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Salem 2.0

Posted on February 28, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

I recently picked up a paperback by a New York Times journalist in a bookshop and read the following on the back cover: “A major metropolitan newspaper announces that half of its new employees will have to be women and the other half members of minority groups. At a Milwaukee school district, ‘inappropriate staring’ has been labeled a form of sexual harassment, punishable by dismissal. And a proposed new American history syllabus features such topics as ‘Why I Am Not Thankful for Thanksgiving,’ ‘Once Upon A Genocide,’ and ‘George Washington: Speculator in Native Lands.’” It went on to describe these incidents as representative of a new, puritanical, left-wing movement that’s sweeping contemporary America. The author—Richard Bernstein—has labeled this crusade “the Inquisition.”

Oh no, I thought. That’s exactly the book I want to write. For the last nine months, I’ve been collecting stories like these, from the two white women who were forced to shut down their business selling burritos out of a food truck in Portland after they were accused of “cultural appropriation,” to the editor of a prestigious New York magazine who was fired for publishing an article by a Canadian radio host, a man charged with sexual assault and then acquitted on all counts.

I even have a title: Salem 2.0.

But there was a journalist who got there before me. Damn him.

Then I took a closer look. The book, called Dictatorship of Virtue, had been published in 1995. It was 23 years old. I was relieved, obviously, but also a bit puzzled: Had the liberal left really been this batshit-crazy for decades? Were the “Social Justice Warriors” who had appeared since the election of Donald Trump—“the Resistance”—just the latest troops in a culture war dating back to the Reagan era? Was the Great Awakening (another title I’ve been thinking about) just a cyclical recurrence of political correctness? Would I have to call my book Salem 3.0 instead? That didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

I returned to my writer’s desk feeling a bit disheartened, but after some reflection, I began to perk up. There’s no question that the current moment in American culture—and across the Anglosphere more generally—is firmly embedded in an anti-Western, anti-bourgeois ideology that stretches back decades. But it’s also true that something’s happened in the past few years to turbocharge this movement and it’s gathered such momentum we seem to be on the verge of a tipping point.

Put it another way: It’s as if the discontent that had been rumbling away among left-wing intellectuals for years has suddenly exploded into a cacophonous rage. A regressive political philosophy fueled by guilt, self-loathing, and resentment that used to be confined to Ivy League universities, Hollywood liberals and the fringes of the Democratic Party has gone viral and infected millions of people in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

If you’re a white heterosexual male, look out.

The mob already came for me, incidentally. At the beginning of the year, I was appointed to the board of a regulatory body in the U.K., and as soon as it was announced an army of hashtag activists started trawling through my social media history to find evidence that I wasn’t a fit person to serve as a member of this august public institution.

No one had ever heard of it before I was appointed, my role was incredibly minor, and there was no salary attached, but the fact that I’d been appointed by a conservative prime minister meant there was an opportunity to score some political points. It didn’t take the online metal-detectorists long to strike gold.

Ten years ago, I was a judge on a food reality-show with the Indian supermodel Padma Lakshmi, and I’d composed a handful of tweets late at night salivating over her boobs. There were some other, equally sophomoric comments about the breasts of other celebrities. Not exactly Harvey Weinstein territory, but it didn’t stop me being targeted by #MeToo activists. An outraged mob sprung up on Twitter, baying for my blood. According to them, I embodied everything that was wrong with the British establishment: male, pale, and stale. A message was relayed from the prime minister’s office that it might be in everyone’s best interests if I stood down. I duly obliged and, shortly afterward, I was stripped of my honorary fellowship from the University of Buckingham, kicked off the boards of two charities, and had to resign from my full-time job.

That’s what gave me the idea for the book, obviously, but the fact that I was skewered by a twitchfork mob doesn’t mean I’m wrong. This latest manifestation of political activism is different from earlier versions by an order of magnitude.

