Mourning the Death of the A.C.L.U

Posted on by Team Penthouse

When I was a young lawyer, I worked hand in hand with the American Civil Liberties Union in defending the free-speech rights of Penthouse magazine and other media that specialized in what the government called “pornography” or “obscenity,” and what its consumers regarded as erotica (hence the expression, “What they like is pornography; what we like is erotica.”). In those days, real civil libertarians saw the government’s effort to ban such material as full-frontal censorship in clear violation of the First Amendment. That was before radical feminists demanded that the A.C.L.U. stop defending sexist material and start defending the rights of women not to be offended, abused, and even raped.

Despite the lack of evidence of any connection between erotic images and rape, a group of feminists led by the late Andrea Dworkin and Professor Catherine MacKinnon claimed that freedom from pornography was a basic civil liberty and human right. They called me a “pornocrat” for defending the rights of pornographers.

We won that battle and pornography is now pervasive on the internet, in hotel rooms around the world (with several important exceptions), and in adult theaters (the few that still exist). With a few clicks one can watch Stormy Daniels earning her living in Technicolor. Although the Supreme Court still does not regard obscenity as protected by the First Amendment, adult pornography has become mainstream and legal as a matter of practice. There has been no increase in sexual assault crimes, and no reputable scientist has found an empirical connection between pornography and rape.

The issue of pornography, therefore, has not become a divisive one in the A.C.L.U., because there are no prosecutions of those who disseminate adult pornography to adults. In light of the A.C.L.U.’s movement away from civil liberties and toward agenda-driven left-wing politics, it is fair to ask how the current board of the A.C.L.U. would deal with a case involving the prosecution of an adult movie theater, such as the ones I litigated back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

My first Supreme Court argument, back in the late 1960s, was on behalf of the owner of the Symphony Cinema Theatre, an art theater that showed European films. He was prosecuted and sentenced to prison for showing I Am Curious (Yellow), an antiwar film that included nudity and some sexual activity. Today that film would probably get a G rating and could be shown on network television. But back in the day, prosecutors claimed that allowing adults to watch the film would destroy our country. How far we have come, with the help of the A.C.L.U. I would not have a high level of confidence that today’s A.C.L.U. board would be as unanimous about this issue now as it was back then.

The A.C.L.U. has undergone a dangerous change from a nonpartisan organization that defends the civil liberties of all, to a partisan organization that now spends a large amount of its budget on elections and other partisan events. It would be hard for a civil libertarian like me to get elected to the board, because I have committed the cardinal sin of defending the civil liberties of President Donald Trump.

During the investigation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, I helped persuade the board of the A.C.L.U. to defend the rights of the despised president, including his right not to be named as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” since there was no mechanism for him to defend himself against such a charge.

Today the A.C.L.U. is on the forefront of defending the excesses of prosecutors who are investigating President Trump. Its legal director vigorously supported the search of the office, home, and hotel room of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer. They pooh-poohed the notion that seizing lawyer-client documents that might well include confidential communications presented a core issue of civil liberties. They implicitly approved the use of FBI agents and prosecutors — rather than judicial officers — as members of the “taint team” that would read each and every communication and decide which were privileged and which were not.

Had the shoe been on the other foot — had Hillary Clinton been elected president and had her lawyer’s office searched — you can be sure that the A.C.L.U. would have taken a completely different position. For the current A.C.L.U., agenda-driven issues — especially “getting Trump” — trump basic civil liberties.

The director of the A.C.L.U. demeans critics like me by calling us “the old guard.” But his ageist ad hominem attacks do not conceal the reality that the old A.C.L.U. was far more protective of neutral civil liberties than is the new A.C.L.U.

A Da Vinci Dollar

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Integrating old-school printing-press methods with digital technology, the Chicago-born Williams did the impossible. As the Secret Service tried to trace the source, Williams reportedly created as much as $10 million in funny money, his visual skills allowing to him to craft a product stunningly realistic on every level, from the watermark and security thread to the ink and imagery. His exploits were captured in a best-selling 2009 book, The Art of Making Money. Eventually apprehended, the former petty thief turned gangster turned master counterfeiter was put behind bars for a third time. When Williams emerged, he had transformed himself yet again, walking to freedom as an exceptionally gifted painter.

How did you first get involved painting and creating art?

It started when I was in prison. I’d always had a fascination with old currency. I used to collect bills from the 1800s. I marveled at the beauty the old engravers could produce. I always felt like America was a strong, powerful force and the money back then actually showed that. I started drawing with a pencil. I was creating pencil images throughout my transfers from FCI Manchester to FCI Big Springs. I didn’t really start painting until I got to FCI Forrest City in Arkansas. I started with oils. A fellow inmate taught a class. I read art books. You don’t have an iPhone to Google images or watch instructional videos. Using books, I learned by studying the masters, like da Vinci and Michelangelo. I read up on colors and techniques. By the time I got out, I could paint anything my eye could see.

After serving seven years, you hit the streets in 2014. How was your transition?

Before going in, I was a pretty powerful dude in Chicago. I knew all the heads of the mobs. If I needed money, I just printed it. I could have gone to the basement, printed $100 million, and been done with it. Maybe I should have done that. But instead, I just printed what I needed. When I got out of prison it was real humbling. I only had a little bit of money. My wife had left me. She was down in Texas with the three kids. I felt really alone. I didn’t know what I was going to do. A really good friend of mine that I’d let down, Mark Schwartz, got me a job cleaning for $15 an hour.

I went from being a real powerhouse in Chicago to scrubbing toilet bowls.

How would you compare printing money to painting images of it?

Mixing paints is kind of like mixing inks. I feel like I’m still printing money. I’m printing it on canvas now. I get to have that same feeling. I got pieces that have watermarks in them, the same as money. I got the Capone piece. It has a strip like the bills. I also put little quotes within the strips. I got paintings that glow underneath, ultraviolet like money. I got almost every security feature that’s in the bills. Watermark. Strip. The interference. Changing colors. Ultraviolet. All these things, even micro stuff. I got micro-handpainted stuff I did that’s insane. I basically applied all the security features that were on actual money into my art. I got secret symbols in my art. Stuff that you don’t even know is there.

