck. I was working there to graduate college debt-free, and had plans to move to Dallas and see if I could put my English degree to work. I used to wonder if Nikki would be gone one day, too, on to another city or a different life, or if in a couple of years she’d still be dancing at the club, in her knee socks and bow.
A decade passed. Eventually I did get to Dallas, after time in Jacksonville and Hilton Head, South Carolina. And then one evening last June, while stuck in Texas traffic, a notification popped up on my phone. It was a direct message from a dancer I knew from the Daytona club. A group of us from those days had been close at the time, but over the years we’d drifted apart. However, we stayed connected on Facebook, where we watched each other’s lives play out in photos and timeline updates.
It had been several years since I’d last spoken to Nikki, but I was familiar with the basic arc of her life from her posts. She was a single mother with three adorable young daughters, and still lived in the general Daytona area.
The message on my phone contained a link, which took me to Nikki’s timeline. A Facebook Live video shot in the dead of night on June 5 shook me to my core.
Nikki stood alone in a murky frame, with an orange glow of what looked like flames visible through a narrow doorway behind her. Her once-long hair had been chopped off, replaced by an unkempt bob. She didn’t say anything but she was panting, almost hyperventilating, and the sound of her voice had a desperate quality.
Wherever she was had a low ceiling, and cramped dimensions. There were pillows on what looked like a bench to her left, and crockery on a shelf. As I stared, Nikki raised what looked like a blowtorch…no, a gun. A rifle of some sort. Then she turned around, walked to the narrow, partly curtained doorway, and passed through it, into the flaming space beyond.
The video kept going. The fire grew stronger beyond the doorway, and there were sounds of crackling flames and soft whooshes as things ignited. The doorway curtain caught fire, sparks flew, and then smoke began obscuring any view at all, even the glow of flames.
People seeing the video’s live broadcast posted urgent responses. I’m trying to get you help. What’s burning? Hey, what’s going on? Yikes, girl. This is scary. Are you okay?
The screen was almost black now as thick smoke filled the space where the smartphone had been propped. Suddenly there were sharp popping sounds, like firecrackers. The video had been recording for more than four minutes. And then came the worst of it.
Nikki began screaming. The muffled wails lasted a full 15 seconds, rising above the popping sounds in the flaming space beyond the doorway. And then abruptly the video stopped.
My head was spinning. I could barely breathe. I wasn’t sure exactly what had taken place, but knew it was very bad. What I’d seen felt like a horror movie. Except this was real.
Did Nikki just kill herself? That was one of the thoughts I had.
We should have known something like this might be coming.
The previous June, Nikki had gone missing for four days. Around 4:30 A.M. on a Friday, her 1997 Toyota pickup had gotten stuck in the Tiger Bay Wildlife Management Area, a vast wooded wetland near Daytona Beach. She called 911 in need of assistance, and during that hourlong call talked frantically and confusedly to the dispatcher. It was obvious she wasn’t mentally well.
Nikki told the dispatcher she’d been exploring the forest in her truck. She said her boyfriend had been kidnapped by “outlaws,” and that she could see spirits when someone was about to die. When police got to the location, they found a tan pickup stuck in mud, but no Nikki.
Four days later, around dawn Tuesday morning, Niki walked barefoot out of the woods, a mile from where she’d left the truck. She was muddy and disheveled, but incredibly, she had no serious injuries. Media reports made reference to her “survivalist background” and said she’d “spent time in the woods in the past.” Somehow Nikki had managed to take care of herself for 96 hours in a Florida cypress swamp full of alligators and snakes.
She told searchers she’d been hiding because she thought someone bad was looking for her. Police snapped a photo of her seated in the back of a vehicle wrapped in neon yellow rescue garb, mud caking her feet and ankles, face grim.
They took her to a nearby hospital for a mental-health evaluation.
And now, in the aftermath of the video she shot on what turned out to be an unmoored sailboat in a Daytona Beach marina, Nikki was again declared a missing person.
It would be five days before authorities found her, dead in the charred boat.
During this time, Florida media referred often to what had happened to Nikki a year earlier, in the Tiger Bay woods. But they also reported on something else that helped make sense of the horrific Facebook Live video, which remained on Nikki’s timeline.
The night Nikki shot it, a Daytona Beach woman named Betty Jo Garcia called 911 at 2:15 A.M. to request police action. She wanted them to evict Nikki from the boat.
“My husband’s been having an affair with this stripper for a year and a half,” Garcia related. “She’s been living on my boat for two days now. I was out of town, so I had no idea this woman was on my boat. I want her off my boat. I want to file a restraining order because she keeps calling and blowing up my phone.”
Garcia owned the sailboat with her then 51-year-old husband, John. It was Nikki who informed his wife of the affair. Betty Jo feared Nikki would shoot her if she tried to confront Nikki on her own, since there were weapons onboard (a shotgun, a handgun, and an AK-47, along with rounds of ammunition) to which Nikki could apparently gain access.
When police got to the Halifax Harbor Marina, they found the burning sailboat anchored 20 feet from the dock, mooring lines untethered. And they heard what sounded like ammunition exploding on the flaming vessel. Here is where the story takes another hard-to-believe turn.
Neither the Daytona Beach police nor the fire department has a rescue boat
at its disposal. They used a P.A. system
in an attempt to contact Nikki, and deployed a helicopter and drone, but didn’t spot her. As cops stood on the dock watching the boat burn, Betty Jo Garcia showed up and tossed a photograph of her and her husband into the harbor.
Nine hours later, nearing noon on June 5, police reached the boat, having received marine assistance from the Coast Guard and Florida Fish and Wildlife.
They found the 1979 Morgan Craft sailboat severely damaged, but there was no sign of Nikki.
The Garcias had informed police that Nikki talked of suicide during phone calls she’d placed to them, after John Garcia told her he wanted to end their affair. So for five days, the local news media ran with stories about a “scorned and suicidal woman” (to quote the Daytona Beach News-Journal) who’d set a boat on fire and then disappeared.
Finally, police found Nikki, under a large cushion inside the burned sailboat, which had been moved back to its slip. Somehow they’d missed her during the initial search.
An autopsy found soot in her lungs and concluded she died of smoke inhalation.
In the days after Nikki’s death had been confirmed, I felt shock, sorrow, and anger.
Her face kept coming into my mind, and memories from our club days. I thought of her three daughters, and Nikki’s own mother, who I’d seen in photos. I got angry at the thought of things reaching a state with Nikki’s mental health where she urgently needed help to stay alive but it didn’t come. I got angry at the thought of her body sitting on that wrecked boat for days. And I got angry at Facebook.
Meanwhile, the video remained on Nikki’s timeline. She had a private account, so despite press coverage of the video, only a limited number of people viewed it. Still, it seemed so wrong — obscene, even — that a video made by a desperate, mentally ill woman in the last seconds of her life could be watched.
I flagged the video to Facebook, and received an auto-reply for reports of platform abuse encouraging me to visit the Help Center to learn more.
Nikki’s birthday arrived in September. She would have turned 32. People posted messages on her Facebook timeline wishing her a good day in heaven.
The video was still up.
