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Karl Lagerfeld Cancelled

Posted on February 23, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

The fashion industry has long peddled in sexist ads, fatphobic comments, and sexual harassment. But after the Twitteratti ran out of people to cancel this week, they exhumed the corpse of Chanel legend Karl Lagerfeld over his sexist, racist, fatphobic remarks. “If any of my friends post condolences to Karl Lagerfeld it’s an automatic ‘CANCELLED,’” tweeted one person. “Fuck Karl Lagerfeld.” Apparently, it was breaking news that a man whose icy appearance was the subject of Pinterest memes could be an asshole.

The controversy goes back to Lagerfeld’s history of blabbing out insolent one-liners, the kind that journalists quoted as they put him in headlines for over sixty years. According to a Vox article, in 2009 Lagerfeld said, “No one wants to see curvy women.” Four years later, he added, “The hole in social security, it’s also [due to] all the diseases caught by people who are too fat.” When the #MeToo movement went viral, Lagerfeld joked to Numero, “If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery, there’ll always be a place for you in the convent.”

Within twenty-four hours of his death, CNN ran a story rebuking these one-liners. “We can’t ignore Karl Lagerfeld’s complex legacy,” wrote Hillary George-Parkin. Woke actress Jameela Jamil, who feels the need to comment on every situation, agreed. “A ruthless, fat-phobic misogynist shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon,” she tweeted. “Talented for sure, but not the best person.” The masses joined the giddy cancellation. “Stop celebrating Karl Lagerfeld he was gross and sexist and doesn’t deserve praise just because he designed the Chanel bag you wanted as a [sic] 15 year old,” tweeted one angry woman. “His old ass should have been cancelled long ago lmao.” When people pointed out that Lagerfeld was already dead and you can’t cancel the deceased, outrage only increased: “The bitch cancelled himself,” wrote a user.

Few acknowledged Lagerfeld’s fame stemmed from his demeaning glare. Only a week earlier, his sunglass-hidden face was starring in memes. His tasteless statements were also typical of the chicest fashionistas. Vogue editor Anna Wintour told Oprah to lose weight. French companies hired so many skinny girls, France banned underweight models. According to Business Insider, a 2016 study found that 94 percent of models classify as underweight.

Political incorrectness and barbaric labor environments are the fashion industry’s standards, but some of Lagerfeld’s comments even surpassed fashion’s outdated views. On a 2017 episode of Salut les Terriens!, he joked, “One cannot — even if there are decades between them — kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place.” It was a vile sentiment, but the media kept propping him. A few months later, the Guardian praised his 2018 show.

Journalists loved Lagerfeld’s offensiveness, and he was flagrant about his flagrance. As many other shock jocks and fashion elites have proclaimed, Lagerfeld said, “Everything I say is a joke. I am a joke myself.” Apparently it took his death for the digital mob to get the message. But it doesn’t really matter. Along with being dead, Lagerfeld is now officially cancelled. It’s basically a double death. RIP.

Mike Krol

Posted on February 22, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

“It was pretty instant once I discovered it,” the 34-year-old garage-rock musician tells Penthouse. “I knew that nothing else in the world would move me the way music did. It’s always been and always will be the most important thing in my life, and the only form of self-expression that leaves me feeling completely satisfied.”

Since moving from his hometown of Milwaukee to Los Angeles, Krol signed to Merge Records and, in early 2018, released his sophomore record with the label, Power Chords, a fuzzed-out, low-fi punk album driven by infectious hooks. As with his earlier albums (Turkey, Trust Fund, and I Hate Jazz), Krol isn’t afraid to get catchy while chronicling angry personal pain.

“[Music] ruined my life because once I started to express myself through it, I knew that it was the only thing that truly made me feel alive—and unfortunately it’s hard to write good songs, making it the cause of many late nights feeling unfulfilled,” Krol says. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way because the payoff is too sweet.”

So, does Krol hate the love that ruined his life?

“I wouldn’t ever say I hate music,” he says. “I hate certain types of music, but music itself never lets me down. The music business on the other hand—that’s a love/hate relationship for sure.”

We sat down with Krol to talk about what’s been going on since Power Chords officially dropped.

What’s with Midwesterners bottling up their anger?

I think it has something to do with the weather. You spend a good chunk of the year hiding indoors from snow, rain, or frigid temperatures and accepting less than ideal conditions that are out of your control. I feel like that way of thinking inevitably creeps into other areas of your life, and before you know it, you’re just angry at everything but feeling totally powerless.

What are the lyrical themes running through Power Chords?

I’d say the main lyrical theme of this album is self-acceptance and growth. Trusting your instincts, addressing your shortcomings, and finding your voice again after feeling like you lost it. It’s about the love of music and how the discovery of a person, place, or thing can shake you to your core, and give you life and power in a way that nothing else can.

What was your writing process like during this record, and did you have to fight any demons along the way?

So many demons! Although this is technically my fourth album, it was my second on Merge, and the first album that I’ve ever released where there was an actual audience interested in and aware of what I was doing. The pressure was on, and I didn’t have my usual “dance like no one is watching” mindset. So, I definitely fell into the “sophomore slump,” where I questioned every decision made and felt like giving up and throwing the whole thing away at so many points in the process. Mostly I struggled with what I should be writing about. And so, naturally, that’s what I ended up writing about: self-doubt and criticism that ultimately grows into forgiveness and strength.

What are your top three albums since your teen years?

That’s easy. The first would be Weezer’s Blue Album. That was the gateway into my whole existence. Second would be the Strokes’ Is This It. That album came out when I was a senior in high school, and it single-handedly changed the course of my life and led me to move to New York City for college. Lastly would be Violent Femmes’ first album, which I was exposed to all throughout my childhood in Milwaukee, and being close friends with bassist Brian Ritchie’s nephew, but it didn’t really click until I moved away from home. I would put it on whenever I was homesick. It taught me more about myself than I’ll ever be able to explain.

Why did you want to learn guitar in the first place?

Purely out of necessity, because I wanted to be in a band and have original songs. My main instrument is the drums, which is what I grew up playing in school and taking lessons for. Around junior year of high school, I wanted to start a band but didn’t know anybody who could write songs. So I borrowed a guitar from a friend and figured out how to play power chords and bar chords, and I started to write the songs for my band. Then I got into home recording and using 4-tracks, and the rest is history. That was the start of my one-man-band bedroom-recording-project that I’m currently still exploring.

Do you remember seeing Penthouse magazine when you were young?

Man, I wish I had some great story about this, but I was a pretty innocent kid. Definitely a late bloomer in that department! When this article publishes, it will be the first Penthouse magazine that I have bought or been in possession of.

Woke Axl Rose

Posted on February 21, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

I have written voluminously and freely about Guns N’ Roses since I had my first column at L.A. Weekly. I’m now writing a book about the band. I could write a doctoral dissertation on GNR, but alas, I’m here to let my keyboard bleed. I’m here to talk about how Axl Rose—my generation’s Johnny Strabler, the bike-gang leader played by Marlon Brando in The Wild One—has become an unintentional servant of a political agenda. How’d that happen? Axl became…“woke.”

I first submit to you a provocative, not-so-woke image—Axl Rose, 1989, as he wraps chains around the wrists of his then-girlfriend, before proceeding to gag and whip her in a bondage scene. Glimpsed in brief flashes, Rose’s S&M act is the template for a Guns N’ Roses video promoting “It’s So Easy”—a video MTV decided not to air.

The footage illustrates the moral framework from which vintage Rose, once America’s most unrepressed rock star, should be understood.

Embodying an aesthetic creed that combined feminine ferocity with rampaging male lust, Axl Rose, as the video testifies, savagely stops across the stage of the Cathouse club, wearing a plaid kilt and skull-print leather jacket, howling into the mic, while a swarm of groupies tear away bits of his clothing.

For America’s youth, he delivered a machine-gun aria that tore through their ears, mowing down the lecturing housewives of Washington. Thirty years later, Rose is a wealthy, bourgeois Democrat, lawyered-up, and serving as the politically correct CEO of an American corporate rock machine.

For countless pimple-faced teenagers in an age before memes, hashtags, internet porn, or first-person shooters, it was a way to feel unrepressed and wild—catching a glimpse of Axl Rose on MTV, imagining what it would be like to be him.

Here, in videos, songs, at the concerts, was a ginger psychopath who owned an Uzi semiautomatic and once told his fans at the Ritz in New York that he was dedicating “Out Ta Get Me” to prudes who “tell you how to live,” who “tell you how to talk…people who tell you what you can and you can’t say.”

Axl Rose is now an ally for the people he once ranted against. He wears a slick fedora, designer jeans from Barneys, reflective sunglasses, and occasionally carries a cane, like Picasso, at one of his opulent art shows. He’s a completely different person. Appetite for Destruction-era Rose had the lean, tattooed physique of a hungry featherweight boxer, the face of a teen idol, and the always-running mouth of a hillbilly Rocky Sullivan, the gangster ex-con, played by Jimmy Cagney, in the movie Angels With Dirty Faces. Rather than bravely riding off into the sunset with his outlaw persona pushing him further towards the grave—à la Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister—Axl Rose now exists as a status-quo liberal.