What was it like growing up in a tough part of Chicago?

I grew up in Bridgeport, on the South Side. I was stealing change from parking meters to put food on the table as a kid. Life wasn’t easy. My mom — the bipolar kicked in real bad. We ended up in the projects. Gangs, drugs, violence, the whole thing. Not too many people made it out of there. I had some friends get killed. I’d been shot. That’s when I ended up meeting the old man who took me under his wing and showed me how to print money. I was there until I was about 21. The last time I got shot I was like, I’m done. I went down to Texas. Nine years later, I came back to the same neighborhood.

Your career has taken off since showing your paintings at last year’s Art Basel Miami. What’s it feel like to have your hard work rewarded?

Three years ago, I was at a point where I felt ready to give up. Nothing was working. The jobs I had been doing were paying cheap. I got real close to feeling like, man, this shit just ain’t working. I didn’t look at the painting as something that I’d make money off of. I thought I would be painting houses the rest of my life. I kind of gave up on the dream of being an artist. I still painted but I didn’t look at it as, okay, this is what my life’s going to be. Then my house burned down and I lost everything. The only thing that survived the fire was my paintings. [Real-estate developers] Joey Jr. and his dad Joseph Cacciatore Sr. gave me a studio at Lacuna artist lofts. They’ve supported me since day one.

Art Basel Miami was last December. I didn’t know anybody down there. I didn’t really expect much. I was like, Let’s just go down there and let’s just make contact. Let’s see what it’s about. I packed up the truck and drove down to Miami. When I got there, there were freaking Ferraris, Lamborghinis, everything, pulling up. I ended up selling everything to one guy. An awesome dude. He invited me to his yacht. We showed the art there.

You recently opened your own gallery.

I wanted to open this gallery on Morgan. I didn’t have the money to do it, but I believed I was going to get it somehow. On the day they put the for-rent sign up, I had coffee in Bridgeport with my managers. I told them, “Guys, if we’re going to do this we got to go all-in. I got an apartment nearby. I can walk to the gallery.” They wanted to look at it. We went and looked at the place and what do you know? They wrote a check to the landlord right then and there. The space looked jacked-up. They were like, “Art, are you sure you want to use this for your gallery?” And I said, “Hell yeah, guys. I got the vision.”

Everybody was telling me I was crazy for getting this spot. For the next two months, we jammed on the gallery. I was getting help from local plumbers, electricians. It was really cool how the neighborhood came together to help me with this thing. I went back down to Miami and sold some more stuff to help pay for the continued work on the gallery. One of my collectors down in St. Louis came through and bought two pieces just when we were running out of money and I was getting nervous. Art always saves Art. Every time.

People are comparing your work to Andy Warhol’s.

Warhol gave me a blueprint for bringing the printing that I loved and the painting I now love and making them one. I studied what he did and how he did it. I think the difference between me and Warhol is, I realized art could be more than having people work for you. It has the ability to bring people together from all walks of life, like it did at my last show. I had blacks, Latinos, whites, Italians. Just everyone together having a great time. It showed me that I can reinvent myself through art.

Something that trips me out is that I know a lot of artists and they don’t want to be social. They don’t want to be in the crowd. That’s cool. I get it. There’s a level of privacy to art, but I think to be human is to be social and to love people. As you love people, you’ll create better art. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m seeing my artwork improve. I’m becoming more creative.

Recently you’ve been combining images of money and pop-culture icons, right?

These new pieces, the Bond girls, or even the Floyd Mayweather piece — that was the first one I did where I printed with the gold — are exciting to me. I change the bills to where they’re not the same. I get it to where it looks really close, then I change them. When I’m painting I mix colors. I find the texture of what I want to paint on. Different canvases. Maybe different papers, even glass, metal. I’ve painted on everything. Clay. It’s an experiment. I play with a lot of different things. I like to use different shading to do illusions within the image. With the collection I got now, the Icon Collection, the painting that got me going down in Miami was the Marilyn Monroe. But all the icons I did — Marilyn, Prince, Dorothy, Judy Garland — all these people died of an overdose. The reason I did them was because my aunt and uncle both died of overdoses. My sister’s hooked on pain medicine. It’s real to me.

You did a charity event with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles. He bought a painting. What was it like hanging out with the Terminator?

I had the Arnold event, I had my gallery opening, and I was invited to go to Cleveland to speak to the Browns. I met defensive coordinator Gregg Williams and he was intrigued by my story. It was all back-to-back. It was overwhelming to me, the trifecta. In L.A., I met Arnold, Jason Statham, others. Arnold was awesome. Dude was like one of us. He was a real dude. He was digging the story. Loved the art. He spent time with me. I didn’t know what to expect from these Hollywood stars, but they were all freaking awesome. At the end of the night they auctioned off some of my work and we raised $150,000 for kids. Blew my mind. People always congratulate me, but I tell them this is just the beginning.

Shadows in the Valley

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Leigh should be done by now, she thought.

She tried calling. No answer. So she contacted Rico Strong, Raven’s male costar.

“We good,” Strong texted when Hearts asked if all was well with Raven and the shoot. “Bring ya black daddy [some] gummie bears please and ya smile.”

He always has his cup, Hearts thought. She had worked and socialized with Strong before, and knew he had a habit of dropping gummie candy into his vodka. Hearts finished her panel, picked up the chewy candy, and drove to the industrial porn studio.

Some 20 minutes later, Raven and Strong emerged together from behind a barred door. As Hearts passed him the bag of gummies, Raven got into the small red car and sat silently. Hearts chatted with Strong for a couple minutes, the actor happy to be done with a six-hour shoot, and looking forward to decompressing with his candied vodka.

After they said goodbye, the two women drove off into the night. Raven was oddly quiet. “What’s wrong?” Hearts asked as they drove down the 101 Freeway.