Shortly before Christmas, when I reported the video to Facebook once again and nothing happened, I sent an email to the company’s press department. A week later, I got a response with an offer of a phone call.
Although Facebook asked that I keep our conversation off-record, the representative I spoke to explained that the reason the video stayed up was because Nikki did not kill herself on camera — she goes off camera for this. An important distinction in the Facebook algorithm, apparently. But then the rep told me what I wanted to hear: The video had been removed.
People react to loss and tragedy in different ways. After Nikki’s death, I searched her timeline for clues that might shed light on her actions. One thing
stood out. It was a quote from the author Jeff Brown. The first sentence read:
“So many break down because they cannot carry the weight of falsity any longer.”
I’m glad Facebook took down the video, but when I think about how long it remained on Nikki’s timeline, autoplaying any time you visited her feed, it strikes me how this platform can be so vigilant about things like a nipple slip in a photo, or putting you in purgatory for posting a politically incorrect meme, yet this tragic recording played on a loop for six months.
With some time to gain perspective, I suppose the reason I got so focused on the matter has do with an experience that’s probably close to universal when a friend or family member dies in circumstances as dire as Nikki’s.
There’s a feeling of guilt and a feeling of powerlessness. You wish you could have done something. You wish you could have reached out to the person at the right time. That didn’t happen here, and I think my emotions pushed me to focus on something connected to Nikki where I could get some action: the video.
A social media platform like Facebook can keep people connected across time and geography, and that’s often a good thing; it can also be a place to express grief and remember someone. Nikki’s mom posted loving thoughts about her daughter, and shared how Nikki had struggled with mental illness for a long time, and how it was so difficult for her to see, as a mother. But as experts have been telling us for a while, social media platforms have also created new stressors in people’s lives, and can deepen, not lessen, that “sense of falsity.” Social media invites people to perform a kind of existential Photoshopping on their days and nights, packaging life for likes.
That’s not an avenue to authenticity.
Like most people, I’ve had periods where it’s hard to find the light, and it feels like the darkness is winning. Feeling inauthentic can be part of that depressive state. You smile, but feel nothing inside. You laugh, but it’s a well-rehearsed chuckle. You’re tempted to react to the void with impulse buys, or alcohol, or drugs. It’s a scary place to be in.
When it comes to mental-health treatments and our understanding of mental illness, we’ve come a long way. The range of effective medicines, the sophistication of talk-therapy approaches, the number of treatment facilities — it’s a different landscape these days.
Progress has also arrived in terms of destigmatization, and the prevalence and prominence of conversations about depression. In recent years, top sports figures, ranging from NBA center Kevin Love to boxer Oscar de la Hoya to Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, have been upfront about their struggles.
And yet suicide numbers remain high, and it doesn’t matter how successful you are, how much money you have, or how much adoration comes your way.
Think of recent high-profile suicides. Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell. Beloved chef and Parts Unknown host Anthony Bourdain. Handbag designer Kate Spade. The list goes on.
The great writer David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, took his own life 12 years ago. He had a loving marriage, a stellar career, and a beautiful home in Claremont, California. It didn’t matter. His wife, artist Karen Green, found his body hanging on the patio of their house.
There’s more to do. There’s more progress to be made.
As Daytona Beach police chief Craig Capri said after Nikki’s body was discovered, “In the years to come, it’s only going to get worse unless we come up with a program to get their needs taken care of. That’s my biggest fear.”
But with luck, over time, this kind of speaking out by people in positions like Capri’s will help bring about more positive change.
This past November, President Trump issued pardons for two convicted war criminals, Major Mathew Golsteyn and First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, and reversed the demotion of another, Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher (of no relation to this here scribe).
Made in the midst of impeachment buildup, the decision caused a firestorm in the military and in veterans’ communities — proponents saw it as evidence that the president was honoring his recurring pledge to “love our military.” Detractors argued that it was an act of political opportunism, one that both attacked the military justice system and normalized the abnormal for a citizenry largely removed from the realities of modern war.
Why yes, dear reader, I am one of those detractors.
The theme of this March-April issue is “Health.” Because I’m a contrarian pain in the ass, I saw this as an opportunity to explore the unhealthy nature of these recent presidential pardons. Our republic is unwell, and these pardons do not help.
No one was more responsible for these three servicemembers’ cases getting the attention of the president than Pete Hegseth, an Iraq war veteran and weekend Fox & Friends host best known for talking to average joes in diners.
Before washing up on the shores of Fox News Island, Hegseth fronted a Koch brothers-funded veterans’ organization and advocated for the privatization of VA health care. Through those connections and a mutual distaste for normal D.C. operations, Hegseth gained the president’s ear. When the nonprofit military justice advocacy group United American Patriots approached Hegseth with their cases, it was only a matter of time before Hegseth in turn brought them to the White House.
During the slow, often public march toward the pardons, Hegseth hosted the spouses of the war criminals on Fox & Friends and made the case that, “The benefit of the doubt should go to the guys pulling the trigger.” Which is a compelling argument, at least in a vacuum, as anyone who’s operated in the messy grays of combat is inclined to grant. I sure am.
Except, well, almost no one involved in these situations actually pulled a fucking trigger, Hegseth. There’s little messy gray involved in these cases, but a whole lot of black and white. Let’s tackle these pardons and their corresponding details one at a time, shall we?
Lieutenant Lorance: On day three as a platoon leader in combat, this former military policeman gave soldiers under his command the order to shoot at three local men on a motorcycle.
After initially balking and missing the men (perhaps on purpose), the soldiers followed the order. Two of the three Afghans were killed. Lorance subsequently issued a false report about the incident. Nine members of his platoon testified against him at his court-martial, and his company commander, Patrick Swanson, recently said, “The tragedy is that people will hail him as a hero, and he is not a hero. He ordered those murders. He lied about them.” Did Hegseth call this guy “a hero” on Fox News? You know it!
Chief Petty Officer Gallagher: Where to begin? Gallagher had a long, distinguished career in the SEALs, and was decorated for valor multiple times. On his eighth deployment in 2017, during the aftermath of an airstrike in Mosul, Gallagher allegedly executed a wounded teenage ISIS fighter with his knife.
This was the culmination of a series of episodes involving Gallagher and excessive force — some in his platoon later testified to messing with the scope of his rifle so he’d stop shooting innocents. Regardless, Gallagher and others then posed with the dead body of the teen fighter for a trophy photograph. After another SEAL changed his testimony deep in the trial, claiming that he had been the one who’d actually killed the ISIS teen, Gallagher was found not guilty of premeditated murder and attempted murder. (The other SEAL had, of course, already been granted immunity by the prosecution. The code runs deep in the spec ops community.) Gallagher was convicted of posing with the body (hard to walk back that evidence) and initially stripped of his SEAL trident — until President Trump ordered it returned, over the objections of his own Navy Secretary, Richard Spencer, who resigned in protest.
Major Golsteyn: As a Green Beret in Afghanistan during a 2010 deployment, Golsteyn allegedly helped cover up the execution of an alleged Taliban bomb maker and/or executed the bomb maker himself after a direct engagement.