For one thing, there’s the sheer, muddle-headed, Bizarro World nuttiness of it. We’re told that “hate speech” is a great evil, unless you’re advocating the hatred of men (a recent column in the Washington Post was headlined “Why can’t we hate men?”), which is absolutely fine. According to a recent poll of “woke” academics and policy experts, the United States is the tenth most dangerous country in the world for women—far more dangerous than Iran, even though Iranian women caught not wearing the full hijab by the religious police are routinely sentenced to 74 lashes. All men are “privileged”—we’re just supposed to accept that without question—in spite of the fact that 75 percent of the suicides reported in the U.K. in 2016 were men, 79 percent of homicide victims across the world are men, 93 percent of prison inmates in the U.S. are men, 94 percent of Americans killed in industrial accidents are men, and 99.9 percent of soldiers killed in combat are men.

And, of course, all white people are “privileged” as well, including the victims of the opioid epidemic, known as “the White Death” because the majority of the 72,000 people estimated to have died from drug overdoses in 2017 were white, and in spite of the fact that poor white boys do worse in school than any other ethnic group, there are fewer white births than deaths in a majority of U.S. states, American black women have higher college attendance rates than white men, and college-educated black women have higher incomes than college-educated white women. For the Social Justice Warrior on the left, it’s as if reality itself is a social construct, not just race and gender.

Then there’s the insidious way in which Maoist intolerance of those who dissent from progressive orthodoxy has embedded itself in company policies, bureaucratic procedures, and legal systems. I’m not just talking about the punishment meted out to James Damore, the Google employee who dared to question the company’s diversity and inclusion policy. He was fired for creating a “hostile work environment”—a decision that was rubber-stamped by the National Labor Relations Board. (So much for the First Amendment.)

I’m also thinking of the change to the Canadian Human Rights Act and Criminal Code which makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by law, if you refuse to use a trans person’s preferred gender pronoun. Jordan Peterson warned us about that last year and, of course, was immediately accused of “helping to foster a climate for hate to thrive” by trans activists, left-wing academics, and labor unions.

Twenty-five years ago, we had the “Antioch Rules,” which made it an offense at Antioch College for a man to engage in a sexual encounter without receiving “affirmative consent” at every stage of the seduction process. But that was regarded by most people at the time as an example of political correctness gone mad and parodied on Saturday Night Live. Today, following President Obama’s supercharging of Title IX, the “Antioch Rules” apply in virtually every American university, and hundreds of young men have been branded “rapists” by kangaroo courts and kicked out of college for failing to observe this absurd protocol. One poor guy was found guilty of “rape” because he couldn’t remember whether he’d asked for permission to remove his girlfriend’s belt, even though they’d dated for over a year after that initial encounter.

In Britain, there’s been a massive uptick in “hate crimes”—a new category of criminal offense created in 2007, not by an Act of Parliament, but by a group of unelected officials. If you say or write something that another person is offended by, and that person thinks you’re motivated by hostility or prejudice toward them based on a personal characteristic, you’re guilty of a “hate crime.” Doesn’t matter whether that is, in fact, your motive, all that counts is that the offended person perceives it to be.

At present, there are five “protected characteristics”—disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, and transgender identity—but the British government is thinking of adding “gender” to the list and outlawing “misogyny.” Given that some feminists think climate change is caused by “misogyny,” God knows who will end up in the dock. The executive board of British Petroleum? Earlier this year, a comedy writer called Graham Linehan was given a “verbal harassment warning” by the West Yorkshire Police for “deadnaming” trans activists on Twitter—i.e., using her original male name, rather than her new chosen name.

I could go on. Scarcely a day passes without a “cishet” white male being “called out” on Twitter for some thought crime or other. A twitchfork mob immediately forms up and within days, sometimes hours, the guy is tossed to the wolves. Recent examples include Kevin Williamson, who was hired then fired by The Atlantic after some intemperate remarks about abortion were dug up; Alessandro Strumia, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was immediately suspended and placed under “investigation” after he challenged the feminist dogma about why more women don’t do physics; and Stephen Galloway, a creative writing professor who lost his job at the University of British Columbia after he was falsely accused of rape by a disgruntled ex-girlfriend.