Raven, head shorn, heavily tattooed, burst into tears. “Oh, my God, what just happened?” she cried out, according to Hearts. Then she grew hysterical.

Strong, she said, had abused her on set.

Raven and Hearts had always liked Rico Strong. A 14-year veteran of the porn business, he had earned a reputation for professionalism and a sense of humor. He began shooting porn at age 18 to support his mother and grandmother, and within a few months he was pulling in $100,000 a year, he says. Over time, Strong became one of the most prominent African-American male porn stars of the Bush era. He calls himself a legend.

“People don’t even recognize you in porn unless you work with Rico,” he tells me in a phone interview. Without appearing alongside Strong, he suggests, “You’re not a girl who can say she’s a star doing interracial.”

But it’s no longer the mid-2000s. Like most porn stars, Strong’s pay has declined (slightly, he says) thanks to the popularity of free tube sites. Moreover, in 2016 Strong suffered what he calls a “dick injury” — the erectile-dysfunction drug Caverject had given him priapism, his painful erection lasting 19 hours. In an emergency procedure, a doctor administered anesthesia and drained blood from Strong’s penis with needles. A leading urologist, Dr. Tobias Kohler, likens the condition to “a heart attack of the penis.” It could have ended Strong’s porn career, but he recovered slowly and returned to work.

Earlier this year, Strong starred in an interracial gangbang alongside Hearts. Studios typically pay white women more to have sex with black men on camera. One performer said she received $2,500 for her first interracial scene — $1,500 more than her typical rate. Hearts showed up on set with Raven, Strong tells me. Noticing the carefully orchestrated design of tattoos covering nearly her entire body, Strong told Raven he loved the ink.

“I really, really, really liked [Raven’s body art],” he reiterates in our interview. “These bitches are cool. They are hella cool. I love the relationship they have with each other. They are pretty — different pretty! They are unique.”

On set at the gangbang, Strong and Hearts exchanged numbers and stayed in touch. Strong recalls Hearts sending him funny Snapchat clips and photos she took. “Nikki does great fucking photography work. She takes dope-ass pictures,” Strong says.

“You’re my girls,” he liked to tell the women, according to Raven and Hearts. “You’re my buddies.”

The weekend after Valentine’s Day, Hearts invited Strong to the Roosevelt Hotel. Located on Hollywood Boulevard, the place is a classic high-low Los Angeles staple: Marilyn Monroe used to live there, Lindsay Lohan used to drink there, and outside on the sidewalk homeless men sprawl while Johnny Depp impersonators duel for tourists’ attention.

Hearts and Raven were at the Roosevelt socializing with porn industry friends. Having planned a staycation that weekend, they’d gotten a suite. After arriving, Strong hung out with the couple, partying, laughing, enjoying their company. A few weeks later, while the couple was shopping for a new leather couch, Raven got a text from Strong. A female scene partner had bailed, and he wondered if Raven could replace her.

Strong, Raven says, described the scene as “kinda rough” with “light racial play” — a description she didn’t believe evoked the intense physical interactions expected of BDSM scenes, like those she’d shot for Kink and other companies. Strong said he didn’t know what production entity was paying for or distributing the film. Regardless, Raven says she texted back, “All right, I’ll rush my ass there.” After all, Strong was a buddy.

Leigh Raven

When Raven arrived at the address, she found a studio that looked like an auto shop. As she entered, she recalled seeing a warren of rooms, with one space a prison set, another containing piles of broken furniture, a third apparently a crash pad for an elderly man.

It was, Raven recalls, “a junkyard for porn.”

The studio’s owner was director Just Dave, a scruffy, tattooed industry veteran whose Twitter bio reads, “I shoot super hardcore the way it’s supposed to be shot!”

He introduced himself to Raven. She says the space and the fact that Dave would be shooting the scene made her nervous. When Hearts worked on Dave’s crew, she recalled Dave telling her, “I’ve been around dykes before. Dykes are mean. I better be nice to you.”

The shoot began with Dave asking Strong and Raven for their list of do’s and don’ts, which is standard practice before filming. This boundaries discussion appears early in the behind-the-scenes footage Dave later released to the media. During these minutes, Raven does not appear visibly nervous. Seated beside Strong on a white couch in the white studio space, she smiles, her manner casual. “You like rough sex in your personal life?” Dave asked, by way of introducing the scene.

“I do,” Raven replied, munching a green apple.

“Do you think it’s safe to say this guy isn’t breaking you?”

Raven giggled and looked at Strong. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna break her!” Strong joked.

In between more bantering, Dave told Raven, “If there’s anything we discuss and you do not like when we’re doing it, you can always say something. I cut anytime I hear stop, cut, and no.”

Raven agreed to a menu of slapping, including “butt smacks,” “boob smacks,” and “face smacks.” Dave asked if she was okay “throwing up” apples. Brandishing the green fruit, Raven replied, “Woo hoo!” Dave then asked, “Is there anything you absolutely don’t like?” After a brief pause, Raven looked Strong’s way. ”When we get to the sex,” she told him, “I have a pretty shallow cervix, so if you’re going to be slamming in there, it’s not gonna feel so good. You can still fuck me rough, but be a little more cautious.”

“We’ll make sure you are lubed up,” Dave replied.

When this discussion was over, Dave instructed Raven to put on a blue tank top bearing a picture of a cartoon donkey, symbolizing the Democratic party. The scene began with Raven on her knees while Strong stood over her, quizzing her about the party’s history of racism. In response to her answers, he would slap her. The first slap happens roughly half an hour into the behind-the-scenes (BTS) footage, a crisp strike that makes Raven laugh in surprise.

“It wasn’t a fake slap,” she stated in a YouTube video Hearts shot three days later capturing Raven’s account. “It wasn’t a slap that we typically use in porn to make things look a little bit more intense than they actually are. It was very painful, and it definitely stunned me. I, you know, saw stars, so to speak.”