Yes, the guy Danny Sugerman, Jim Morrison’s biographer and author of a book about Guns N’ Roses, once described as “symbolic of the wild and free west” has been anointed by the media as ”woke,” a characterization he doesn’t deny, and probably embraces. Today’s Axl Rose is as a moralist, one who wants his fans to view the Trump administration as ”disgraceful” and ”inappropriate.” It’s ironic, to say the least, given that the zenith of his popularity resulted from Rose being both disgraceful and inappropriate.

I struggle to reconcile the ungovernable Axl Rose I remember from my childhood (engrained in memory is a 1989 RIP magazine cover showing him brandishing a riot-grade shotgun between his legs, a phallic representation of his machismo) with the current, millennial-friendly version—a Twitter celebrity with a Chihuahua avatar who advocates for corporate Dems and functions, witting or not, as a liberal-media propaganda tool.

“WELCOME TO THE LIBERAL JUNGLE” crowed the far-left online publication The Intercept when it ran a “Woke Axl” op-ed in early 2018, using the line to tempt GNR fans to sign up for their newsletter.

Axl Rose in 2019 is shiny currency for the left, given today’s fashionable contempt for Trump and the amount of online attention that comes with being a celebrity member of the “resistance.”

Whatever his degree of actual wokeness, it would be reductive to think tagging Rose with the “w” word sums him up in full. But, as stated, he accepts the characterization. Why? First, it strikes me as a deft career move since it gives the media a headline redirecting the gaze of anyone who might focus on Rose’s past transgressions—his politically incorrect statements, the lawsuits and allegations against him from former romantic partners who say he could be both loving and brutish. As long as Axl Rose continues to send out the occasional anti-Trump tweet, and stories on his wokeness drive clicks, the media, and liberal social media influencers who have no interest in revisiting the Axl Rose of the eighties and nineties.

Judging from a variety of clues that appeared over the years, Rose naturally evolved into a progressive following a long period of guilt and isolation. The singer had demons—their source goes all the way back to his childhood—and psychotherapy and extended self-analysis domesticated him. This multi-year “night of the soul” saved his life, while killing his vintage allure. Like others rock stars have had to kick a heroin habit to survive, Axl Rose had psychic demons to contend with, and he’s seemingly purged them from his body.

“Vote Blue…Bitches!!” Rose tweeted last October, shortly before the midterm elections.

And yet, in 30 years of public life, Rose never endorsed a political candidate, rocked the vote for MTV, contributed to a campaign, or allowed popular politics to dictate his work. Search GNR’s catalog for political lyrics and you’ll turn up just a generalized 1990 antiwar song “Civil War,” and allusions to Communist repression in the song “Chinese Democracy.” There’s not a single Rose interview that clarifies his political views in any detail, except for a mention on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2012 that he liked Barack Obama, but wasn’t someone who voted.

Rose was 50 then, and apparently had never entered a voting booth. When George W. Bush was carpet-bombing Iraq and building the framework for a police state with the Patriot Act, Rose was silent. In 2008, the year Chinese Democracy was released, America was sunk in an economic recession protested by millions and fighting two elective wars overseas. The album’s liner notes thanked the Trump Hotel, but included no mention of President Bush or the body count in the Middle East.

Earlier, Rose was silent during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. And during the political triangulations and Monica Lewinsky-stained Clinton years (roughly 1998 to 2000), he was, essentially, hidden from sight in his Malibu canyon mansion, struggling to free himself of the rage that had long defined his persona.

It’s also worth noting that “Woke Axl,” with his wealth, name recognition, and huge, international fan base, has so far restricted his progressive activities to sporadic minutes at the keyboard, tweeting, doing none of the harnessing of music celebrity for activist causes in the way of someone like Bono, or Roger Waters.

But for the left in 2019, all of this is irrelevant. Rose is woke, and willing to use his platform to communicate their message. Whatever the exact definition of woke, it clearly constitutes obedience to liberal dogma and a rejection of the First Amendment.

From the outside, it’s hard to calibrate how much of Woke Axl reflects a true awakening, as opposed to a winning PR strategy. But classic Rose is gone, having vanished during his time out of the spotlight. Though he hasn’t self-identified as woke, the fact that he can be used to advance retrograde elitist propaganda signals a time of mourning for the Guns N’ Roses fan who remember a different Axl.

“I think Axl’s a little out of control,” MTV’s Kurt Loder once said, “which is the way you should be if you’re going to be a big rock star…. You should out of control.”

Two days before the November midterms, Woke Axl—the nickname thrives as a meme—tweeted that Guns N’ Roses played “anti-Trump” music, a bizarre statement. I suppose an argument can be made for viewing Appetite for Destruction as a blowtorch cutting across the steely conservatism of the 1980s, but—and I don’t know if Rose himself realizes this—Donald Trump is not a conservative. He’s a radical.

Vintage Guns N’ Roses, if you ask any fan, was apolitical. The band’s spirit was lubricated by cheap wine, masculinity wrestling with androgyny, and a motorcycle-gang effigy to the First and Second Amendments. Axl Rose in leather assless chaps, slithering across the stage like a lithe, Tom of Finland illustration of a biker boy—a long-locked, Dionysian icon; an escape from the Wall Street-themed world for the hair-metal generation.

When Axl Rose did get political, he did it with mischievous fashion choices. He strutted onto a stage in Paris in 1992 wearing a baggy leather jacket emblazoned with the Confederate flag, paired with white spandex shorts and combat boots.

This followed by four years the song “One in a Million,” where he cavalierly used the N-word, and advertised his disdain for both immigrants and “faggots,” saying they made no sense to him. Boiling with a primitive honesty, he kicked down the doors of political correctness, and then stomped around in his snakeskin boots.

“I don’t like boundaries of any kind,” he told Rolling Stone in 1988 when asked about ”One in a Million.” He added, “I don’t like being told what I can and what I can’t say.” Who could have predicted that today’s Axl Rose would be thoroughly repulsed by the Axl Rose of 1988?

Back then, Rose’s reckless inability to be his own publicist was intoxicating to so many of us, raised by the censors of cable TV and the canonized propaganda of a Christian majority. Rose was actually pushing MTV towards anarchy.

Fast-forward to 2019, and Rose is now a willing ally of a movement that aims to repress sensuality, muzzle speech on college My struggle with this led me to email a reliable voice, writer Chuck Klosterman, and Chuck was ready with thoughts. Here’s one of his observations about Woke Axl:

“To me, the most amusing aspect of all this is imagining what would have happened if you’d have walked up to a liberal person in 1989 and said, ‘You know what? In 30 years, the man who will embody and voice the views of young progressives will be Axl Rose. But you know who all those young progressives will despise? Morrissey.’”

Axl Rose now attacks the likes of First Lady Melania Trump, whom he described as “an alleged former hooker” in a March 2018 tweet. Here we have him virtue-signaling by referring to a conservative woman as a “hooker,” which pushes him further away from the right-wing image of Axl Rose equipped with firearms and Middle American naiveté.

In an era where careers can be extinguished by exposure of past tweets or decades-old comments, and where even the most inconsequential act is used by liberals to smear people they disagree with, Rose has managed to duck the pitchforks and torches of the mob by, well, never disagreeing with them. While Metallica’s James Hetfield chats openly with Joe Rogan about his heretical libertarian lifestyle as a hunter and heavy-metal rebel, Rose tweets from a distance using cute emojis as punctuations for fashionable outrage.

In the fall of 2017, when actress Ashley Judd accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment in a New York Times interview, it was a watershed moment that helped unleash #MeToo. Right around this time, the media decided that Axl Rose had not only demonstrated at least vague solidarity with #MeToo, but had in fact joined the cause, a grotesque take invented and propagated by activists at publications like Vogue and The Intercept.

When “Woke Axl” headlines reached GNR fan sites and podcasts, some Axl Rose worshippers began pandering directly to their hero with their hashtagged Trump resistance—a phenomenon akin to the way Taylor Swift fans not only worship Swift but every Swiftian opinion.

A week after his “alleged former hooker” post, Rose tweeted, “Happy International Women’s Day!!” One would assume the left would find the singer’s feminist rebrand to be a bit hypocritical…but that’s not how the left operates. As long as Rose uses his 1.2 million Twitter followers to push his fan base further left—and as long as he can convince his agreeable fanboys to vote, like Taylor Swift on Instagram—he remains beyond the burning glow of the torches.

This will hold, of course, only if Rose continues to comply. If he does disagree with the left by defending free speech on college campuses or tweeting about offensive or “sexist” comedians he might enjoy, he would likely ignite a campaign of self-ruination that would turn his record-breaking reunion tour into a tragic coda.

“Woke Axl” requires that Axl never detail his political beliefs. Since GNR reunited in April of 2016, Rose has refused to grant an interview to a single member of the American media. Not only that, but it seems any interview he or Slash do offer (Rose has spoken to a couple foreign reporters) is accompanied by a liability agreement or pre-interview guidelines that put the journalist and media venue on the hook if the coverage creates a publicity storm.

Not unlike the documents handed out in Weinstein’s Hollywood, Rose’s lawyers also draft and enforce non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to be signed by those who enter the singer’s orbit, preventing people from talking about him “in perpetuity.”

And some of those who have been in Axl’s orbit but haven’t signed an NDA tend to stay out of sight—inaccessible and untouchable—whether out of fear of GNR and its singer or in mimicry of Rose’s own career-long war against the media.

During last year’s marketing of GNR’s Locked N’ Loaded box set, a celebration of the band’s Appetite-era work, the Guns N’ Roses equivalent of a book burning occurred.