He and others then returned to the village that night to dig up and burn the bomb maker’s body. The story only surfaced later, after Golsteyn mentioned it in a polygraph administered by the CIA during a job interview. Though Golsteyn would make different claims about what happened to the bomb maker and how, he was investigated twice and eventually charged with premeditated murder. His trial had been scheduled for December 2019.
It bears repeating: These were not quick decisions made in the fog of war. Every single one occurred in a space where these soldiers could have thought through what was happening and how to react.
We’re 19 years into these everlong wars. A vast, vast majority of American servicemembers who’ve gone abroad to fight them have held the line in near-impossible situations. There’s absolutely been cases where confusion has led to tragedy. There’s absolutely been cases where soldiers were forced to choose between a bad choice and a worse choice, and it’s led to collateral damage and dead and wounded soldiers. There’s absolutely been a whole lot of moral and ethical dilemmas that offer much in the way of complexity, and little in the way of clarity. Such is war. These sorts of wars, especially.
These aren’t that, though.
These pardons do a disservice to everyone who held that line, or attempted to. They impugn every soldier and Marine who exhibited courageous restraint in moments of great confusion and hazard, often to their own detriment, because that’s what duty meant in the moment.
And now these three pardoned war criminals — Lorance, in particular — are public figures. They’ve campaigned for President Trump at fundraisers. They go on Fox News and hold court like they’re modern-day Spartan soldiers or something. It’s a fucking disgrace. And it’s not over. That advocacy group United American Patriots is now making noise about seeking a pardon for Robert Bales, the staff sergeant who straight-up slaughtered a family of Afghan civilians in cold blood in 2012.
I know we live in the upside-down these days, but this is too much. Yes, they’re hard, yes, they’re often confusing, but the rules of engagement matter. Escalation of force matters. It’s what separates us from the enemy. It’s what separates us from barbarism. They’re part of what makes the American servicemember special.
Our Founder’s Erotic Film “Caligula” gets Rediscovered
Depending on the predisposition of the source, history remembers Bob Guccione either as an ostentatious creative spirit or a ruthlessly clever businessman — the reality probably lies somewhere in the middle. What’s certain is that the Penthouse magazine founder loved a challenge, loved exceeding expectations, and lived to push the envelope, weighing in via his publication on charged social and cultural issues, and highlighting the centrality of sex in human life.
A visual artist who painted, drew, and developed his own aesthetic as a photographer, Guccione inevitably turned his eye to Hollywood and moviemaking. His efforts began in the early 1970s, when the Penthouse company helped bankroll the horror film A Name for Evil and the counterculture drama The Dope Lawyer, while also partnering with Paramount Pictures to assist in financing The Longest Yard, The Day of the Locust, and Chinatown.
Meanwhile, producer Franco Rossellini and author Gore Vidal had begun collaborating on a film about the notorious Roman emperor Caligula, envisioned as a scathing commentary on power and corruption. Their quest for financing led them to Guccione, who saw in the political, brutal, and sexually charged subject matter an opportunity to make a truly revolutionary film.
Under his supervision, Guccione believed that Caligula could deliver a progressive cultural statement to a larger audience than was possible with a men’s magazine. His vision was bold and ambitious, and he was willing to invest heavily to pull off such a momentous undertaking.
“I promised to make a new kind of motion picture, one so innovative in its magnitude that it would fundamentally change the viewing habits of the theatergoing public,” Guccione said in promotional audio accompanying the movie’s release. He added, “If experiencing something that no one has ever felt before is as important to you as it is to me, I recommend that you see and experience Caligula.”
With a massive budget and starring four of England’s most respected actors (Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and Sir John Gielgud), Caligula was Guccione’s attempt to fuse the scope and star power of a grand Hollywood historical drama with the excitement and audacity of pornographic film and the innovative sensibility of European art cinema.
Evaluated purely from a conceptual standpoint, the film can be said to faithfully
combine these elements. The creative result is less easily defended. Following an issue-plagued production, both Vidal and its Italian director, Tinto Brass, sued to remove their names from the film, and star Malcolm McDowell was publicly recommending that viewers skip the movie altogether. Audiences ignored his advice, and all the scandal only served to sell more tickets.
Released in America in February of 1980, Caligula was a box-office hit, but the reviews were universally brutal. Unfazed, Guccione delighted in the fact that, according to his calculations, by September, Caligula had earned a dazzling profit of $89 million from domestic and international sales.
Between the lawsuits and the production vitriol, it was public knowledge that the version shown in theaters strayed significantly from the visions of both Vidal and Brass. For this reason, cinephiles for years have dreamed of a better Caligula. The notion of a more artful and authoritative cut of the movie became a kind of mythical beast, with some fans carefully comparing releases from different countries and assessing edits through study of mere seconds of variant material, fueled by romantic notions based on behind-the-scenes photos of gorgeous, lost moments.
Guccione pushed conversations about the raw footage away as he proceeded into other arenas, and with each administrative regime change at Penthouse, knowledge of what had become of the materials diminished. The film world reasonably assumed the original footage never left Rome and had been destroyed long ago.
To understand the mystery surrounding the raw elements of Caligula, we have to return to the volatile end of its contentious production.
Shortly after filming was completed, Brass was shocked to find the locks changed at the studio and his editing bed outside in the snow. Meanwhile, Guccione secretly shot footage of Penthouse Pets engaging in hard-core sex in order to finish the film according to his vision.
Guccione had been sneaking the raw negatives out of Italy from mid-production onward, suggesting his plan to commandeer the film was long-gestating. Unlike in America, the Italian film industry prioritizes the rights of the director as a film’s “creator,” and Brass was successful in receiving an injunction against Guccione’s plan to complete the film without his input.
But by the time Brass won his victory in the Italian courts, all of the negatives had been moved to England. Guccione quickly turned to the British courts, who decided in Guccione’s favor, stating that any materials would not be returned to Italy until the settlement of any appeals.
After this temporary win, Guccione’s associates began relocating the negatives in an attempt to stay ahead of any seizure. (One of the first things I noticed when opening the film cans was that they were all recycled from earlier movies, with many of them bearing a confusing handwritten label of “My Son, My Son.” I learned later that this was deceptive coding meant to discourage any examination during transport.)
The legends surrounding the move of the original film materials ranged from Guccione claiming to have carried them all in suitcases (physically impossible) to the negatives being smuggled out of Italy wrapped around the legs of trusted couriers (even more impossible). The truth was far more mundane: Through a combination of palm-greasing and sleight-of-hand, the footage was spirited from England to New York City. Penthouse then reached a legal resolution with Franco Rossellini’s Italian production company, allowing Guccione to complete the film.
The 96 hours of raw footage, the location sound tapes, and other production material eventually made their way to Los Angeles, where for decades they sat in a film-storage facility gathering dust.
The timing of their rescue was nothing short of a miracle — credit for saving the cache goes to Ranjit Sandhu, the academic behind Caligula.org, who tipped off German researcher Alexander Tuschinski in 2018 to where the materials were stored. Tuschinski in turn notified Penthouse, whose new administration were shocked to learn the materials still existed. When the storage facility was contacted, it emerged that the entire collection was literally days away from permanent destruction for unpaid bills. If not for this eleventh-hour exchange, the Caligula footage would have been lost forever.