In a precisely written, 3,600-word joint statement from Dave and Strong published by Adult Video News on April 12, Raven’s reaction to the slap is characterized as a “long hearty laugh,” implying that the contact couldn’t have been that hard. There’s another crisp, sudden smack roughly an hour into the BTS footage, causing Raven to go, “Oh!”

Insisting that he only delivered stage slaps, Strong denies that he hurt or ever would hurt Raven. “I would never hit a girl,” he tells me. “I’m 225 pounds. If I hit a dude, I’m gonna break your face, bro. I know how to hit a girl and make it look good. She has to go home and see her family. I’m not gonna do that shit.”

The veteran performer, whose scripted dialogue with Raven during the smacks, fellatio, and intercourse plays up their racial difference, goes on to reference one of the main characters, a cruel slaveholder, in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

“I love Django Unchained,” Strong says. “Leonardo DiCaprio is not a racist, but he said ‘nigger’ fucking 400 times in that movie. That doesn’t make him a racist in real life. He’s playing a character for his money in that movie. It’s the same thing I am doing on the set for that movie. It’s a character for this genre of porn that these fans like.”

The face slaps gave way to an aggressive deep-throat scene, with the two performers taking various positions on and beside the couch. The act’s length and physicality challenge Raven, who gasps for air at points, but she stays at it. The script called for her to go beyond gagging and actually regurgitate apple chunks as she fought to keep Strong’s erect penis down her throat. She recalls her costar saying at one point, “I hate doing these. I’ve done, like, 40 of these [scenes]. It sucks, man.”

In her YouTube account, Raven characterized the deep-throating as “a very, very, very rough blowjob where if I pulled back I got punished, so to speak.” Elaborating, she stated, “Rico was then sticking his dick in my mouth as far as he could while I was giving him, you know, leg squeezes, leg nudges, to ease up, but he wasn’t easing up… It was becoming unbearable at this point, because I had big, giant pieces of apple coming up the sides of my throat where, essentially, I’m choking.”

Claiming she was given additional apples so Dave could get the regurgitation footage he needed, Raven went on to describe herself during these mid-shoot minutes: “[I was] covered in saliva, snot. I’m sitting on the edge of the couch, not really saying much, wanting this to really be over.”

In their April statement, Dave and Strong emphasized that Raven showed no concern in the pre-shoot discussion when Dave mentioned the “throat-fucking” requirement. And they pointed out that she even referenced a “blowbang” scene she shot in January where she hung upside for 45 minutes while being deep-throated by multiple performers. “I popped all blood vessels in my face,” Raven tweeted after that shoot, “but it was all so worth it.”

Continuing to defend every element of the shoot, the statement noted that Raven never called for the scene to stop. It added, “No one who’s ever watched rough sex scenes would consider the March 6 scene among the roughest scenes out there. Not even close.”

After the grueling deep-throat session, Raven had sex with Strong in what she says was a sharply painful reverse-cowgirl position. In the BTS footage, which records two hours and 45 minutes of the six-hour shoot, there are moments when Raven whimpers; at one point she briefly wails.

“I was being penetrated extremely, extremely deep,” Raven said in the YouTube video. “I was squeezing [Strong’s] leg, his left thigh, I think, as hard as I could, while pushing away and wincing in pain and tears coming down my face, and he would smack my hand away, say some sort of ‘dumb white bitch’ comment.”

During the sex, her legs began shaking uncontrollably, a moment she mentions in the video. Raven says the position’s duress and the difficult penetration was not acknowledged by the men. She also claims Strong put his hands around her throat as they had sex near the end of the shoot, and again she saw stars, her vision briefly going black.

As to why she didn’t protest, didn’t ask Strong to stop, didn’t ask Dave to cut, and didn’t get up and leave, Raven says she was scared.

“I didn’t know what could happen to me. I was in a warehouse, it was nighttime, there were multiple men on set, it was just me,” she stated in the video. Raven says she did not expect the shoot to get this rough, and once it did, she told herself just to endure it.

The Adult Video News article publishing the April 12 statement also included Raven’s written rebuttal. She said the reason she didn’t end her participation in the scene was because her “defense mechanisms” had kicked in. Even that surprised laugh when the first face smack arrived was a way of coping, she suggested. “Things only got worse” from there, she continued in her statement, “and I did my best to dissociate and get through it. I remained in a state of protection mode for the remainder of my time on set.”

The shoot concluded with Dave filming a standard “exit video.” On most porn sets, directors record these interviews, asking performers if they consented to the activities captured. Wrapped in a pastel knit sweater, Raven answers questions asked by a production assistant. During its 2:27 length, she’s not visibly upset. She smiles, briefly laughs.

Asked to sum up the shoot, Raven says, “It was something new, for sure, but… it was good.” The assistant points out that she never asked Dave to pause a scene and he seems impressed by her stamina, saying it’s not typical for shoots like these.

Then he asks, “Was [Strong] attentive of your do’s and don’ts?”

“Yes,” Raven responds.

“Did you feel safe during the shoot?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel respected by staff?”

“Everybody was really nice and attentive,” Raven answers.

“Would you ever shoot with us again?”

“Yeah.”

Later, with Strong sitting beside Raven in the frame, she is asked, “And you weren’t raped?” No, she says. Not long after that she was handed her $1,000 check and left.

Nikki Hearts

Three days later, Hearts posted the YouTube video with Raven sharing her account of the night. Wearing a navy hoodie and large-framed eyeglasses, gazing straight ahead, she discusses the shoot in detail for roughly 40 minutes.

“Why did I agree to everything in the exit interview?” she asks aloud, when I meet the performer in June. “How could I believe it was safe to say how I really felt about that scene? In what world would that have gone over well? I was alone, surrounded by men who had just crossed my boundaries. They were all 50 pounds heavier than me.” She says some of their conversation during breaks did nothing to ease her mind. “Bottom line,” Raven continues, “I was willing to say anything to get out of that warehouse safely.”