Still don’t believe me? A Harvard University survey conducted two years ago found that 51 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 do not support capitalism, compared to 42 percent who said they support it. That’s up four percentage points from a 2011 Pew survey where already 47 percent of the same age-group held a negative view of capitalism.

So what accounts for this explosion in ultra-liberal attitudes? How did political correctness metastasize?

One possibility, not to be lightly dismissed, is that the world has become a much more unfair place in the past few years. Of course people are protesting more—there’s more to protest about. But is that true?

The answer is no. Take racism, for instance. By almost every measure, racism is declining in the United States. In 1967, when miscegenation laws were repealed, three percent of all newlyweds were married to someone of a different race. In 2015, that number had risen to 17 percent. Next time some placard-carrying millennial tells you that all white Americans are racist, point out that more than one in ten white newlyweds has married a person of a different race.

Economically, African-American men have never been doing better. According to a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute, 57 percent of black Americans now belong to the upper or middle class, compared to just 38 percent in 1960. The share of black men in poverty, by contrast, has fallen from 41 percent in 1960 to 18 percent today. It’s the same story for Hispanic-Americans—55 percent belong to the upper or middle class—and Asian-Americans (73 percent). Police shootings? According to the Harvard economist Roland Fryer, blacks are no more likely to be shot by police officers than whites.

When comparing different countries, one way of measuring the level of racism is to ask whether people in that country would object if a person of another race moved in next-door. By that metric, the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are among the least racist countries in the world. Less than five percent of Britons said they would object, compared to more than 40 percent of Indians and Jordanians.

What about homophobia? Again, all the survey data suggests attitudes toward homosexuals across the Anglosphere have never been more liberal. For instance, just 35 percent of Americans were in favor of gay marriage in 2001. By 2017, that number had grown to 62 percent. Ditto for the U.K., where the number approving same-sex marriage has climbed from 17 percent in 1983 to 64 percent by 2016.

Gender? Contrary to the views of gender studies professors, the fairer sex has never had it so good. In the U.S., women comprise over 56 percent of students in college, while in the U.K., 40,000 more women than men enrolled at universities this fall.

As for the so-called “rape epidemic” on American college campuses, it’s a myth. Sexual assaults of female college students in the U.S. dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, and in the same period, young women in college were less likely to be assaulted than those who weren’t in college.

The gender pay gap? Once you control for the fact that women are more interested in lower-paying jobs than men (only nine percent of nurses are male), are more likely to take time out to start a family, and have a higher preference for part-time work, the gap disappears. Gender studies professors will tell you different, of course, but a recent survey found that they are paid, on average, $15,000 a year more than male professors in STEM subjects.

Okay, you might say. Maybe those lucky enough to live in the West are doing all right. But what about the less fortunate? No one would question that capitalism is wreaking a terrible toll on the developing world, would they? Well, yes, they would. Since 1990, more than a billion people across the planet have been lifted out of extreme poverty—113 million of them in a single year (2013)—thanks to the free enterprise system. The people millennials should be feeling sorry for are the citizens of the people’s republic of Venezuela. When Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, 40 percent of Venezuelan households were living in poverty. Last year, that figure had climbed to 82 percent.

When you look at the data, there is less for liberals to protest about than there has been at any point in the past 50 years. So why have they gone crazy? What gives?

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (a First Amendment lawyer and social psychologist, respectively), who’ve made a study of the anti-free speech culture on American campuses, the reason for this sea change is because today’s students and recent college graduates have been raised by overprotective, liberal parents and spend too much time on the internet. These digital natives believe the world is divided between good people and evil people, are impervious to reason once they’ve made up their mind about someone, and think the best way to deal with that person is to push them out of the body politic as if they are a pollutant or a pathogen. Not literally, but metaphorically, by “no-platforming” them, heckling them, ordering them to “check their privilege,” and, if necessary, “calling them out” on social media, i.e., publicly shaming them.