When the archives were opened, beneath the dust we discovered that the original camera negatives and location sound were in pristine condition, miraculously untouched by time.
While promoting Caligula during a 1980 Penthouse magazine interview, Guccione joked that Tinto Brass had shot enough footage to “make the original version of Ben-Hur about 50 times over.”
This prodigious collection of archival material contains countless goosebump moments. The most exciting aspect? In the rescued footage, McDowell and Mirren deliver breathtaking performances no one has seen for 40 years. Enabled by the unearthing of the original materials, and guided by the narrative of Vidal’s original shooting script and the vision of Tinto Brass, the recut Caligula can be viewed as the discovery of an entirely lost film starring two of the world’s most celebrated actors.
One unforgettable moment involves a scene in the Roman Senate. It exists in the original release, but what is most powerful happens after Guccione’s edit ends. The camera slowly pans up to Mirren as Caesonia, watching her emperor-husband unleash pandemonium upon the Senate. Caesonia looks on, pleased; she releases a coy giggle. As the scene continues, her mood shifts: with a glint in her eye she raises her chin dramatically, surveying the melee below like a satisfied goddess of chaos.
I hope you’ll be watching next autumn when this moment — and many more like it — are presented in Caligula MMXX.
Learn more about the 40th anniversary release of “Caligula” at caligulammxx.com.
After meeting collaborator Matt Hislope in a University of Kansas theater production, he and Hislope moved to Austin, Texas, in 2001, where they founded Rubber Repertory. For ten years the duo staged innovative conceptual theater, work that earned them multiple Austin Chronicle cover stories, including one issue that showed them naked, wrapped in rope, beside an agility tunnel outfitted with human arms.
Rubber Repertory’s productions were sexual, experimental, controversial, and helped “Keep Austin Weird,” as the slogan goes. After leaving Austin in 2013 and founding an artist residency in Lawrence, Kansas, Meyer headed to Los Angeles. He landed a few choice roles in No Country for Old Men, Dope, and Suburbicon, before the hustle started to wear thin.
“Even when your acting career is going really well, it still feels so disempowering,” he tells Penthouse. “I started making art to feel like I had control over something. Something that felt more tangible. I probably also did it so I could have an identity beyond just being an actor. Pretty sure that one out of every four dating-app profiles in L.A. says, ‘No actors,’ so it felt good to be able to hide behind something else.”
Meyer tells us about the time he was in college, when he had a job working at a radio station for the blind. Every Sunday morning, an “alluring woman” would come in to read, and would describe the latest issue of Penthouse for the station’s listeners.
“I’m pretty sure they played it as part of the late-night programming,” he remembers. “Anyways, 20-year-old me was fascinated by her, but I was way too shy to actually initiate a conversation. I do remember smelling the recording booth after she left, though. She wore the headiest scent.”
Meyer’s drawings are freaky, oddball depictions of naked bodies in erotic positions. They also have a trippy Ralph Steadman-like quality when he plays with color, which makes the art seem like it was fueled by PCP.
“I like it when the [body’s] forms become characters or landscapes,” Meyer says. “I like seeing what kinds of strange and kinky stories emerge when body parts from sexual imagery are isolated, layered, and distorted.”
Meyer is not a trained artist. He started sketching for fun, so most of his inspiration comes from other experimental theater types, like Taylor Mac, Deborah Hay, Yoko Ono, and Miranda July. However, Instagram has enabled him to develop his art and grow a following one hashtag and like at a time.
“If we’re getting more into therapy mode, I’m sure part of why I draw erotic art is to signal to the world that I’m a sexual person,” he says. “I do sometimes get self-conscious about all the big boobs I’m drawing, so I’ll start drawing smaller boobs and maybe even some dicks, but that never lasts very long.”
Depending on where you are in the country, you might be enjoying blissful spring warmth or lingering late-winter. Whatever the weather, it’s always a good idea, when indoors, to take off your clothes and get busy. The following Romance Products will help you in your mission, should you choose to accept it.
Dosist Passion Vape Pen
Early twentieth-century anti-“marihuana” propaganda threatened its potential users with a depraved lifestyle of sex and violence after a single toke. But that was then, and this is now. Get stoned, peace out, and fuck, is what we’re trying to say. This petite vape pen, with its 11:1 THC to CBD formula designed for an intense body high, will help get you there. dosist.com / $30
Jack Knob Polish
What if you wanted all the pleasure of being stoned, but didn’t want it to extend beyond the crotch area? After all, some of us have to work in the morning and can’t spend all night getting high and getting down. Well, look no further. The CBD in this water-based lube helps promote blood flow to your junk, which means a longer-lasting, more intense erection, but without the mind fuckage. Say no more, right? cbdcaring.com / $12-$24
Intimate Art Kit
One of my exes had this folded-up canvas in her closet that was covered in blue splotches. When I asked about it, she said she’d gotten naked, rolled around in blue paint, then rolled around on this canvas as part of some yoga cult she’d once been involved in. The premise here is similar, but you don’t have to go to India, you don’t have to join a yoga cult, and you can put the results up on a wall and make your dinner guests eat under your sex art. uncommongoods.com / $60
Position of the Day Playbook
Everyone could use a little help keeping the party going. While some of the 366 positions in this illustrated guide look like they could injure the less flexible among us, most are likely to result in the kind of mind-blowingly athletic sex you’ve been dreaming about since you were a horny teenager reading this magazine. urbanoutfitters.com / $13
CannaMojo
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Born and raised in Boston, Earl Miller was enrolled in medical school when he got a taste for the arts. He switched his sights to acting, relocated to New York, and attended the prestigious Neighborhood Playhouse conservatory. Soon, he landed roles off-Broadway and on TV. But when the lighting director of a play he was in suddenly quit and Miller stepped in to do the job, he discovered he liked working behind the scenes. So began the journey that led to his true calling: photography. In 1967, he used his tax refund to buy a camera, and before long his career as a lensman took off.
Miller shot commercial campaigns, took celebrity headshots, and even toured with Sonny and Cher as their personal photographer. But it wasn’t until he picked up a 1972 issue of this magazine that he knew he wanted to photograph beautiful women. He submitted some of his work, and Guccione bought it. The two men went on to develop a creative partnership, and the Miller images Guccione published would burn themselves into the brains of countless Penthouse readers.
“[Guccione] told me that he firmly believed the magazine was a richer experience for the reader if it presented a wider range of visual artistry,” Miller told Adult Video News in 2010. “Rather than force his creative people to shoot in a particular style, he encouraged photographers to find their own vision and reach their own level of artistry.”
Here, we celebrate the decades-long collaboration between Earl Miller and Bob Guccione by sharing some of Miller’s work, and getting the photographer’s memories as he recounts one unforgettable shoot.