When Raven and Hearts got home that night, they laid in bed with their puggle and two cats, trying to process what happened. They were friends with Strong, they were unsure who had paid for the video, and Dave had claimed to have shot many such scenes. Raven says the director indicated he was scheduled to film a similar scene the next day, and she felt concerned about what the female performer might face.

As for Hearts, she recalls struggling to make sense of it all.

“I really liked Rico and I like a lot of his friends,” Hearts tells me in June. “I was super betrayed and confused, but I don’t even think [Strong] knows he did something wrong. I felt so strongly that Dave allowed it and pressured it to happen. Rico was doing it for money.”

“And I was taking it for the money,” Raven says.

Turning to friends for support, Raven texted porn star Riley Nixon, sharing in broad, unsettling strokes what she said she’d been through. Before Raven even mentioned her costar, Nixon says she texted back, “Was this Just Dave’s set?”

In January, Nixon herself had received an invite from Strong to shoot a video with “light racial play.” To her, “light” meant Strong might say something like, “Little white girl, you like that big black dick?” She found it strange that he did not know the name of the production company, but her rent was coming, and she was broke. She agreed to the shoot.

At the set, Dave asked Nixon to put on a shirt that said “Feminist.” During the scene, Strong asked her questions about feminism and smacked her face as she answered.

“I like getting slapped in the face when it’s done properly,” Nixon tells me. “It’s great, but it’s not done to cause extreme injury. You have to learn to do it properly. Rico does not know.”

When the scene finally wrapped, Nixon stood up. Vomit, she recalls, drizzled down her body. She went to the bathroom and discovered a filthy floor. This was a time when ringworm had been traveling through the porn community, so Nixon grabbed an old washcloth and dropped it on the shower floor to stand on. Thinking she should document the conditions, she snapped a few photos, stepped into the shower, and tried to get clean in the dirty stall, which offered dishwashing liquid rather than body wash.

When direct-messaged about this account, Dave neither denied nor disputed Nixon’s description of the shower. As for Strong’s take on studio conditions, he says, “Some things aren’t the best. But I felt okay.”

Nixon sees one key difference between her experience and what Raven recounts. Soon after leaving the studio on that March night, Raven began to feel she had been victimized. A line had been crossed, she believed, and the word “rape” entered her mind.

“I would never do anything in this world to hurt a woman, let alone a woman in my career,” Strong said. “It has to do with racism. She knew the attention she’d get if she put it on a black man.”

Nixon does not characterize her own experience this way. “I am not trying to throw them in jail,” she says. “I consented.… [Rico and Dave] need to learn or get a new job.”

Unsure of what to do with what Raven had told her, Hearts reached out to legendary porn star Buck Angel.

“What? What?” Angel responded when Hearts described what Raven allegedly experienced. As a 46-year-old trans man, Angel has long advised younger performers, even calling himself their “tranpa.” He suggested Raven should go public with her account.

“It needs to be spoken about,” Angel tells me in an interview. “The more this happens in our industry, and the rest of the world sees this, we are [going to be viewed] as perverts [who] rape women. This is a male-managed industry, and there is a huge disrespect for women.” He pauses. “Even though I’m a transsexual man, I’m still a man, and I’m treated so much better than women in this industry.”

It would not have been the first time a porn star made allegations of abuse. Linda Lovelace, star of the 1972 movie Deep Throat, accused her manager of rape in her notorious 1980 memoir Ordeal. Jenna Jameson detailed a lifetime of sexual abuse at the hands of various men in her autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. Retired porn star Shelley Lubben is one of several ex-performers who has alleged being raped by costars. In 2015, Stoya and other porn stars took to social media to accuse male performer James Deen of sexual abuse (he denied all accusations).

All of these accounts and allegations became cautionary tales for young women entering porn. But Raven and Hearts were hoping that a lengthy, detailed video account, recorded fresh after the alleged incident, would not only act as an immediate industry alert but might also help bring about some actual change in gender relations on porn sets.

In this way, it could be another chapter in the #MeToo movement.

Raven spoke to Riley Nixon, explained her goals in going public, and the women agreed to film a YouTube video at a friend’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

The March 9 video quickly went viral.

In response to the allegations, Rico Strong stated that he believed Hearts was in love with him and had set up Raven to falsely accuse him because she was angry that her wife was having sex with him on camera. “I would never do anything in this world to hurt a woman, let alone a woman in my career,” Strong said. “It has to do with racism. She knew the attention she’d get if she put it on a black man.”

“If Nikki was racist,” Buck Angel tells me in response to Strong’s conjecture, “she would not have shot [that gangbang film] with him in the first place.”

Just Dave reacted by releasing the behind-the-scenes footage, which offers a wide shot of the set from a fixed position, with Raven’s facial expressions not always visible. He sent the footage to longtime sex-industry reporter Tracy Clark-Flory, who had written about the YouTube accusations for Jezebel. Her April 14 story highlighted the fact that Dave and Strong made transphobic jokes on set, which prompted additional controversy.

“They didn’t even fucking realize it [came off bad],” Hearts says of the trans jokes.

Riley Nixon

Given Dave’s willingness to circulate the BTS footage, no one was surprised that the tape contained no smoking-gun evidence in support of Raven’s account. As Clark-Flory wrote, “Her key allegations — that she was uncomfortable with the nature of the shoot, guided into a particular sexual position she had voiced concern about, pressured into eating apples to vomit on camera, penetrated deeply enough to cause pain, and scared of voicing her discomfort on set — cannot be ascertained from the video footage. Raven is shown laughing at several points in-between takes and also being quiet and looking tense.”

The footage is available for anyone to access at several online venues, including AVN.com. Viewers can make up their own minds about how to interpret the rough-sex scenes and Raven’s vocalizations, as well as her demeanor before and after the marathon session. But to Just Dave, this footage is case closed. When I direct-message him on Twitter, he writes, “The truth is irrelevant! Why let the truth get in the way of a good narrative? This girl made everything up! Everyone who has watched the BTS video knows it! But everyone is afraid of the backlash for defending me. I definitely have a shit ton of DM’s from everyone telling me what a raw deal I got. But hey: That’s life.”