First, the track “One in a Million” was curiously left off the collection of demos and remasters—while remaining on streaming services like Spotify. Why? Rose was silent.

This silence continued as some of his fans were doxxed, bullied, and ostensibly buried on the internet by a small group of trolls, with some alleging the trolls were either hired by Rose’s management or simply driven by their own toxic fandom to coordinate an online takedown of an entire library of rare concert footage, documentaries, and GNR bootlegs—material the band couldn’t profit off or control during the Locked advertising blitz.

The trolls, it seems, directed the RIAA and IFPI (the Recording Industry of America and International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, respectively) to remove additional copyrighted GNR material off YouTube. Fans panicked on the forums, mystified by a purging whose questionable copyright-violation claims were, and remain, a mystery.

For more conspiratorial fanboys, GNR had become “Big Brother.” For others, though, GNR was on the “right side of history,” and some anti-Trump Axl stooges celebrated as YouTube channels like the popular Frans N’ Roses were reported and removed.

Meanwhile, Axl Rose, apparently unconcerned or uninformed on the matter, proceeded to drag Trump on Twitter and refused to shed any light on how he became a progressive culture warrior, except to let us know, passive aggressively, that he’s repulsed by “One in a Million” and wants to bury his uncomfortable past (along with his demons).

Today, the left-leaning media uses Axl Rose to recruit. For the first time in history, the singer of Guns N’ Roses has become a role model for liberal America.

Pardon me while I vomit all over my keyboard.

Warm Drag Lead Singer Vashti Windish is our Muse

Posted on February 20, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

LIKE most punks, Vashti Windish, frontwoman of L.A. duo Warm Drag, started out as a misfit. “I was always an outcast,” she tells Penthouse. “My name was weird, my clothes were cheap, and I didn’t eat meat.”

But things changed when this Florida native became a teenager.

“There was this girl who rode the bus with me, she was scary yet magnetic,” Windish recalls. “Her head was shaved, her lip was pierced, and she wore a flannel with cut sleeves and combat boots.” Intrigued, the shy Windish eyed her up and down, and the girl introduced herself. “My life was never the same after that.”

The two became friends, and Windish was inducted into the world of punk rock. She fell hard for bands like Crass, the Misfits, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, and Bikini Kill, and found inspiration in their free-spirited, fuck-you attitudes. “These core bands were a gateway drug for other obscure music I’m still finding today,” she says.

Windish has since spent her life inspired by music and the powerful aesthetic of rock ’n’ roll. When she finally migrated from Florida to New York City, she played in two bands, Golden Triangle and the K-Holes. While in the K-Holes, she met saxophone player Sara Villard, and the two women started a business based on their shared love of costume, stage wear, and designer and vintage clothing. They opened their first store, Worship, in Brooklyn in 2013; another shop followed in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles in 2015.

Though her businesses have been a success, Windish says she could never abandon music. Since moving to L.A., she started her indie-punk duo Warm Drag with drummer Paul Quattrone. The band signed to In the Red Records, and their releases have garnered attention for Windish’s powerful, sexy vocals and Quattrone’s spacey synth.

Even now, at age 40, Windish still feels the same fearless exhilaration she first experienced with music when she performs onstage with Warm Drag. “I just lose myself,” she says.

“It’s almost like a trance. I don’t think. I just feel. It’s the best.”

Photography by Lindsey Byrnes

Crush on Amy Klobuchar

Posted on February 18, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

According to HuffPost and Buzzfeed, the Democratic Minnesota Senator’s employees allegedly cried and Klobuchar once “accidentally hit” a staffer with a binder. [So that’s bad. – Ed.]

Klobuchar also has gotten more bills passed than most senators, appeals to the Midwestern states Hillary forgot to visit, and advocates for moderate legislation that won’t scare away your grandpa who still votes. [And that would all be very, very good. You know, binders are not really all that heavy. It was probably an accident. -Ed.]

If she were a man, Klobuchar would be praised for “getting the job done.” Because she’s a woman, she’s compared to a barking school teacher. Employers should treat their staff well, but as President Donald J. Trump wreaks havoc from the Mexican border to the Canadian Peace Bridge, Klobuchar’s legislative history outweighs her Glassdoor rankings.

America could use a tough Minnesota broad. Klobuchar’s the one. [Pretty sure “broad” has fallen out of favor in this context. Mitchell might deserve one of those binders to the head. Just sayin’. -Ed.]

[Now we are sad we have run out of -Ed. spots, because we were having a fun time with the whole point/counterpoint -Ed. thing.]

Regardless of the degree of fun we are having, however, one fact should remain clear: Amy Klobuchar Rocks!

CEO Bella French

Posted on February 17, 2019December 11, 2021 by Team Penthouse

But CEO and occasional camgirl Bella French had full confidence in her vision. After all, it was an excellent concept: create a platform where any camgirl can host her own content, and make it a hub for the sexiest women in the world. Today, ManyVids is a multinational pro-sex technology conglomerate that specializes in live-streaming, e-commerce, and video-hosting.

“We are first and foremost a tech firm,” French says of the company she now runs with her cofounder tech pros, Sed Dehan and Gino Sciretta. “We want adult performers to have the best tools for success.”

French no longer cams as much as she used to; her main focus is running the company. Since her days as a buxom blonde bombshell, she has reduced her breasts and gone back to her natural hair color. In other words, she’s returned to herself.

Aside from overseeing a cutting-edge digital platform, French is devoted to advocating for sex workers, which is why this year she revealed herself as the company’s co-founder and CEO in the documentary We Are Many. One of her latest projects? A 1-800 hotline for adult entertainers to call when they need help.

Following a shocking string of suicides last year by prominent women in the adult industry, French was compelled to do something. After shutting herself in her office to cry silently, she returned to her 80-plus employees to brainstorm a solution. The hotline was born.

“It’s one of my proudest accomplishments,” she says in her charming accent. “I care about the models. They are our business partners and we want them to be treated with respect.”

We sat down with the savvy French Canadian to talk business, entrepreneurs, busting ass, obstacles, and boobs.

You’re the CEO of a major technology company. Why keep this awesome title a secret until now?

There were a few reasons why I waited. First of all, I’m a workaholic. I love to work, and I had no interest in putting myself out there publicly because that would take up a lot of my time when I wanted to be working on the platform. Secondly, I didn’t want attention taken away from the company and put on me instead. I knew that if I was out there, then my history as a camgirl would bring too much attention. I wanted the focus to be on ManyVids. As we evolved, it became harder and harder to do business hiding myself. I realized that unless I put myself out there, I could not advocate for the changes I want to see in the adult industry.

I’m really passionate about that stuff, and I couldn’t do that hiding behind the computer.

You had a sizable following when you were camming, right?

Yes. I started camming in the fall of 2012 and I did it pretty seriously for three years. When I started ManyVids, I had to cam less to focus on the company. However, now that I’m public I am camming a bit again.

How did your company begin?

Before creating ManyVids, I went to business school and then I opened two of my own clothing stores. I was born an entrepreneur. I love building projects. At one point, while camming, I decided I needed my own website. With the help of my boyfriend Sed Dehan, I created bellafrench.com. We barely invested any money in it. It was ghetto. But it still did really well. It gave me the idea to create a larger platform that could host lots of mini websites within it. We knew it was going to work because we had the proof of concept! That’s how the idea started. We knew that there was a lot of potential in the cam world. So, I cammed and saved money, while Sed worked on code with his friend and our third partner, Gino Sciretta. I wanted to have the most cutting-edge platform for camgirls to succeed on. I’d heard too many stories of webmasters and coders who would try to get money out of camgirls to build them websites. It happened to me!

Wait, coders would try to take advantage of camgirls by offering them sites, like weird, online pimps?

When I was camming, I had a guy message me, bragging about the amazing websites he was building for various models, including Coco Austin, and he asked me to get on Skype to talk it over. I agreed because I was curious. But basically, what he was trying to do was sell me a templated website, which is the easiest website to do, for $6,000. No thank you! Other models told me similar stories.

There are creeps everywhere. We can’t avoid them!

It’s so bad! I actually think there is a huge misconception about adult performers, and the assumption is that we are all ditzy, dumb girls. It’s simply not true. Camgirls are sex entrepreneurs capitalizing on their charm and beauty. They’re monetizing the fact that men worship female sexuality. They offer the girlfriend experience from the comfort of their apartments. Genius!

How did you get into camming in the first place?

There was a big flood in my Montreal clothing store. The water tank in the apartment above had broken and flooded my business. The tank was connected to city water, so it just kept filling up and pouring water into the store. I lost $250,000 investing in that store. It was brutal. My insurance wouldn’t cover more than $50,000. I had borrowed money from all sorts of places to start the store, but more importantly, my father lent me money and I swore to him that I would pay him back every dollar. I was not going to break that promise by declaring bankruptcy. I was never too interested in the adult industry, but I knew Gino’s girlfriend made a lot of money camming. I started doing research.

My first reaction was shock. I was never going to do that!

You were a prude!

Yes, like a lot of people, I had a misconception about what the industry was. Two weeks later, I caved and just decided to do it to pay back my debts. My plan was to get out the minute I had enough money. But then I got hooked. I ended up loving the cam world.

Did you pay off all the debt?

Yes! It took me close to three years, but I was also paying for my life and getting a lot of plastic surgery then.

Yeah, you used to have massive boobs. That blonde bombshell look. Why the physical changes?