Miller recalls his shoot with 1980 Penthouse Pet of the Year, Cheryl Rixon:
“It was the winter of 1980. Bob Guccione had sent me to Tempe, Arizona, to shoot a special layout for the July 1980 issue of Penthouse featuring Pet of the Year, Cheryl Rixon. Cheryl was riding high and had just played her first mainstream film role in Columbia Pictures’ comedy Used Cars, starring Kurt Russell and Jack Warden. A PR guy at Columbia was also my production manager, so he was able to arrange whatever film location I wanted to use for Cheryl’s spread. My favorite location was way out in the desert where I knew we would have total privacy. This particular spot was the derelict fuselage of a DC-3 airplane, which was used as Kurt Russell’s office in Used Cars. It was freezing cold that day. I have a vivid memory of my crew and I bundled in heavy winter gear. Meanwhile, Cheryl had to lay her perfect naked body on that frigid metal plane.
“Cheryl got an unexpected audience that day on set. My PR friend forgot to mention that several truckloads of Tempe Teamsters [hired by Columbia Pictures] would be showing up to strike the props. As luck would have it they all rolled up right after Cheryl got completely naked on top of the plane. Oh crap, there goes my privacy, I thought, assuming that Cheryl would want to halt production until they left. Man, I sure was wrong. Cheryl just loved the extra attention. She performed like a star for those guys as they trudged props back and forth to their trucks. With an audience of men gawking at her, Cheryl forgot all about the freezing weather and strutted her stuff like no one else. Plus, the Teamsters got a bonus that day they never forgot.”
Bottom line, it seems good to be Earl. Cheryl Rixon, btw…
There a scene in the 1992 movie American Me where actor William Forsythe, who plays J.D., a Slavic-American character based on the legendary Mexican Mafia gang leader Joe “Pegleg” Morgan, hits a California prison yard as a newbie and is confronted by white inmates.
J.D. responds in fluent Spanish. Moments later, a group of Mexican-American gangsters roll up, glare at the “peckerwoods,” and embrace J.D. as one of their own.
As the scene extends, one of the Latino inmates questions Santana, the gang’s shot caller, about J.D. hanging with them. Santana kills the issue by letting the dude know this Anglo was one of them, a homeboy with heart, courage, and discipline.
“Pegleg” Morgan — born Joseph Megjugorac in 1929 in Los Angeles, the son of Croatian immigrants — rose to become a real-life shot caller in the vicious Mexican Mafia gang, founded by 13 Mexican-Americans in a California youth prison in 1957.
This crew, also known as La Eme (Spanish for the letter M), rapidly gained in size and strength, using intimidation, extortion, and murder, both inside and outside the California prison system. Controlling territory, trafficking drugs, and terrorizing anyone who resisted their demands or threatened their power, La Eme became a dominant, entrenched, moneymaking force throughout the Golden State. And as its lethal footprint expanded, its Slavic-American player became one of the most powerful gangsters in the United States.
“Joe Morgan was a nails-tough Croatian who grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood in East L.A.,” says true-crime author and Gangster Report founder Scott Burnstein. “In total, he spent 40 years locked up for crimes ranging from bank robbery to homicide. He escaped jail twice, committed murders like he had a license, and developed, for La Eme, lucrative, power-boosting connections to both Mexican drug cartels and the Italian mafia in L.A.”
With his shaved head, burning eyes, dark eyebrows, and prosthetic leg (a result of being shot by cops while on the lam), Morgan had the right look to match his steely character. He
was smart, ruthless, charismatic, strategic, and lived by strict rules — a code he expected his associates to live by, too. Morgan, who died in 1993, helped spearhead the Mexican Mafia’s evolution into the baddest prison-spawned gang to ever do it —
a California kingpin with a big vision and ceaseless drive, a killer whose lengthy leadership status within La Eme puts him in
the conversation with marquee gangsters like John Gotti and Pablo Escobar.
“Although Slavic ethnically, Morgan adopted Mexican ways and spoke Spanish perfectly,” recalls Richard Valdemar, a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department gang investigator for 33 years, now retired. “As a kid, he joined one of the Maravilla gangs in East Los Angeles. He’s unusual because he’s a white boy who grew up in the projects. If you met him and hung out with him for just a few moments, you’d forget he was white, though. Joe didn’t fake it.”
Despite being a güero — a light-skinned person — Morgan had a bone-deep connection to L.A.’s vato loco underworld, its subculture of Mexican-American street gangs and gangbangers. He developed a command of Mexican-Spanish slang. Raised in the barrios, he was a Chicano at heart, a guy who identified as Mexican-American, and who also, from early on, happened to be one of the baddest motherfuckers around. By his late teens, he stood well over six feet tall, and projected an intense, intimidating vibe. In 1946, still just 16, he took up with a 32-year-old married woman, Elvira Rojo, who eventually offered him $1,000 to kill her husband. Morgan did the deed early one September morning, walking into the room where Rojo’s 52-year-old husband was sleeping and bashing his skull with a hammer. He transported the corpse into the Malibu hills and buried his victim in a shallow grave.
“While awaiting trial for murder in the L.A. County Jail, Morgan keyed in on his cellmate William Westbrook, another 16-year-old who was being transferred to a juvenile forestry camp,” says Chris Kasparoza, author of the mob novel For Blood and Loyalty. “Morgan posed as Westbrook and escaped, making it no shock that he went on to become a leader in what the government has alleged is the most dangerous prison gang ever.”
How did a teenager hoodwink prison staff and actually gain his freedom for a time? In an early display of his craftiness, brains, and daring, Morgan studied Westbrook’s mannerisms, practiced his signature, and threatened his cellmate’s life if he didn’t go along with the young killer’s ruse. When guards came to transfer Westbrook to the camp, Morgan impersonated his cellmate and Westbrook stayed silent. After forging his signature on a booking slip, Morgan, sans handcuffs, got into a car with a probation officer.
At San Fernando Boulevard and Colorado Street in Glendale, Morgan jumped from the car, took off, and escaped. The sheriff’s department didn’t realize a cold-blooded homicide suspect had gotten away until hours later. The young criminal was now a fugitive, a wanted man, and he made page two of the Los Angeles Times with his ballsy escape.
It was the beginning of Morgan’s outlaw legend. And unlike many prison escapees, this canny 16-year-old from the mean streets of East L.A. wasn’t immediately recaptured.
“They got him a couple weeks later,” says Christian Cipollini, an organized-crime historian and founder of the site Gangland Legends. “Cops got a tip on his whereabouts, and when they showed up, Morgan took off. An officer shot him in the leg, shattering bone, and stopping Morgan in his tracks. Due to complications, his leg was amputated just below the knee and Morgan ended up with a prosthetic. That led to the authorities and media dubbing him ‘Pegleg,’ although prison lore holds no one ever called him Pegleg to his face.”
Convicted of second-degree murder, Morgan was sent to Folsom State Prison instead of a juvenile facility, due to his “criminal sophistication,” as the judge put it. Despite being the youngest inmate to ever hit the yard, Morgan received mad props at the prison, where he served nine years. With his story and Elvira’s photo in the newspapers often, Morgan became a jailhouse celebrity. (To his fellow prisoners, having sex with an attractive woman twice his age was a grand caper.)
Gangster Report’s Burnstein picks up the story from here.
“In July of 1955, Morgan was paroled, but he wasn’t out in the world for long,” Burnstein recounts. “On November 30, 1955, he robbed a West Covina bank of $17,000 with a machine gun. The FBI arrested him at a bar in Long Beach a week later. He was sent back to state prison — a convicted murderer, bank robber, and escape risk.”