Declining an interview, Dave directed me to his April 12 joint statement. It’s a careful text, with a point-by-point rebuttal of Raven’s claims. Flatly denying “every accusation or implication of assault, sexual assault, deception, bullying, and consent violations” made in the YouTube video, it insists Raven was fully briefed on the shoot’s requirements. It mentions Dave’s 15 years shooting porn. It ends by warning of the dangers of “one-sided Twitter trials.” Addressing all porn directors and producers, the statement argues that without better protocols for handling allegations, a false claim could destroy a career.

In Raven’s same-day response posted on AVN.com, she contended that the face smacks were “flat-out violent.” She wrote, “I do a ton of rough scenes. Probably some of the roughest in the business as a matter of fact. I am able to do this because of the fact that am not taken by surprise at any moment [and] the environment is controlled.”

When she films “extreme BDSM scenes,” Raven continued, those on set “know how to look for true pain or discomfort.” Here, she said, “there were plenty of times I visibly cried, and pushed away at Rico, hoping that at some point Dave or [the assistant] would recognize my pain and cut.” She reminds people that the BTS footage captured less than half the shoot. And she explained that her reason for going public was to “get the word out to other women who might be put in the same situation, as quickly as possible.”

As the YouTube video continued to circulate, Raven and Hearts spent tense evenings at home beside their beloved pets. Death threats began hitting their inboxes. Though some female porn performers publicly defended them, others attacked them on Twitter.

“Wow!” Buck Angel reacted when I asked about other actresses taking shots at the couple. “What does this say about this situation to me? It says women are fearful to lose their jobs, so they don’t want to speak out.”

During this period, the phone rang. Hearts hesitated, then answered. It was Ian O’Brien, Senior Director of Programs and Operations at an adult-industry advocacy group called the Free Speech Coalition.

“We need help,” Hearts told O’Brien, saying she and Raven feared for their physical safety. O’Brien drove to their house with a box of pizza. Sitting down opposite a stripper pole and an oversize Chucky doll, he listened as the couple told their side of the story. He ended up booking them a hotel room and drove their pets to a 24/7 animal daycare.

Safe in the hotel, Raven and Hearts continued to encounter online attacks from female performers, members of the roughly 2,000-strong Valley porn community.

“Everyone says porn is one family, because we all make our migration to [the Adult Video News Awards in Vegas] once a year, and we’re all [transplants], but we’re all one big, literally incestual family,” Hearts tells me. For a long time, the house the couple shared had been an unofficial shelter for distraught girls in the porn industry. These were young women who came to Los Angeles, ran into trouble (abusive boyfriends, drugs, money problems), and ended up crashing for a time in the safe space of this house.

“Now we are here alone,” Hearts laments. “We don’t have a lot of support.”

In the days following the March 6 shoot, Raven attempted to achieve more than social media justice. She believes directors are responsible for their workplace, not performers. She says, “[Dave’s] just as much, or more, at fault.” Troubled by the thought of other women working on his set, she called the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) for help. She wanted to report an unsafe workplace environment.

“Get there this day, this time, and you’re going to find fucked-up shit,” Raven recalls telling an official at the government agency. To her knowledge, the agency never investigated. (Cal/OSHA is not at liberty to discuss specific complaints, they told me.)

“OSHA does not care about porn,” Buck Angel observes. “They don’t think it’s a legitimate career. I’m in the cannabis business now — it’s exactly the same as the early porn business: the way people react to you, these stigmas.”

More consequentially, Raven also went to the Devonshire Police Department, an LAPD precinct in Northridge, and filed a police report. She underwent a SART exam, which she says discovered cervix bruising and a vaginal tear. Later she was interviewed by a female detective. The session did not go the way Raven expected it would.

“Don’t bullshit me, don’t lie to me,” she recalls the investigator saying as they sat alone in a room and went over her account. (The department did not return two voicemails requesting comment.)

“I have no reason to lie,” Raven responded. “I’m flustered.”

“I already watched the video,” the detective said, according to Raven. “Just Dave brought it over.”

“Then why did I have to explain all that?”

“That was not how it all happened,” the detective stated.

“Everyone says porn is one family, because we all make our migration to [the AVN awards]… but we’re all one big… incestual family.”

Raven asked her if she had watched the entirety of the behind-the-scenes footage.

“I didn’t watch it all,” the investigator answered, according to Raven. “Since you didn’t say ‘no’ and you didn’t say ‘stop’, what can I see that shows you were in discomfort?”

“I was crying. I was saying ‘ow’.”

“There’s no law against crying in porn.”

When Raven came home, she wept to Hearts about her exchange with the female detective. The police department ultimately chose to drop the case.

“[The cops] were just as offensive as the incident,” Hearts says.

The debate around the Raven/Nixon video has emerged at a pivotal time for porn. In 2013, the Obama administration marked porn companies as “high risk,” encouraging banks to stop taking adult performers’ money. Throughout the Obama era, California politicians attempted to pass laws mandating performers use condoms. (It did not cross their minds that this would simply just push porn further underground.)

Under the Trump administration, the sex-worker witch hunt has arguably worsened. President Trump signed FOSTA (the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), a bill that also prevents sex workers from advertising online, and senators Elizabeth Warren and Marco Rubio are currently collaborating on new legislation that would expand the previous administration’s war on sex workers’ bank accounts. Meanwhile, Tennessee congresswoman Diane Black is insisting that porn causes school shootings.

“It was bad under Obama and it has gotten worse,” says Buck Angel. “It has gone back to this puritanical everyone-is-on-drugs view.”

Media stories about on-set abuse do nothing to help the industry’s reputation. The accusations leveled against James Deen in 2015 were widely publicized. A year later, porn star Nikki Benz alleged that she was subjected to physical abuse on a set with director-performer Tony T and performer Ramon Nomar. She’s suing them for sexual assault; they’re suing her for defamation.