I always thought Ice-T’s wife Coco Austin was incredible, even before I started camming. I got more surgery as I was camming, but before then I had dyed my brown hair blonde and enhanced my breasts to get that Coco look.

I met Coco Austin when my band was playing with Body Count. Her ass is crazy in real life and her hair cascaded down her back like an upside-down vanilla ice-cream cone.

My fans loved the big boobs. At their biggest, my boobs were 1,200cc implants, but now I have reduced them to 800cc. It’s like I was a different person, as though my sexualized side amplified into one human being. I had so much fun being that character.

I can’t imagine having boobs that huge!

In your everyday life, it gets a bit much. You get so much attention. I love sports, especially running. Even now when I go to jog, I have to wear two sports bras and Band-Aids on my nipples. People don’t realize what a big commitment it is to have huge boobs.

And we thank you for your dedication.

Photography courtesy of ManyVids.

Lorena Bobbitt’s Handy Work

Posted on February 16, 2019December 9, 2021 by Team Penthouse

In the early nineties, Lorena Bobbitt was a wife driven to the edge of sanity. After years of domestic abuse, she cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis in a fit of rage. What followed was a tabloid tirade and one of the most iconic domestic abuse trials in American history. Two wrongs don’t make a right; however, we are impressed with Lorena’s handy work. In the June 1994 issue of Penthouse, we published an exclusive picture of Bobbitt’s castrated penis. (We’ve republished the image on Twitter.) Read our 1994 coverage of Lorena’s trial below.

Immediately following Lorena Bobbitt’s acquittal this past January, radical feminists all over America gleefully exchanged high fives, chanted antimale slogans, and anointed their new heroine. But the higher the bird flies, the farther she has to come down for water. Lorena Bobbitt, the alleged victim, is not a heroine. The gruesome and barbaric act of cutting off her husband’s penis prevents her from ever rising in the hearts of humankind.

But there are always those who think otherwise. Vanity Fair has enshrined her as a “national folk hero.” She was presented and portrayed in the press as a sympathetic victim. She tearfully exploited herself last September on 20/20 by attempting to justify her savage butchery of dismembering her husband’s penis. Victimhood is now a license to commit mayhem and murder.

Expert testimony was presented by the defense in the Lorena Bobbitt case to prove that she was mentally ill. Essentially, Lorena’s defense consisted of her testimony and that of witnesses who claimed that John Wayne Bobbitt beat, raped, and sodomized her. Her psychiatrists said that after years of being battered, she struck back in the only way she could.

One of her lawyers, in her opening statement to the members of the jury, said, “In the end, what we have is Lorena’s life juxtaposed against John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis. In her mind, it was his penis from which she could not escape, which caused her the most pain, the most fear, the most humiliation. At the end of this case, you will come to only one conclusion: that a life is more valuable than a penis.” Aren’t those great words? It’s the kind of rhetoric that is harmful and mean-spirited, yet it worked.

The battered-wife syndrome is invoked for self-defense to show that a woman acted justifiably and that her conduct was excusable. In this case the defense claims that Lorena lost control, that she was brutalized, traumatized, and thus temporarily insane when she had the “irresistible impulse” to cut off John’s penis.

Most states, including New York, do not permit the defense of irresistible impulse, but the state of Virginia (where the Bobbitt trial was held) does. Virginia allows a defendant to be held blameless if his or her mind has become so severely impaired by disease that he or she is totally deprived of mental power to control or restrain his or her actions.

Lorena Bobbitt’s acquittal sends the wrong message to women. It is another case of a defendant using a victimhood defense to explain away her acts of violence. Besides the Bobbitt tragedy, there is also a woman who castrated her husband with a pair of scissors and a Massachusetts man whose wife of 13 years sprayed Mace in his face, blinding him before she struck him in the head with a two-by-four, causing an injury that required 50 stitches. There must be suitable punishment for such violent, antisocial behavior.

As a trial lawyer, I believe that in order to ameliorate the violence against men, as well as against women, we should require all people to take responsibility for their criminal acts and bar any defense (with the exception of self-defense) that permits a defendant to plead that he or she was a victim and should be excused for any wrongdoings committed.

Paris Hilton’s Veteran Pal

Posted on February 15, 2019December 9, 2021 by Team Penthouse

According to Page Six, the smut paper of record, Walton rolled into the Philipp Plein show in a yellow bowtie and veteran’s hat.

One of America’s last World War II veterans, Walton has embarked on a year-long road trip to experience every US state. Stripe magazine reported he calls this endeavor the No Regrets Tour. Last year, the tour led him to see his favorite DJ, Paris Hilton, perform. Millennials may be scared to call strangers, but this member of the Greatest Generation walked right up to Hilton. When she learned he drove thousands of miles for the concert, she invited him into her VIP space. The odd couple danced all night long, raving with glowsticks like teens in Miami Beach. “Happy #MemorialDay!” Hilton tweeted.

They’ve stayed in touch, and Hilton invited Walton to Fashion Week. As he mingled with fashion luminaries, Walton played with balloons and smiled. While the rest of America screams in outrage, Walton smiled with joy. He looked like Winnie-the-Pooh, GI Joe, and a club kid rolled into one.

Fyre Festival fraudster Billie McFarland once said, “Live live a movie star, party like a rock star, and fuck like a porn star.” We’d say age like Sidney Walton!

Honestly this seems a tad “filler” for the magazine itself, so we have no idea why the — now long gone — editor decided to put it on the site at all. That said, you just gotta love old guys that still have gusto, right? That fella could probably tell some stories. … Now HE might be an interesting site article, and they could still throw in the Paris Hilton decoration if they really felt they had to. Baby steps….

Breaking Up Woke

Posted on February 14, 2019December 9, 2021 by Team Penthouse

Dating in 2019 isn’t easy. Right now, in the cesspool of political tribalism, social media, and the extreme polarization of the partisan divide, dating has become stranger than ever.

In the Trump era, hostility for opposing parties has intensified to radioactive levels. In January of 2017, the New York Times reported that more than ever before, parents want their sons and daughters to marry within political party lines. The dating app Tinder conducted a study and found that 71 percent of its users said differing political beliefs were a deal breaker. To help people get ass based on ideology, new political dating apps have popped up such as TrumpSingles.com and BernieSingles.com. Politics has always been a contentious issue but today it has invaded all aspects of our lives. It has become the new music, art, and religion. It feels like everyone has not only an opinion but a deep, vested interest that is worth throwing away a potential relationship for.

I am not passionate about politics. I think that someone’s political views are the dullest thing about them. I’m a registered Democrat, but I have voted Republican in the past. I did not vote in 2016 because I did not want to pull the lever for either candidate. I have never fawned over or admired any politicians. My requirement for a partner isn’t whether they consider themselves a Conservative or Liberal, but that they are open-minded. So, when I started up a romance with a man I had known as an acquaintance for years, my first text to him was a lone link to New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’s lecture “Seven Dirty Words”.

Maybe I was testing him?

He responded with a rambling yet neutral reaction to Weiss’s powerful speech, then after ellipse asked, “Can we hang out soon?”

An intense and passionate love escalated after that text. There was undeniable chemistry between us that we couldn’t ignore. Three days later we were on my stoop trying our best not to have sex in public. Two weeks later, he told me he wanted to marry me. Our relationship escalated into a combo of lovemaking and rough sex balanced with flawlessness I’ve never experienced before. We talked and stared at each other like lovesick teenagers until 5 AM, planning our future together. I was falling hard! We were not sleeping. We were not talking to our friends. We were barely coming up for air. It was fucking magnificent. Everything was perfect—until we started talking politics.

At first, there were little hints that our ideologies weren’t so in sync. While I was ranting about the insanity of the latest radical leftist protest, he stood there with a puzzled look on his face.

“But Leah, social justice is important.”

“I know,” I said. “But social justice warriors are making a mockery of social justice.”

“Social justice warrior has a negative connotation to it,” he said. “That’s what Republicans do, don’t you see? They take something that’s not a negative and play with language to make it become that way.”

I rolled my eyes. Yeah, no shit, I thought to myself. Because the social justice warriors are so fucking negative.

“Why are you always complaining about the left?” he asked. “What about the right?”

“I have higher expectations of the left, babe. Aren’t they supposed to be the reasonable ones?”

Our first political blow out happened while naked in bed after a heavy sex romp. I don’t remember how we got on the subject, but what I do remember is that when I stated that being a woman wasn’t oppressing, he became flustered and irritated.

“Sexism is real,” he said to me in a way that can only be described as “mansplaining.” A knot the size of Manhattan developed in my throat. Rage coursed through my veins. I could not believe this man I worshipped was lying in naked next to me trying to debate womanhood. My own boyfriend was igniting the same insufferable rage I felt when listening to conservative pundit Ben Shapiro rant about abortion. His patronizing tone pierced my eardrum. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I jumped out of bed and stared him down so hard I felt like my eyeballs were going to pop out of my head.

“You don’t get to tell me any of this,” I said. “I am well aware of sexism. I am the woman here!”

He accused me of having conservative talking points. Tears welled up in my eyes as I stormed out of the room. It felt like a Twitter mob had invaded my bedroom and was attacking me with the usual insults: alt-right, a liberal trust funder, white-supremacist, self-hating whitey. He wasn’t using these names, but his lecture stung even worse. The last person I wanted to have these fights with was the man I loved.