In their new book The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt note that millennials couch their objections to these “bad people” in psychological rather than ideological terms. Thus, the reason they don’t want conservatives like Ben Shapiro and Ann Coulter appearing on campus is not that they disagree with their political views, but because they “trigger” them or make them feel “unsafe.” Most people would take these claims with a pinch of salt, suspecting that students are weaponizing their mental health in order to push their liberal agenda. But Lukianoff and Haidt take them seriously. They believe there is something actually wrong with young Americans: They are far more psychologically fragile than they should be, thanks to the bubbles and echo chambers they’ve spent their lives in, and cannot cope with conflict or challenge. The solution, then, is to get them to toughen up—or, at least, persuade them that engaging with someone holding different views won’t cause them lasting psychological harm.

One problem with this analysis is that it fails to account for why these authoritarian Young Turks skew left rather than right. After all, if their main concern is to avoid the anxiety they believe arises out of viewpoint diversity, wouldn’t any political creed serve as well as any other provided everyone signs up to it? Why have they embraced the teachings of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault rather than Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek? Lukianoff and Haidt have an answer to this. It’s because their professors are overwhelmingly left-wing.

The expert on political bias in the American academy is the political scientist Stanley Rothman. According to him, the proportion of U.S. professors describing themselves as right-wing declined from 34 percent in 1984 to 15 percent in 1999, and those describing themselves as left-wing increased from 39 percent to 72 percent in the same period. And the shift has continued—accelerated, even—in the last two decades. According to a study carried out by Econ Journal Watch in 2016, which looked at the voter registration of faculty members at 40 leading American universities in the fields of economics, history, law, psychology, and journalism/communications, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 11.5 to one on average. In psychology, the ratio is 17.4 to one; in history, it’s 33.5 to one. A more recent study of 51 of the top-ranked 66 liberal arts colleges by Mitchell Langbert, carried out in 2018, found that 39 percent of them had no Republican staff on their faculties at all.

“The political registration in most of the remaining 61 percent, with a few important exceptions, is slightly more than zero percent but nevertheless absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation and in favor of Democratic affiliation,” writes Langbert. “Thus, 78.2 percent of the academic departments in my sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”

Whether Lukianoff and Haidt are correct in their core analysis, this extraordinary political imbalance in American universities must have played a part in radicalizing the generation that has come of age in the new millennium. And the same pattern emerges in other parts of the Anglosphere. In the U.K., for instance, those academics saying they would vote for right-of-center parties declined from 35 percent in 1964 to 11 percent in 2011, and those saying they’d vote for left-of-center parties increased from 64 percent in 1964 to 77 percent in 2015.

Other factors are surely at play, too. One thing that used to act as a firebreak on the spread of radical, socialist ideas was the distinction between the regressive left and the progressive left. Moderate liberals have generally treated hard-left political activists with caution, knowing that in the twentieth century, communist regimes were responsible for something like 100 million unnecessary deaths. But the line between the progressive and regressive left has always been quite fuzzy, and it’s become blurrier still since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. That event—and to a lesser extent the electoral success of right-wing populist movements across Europe, including Brexit—has polarized party politics and enabled the regressive left to capture large swathes of the moderate left.

In addition, the melding of hard-left dogma with postmodernism—what Jordan Peterson calls “postmodern Neo-Marxism”—has helped with its rapid spread in the last few years, even though that phenomenon dates back to the 1960s. It’s almost as if a group of cultural terrorists had been perfecting a virus in a lab for 50 years and then waited for just the right moment to release it.

Many progressive liberals have ended up feeling like apostates just because they have remained true to their original values, while all around them friends and allies have shifted leftwards. Some of them—such as the former Evergreen State College professor Bret Weinstein, who was hounded off campus by baseball-bat wielding thugs—have ended up as leading lights of what’s been called the Intellectual Dark Web.

Another theory, this one propounded by the African-American intellectual John McWhorter, is that the phenomenon of “wokeness” is a new, secular religion, and one reason it has grown so fast is that traditional, organized religions have experienced a steep decline in recent years. That would explain why Social Justice Warriors expect you to take so much of what they say on faith and why they treat those who challenge them as apostates—evildoers, motivated by venal self-interest—rather than worthy intellectual opponents.