When Morgan was apprehended following the bank heist, the Los Angeles Times headline read, “Hammer Slayer Held in $17,000 Bank Hold-Up.” The press coverage reminded everyone that the same guy who walked into a bank with a rapid-fire weapon like some kind of golden-age gangster — John Dillinger, say, or Machine Gun Kelly — was the teenage Romeo who took a hammer to the head of his married sweetheart’s husband.
Incarcerated at San Quentin, Morgan continued to build his criminal legend. Though in terms of daily prison life, Morgan was known for conducting himself as a gentleman around jailors and fellow prisoners, when it came time to enforce or expand his gang’s power, he could flip a switch, and — like Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde — become capable of killing someone with his bare hands or otherwise do what was needed to get the job done.
Despite the prosthetic leg, he was not limited much physically, and was one of the better handball players on the yard, an aptitude which only added to his status.
At meals, Morgan sat with Latino prisoners and formed ties with those who would form the core of the Mexican Mafia. He became a mentor of sorts to members of the newly born La Eme, teaching them how to do time at San Quentin.
“Joe had a reputation from the start at San Quentin, because his homeboys in Maravilla were probably the largest segment of incarcerated gang members,” says retired investigator Valdemar. “If someone called him a white boy, he would have killed him. He knew what his genes were, but his heart was Chicano.”
A natural-born leader, Morgan influenced La Eme before he became a member. “He became the new gang’s first counselor and later its business guru,” says crime expert and documentary filmmaker Al Profit, director of the American Dope series. “He studied Aztec history and formed solid relationships with gang carnales like ‘Hatchet’ Mike Ison and Ruben ‘Rube’ Soto. Back then, prisoners tended to settle their disputes with their fists. But when La Eme came along, they started making and hiding weapons in strategic places on the yard, so they could grab them when things jumped off.”
On February 24, 1961, after being subpoenaed to act as a witness in the trial of a man who murdered a San Quentin inmate, Morgan masterminded an 11-man escape from the L.A. County Jail using lock-picking tools and hacksaws hidden in his artificial leg. The inmates made their getaway through a pipe shaft. Again Morgan made the news. A splashy front-page Los Angeles Times story called it the jail’s largest escape ever.
“Talk about street cred and cleverness,” says Christian Cipollini, commenting on the jailbreak and Morgan’s resourcefulness in bringing it about. This time Morgan remained at large for a week before being captured at a store in West L.A.
“When he walked back onto the yard in San Quentin, he was a California prison legend who’d escaped more than once and had served 14 years, mostly at Folsom. He learned the Aztec language and taught others so they could communicate in code. He was a master negotiator, an expert on doing time, and had connections with all the racial groups.”
“La Eme formed at D.V.I. — the Deuel Vocational Institution — a California youth prison that housed the state’s most violent teenage inmates,” says Chris Kasparoza. “Legend has it that it was the brainchild of a then 16-year-old Luis ‘Huero Buff’ Flores, who brought together the toughest, smartest, most dangerous members of various Mexican-American street gangs at D.V.I., mostly from the barrios of East Los Angeles, uniting them. It was like a ‘special forces’ of teenage gang members who ruled their youth prison yard.”
It wasn’t long before these first La Eme soldados were transferred to maximum-security adult prisons like San Quentin, with prison officials hoping the transfers would kill the fledging Hispanic gang in the cradle. That didn’t happen. La Eme members recruited even more ruthless and murderous Mexican-American inmates into their ranks, and learned lessons about criminality, organizing, and securing power from people like Morgan.
“The Mexican Mafia did not materialize in the streets, it formed within prison confines, probably out of necessity. Like virtually any other prison gang, these guys needed to stick together to survive and thrive,” says Cipollini. “The idea soon morphed into creating not just a gang, but a super-gang. Eventually that evolution created vast outside connections and reach, but of course that kind of expansion also produced enemies.”
In 1969, at the age of 40, Morgan was sponsored by his friend “Hachet” Mike Ison and joined La Eme, becoming the organization’s first member with non-Mexican blood.
Morgan was given the Aztec name “Cocoliso” and was immediately accepted into the inner circle. Up until that point, he’d been acting in an advisory capacity. Embracing his role as a Mexican Mafia soldier, he proposed operations and began scheming from day one.
“La Eme was founded on the principle that every man is equal and the gang operated on a one-man/one-vote, majority-rules system,” says Al Profit. “Leaving their individual rivalries in the street, the top gangsters merged into a single crew. Joining required a formal sponsorship. A made member had to speak up for the individual being considered for membership and take responsibility for them. La Eme was recruiting gangsters with serious criminal résumés who weren’t afraid to use violence as an intimidation tool.”
In addition to being fearless, intelligent, and ambitious, Morgan was willing to kill when and wherever for La Eme. In the pen they say, “Boys fight and men kill.” La Eme gained a reputation for killing with abandon. Side by side with all the violence, though, there was an emphasis on mental discipline, thinking ahead, and studying.
Morgan, especially, believed in the benefit of hitting the books. Determined to be the best gangster he could be, he pushed his brothers to read classics like Machiavelli’s The Prince and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to gain insights into maintaining power and battling enemies.
Other books Morgan encouraged La Eme members to read were Grey’s Anatomy, to learn about the body and its vulnerabilities so as to maximize damage in shank attacks, and primers on martial arts and weapons. Morgan wanted to exploit every possible advantage, from knowledge of murder methods to big-picture strategizing, in his quest to make La Eme the dominant gang force in the California prison system and on the streets.
“For a long time, there’d been a close association between the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia because they have the same gang enemy — the Black Guerrilla Family,” Cipollini of Gangland Legends points out. “It was the Mexican Mafia who first challenged the BGF. But La Eme was also battling with another, newer Hispanic gang, Nuestra Familia. About the time that Joe Morgan came on the scene, the BGF and NF formed an alliance. The lines were drawn in the sand. That took things to a whole other level.”
In 1972, there was a bloodbath in the California system. Thirty-six prisoners were killed that year and gang experts believe the Mexican Mafia was responsible for 30 of the killings. Race riots raged at Folsom and San Quentin. There were constant, major conflicts between black and Latino inmates. It was sparked by a La Eme hit put on a BGF soldier at San Quentin. In Chris Blatchford’s The Black Hand, Rene “Boxer” Enriquez says that Morgan was good for at least a dozen murders on his own and had engineered many more.
“All the members were expected to put in work,” says former gang investigator Valdemar. “They called it ‘putting in work’ or ‘wetting your steel.’ When I say work, I mean murder. If you hesitated, you fell from grace. Every one of them put in work and they were reluctant to pass on work to anyone else. The gang was basically a bunch of prolific murderers. Prisoners like Morgan knew the system. He let people like me run the overt system, but he ran the covert. Overtly, they were cooperative with us and knew we controlled the walls, but inwardly, they operated covertly and controlled the inside.