We made up, of course, but it didn’t end there. For the next two months, it seemed like politics kick-started every single fight we had. We couldn’t stop fighting. We weren’t debating over the alleged social construction of gender roles or the Israeli/Palestine debate. We were screaming at each other. Slamming doors. I threw him out of my apartment after he said FOX News was my favorite channel. I accused him of turning his back on his Jewish heritage. Politics was ripping us apart.

It all came to a head at 2 AM over a Jordan Peterson video.

“I saw a video of Bari Weiss interviewing Jordan Peterson,” he said one night. “She was really fawning over him.”

“That’s just her personality,” I replied. “She’s extremely charming and personable.”

“I don’t see why anyone would fawn over a racist Canadian professor,” he said, disgusted.

Was he really starting this discussion right now? Despite being half-asleep and kicking the flu, I remained calm. I barely said a word as this so-called discussion turned into a one-sided rant.

“If she cares so much about anti-Semitism,” he continued, “then, why doesn’t she care about racism?”

“How do you know she doesn’t care about racism?” I was barely awake. “Maybe she doesn’t think he’s a racist. I don’t think he’s a racist. And, of course, she’s standing against anti-Semitism. She’s Jewish. That’s what people do! They care about the things that affect them. Aren’t we all like that?”

“You keep standing up for her!” he screamed. “Only because you agree with her politics and you like her writing!”

“So what? That’s not why I feel the way I feel. You can’t discredit her because you think she was being nice to a man who may or may not be racist!”

Was this conversation actually happening? I watched as my boyfriend started to shake his head back and forth. He scrunched his face into a scowl. Why was Jordan Peterson so important to him? He couldn’t let it go. Then again, neither could I.

After shouting nothingness back and forth until our faces were red and puffy, he got up from the couch and told me it was late. He had to go. He slammed the door as he left. I was left with silence. How had this happened? One minute we were drifting off to sleep and the next we were screaming about a New York Times writer and a professor from Canada no one cared about before 2016.

Five minutes after he made his dramatic exit, I grabbed my phone and typed, “You’re a dick.” I pressed send.

The next morning, I woke up to ten missed calls from him. The flu had kicked into high gear; I felt like my head was swimming in water. I threw the phone down and went back to sleep. Messages flew in at a rapid pace.

“Are you ignoring me?” he texted. He was on one, but I was too.

When I finally called him back, we wasted the next 12 hours screaming our lungs out at one another. We battled like two head-strong political science majors in the debate of their academic career. It was a full-blown war. We were desperately trying to convince the other of our point, and we weren’t even listening to one another. We were waiting for the other person to take a breath so there was room to jump in and yell. The heated debate took a tailspin when I said, “Your argument is weak and obscure.” He broke up with me and hung up the phone. My relationship was over. Thanks, Dr. Peterson.

Over the next 24 hours, we were silent. This was the longest we had gone without speaking. Was it really done? I thought. Sitting and stewing, I convinced myself that I did not need to apologize. He had been so visceral! He was the one who started this discussion in the first place, not me. I was perfectly happy never knowing an interview between Weiss and Peterson even existed. He was the one who couldn’t handle different points of views. He was the one who had a problem with the fact that we didn’t share the same ideology, not me. And moreover, he was the one who dumped me over nonsense. Despite trying to convince myself that this wasn’t my fault, my stomach knotted. My head was spinning. I was a mess, so I went to the gym.

Walking back to my apartment, I rounded the corner to find my boyfriend standing outside my place. I got closer and saw he was holding a bouquet. He had puppy dog eyes that looked glassy with tears. We hugged one another. We sat in the diner for hours and talked. I picked at my overpriced salad as we both humbly apologized. He told me nothing was worth losing me over, especially not this political nonsense. I agreed. We vowed never to let our politics come between us again.

That was a couple of months ago, and we haven’t had one argument since. Our relationship has never been better. We still talk about politics, but we don’t take it that seriously when we disagree. I am still complaining about the far left. But I also am much less defensive when he brings up an opposing view. After all, isn’t my critique of the far left the inability to see other people’s beliefs? We don’t walk on eggshells around each other, and no conversation is off limits. In a divisive world, I feel responsible to not be a part of one-sided discourse. I want my personal life to reflect what I want from society. Not the other way around. But for now and the foreseeable future, I am so fucking in love with my Marxist Commie boyfriend.

Judd Apatow

Posted on February 14, 2019December 11, 2021 by Team Penthouse

This is a video I have made about Judd Apatow and comedy and cancel culture.

In this video, I have used the long-heralded journalistic “gotcha” technique of spending hundreds of hours looking through Apatow’s work in order to find some footage that portrays his hypocrisy in positioning himself as a moral arbiter of the comedy world. Everyone should be aware of this technique. No one should trust journalists. And I say that as one.

To that end, I have spent the last few weeks doing what all tabloid-bred shit-heels do, which is dig through the corners of the internet, researching Judd Apatow: the man, the myth, the hypocrite.

I will always admire Apatow for cowriting The 40-Year Old Virgin in the early aughts. It gave me life when I saw it in the theater all alone, right around the same time I saw The Aristocrats. (I mean, talk about a movie where they “punch down,” am I right?) But as a slightly autistic comedy obsessive, I’ve grown increasingly consumed with rage watching this guy use some of the most reliable intellectual dishonesty techniques known to man, all to escape being eaten alive by the mob with which he now aligns himself.

Because I am so weak and cowardly myself, I have a knack for spotting it in others. Never before have I witnessed such an utterly thrilling display of wormish personal disloyalty, argumentative cherry-picking, playing dumb as a decoy, and through-and-through historical revisionism in both his press appearances and his social media presence.

This guy is good.

To calmly attempt to transition from the man who made his millions off of faggot-and-tranny jokes in his always wildly sexist (in a hilarious way—sorry, guys, but sexism is hilarious, as is misandry) movies to his recent reinvention as Mr. Woke Stasi, El Capitan, is pretty badass. It actually reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the brilliant, groundbreaking FX show Louie (have you ever seen it? Well, sorry fuckos, it’s gone forever now!) where Louie (Louis C.K.) has a shot at replacing Letterman. As he’s fully flop-sweating it out for the guy who’s auditioning him, Louie goes to a deep, deep place of desperation and fart-poop-fuck-boobies juvenilia to get the job. Because he’s fucking terrified. And it is so goddamned authentic that it makes your heart sing, and you feel like you’re not the only one who’s been both so low and so high at the same time. That maybe you’ll recover.

Anyway, I kept waiting for the Apatow takedown to come. And it never did. As I read about behavioral contract agreements emerging in comedy clubs and saw a club owner who put Louis C.K. up for a spot get threats of fire-bombing and hurting his children, I realized that this takedown quest was part of my own weasel-y little Hero’s Journey.

I’ve written a separate piece about the increasing despair I’ve felt these past few years, sussing out the growing hysteria around comedy and free speech and media manipulation (and how Apatow uses it), but this is just a video description. So here it is. A description of the video I made with the hashtag #TimesUp. Because his time is up. Get it?

I did the usual journalistic tricks (search “name” + “accuser,” search “name” + “controversy,” search “name” + “dragged”) and came up with a few things that surprised me.

On a scale of 1 to James O’Keefe, this video is a 3 in terms of deceptive editing and applying a scary-music copyright-free YouTube track to ancient stand-up where Apatow jokes about wanting to fuck his stepfamily, saying he’s a sexist not a racist, making a joke about going on a shooting spree (I’m so with you on that one, Judd, one of my favorite gallows humor go-to’s), and all manner of material that is not fit for pristine 2019 ears.

There were some things that really did surprise me in this Apatow Vision Quest I’ve undergone this past month.

I realize it was a joke when he said to Jon Stewart that he enjoyed getting actors to show their dicks. (I almost wrote “young actors” and realized I’d be given a pants-on-fire rating by the Washington Post for that! “It’s more complicated…”).

But I also did uncover what is clearly a preoccupation with dicks.

Talking to other actors about showing theirs, showing his own on film for an agonizing ten seconds (there’s nothing revolting about Apatow’s penis, but I don’t want strangers masturbating in front of me, either… it’s annoying and gross), and in one riveting scene, propositioning the gorgeous and wicked Andrew Rannells (who I believe is one of the funniest actors alive) to do a nude scene on Girls after discussing something completely different on a Paley Center panel.

It’s odd. It’s like the friend who you’re going on to about something for an hour and a half, and then she busts out with, ‘So I really think the fact that he used four i’s in this ‘Hi’ text means that he wants to have a relationship.’” She was never listening. She had something else on her mind the whole damned time.

I don’t really think Judd Apatow should be “cancel culture”-d by any means, but I’ll tell you one thing. By Apatow’s standards, he surely does.