It has been difficult for the porn industry to prevent worker abuse. According to O’Brien, the Free Speech Coalition lacks formal policies and protocols for allegations of abuse. Production companies did not band together to form the coalition to fight rape; they aimed to fight censorship laws, while providing a code of ethics.

As MindGeek, PornHub’s parent company, increases its reach and porn stars jump to more indie work, the Free Speech Coalition has been forced to retool its mission.

“The realm of governing in the industry — especially something as complicated as these claims — is something we have to figure out,” O’Brien says.

But the Free Speech Coalition only has so much control.

“The Free Speech Coalition is voluntary,” O’Brien explains. “A lot of it is based off of trust. The decentralized nature of production makes it difficult to regulate. We can’t just have a conversation with a company and say, ‘Fix your policy.’ They may have hired an outside contractor. We may or may not know them.”

In other industries, workers would turn to the government to push for regulation, but porn workers don’t have faith in this as an option. To their eyes, the government either targets them or ignores them.

“How do you talk about assault or violence in an industry that has had so many false presumptions about it without triggering biases,” O’Brien remarks.

In July 2016, several porn performers established the Adult Performers Actors Guild (APAG) to address concerns of workplace abuse. APAG has encouraged performers to avoid taking to Twitter or Instagram for justice.

“It’s the day of social media,” says union president Alana Evans. “When we are upset, we like to go public.” But Evans believes airing workplace grievances online prompts production companies to go on offense and avoid cooperating. To avoid a kangaroo court, APAG instructs women to file a union report and then allow the group to investigate.

APAG has fought against directors shooting exit videos, encouraging them to pay before the end of a shoot, and advising performers to say “no” upfront or in the moment to any activity they don’t want to participate in. “Right then and there is where we take away consent,” Evans says of exit videos. “You’re extorting her. She’s looking at either paying hundreds of dollars in kill fees or having sex and doing something she didn’t want to do, because you’ll make her pay. It is not a small amount of money.”

In April, the Supreme Court of California ruled that many workers previously considered contractors are now employees. APAG believes this will make it easier for the union to negotiate with producers and protect workers. Still, even with this change, some porn veterans remain pessimistic. “Unions in the adult-film industry are difficult for a number of reasons, the biggest being the blurred roles of performer-producers,” remarks Jizz Lee, a producer at Pink and White Productions. “There’s also not enough financial infrastructure — thanks, tube-site piracy.”

Lee and others see a more grassroots organization, the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, as a possible solution. The group promotes a code of ethics, hosts performer mentorship programs and skill sharing, and offers other resources. After director Shine Louise Houston read their ethics guidelines, she stopped giving paychecks following exit videos and starting distributing the payments beforehand.

But not everyone in porn will self-regulate, Hearts points out.

“If you have shot any sex, you can be a porn director,” she notes. And she makes the point that no one can force a director or producer to follow ethical guidelines.

In other industries, workers would turn to the government to push for regulation, but porn workers don’t have faith in this as an option.

The March 6 BTS footage captured a professionally run set in terms of paperwork distributed and signed, the director proceeding through the boundaries and script discussions, the exit interviews and payments. But that doesn’t mean everything about the shoot was transparent. For example, Strong says he doesn’t know what company or entity was associated with it, or the one he shot with Dave and Riley Nixon earlier.

“I don’t know whose site it is. I’ve never met the owner — anything,” he tells me. “I know Just Dave is working for someone else. I’ve heard him call and say, ‘I want this. I want that. Here’s the script.’ He sends it in.”

As for these scripts, with their race-play dialogue, aggressive deep-throating, and regurgitation moments, Strong says he has toned some of them down prior to shooting. Elaborating, he states, “It was some of the racial play and some of the things they wanted me to say. I wasn’t comfortable saying it, with everything going on in the media. I don’t need to say that right now… I don’t want to go that deep into that character.”

He says he also weighed in concerning the regurgitation requirements. “I can’t handle throw-up,” he tells me, saying he suggested what the women should ingest. “Let the girls only drink water and eat apple slices. We bought apple slices from Whole Foods. When you chew that up, it’s just water.”

As you might imagine, the controversy surrounding the March 6 shoot has impacted the work lives of Strong and Just Dave. Their joint statement addressed this. “Just Dave’s shoots have ground to a standstill and Rico hasn’t worked in more than a month,” it pointed out, adding, “A leading talent agency’s response to the accusations was to ban both from ever working with its roster.”

The morning Strong and I talk, he says he woke up to a notice on his door saying the electric company was going to turn off his lights unless he paid his overdue bills.

“I have now not worked in 106 days,” he tells me. He still supports both his mother and grandmother, and says both women are now suffering from cancer. He paid their medical bills out of pocket, but now he has run out of money. And because of his years of work in the adult-film industry, he says it’s hard to find another job.

“I never even wanted to do porn,” he tells me. “I’m stressed out. I know I didn’t do anything. I know I would never put someone in an uncomfortable situation.” Looking back over his many movies, Strong says there were times when women declined to perform certain sexual acts, and he told directors, “Kill the scene. I’ll eat the [financial] bullet.”

“It fucked my life up,” he says of what happened. “My life is a disaster.”

Leigh and Nikki

Raven and Hearts have had their own struggles.

Arriving early at their house one day in June, I wait beside a doormat reading “Go Away.” The women arrive with McDonald’s hamburgers and weed. They welcome me into their tidy home, where I spot a row of Converse sneakers and see-through stripper heels. Raven wears a hoodie over her now fully shaved head, shuffling around in furry slippers. Hearts rocks purple pants, an Evil Angel sweater. The whole house smells of candles.

Sitting on their leather couch, they discuss porn-world rumors and conspiracy theories about Hearts. While I was reporting this story, a porn star told me she had heard that Burning Angel, a popular alternative production company, had fired Hearts for alleged Nazi ties. (A Burning Angel spokesperson dismissed the story as ridiculous.) To the surprise of Raven and Nixon, Hearts received most of the criticism.