“He was in custody in the L.A. County Jail when I worked there,” Valdemar continues. “Like 1972-73. He was in my module, the high-power module, where all the big people from the Aryan Brotherhood, BGF, Mexican Mafia, and some political guys, like Black Panthers, were. I had direct contact with him on a regular basis. I also ran the law library which inmates were allowed to visit. He was very polite. He would greet me in Spanish. The guys at the top back then, they had a smooth, know-how-to-do-time kind of attitude, but they were dangerous.”
“La Eme seized control of the flow of narcotics into San Quentin,” says Niko Vorobyov, author of Dopeworld, a new book about the international drug trade. (See our interview with Vorobyov starting on page 104.) “And as gangmembers were transferred out, they did the same thing at other prisons. Joe Morgan had La Eme getting protection money from incarcerated Italian Mafia members, along with running all the prison hustles. More importantly, he started laying the foundation for the organization on the outside.”
Beginning in 1971, in another brazen La Eme initiative, recently paroled members of the gang began taking over federally funded drug and alcohol programs in East L.A. barrios, and some community action groups as well. The moves provided income fronts for ex-con gangbangers, always ready to do the gang’s bidding (strict, across-the-board obedience to the directives of La Eme shot callers was and is an ironclad rule, and the punishment for leaving the gang is death), as well as opportunities to siphon off government money. Gang revenue streams were expanding.
Over the years, as Valdemar’s career in law enforcement progressed, Joe Morgan’s name kept popping up in various investigations, but during most of this time, he remained in custody. In other words, Morgan was pulling strings from inside the belly of the beast, issuing directives, cementing La Eme power. This was a gang and a kingpin with reach.
One of the strategic moves Morgan helped guide was establishing the pact with the Aryan Brotherhood, known as the AB. “He was a liaison,” Valdemar remembers, before adding, “but the AB had a close relationship with all the Mexican Mafia members.”
Elaborating on Morgan’s personality and approach as a La Eme shot caller, Valdemar offers this: “I would say he’s one of those people that commanded your attention. If he was in the military, he would have been a leader. He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t boisterous. He didn’t try to inflict himself on anyone else. He just quietly took command.”
The Mexican Mafia has no official hierarchy. Unlike the sprawling Latin Kings gang, they don’t bestow titles and don’t elect “Coronas” to rule the organization. Mexican Mafia members rise to de facto leadership according to what’s needed at the time and who’s in power. It was law enforcement that labeled Morgan a godfather. But in truth, he was just a loyal member of La Eme who took charge to benefit the gang — and had the help of several equally powerful members who backed him. Morgan was a natural leader, so he took on a leadership role.
He knew his clout. He didn’t need an official title.
“To rise to the pinnacle of La Eme, as a güero no less, he must have been one smart, devious, bad motherfucker,” says Chris Kasparoza. “But also a loyal, charismatic one, with a code of honor. There was a reason why so many alpha-male murderers deferred to him, and even the cops tasked with locking him up were impressed. Morgan could get people to calm down. He was a diplomat in a certain sense.”
“His main allies,” says Al Profit, “were Ramon ‘Mundo’ Mendoza, Robert ‘Robot’ Salas, Alfred ‘Alfie’ Sosa, and Edward ‘Sailor Boy’ Gonzales. With these hard-core brothers, Morgan implemented La Eme’s decrees on the streets, which led to more power inside the prison system. During this part of the 1970s, the Mexican Mafia would become well-known all over California. All the Mexican street gangs paid tribute to La Eme. The organization’s name spread fear. Along with the brotherhood’s growth, of course, is the fact that law enforcement was getting hip to the gang and who their leaders were, in and out of prison.”
As his power grew, Morgan developed enemies and detractors within La Eme.
“Two OGs — Reymundo ‘Bevito’ Alvarez, who murdered a BGF shot caller, and Ernest ‘Kilroy’ Roybal — schemed against this rising soldado,” says Christian Cipollini. “They insisted that no one should be in La Eme who wasn’t Latino. They didn’t like Morgan, but Morgan had too much clout. He was paroled from Folsom in 1971, and when he hit the streets there were dozens of La Eme members on the outside as well. Morgan set about to try and organize the brothers into a cash-producing criminal enterprise.”
This Anglo shot caller wanted to “spread the Eme gospel.” Along with longtime friend Rodolfo Cadena, he launched a strategy of leveraging the organization’s power inside prison to control territory in the wider world.
Says Gangster Report’s Burnstein: “The ‘If you own the inside, you can own the outside’ philosophy grew La Eme to epic heights. Morgan’s contributions to the gang’s expansion were invaluable. Not only did his connections to narcotics suppliers catapult the Mexican Mafia into being instant, major players in the California dope game, his skills as a gangland politician paid dividends in the form of alliances and business relationships with other criminal factions — the Italian Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, outlaw biker gangs.”
Morgan (top row, right) and other Mexican Mafia members at a funeral, San Francisco, 1976
Morgan came to the conclusion that a lot of La Eme members, when they hit the streets, were obsessed with settling old scores instead of benefitting the organization as a whole. He envisioned the gang getting into more profitable endeavors. He knew murder had its place, but he wanted to use violence to further La Eme’s ends instead of securing personal revenge. As early as 1973, California newspapers were identifying Morgan as the leader of the Mexican Mafia. He couldn’t stay out of prison, though. He was always going back on parole violations.
Then in 1975, out on parole, he was indicted on federal narcotics charges and fled to Utah. He remained on the loose until July of 1977 when he was captured, and a charge of trafficking firearms joined the drug charges and fugitive warrants. A year later, he was sent back to prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm and heroin possession.
“Morgan and other top La Eme members were part of a new generation of drug lords that didn’t answer to the Italian Mafia,” says Niko Vorobyov. “They made their own connects, getting heroin straight from the source. Before, the main smack track to the States ran through the Italians, who got it from French refineries and the Middle East. But as that route started drying up, it was time to look south of the border. Poppy’s been grown in the hills of Sinaloa in Mexico since the nineteenth century. And the connections that Morgan put together in prison allowed La Eme and their street affiliates to start moving Mexican black-tar heroin in the seventies.”
Morgan had ample heroin connections. He was known as a guy who could get weight. In time, a childhood friend hiding out in Mexico, Harry Gamboa Buckley, raised in the streets of Maravilla, introduced Morgan to Jesus “Chuy” Araujo, head of the Araujo drug cartel.
Shortly after Araujo became Morgan’s main supplier of heroin, Morgan let everyone in Southern California’s criminal underworld know that if they were in the dope business, they had to sell Mexican Mafia dope. Refuse to do so and you were hit. As in murdered.
“Morgan considered the gang’s financial condition the most important aspect, but other brothers didn’t share his opinion,” says Scott Burnstein. “With made members in every major southern city in California, Morgan knew that La Eme was sitting on a gold mine. Morgan envisioned La Eme being like the Italian Mafia.”
Morgan advocated for a situation where he and other Mexican Mafia leaders functioned as Carlo Gambino or Lucky Luciano types, calling the shots while the soldiers did the dirty work, and counting the money all the way to the bank.