Apatow Inspired Me

Posted on February 14, 2019December 9, 2021 by Team Penthouse

“I don’t think anything is without humor. Whenever there’s a movie that has no jokes in it at all, I always think, well that’s not even possible. In any situation somebody is making a heinous joke. At funeral or massacres, someone’s making a joke. Someone at a massacre is going, can you believe this is happening to us right now?”Judd Apatow, 2014

“This hacky, unfunny, shallow routine is just a symptom of how people are afraid to feel empathy. It’s much easier to laugh at our most vulnerable than to look at their pain directly & show them love and concern. Louis CK is all fear and bitterness now. He can’t look inward.”Judd Apatow, 2018

“very Judd tweet reveals his terror that the woke mob will drag him next.”Jon Gabriel

“‘Please don’t come after me, I’m still one of the good ones,” gasped the comedian.’”Jim Treacher

“Scout is so involved and active. She is on all platforms, and rarely becomes aware of anything much later than, say, the three-hundredth person. By way of comparison, the earliest I’ve ever been aware of anything was that time I was the ten-million-two-hundred-and-sixth person to see that thing. There’s evidently a considerable gulf between Scout and me. But that’s why I am always so appreciative of her coming by and giving me news. Now, according to Scout, the news was (is?) that the past is now also the present. I invited her to pull up a stool at my mid-century-modern breakfast bar and unpack that a little for me.”“Now More Than Ever” By Zadie Smith

“Comedians, from a fellow comedian, please stop attacking other comedians. What are we doing? We need to circle the wagons here. Jesus fucking Christ.”Bill Burr, 2019

I always think of that classic David Letterman moment in 2007 when Paris Hilton came on the late-night show to promote her new fragrance line or something. He kept returning to questions about her jail stay. She didn’t want to talk about it, and he responded: “See now this is where you and I are different. Because this is all I want to talk about.”

The spectrum of human depravity and heroics and redemption and failure and shame, and especially, oh especially the lies we tell ourselves to explain away why we are in fact immune from the checkered history of the human spirit while everyone else is not–see, that is all I want to talk about. There’s energizing, inspiring, soul-revitalizing honesty in discomfort and clash. I love to explore the Roshomon-like rubric of our millions of splintered and conflicting realities. I truly believe it is only through such uncensored exploration of the collectivity of endless dark truths in this world that we can ever reach something approaching light.

Over the course of the last seven years, as our culture has changed, as the social media Mob—or as it has been called of late, the “woke Stasi”—has evolved into a fearsome, vengeance-seeking beast in preemptively censoring the nature of public discourse. As it has, I’ve slowly released my will to fight. If you need the metaphor, here it is: I have been dutifully, zombie-eyed asking Paris Hilton any number of in-depth questions about what the very favorite part of launching her new fragrance line really was. So to speak.

Like most journalists, I am an angry, petty, vicious, two-faced individual. The reason I hope that you will now trust me is that I am telling you that I am an angry, petty, vicious, two-faced individual.

Sadly, it is par for the course if you work in the media-entertainment industrial complex. Over time, you gain a keen understanding that one minute the person who is smiling to your face at a dinner party asking for a favor might the very next be placing a nasty item sabotaging you under the guise of anonymity and gossip. You really can’t take such fecklessness personally, I’ve learned. Hell, if I wrote off all the people who’ve done this to me over the years, I’d have missed out on the many riches of wit, wisdom and brilliance such folks have otherwise enriched my life on a personal level.

We’re all flawed. We’re all shit-heels. Mother Teresa herself would not have survived the “cancel culture” we are currently living in. The best among us try to be as little this way as possible and offer some light and truth and kindness when we can. But if you work in trades that involve the cultivation of transactional relationships, this is the swampy business of shady favor trading and alliances. And the more you believe the lies and the justification you tell yourself about why you may do any number of unseemly things that you do (those moments when your conscience starts to kick up questions of uncertainty and perspective and doubt and nuance), well, the more unimpeachable success you will have in climbing and climbing and climbing.

The most political animals among us do so without remorse, self-reflection or impunity. Loyalty and integrity become as anachronistic as the telegram itself.

And yet, it doesn’t stop the practice from being as slimy and soul-deadening and joy-corrosive as it sounds.

Young people with dreams of access journalism have no idea the reality of the viper’s pit and backstabbing that exists once you enter (as Graydon Carter once explained to Toby Young in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) the successive rooms of power you are granted if you start abiding by the rules of how the game is played: Attach yourself to the right players.

If the winds shift ever so slightly, jump ship and glom on to the next up-and-comer. Backstab without remorse if it helps you. Loyalty is for suckers. Regurgitate the agendas and talking points of your most viable alliances. Whatever you do, don’t think independently. Please your masters. Sure, this will engender personal bitterness when you disagree with the opinions of the tribal alpha setting the hivemind of who’s in and who’s out, but suck that up. Because that’s what placing nasty stories are for. Leaks and tips provide you with a sanity-balancing outlet to release the bile and whisper campaign, to out the players you may see wounded (and of no use to you anymore) and boost up those who may be able to shine up your status.

This is what I wanted to do to Judd Apatow. Tip off another reporter braver than I am that this guy’s hypocrisy is just begging to be exposed.

The most hilarious part about a takedown piece that ran about me years ago was the reliance throughout on anonymous quotes talking trash when I could have easily given a dozen people who would eagerly go on record to spew the same. It’s the coward’s way out. It always has been.

And recently, until a few minutes ago, I was a coward of the greatest proportions.

Up until recently, I’ve been playing it extremely safe. Well, not safe, so much as petrified.

In this brave new world of ex post facto authoritarianism, I’ve observed, almost outside of myself, this slowly boiling over disgust and distaste for a culture that now caters to victim privilege above all else.

And now comes the part where I give my bona fides as a respectable victim myself. I was raped when I was 15 by a distant family member. My dad is a blind PTSD-ridden combat vet with severe rage issues. My mom suffered from crippling OCD most of my life growing up. I was such an anxious fuck amongst all this dysfunction and terror and fear that I wet my bed almost every night until I was 15.

But do you know what the one thing that my family had–that I had–that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world? The one thing that would always bring us a shot of transcendent joy like absolutely nothing else in the world?

Dark, mean, fucked-up, utterly wrong comedy.

After a fight one time, I don’t think I’ve ever made my dad laugh as from-the-soul deeply as when he asked me who I was taking to prom, and I said it was going to be the sniper from ‘Nam.

Do young people even know about this anymore?

That making the sickest, wrongest, most fucked-up jokes can be one of the greatest catharsis you will ever know in life? I mean please don’t take this advice if you’re a bona fide psychopath. If you’re a psychopath, please just turn yourself in because I don’t want you wearing my skin like a hat, dancing around your refrigerated lair of corpses quoting from this article. I would be super mortified.

Over the years, I’ve heard comedians wish everything from AIDS to murder on an audience member. Like everyone else in the audience, I came to experience the thrill of the taboo. It reminds me of a YouTube comment I once read. Yeah, I know how stupid that sounds. Which is exactly why I’m saying it.

So I don’t know if this is a played-out street joke or just the brilliant concept of a lone YouTube commenter who will never realize the gold he has on his hands, but the guy (or girl! Or girl!) theorized that some day, “There will be ‘Speak Freelys.’”

Have you ever heard something so apt to this cultural moment?

Speak freelies. I wish I could go to one. I wish our world still was one.

I learned a valuable lesson about this new systematic cultural dishonesty in 2012.

It was mid-summer when I went from the gallows-humor-rich halls of the New York Post to the ultra-liberal intersectional couches of doomed Internet feminist startup xoJane. One night after attending the comedy roast of Anthony Bourdain, I ran into the ever-offensive comedian Gilbert Gottfried on the red carpet not long after his very public firing after he made some jokes on Twitter about tsunami victims. So I asked him for an interview.

You see, that right there was my first mistake. It turned out, my job was not to ask. It was to coach.

My editors needed to do a special review of my piece for potential offense. Kind of like a pre-trigger-warning trigger-warning. In the future, I was told, it was probably best to get controversial celebs greenlit first to figure out the right angle.

“If it was [Daniel] Tosh, for example,” the email read, “we’d have to get him to talk about the rape joke thing in a meaningful way if we were going to post a sympathetic interview.”

When I got that email, I cackled insanely.

Sure.

Just one of those super-chill Daniel Tosh interview/healing seshes about the pain he has inflicted through his purposefully offensive—and often super-cathartic—jokes.

No arrogance or delusion on the part of the woke media there at all. No inherent belief that social engineering is simply part of the job. No terrifying credo that “If they think wrong, it is our job to teach them to think right.”

Who, what, when, where, why and woke: The Six W’s of any acceptable modern journalism piece.

It was November 9, 2017, when the Mexican-American comic and TV auteur born as Louis Szekely released his one-time press statement apologizing for asking multiple women if he could masturbate in front of them. In that time, the movie producer Apatow has steadfastly remained one of his most loyal, outspoken defenders of the comedian’s controversial jokes and of the need for unencumbered speech in comedy in general.

Just kidding. He threw Louie under the bus faster than you can say, “Hey Judd, have you ever thought about casting your kids?”

When the New York Times reporters on the Louis “beat” came out with their cri de cour against C.K., Apatow’s sweaty fingers cranked out this solemn masterpiece on social media, “This to me was one of the saddest parts of the Louis CK story in the @nytimes. When you disrespect and sexually harass young, vulnerable people you become a dream killer.”

This felt especially rich from a guy who once told Stephen Galloway on the show Hollywood Masters in 2014: “Is it a Golden Age of comedy? I think it is a Golden Age of comedy generally….Everything’s better in retrospect, but it’s amazing what’s happening in comedy now. Louis’ show, if that was all there was it would be a Golden Age of comedy.”

Then again, it was also that same year that he wrote of Louis in his genuinely terrific book Sick in the Head, “Louis C.K. is one of those people who are so brilliant and funny and uncompromising that sometimes I need to avoid their work. When I was writing This Is 40, I made a point to never watch his TV show because I was aware that it was, on one level, about a middle-aged guy with two daughters, and if I watched it, and loved it, I would probably feel like there was no need for me to make my movie.”