It also fits with their fondness for reciting bits of dogma as if they were liturgical incantations, like the protestors at Middlebury College who responded to a speech by the conservative political scientist Charles Murray by chanting the following catechism in unison: “Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact’.” Finally, it explains why straight white males who want to be accepted into the church of political correctness have to confess to being racist—the woke version of original sin.

So what can you do, particularly if a mob is gathering outside your home chanting “Time’s up”? (I literally had a pack of jackals on my doorstep, although, to be fair, they were all journalists.) A ray of hope was provided by a recent report for an organization called More in Common which divided Americans into seven camps: Devoted Conservatives, Traditional Conservatives, Moderates, Politically Disengaged, Passive Liberals, Traditional Liberals, and Progressive Activists. According to the report, only people in the last category are members of Team Woke. They may shout the loudest, and, in doing so, persuade the rest of us that they’re far more numerous than they are, but in fact, they only constitute eight percent of American adults. By contrast, 80 percent of people polled by the report’s authors agreed with the statement “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Social Justice Warriors, it turns out, are in a tiny minority.

The answer, then, is for the “frustrated majority”—that’s how we’re referred to in this report—to stop kowtowing to these self-appointed commissars of the public square and start standing up to them. The reason they have such unprecedented power at this moment in our culture and can cast into the outer darkness anyone who dissents from their sacred beliefs is because we’ve allowed them to have it. To quote the phrase that empowered the British people to vote to leave the European Union, it’s time to “take back control.”

Okay, where’s my typewriter? Time to get going on Salem 2.0.

Busted Bro Bernie Sanders

Posted on February 25, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

Men think of sex workers as wealthy goddesses, but we’re actually working class. Like most middle-income Americans, we’re afraid to discuss money, but twice a month, my column “The Working Girl Diaries” will cover porn stars’ wallets. From how class affects porn stars’ financial habits to how much we spend on lube and kitty litter, I’ve got you covered. There is no taboo (economic) topic I won’t touch. You used to think of me as the Weiner girl, but now I’m the Barbara Ehrenreich of sex!

When I sexted a congressman, I learned the hard way that no politician is perfect. Well, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has forced me to learn that all over again.

I’ve always thought of the Vermont Senator has a working-class hero. In his three decades in Washington DC, Sanders has fought to raise the minimum wage, bolster unions, and tax the rich. His policies would help most middle-class people, but there’s one group of small business owners that Sanders has fucked up the ass again and again: sex workers.

Along with every Senator besides Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Ron Wyden, Sanders voted for the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a.k.a. FOSTA/SESTA. On the surface, SESTA sounds great; politicians branded the bills like Instagram influencers promoting the Fyre Festival. But the legislation limited free speech and shut down sites like Backpage, where sex workers posted ads. Although Backpage came with more than its fair share of clients, it gave women a safer way to work. Instead of prowlings dangerous streets for johns, working girls could advertise their services. FOSTA/SESTA has forced girls back into risky neighborhoods, where they face robbery and sometimes murder. Prostitutes can’t even continue to share bad client lists, which once warned sex workers of abusive men, because FOSTA/SESTA banned the practice.

FOSTA/SESTA has harmed the very community it’s supposed to protect, and sex workers expected Sanders to do better. “I called Bernie’s office when I was lobbying against FOSTA/SESTA and the aide didn’t know the bill,” says adult performer, writer and sex workers advocate Janice Griffith. “They couldn’t say whether or not Bernie had even read it or if he had an opinion.” As a sex worker and devout liberal, I wanted to ignore these stories. “Bernie’s just ignorant!” I cried. But politicians, especially progressives like Sanders, should be held to high standards. A guy as smart as Sanders should know that if you’re passing legislation that will impact a group of people, you should talk to that group of people. When analyzing education issues, Sanders has met with teachers unions. But nobody wants to meet with hookers to discuss politics. Senators only engage sex workers behind closed doors when they want sexts or blowjobs.

It’s frustrating to feel like progressives have ignored sex worker’s voices. And it’s even more frustrating that almost every Democratic candidate for the 2020 election has been pretending our marginalized community doesn’t exist. (Everyone’s intersectional until a repressed minority group overlaps with prostitutes!)