In the late 1970s, gang hit man Mundo Mendoza, having embraced Christianity, became a government informant. Morgan had no idea that one of his trusted confidants was actively working against him, playing ball with law enforcement. Mendoza testified that Morgan was responsible for ordering multiple murders both inside prison and out on the street. He implicated Morgan in the murder of Robert Mrazek, a La Eme associate, who was shot to death in 1977. Prosecutors presented evidence that Mrazek’s wife Helen asked Joe Morgan to kill her husband. According to a 1993 Los Angeles Times article, the La Eme kingpin first asked Mendoza to do the hit (the paper called Mrazek a “suspected Seal Beach drug dealer”). Mendoza claimed Morgan supplied him with a photo of Mrazek, his house key, and a .45-caliber pistol stuffed in a brown paper bag.
Ultimately, the execution was handled by La Eme member Arthur Guzman, who, along with Morgan and Mrazek’s wife, were all sentenced to life in state prison.
The year was 1978. Joe Morgan would never see the streets again.
“I was housed on the same tier with Morgan at Folsom during the mid-1980s,” an individual known as Serious Steve tells Penthouse. “What immediately struck me was how the guards treated him with a civility and deference I had not encountered before in prison. Morgan had him some presence. He was a strongly built person a head taller than most of the other carnales and was cat-quick on the handball court. He was fluent in like four languages and could speak intelligently on most any subject. A charismatic, charming individual. And very intense, to say the least. When Joe Morgan spoke, everyone listened. I never heard anyone refer to him as Pegleg.”
Criminal turned writer/actor Edward Bunker also got to know Morgan at Folsom, though decades earlier, during Morgan’s first Folsom incarceration.
Bunker — who played “Mr. Blue” in Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 film Reservoir Dogs, and inspired the bank-robber character Nate, played by Jon Voight, in Michael Mann’s Heat — called Morgan the “toughest by far” of all the men he met during his 18 years in prison.
In his 2001 memoir, Education of a Felon, Bunker writes: “When I say ‘the toughest,’ I don’t necessarily mean he could beat up anyone in a fight. Joe only had one leg below the knee…. He was still pretty good with his fists, but his true toughness was inside his heart and brain. No matter what happened, Joe took it without a whimper and frequently managed to laugh.”
When the movie American Me was released March of 1992, it elevated La Eme’s national profile, not unlike the way Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather brought the Italian Mafia to the pop-culture forefront in the early seventies.
People who might have thought of La Eme as merely a violent California prison gang, if they were familiar with the Latino brotherhood at all, now saw it as bona fide criminal syndicate with reach and power.
However, members of this secretive organization, including Joe Morgan, were not at all happy with the movie’s fictionalized chronicle of their gang’s birth and ascent.
And this anger had director and star Edward James Olmos, who played Santana, a shot caller inspired by the iconic La Eme cofounder Rodolfo “Cheyenne” Cadena, fearing for his life, talking to the FBI, and seeking a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
“I want to show there’s a cancer in this subculture of gangs,” Olmos told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, addressing his reasons for making American Me. Hoping to demythologize the La Eme world so as to discourage disaffected young Mexican-American men from joining the gang, Olmos created a harsh portrait of gang existence, with scenes of abuse and extreme violence. But what got Morgan and his crew mad were other aspects of the movie. In American Me, the Santana character is raped by another youth in a juvenile facility, and later Santana is shown being impotent with a woman.
Moreover, older and wiser Santana is eventually killed by his gang brothers for having doubts about their bloody enterprise. But in real life, Cadena was murdered by members of the Nuestra Familia gang, La Eme’s bitter enemies. In a gruesome hit that set off rounds of prison payback murder, “Cheyenne” Cadena was shanked multiple times and thrown off a tier at Chino State Prison, only to be shanked again when he landed.
To members of La Eme, Olmos’s movie stained their honor.
And payback followed here, too. At least it sure looked like it did.
Within weeks of the movie’s release, two of its consultants were murdered execution-style. Just 12 days after the premier, a 53-year-old La Eme member who’d spoken to Olmos during his research interviews was gunned down by a pair of gang hit men in the Ramona Gardens projects in Boyle Heights, a La Eme stronghold.
Then in May, 49-year-old gang-intervention counselor Ana Lizaragga, a paid technical adviser with a small part in the movie, was slain by a pair of ski-masked hit men in her Boyle Heights driveway, shot in front of her boyfriend as they packed up their van for a trip. One of the assassins, a La Eme prospect, had just been paroled from Folsom.
In August of the following year, another unpaid consultant to the film was slain in his car. A member of a local La Eme affiliate gang was sent to prison for that hit.
Law enforcement pointed out that all three victims had displeased La Eme for reasons other than cooperating with the movie, and so were careful about calling the executions “payback.” Lizaragga, for example, who’d lost her own husband and two nephews in gang shootings, was suspected of being a snitch. But the timing of those first two hits, especially, is hard to ignore. A Chino prison official told the Los Angeles Times that the killings were meant as a message for Olmos. He also received veiled threats from gangmembers.
“When they made American Me,” says Richard Valdemar, “they actually approached Joe Morgan and supposedly got unofficial permission to make the movie as long as he hired Mexican Mafia advisors. And Olmos did in fact do that. But that meant he put himself under the rules of the Mexican Mafia.”
A month after the movie opened, Morgan filed a lawsuit seeking $500K in punitive damages from Olmos, Universal Studios, and others connected to the film. Morgan contended that filmmakers didn’t have permission to use his story and likeness in creating the J.D. character, an Anglo gangmember from East L.A., fluent in Spanish, with a shaved head and prosthetic leg. The case was eventually dismissed. But ever since the ordeal faced by Olmos (who made the cover of Time in 1988 for his Stand and Deliver stardom), Hollywood has been understandably leery about new Mexican Mafia projects.
Joe Morgan died of liver cancer in November 1993, in a hospital ward at Corcoran State Prison, where he’d been transferred from Pelican Bay State Prison, having spent his final months and years confined in an 8-by-10 cell 22-and-a-half hours every day.
He was 64, and left behind a wife, Jody, and two children.
In his 2012 memoir Mexican Mafia: The Gang of Gangs, Ramon Mendoza describes Morgan as the “coldest, most calculating, and brutal son of a bitch you could ever encounter.” But he was also, Mendoza adds, the “funniest, most compassionate, and witty person one could ever hope to know.”
This complicated, one-of-a-kind prison gangster, who went hard and was instrumental in turning the Mexican Mafia into a dominant American gang, carries a legendary charge in the annals of organized crime. Part of Morgan’s legacy is still very much alive — La Eme continues to control the great majority of Latino gangs in Southern California, and has affiliate tentacles all over the country. A vast network of Sureños — Mexican Mafia foot soldiers — remain ready to do the bidding of their prison shot callers.
As for the movie Morgan helped inspire, retired gang investigator Richard Valdemar remembers something else that happened during the tense weeks after its release.
Concerned about the murders of Olmos’s East L.A. gang consultants, William Forsythe, who played J.D., called up Valdemar and said, “Hey, am I in trouble?”
Valdemar replied, “No, they love you. They think you’ve played him to perfection, so you’re not in trouble.” Valdemar himself thinks Forsythe did an excellent job.
“In fact,” Valdemar says, “the scene where he’s walking into court with the leather jacket on, if I didn’t know that was the actor, I would have thought that was Joe Morgan.”
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