Shit, Judd. If I had a time machine, forget baby Hitler. I’d just sit next to you and queue up your Netflix.

Apatow also went on in that same lavish (and slavish) introduction, “I also make a point of not watching too much of his stand-up, because he’s so prolific and covers so much ground. Watching him makes me feel like there’s nothing left to talk about, and that everything has already been done, as well as it can be done, by Louis.”

Well at least we know he’s coming from a pure place in his current bile toward the comedian. An incredibly pure one: Pure resentment.

If you’ve never had the misfortune of working in the current dumpster fire that is modern media, then you may not be aware of just how insanely the model has changed. I mention this because I’d like to talk about how artfully done Apatow’s moralizing to generate headlines has been.

In 2014, the Washington Post film critic Anne Hornaday wrote a thoughtful piece looking at the entitlement sentimentality she saw running like a virus through male culture. Did some of it come from the entertainment they consumed, the films and TV that kept portraying a recycled kind of tale, where the loser guy wins the hot girl? Maybe?

“For generations, mass entertainment has been overwhelmingly controlled by white men, whose escapist fantasies so often revolve around vigilantism and sexual wish-fulfillment (often, if not always, featuring a steady through-line of casual misogyny). Rodger’s rampage may be a function of his own profound distress, but it also shows how a sexist movie monoculture can be toxic for women and men alike. How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like ‘Neighbors’ and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?

Hornaday kind of nailed it. The oeuvre of loser gets hottie out of his league is in some ways, kind of the ultimate incel fantasy, to be honest.

Seth Rogen and Apatow predictably lost their shit in response. Anyone would.

But what I noticed in particular from looking at Apatow’s tweets to Hornaday was how precisely he pinned down the way a news cycle works.

You’ve got to piggyback, to frame, to jump on a bandwagon of virality.

And well, Louis C.K. He’s the perfect cocktail.

Because journalism nowadays is basically algorithms + controversy. If you aren’t aware of the theory of outrage porn (like the C.K. story) being humans’ super-normal stimuli or, say, ElsaGate’s utter infiltration of your child’s brain, these all go hand-in-hand with generating good clickbait.

There’s a terrific Digiday piece that unpacks the Web-traffic-boosting strategy that is, tacky-ness-wise, the equivalent of doing some power networking at a funeral, when it comes to covering something like a celebrity death or a #MeToo controversy.

Did I mention how smart Apatow is? God is he smart.

In the arena of stand-up comedy, the contract between audience member and performer has always been that you are there to hear the performer riff on all that awful, terrible everything-ness that you can’t say in polite society in a way that releases all of the tension and stress surrounding these awful, terrible things and ultimately makes you laugh. That’s the comedian’s job. That’s it.

The reason this social contract was safe for so long was because (a) no cell phones and (b) no social media. But now, we have inadvertently created our own little East German informer citizenry. Snitches don’t get stitches. They get, like, 20,000 likes and maybe even a $300 freelance piece about their viral tweet condemning a word that was used wrong, and damn it, you were there to catch it.

The reason it also worked is because we used to come from a place of grounded, collectively shared reality. We understood that outrageous words and ideas are simply outrageous words and ideas and have no bearing on actions or outcome.

It reminds me of one of my favorite TV episodes in all of eternity: Black Mirror’s “Nosedive.”

I rewatched it before putting this together, which gave me the courage to write the piece in spite of realizing the influx of “your brains are made of shit” and Ellen Barkin-style “you deserve to be raped” responses I will likely receive.

In a world not too far off from where we are today, in “Nosedive,” every person is constantly ranking and liking each other’s social portfolios, and status and equity are determined accordingly. There is actually a scene where one of the office workers whispers to the protagonist, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, who is wincing at the desperation of someone who is trying to curry points and raise his score by offering her a smoothie: “We’re not talking to him.”

We’re not talking to him. It is the same kind of de-person-ing that happens to you in the fifth grade by the bullies. Like the emergent nerd-bullies of the past few decades (whose anger at the jocks have transformed them into a kind of super-mega-book-learnin’-filled bully), the bullied-bullies employ the same techniques that mean girls used to torment me with growing up.

Later in the episode, Howard is en route to the worst trip of her life to try to get to a wedding to increase her social stature when she gets picked up by a female trucker whose ranking instantly shows that she has fallen far and fast from the acceptance of the reigning hive-mind. The trucker says she used to be a 4.6, but now she’s a 1.4. Keep in mind: This is a world where the only acceptable tone is one of utter smiling zombie blankness and laughter when nothing funny has ever been said.

The trucker reveals she stopped giving a fuck when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and despite all the ratings and false-approval-rankings from a world of smiling acquaintances surrounding her, the cancer did not care. It just kept spreading. Then her husband was kept out of a treatment facility because his score was one-tenth a point too low. That was her breaking point. At this, Howard says she is so sorry.

“You don’t know me so you’re not really sorry,” the trucker says. “You’re mainly awkward because I’ve sprung some cancer talk on you.”

When her husband died, she thought “fuck it.”

“I started saying what I wanted when I wanted,” she says. “Just drop it out there. People don’t always like that. It is incredible how fast you slip off the ladder when you start doing that. It turned out a lot of my friends didn’t care for honesty. Treated me like I had taken a shit at their breakfast table.”

“But Jesus Christ,” she says, “it felt good, shedding those fuckers. It was like taking off tight shoes. Maybe you should try it.”

Having subsisted on the trifurcated portions of a book advance paid out in three installments, I have written and killed various pieces, composed and deleted way too many tweet drafts to count over the last few months, all in fear of the mob going after my remaining advance payment.

This week, several disheveled cartons of my memoir arrived on my doorstep via courier, and the check finally landed in my bank account. Then again, perhaps the mob can find a way to actually convince my bank, USAA, to drop me as a client and take away the money. Maybe they can cancel the bank. That would be cool.

But I’m not going to let them take what has kept me alive and sane throughout my life: Comedy. And not just any kind of comedy. Really, really fucked-up mean-spirited comedy that uses the tragedy of life as material. That’s how I heal.

Wheeler Walker Jr

Posted on February 11, 2019December 11, 2021 by Team Penthouse

I’m outside Brent’s Deli in Northridge, California, waiting for the king of outlaw country music, Wheeler Walker Jr., who’s on the cusp of launching his third album, WWIII.

He’s due to arrive on his own, without a posse, a lady friend, or an assistant. And though I’m aware that without comedian Ben Hoffman there would be no Wheeler Walker Jr. — the Nashville musician is Hoffman’s invented persona — I’m hoping the guy who shows up is 100 percent Walker, zero percent Hoffman.

Rolling Stone has called Wheeler Walker Jr.’s music “unfathomably obscene,” “undeniably offensive,” and “goddamn funny.” This foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed, pot-smoking hit-maker released his first record, Redneck Shit, in 2016. Following a buzz-building premiere via stream on Pornhub, the album debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard Top Country chart. You could even call Walker a crossover artist, considering that Redneck Shit also went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Comedy chart.

On this November day, Walker’s fresh off opening for Kid Rock on his 15-date Red Blooded Rock N Roll Redneck Extravaganza tour. He’s spent much of the last three years on the road, including during his own 20-city Eatin’ Pussy/Kickin’ Ass tour, and last summer’s Dragon Energy gigs.

Minutes after taking up my post outside Brent’s, Walker arrives. Granted, the man didn’t roar up in a lifted pickup with a joint in his mouth and a girl on his arm, but the bearded Kentuckian who climbs out of a rented SUV in boots and jeans, black shirt, shades, and a black Adidas cap is indeed Wheeler Walker Jr. No sign of Hoffman.

Walker’s made a career out of songs with titles like “Fuck You Bitch,” “Which One O’ You Queers Gonna Suck My Dick?,” and “Drunk Sluts.” Sex and getting high are central themes. His tune “Summers in Kentucky” lulls you with its beautiful melody and nostalgic, teen-love lyrics, then becomes X-rated. “Puss in Boots” is a rollicking good time, musically, while talking about blowjobs, fake breasts, and pubic hair.

WWIII picks up right where Walker’s last album, Ol’ Wheeler, left off. The record’s first two tracks are called “Save Some Titty Milk For Me” and “I Like Smoking Pot (A Lot).” Fourth on the album is ”Fuck You With the Lights On,” a tune Walker wrote for his wife Christine, a woman he loves so much he keeps the lights on when they do it.

When he’s not writing dirty, druggy songs, or delivering them onstage, Walker likes to lob Twitter bombs at big-name targets. A typical day might see him going after Kanye West or having fun with a Donald Trump tweet. But Walker reserves his greatest ire for what he calls “fake country.” Carrying a torch for George Jones-style roots music, Walker has engaged in one-sided online feuds with country duo Florida Georgia Line, Bebe Rexha (the platinum blonde singer who collaborated with FGL), and even Mason Ramsey, the kid who shot to fame when video of him yodeling a Hank Williams song in a Walmart went viral. The video propelled the then 11-year-old to a major-label record deal and an Ellen appearance.

A typical Wheeler Walker Jr. tweet? At November’s start, the musician plugged his new album by typing individual words in a very long column, one atop another, in which he also unloaded on Ramsey, whose first single had cracked the Billboard Hot 100 in May.

Walker tweeted: “Please Buy My New Album When It Is Out On November 30th And Help Kill Pop County [sic] Dead.” He added, “Fuck Yodel Kid Fuck Yodel Kid Fuck That Little Shit.”