On the rare occasion a liberal politician acknowledges sex workers, he or she sides with the religious right and paint us as victims. As Out magazine reported, Senator Kamala Harris said she endorsed FOSTA/SESTA because the bill “makes it possible for victims and state prosecutors to hold online sex traffickers accountable.” As Griffith points out, “A lot of anti-sex work legislation comes out under the guise of protecting people and everyone wants to protect people on paper, but what does that actually mean.” Harris couldn’t fathom a girl choosing sex work. Maybe she should leave upper-class San Francisco for a day and speak to a working girl.

But until johns, and men who don’t buy sex, defend sex workers, politicians will continue to ignore us. “Sex workers shouldn’t be the only people making these calls,” Griffith says. “We need people who have less to lose standing with us and using their voices.” Most sex workers doubt this will ever happen. “Bernie and Bernie bros aren’t able to see sex workers as a legitimate demographic of the labor rights movement,” Feminist Stripper says. “Until that happens, we’re all, for a lack of a better term, fucked.”

Illustration by Amanda Lanzone

Dershowitz on Growing Old

Posted on February 24, 2019December 8, 2021 by Team Penthouse

I’m sprouting hairs in places where nature never intended them to grow, while the hair on my head is thinning. My stomach has grown, while my height has diminished. My gums are growing, while my teeth are disappearing. My store of anecdotes is growing, while my memory of recent events is shrinking. My interest in working harder is growing, but my energy is waning. My visits to doctors are growing, but my life expectancy is diminishing.

Growth is not linear, but there are patterns. The key is to recognize the patterns and use them to your advantage. Age provides some advantages and strengths that we can exploit.

I remember, as a young adult, wanting very much to grow—in height, in strength, in intellectual capacity, and in success. I thought of growth as only moving in a positive direction. But now I realize that growth is multidimensional and multidirectional.

As a person who has been active all of my life and blessed with the energy to sustain my activities, I find it difficult to get used to the negative aspects of growth—of “growing” old. But as Churchill reminded us, growing old is better than its alternative. I see that alternative all around me as contemporaries die, while others become disabled. It’s as if our expiration date—our “sell by”—has come and gone.

As an old man, I value every day. A friend of mine said that when you’re 80, if you seem to wake up one morning and nothing hurts, it probably means you’ve passed on. Even pain, a companion to old age, can be a blessing. It reminds you that you’re still alive and enduring the trials and tribulations of growing old.

Philip Roth once observed that growing old is not a battle—it’s a massacre! Your reliable old body begins to turn against you. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole where every time you cure one malady, another pops up. It is a never-ending battle whose ultimate ending is entirely foreseeable. There is darkness, not light, at the end of the tunnel.

I always seem to be waiting for test results from one doctor or another. My principle exercise is walking from one doctor to another. The trajectory is the opposite of what it was when we were young. “Growth” now means tumors, plaque, kidney stones, and bunions. No more growth of that kind, please!

I don’t want to sound morose. I have lived a good life with no serious illnesses and look forward to more productive years. At least physically, I am happy with the status quo. But I know the status quo will not persist. Nor will my physical situation get better.

Now I want to grow emotionally. I treasure my relationships, with family and friends. I don’t need the number of my friends to grow. I have enough. But I would like to see growth in the intimacy of my relationships. I no longer value ambition for ambition’s sake. I don’t need more successes or accomplishments. I don’t have to prove anything. I don’t have to answer every criticism, of which there are still many. I no longer keep score—except for my blood sugar and PSA numbers. Quality has become more important than quantity.

Change does not come easily to me. I still think of myself as a young man on the move—until I look in the mirror. I have to fight against long-honed competitive instincts. I find it hard to say no to new challenges and opportunities.

I’m trying, with the help of my wonderful wife, Carolyn, to be more in the moment—to go to matinees, to turn my cell phone off, to take long walks without particular destinations. My life with Carolyn continues to be a source of great pleasure and joy, and I’m excited to share more time with her.

My eternal optimism has not waned with age. So when I gaze toward the future, I do so with expectation. I look forward to enjoying my remaining years.

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.