When asked about the tweet, Walker doubles down: “People are like, ‘You’re just jealous.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, no shit, that’s the whole point. That little yodel kid took off. Like, fuck him. I don’t wanna be outsold by some little kid. He ain’t even that good.”

After settling into our green vinyl booth, Walker takes off his shades, revealing thoughtful brown eyes, but quickly pops the glasses back on when a photographer approaches.

“I just don’t like taking pictures without my shades,” he tells me.

Walker speaks low, so I have to lean forward to hear him, even in a quarter-full deli. In person, the musician has more shadings than the online version, a righteous Kentuckian battling for the soul of twenty-first-century country music. He’s unfiltered in his speech, with a propensity to ramble, but his manner is polite. “He’s an all right fucker,” says a guy Walker tells me is his dad, Wheeler Walker Sr., when we speak by phone.

I’m a little surprised when Walker orders matzo ball soup, bagel chips, and seltzer water, but then again, we’re in a deli. Walker tells me he was sober for a while, but now he drinks on occasion, along with smoking lots of pot. As he sips his seltzer, I ask him about the title to WWIII, an 11-song release which has him making slick music videos, doing press, and getting ready to go out on the road again, solo this time.

“It’s called that ’cause my son’s Wheeler Walker the third,” Walker tells me. “Everyone thinks it’s about World War III, but it’s not, ’cause World War III ain’t happened yet. Then again, with the country community so pissed at me, when this album comes out, it’s gonna be World War III probably.”

Walker explains that many of his fellow country professionals are upset with him because of the crude language in his songs. He points out that his records do better than a lot of the musicians who are pissed at him. And that’s despite the fact that radio stations can’t or won’t play his songs, given their raunchy, drug-celebrating content. I ask Walker if he’d ever clean up his lyrics to get more airplay. No sir, Walker responds.

“I’d rather do what I want to do and see if it hits or not,” he tells me. “When I listen to other people’s music, I can hear them trying to sell records. Selling records ain’t my goal. I got something to say. And music, country music, is the best way I know how to express what I want to say.”

As Walker turns to his soup, I entertain the idea of asking him about Ben Hoffman, who just sold an animated series to Netflix, but before I get a chance, Walker gets on a roll about authenticity and self-expression, his voice charged with a quiet fire.

“People used to call country music three chords and a truth,” Walker says. “And I used to love it, but I didn’t hear anything close to the truth on the radio. I came to realize that for a musician to tell the truth…I mean, these are vulgar times, man. You gotta use vulgar words to get your truth across. And people aren’t telling the truth ’cause they’re scared that the truth’s gonna get ’em in trouble. Nowadays with politics, all these big country guys—I know ’em and they’re all liberal dudes—but they won’t talk about it, ’cause it’s gonna hurt record sales. I’m not saying you have to write political songs, but they’re trying to be someone they’re not to sell records. It’s like, be who you are. These people, they’re made-up personas. They’re just not real. People are looking for real stuff.”

The list of country bands and artists that offend Walker’s sensibilities is long.

“Florida Georgia Line,” he begins. “When you listen to country radio, it’s just a big blur of all this shit. I don’t know all their names. There’s this duo, Dan and Shay, that’s horrible. There’s this guy, Chase Rice, he’s fucking shit. Luke Bryan is really bad. Just everyone. Keith Urban is horrible. He used to play something closer to country music, but he’s from Australia, so what’s that mean? I don’t know how brain-dead you have to be to put a Keith Urban album on and have any kind of enjoyment from that. It’s just dog shit. Maybe everyone in the audience has brain damage, I don’t know. Or CTE. What the football players have.”

When prompted, however, Walker does name some country musicians he likes.

“Chris Stapleton’s really good. I like him. This guy, Tyler Childers—he’s great. Sturgill Simpson. He’s the guy who introduced me to my producer. He’s amazing. There’s not a lot, really. Jason Isbell. I don’t know if he’s country or not, but he’s great. He’s a Nashville artist, certainly. I call him country ’cause I like to claim him as country. John Prine is still around, doing great stuff. Billy Joe Shaver. He’s still alive and kicking ass. Getting to meet him, that was a highlight. Billy Joe being a fan meant a lot to me.”

Walker’s love of country music began during his Kentucky childhood. Wheeler Walker Sr. says his son started writing songs as a kid. “There was one about the neighbor’s maid,” his dad tells me by phone. “Nice lady, too. Thank God her grasp of language wasn’t incredible. She would have been completely offended. All this stuff’s now a gray area in light of our current… you know, how things are today. But yeah, Walker sang a bunch of real dirty songs from the get-go.”

Three decades after penning that song about the neighbor’s maid, Wheeler Walker Jr. found himself in a Nashville studio, recording Redneck Shit, an effort destined for surprise success.

“Honestly, I didn’t know if I was gonna release it,” Walker says. “Then it started getting a following around town. People were passing it around. Like, if everyone’s passing it around, why don’t I pass it around for ten bucks a pop? So I put it out myself and…I mean, we sold 125,000 of ’em.”

Listeners loved the dirty, party-loving lyrics. But Walker’s fans are quick to point out that when he goes into the studio, he comes out with an honest-to-God country music record, with songs full of great melodies and twangy hooks. “Redneck Shit is far from just an X-rated novelty record,” hailed Rolling Stone in 2016. Walker’s fans include rapper Killer Mike, of Run the Jewels, and the aforementioned country star Tyler Childers. And then there’s Kid Rock. The former Michigan senatorial hopeful asked Walker to tour with him in 2018. After working out the scheduling, Walker was all-in.

“I was like, anyone who’s got the balls to take me out on tour, put me in front of his audience, well, that said something,” Walker tells me. “It was weird. I’d look out and see little kids and stuff. I’d get nervous that they’re hearing my songs—the adult content, you know—then I’d be like, ‘Wait, they’re seeing Kid Rock. They shouldn’t be at this show anyway, so fuck ’em.’”

Joining Kid Rock’s Redneck tour was the first time Walker had opened for anyone. If you’re familiar with Walker’s work, it’s pretty obvious why. There aren’t many artists who can gracefully follow a guy singing songs like “Better Off Beatin’ Off,” “Sit On My Face,” and “Finger Up My Butt.” Not to mention the ballad “If My Dick Is Up, Why Am I Down?”

WWIII features another first. On it, Walker introduces his family, such as it is, to the wider world. In addition to his son Wheeler Walker III, there’s also his wife, a zaftig blonde who loves her husband’s music above all else (she’s played by Instagram personality Trailer Trash Tammy, who is herself played by actress and comedian Chelcie Lynn). Walker says WWIII is a love album. He also calls it his “most personal” record.

“It’s kind of an R-rated version of my home life,” the musician explains. “One song’s called ‘Anal & the Dishes.’ That’s my life now. Like, Christine will say, ‘Honey, could you do the dishes?’ And I’ll say, ‘I’ll do ’em for anal.’ And I just go to my office and write a song called ‘Anal & the Dishes.’ It’s just like a crazy version of what my home life is. Obviously mine’s different than most people’s. Or maybe it’s not that different. It’s just I’m looking at it through a different lens. Other musicians might not go and write a song about it.”

Walker says he has no plans to stop tweaking mainstream country music. One of his favorite tactics is to write about gay sex. When I ask him about the song “Which One O’ You Queers Gonna Suck My Dick?” he leans forward, conscious of the guy in the booth behind us.

“I wonder if this guy’s freaking out,” Walker says. “For some reason this stuff pisses off the country community more than anything. So I’m gonna sing about it. I ain’t gonna say whether or not I do this stuff, but I want them to think I do because it pisses ’em off. To pretend gay people don’t exist in show business is just idiotic. Like I said, this stuff pisses ’em off the most, so for that reason every album will have this material on it. It’s really my two favorite things—making music and annoying people. It’s kind of what I do.”

Walker says that dragging people on Twitter helps relieve the stress he experiences at home, as a husband and father. As he puts it, “If I get mad at this or that, when I’m off the road back in Nashville, instead of yelling at my wife or kid, I just go to my office, get on my phone, or fire up my laptop, and rip on a bunch of country artists. Stir things up. Get some attention. I’m just yelling into the void, really.”

And with that Walker rises from our booth, thanks me for my time, and heads for the exit, boot heels thumping across the floor.

By the time you read this, Wheeler Walker Jr. will have strummed his guitar and sang his licentious, rowdy songs in another dozen or so major American cities, including Nashville, in support of WWIII. He’ll have taken more flak for his lyrics, watched his latest music videos rack up clicks, and without a doubt caused more trouble on Twitter, busting on celebrities and badmouthing country peers. But really, it’s all in good fun.

Like his dad, Walker Wheeler Sr., says, “He’s an all right fucker.”

The Dakar-Peru Road with Penthouse | Episode 5

Posted on February 7, 2019December 5, 2021 by Team Penthouse

On the (Sandy) Road Again

Down and VERY Dirty

While the video department fights over which editor gets to piece together all the fun Olga footage from Dakar, we thought we might take five minutes and give you a bit of a view from the driver’s seat in the car. We should mention that we took what was originally a 15-minute shoot and sped it up so that it plays in only five. Honestly, we found it more fun this way, and riding in a car in the middle of South American desert can only be so much fun, after all.

It may have been dusty and windy, but some of the views were spectacular. We did notice that our Team did not seem particularly concerned with any of the broken down compatriots along the road. Competitions. What can you do?

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