“They have this conspiracy that Nikki put me up to this, because she is a jealous wife, and I had chemistry on set with Rico,” Raven says. “There have been performers that have completely turned on me. They said I made this up to get fame and notoriety. Please tell me where the money is coming from.”

In fact, producers and directors have stopped calling. Raven estimates she has lost 90 percent of her work, with only Penthouse and Evil Angel booking her as of press time. Hearts previously worked behind or in front of the camera three to five days a week, but all her porn work has vanished. Still, she insists she is fine with being excommunicated.

“I’ve exited porn,” Hearts says. “I can’t work with these people, with this kind of shit.”

Although Riley Nixon has booked scenes with Kink and a few other producers, she hasn’t worked much either. Raven, Hearts, Nixon, and Strong have all ended up in a similar situation: exiled from the San Fernando Valley’s most notorious industry.

Raven and Hearts admit empathizing with Strong. “He was doing his job to get his paycheck,” says Raven. Still, as that March night comes back, she adds, “But at the same time, anybody with any morals or basic understanding of morals would have backed off.”

Hearts tells me she used to be idealistic about the porn industry, believing it could help American sexual attitudes broaden and evolve. Her view has changed.

“Porn is joked over and laughed at, like it’s not a real job,” she says. “I am seeing now why people think that. If you work at McDonald’s, you are treated better.”

When Raven and Hearts posted the YouTube video, they hoped to help women performers avoid what they viewed as a potentially dangerous situation. And they believed it could help lead to greater awareness of the way women are treated in porn. Instead, both the accusers and the accused have become characters in a story with tragic outlines. It’s a tale that seems part Rashomon, that classic Akira Kurosawa film about how different people can interpret the same event in contradictory ways, with truth elusive. And it’s a tale of what can go wrong when accusations go viral in an era where gender relations are so supercharged, and people so quickly pick sides. No one wins in this story.

Power Failure

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Square Enix, Xbox One, PS4, PC)
— If you only associate Lara Croft with short shorts and a physics-defying chest, then you haven’t played one of her games since the Tomb Raider franchise got a reboot in 2013. The series’ titular star shrank in bra size and grew as a character, becoming the ultimate off-the-grid survivor. That game marooned teenage Croft on an island with the sole goal of staying alive rather than slaying Eurothugs or snatching relics. The 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, restored a crucial element lost in the reboot’s woods: tombs worth raiding. Now, Shadow of the Tomb Raider completes the so-called “survivor trilogy” by mixing Croft’s Bear Grylls-style wilderness skills with an epic quest for ancient doodads.

In this game’s jungles and tombs, we see Lara demonstrating everything she learned as an alumnus of her last two adventures. She spelunks sprawling caverns and explores hidden cities crammed with traps and puzzles that require actual cunning rather than random item collection. You have more control than ever — the best in the series — over Lara’s shimmying, leaping, and rope-swinging abilities, to the point where exploring actually feels thrilling and even dangerous. In between the raiding parties, she’s free to explore vibrant villages or go all “snake eater” in the wilderness, taking out thugs with sneak-and-strike guerrilla tactics that have become the new normal for this series.

But just as her assassin abilities peak, Lara realizes she still has some growing up to do. Deep in a Mexican Mayan tomb, she recovers an artifact with doomsday potential. Suddenly, Lara learns that her freewheeling approach to relic-hunting — grab the artifacts before the bad guys do — might unleash an actual apocalypse. It’s an intriguing twist in this trilogy’s charting of Croft’s formative years, and a strong sign that her days of mini-shorts and imperialist tomb raiding are dead and buried.

Metro Exodus (Deep Silver, Xbox One, PS4, PC)
— Good luck eking out a living in Metro Exodus’s radioactive wasteland, where you’ll find no phones, lights, or Instagram, and no remaining limbs if you’re not careful. Wield homemade weapons and skulk through ruins crawling with mutants in this nightmarish trek through postapocalyptic Moscow.

Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, Xbox 360, PS3)
— Survive off the grid at your home on the range in this lead-slinging homage to spaghetti westerns. Filled with steamboat shootouts, stage-coach robberies, and showdowns at high noon, it’s the best Wild West game you can play until the sequel launches in October.

Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment, Xbox One, PC)
— Like a videogame version of the movie Cast Away but with a sci-fi twist, Subnautica ditches players in a tropical sea on a distant planet. Scour coral reefs and deep-ocean vents for food, water, and materials to repair your ship while trying to stay free of the alien fauna’s food chain.

State of Decay 2 (Microsoft Studios, Xbox One, PC)
— GTA meets The Walking Dead in this wide-open adventure set in a zombie-infested world. Build a base with up to three pals and embark on raiding missions while managing limited resources and your own team of survivors. Just be ready to put a bullet in your friends’ heads if they succumb to the zombie blood plague.

Jonathan Demme

Posted on by Team Penthouse

To anyone who ever worked with this gregarious, prolific filmmaker, this big-hearted tribute came as no surprise. Demme was all about collaboration.

The director’s interests and talents were wide-ranging, as was his body of work — features, documentaries, TV, performance films. And his enthusiasm for his subject matter was always palpable, especially in his smaller films. Demme had an uncanny knack for bringing together the very best people — actors, writers, art directors, musicians — and he often went overboard in sharing credit. But it was all part of what made his films so great, and why he was so beloved. For him, every project was a passion project.

Demme died of esophageal cancer in 2017, at age 73, and the film world still mourns his loss. Even though we’ll never know all the brilliant work that awaited, we can still tap into his rich and generous legacy. Lucky us!

Stop Making Sense (1984)

Demme saw the Talking Heads in the early eighties, and said he was blown away by “this movie just waiting to be filmed.” He tracked down David Byrne, toured with the band for about a week, and then filmed them over four nights at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. It was December 1983, and the Heads were at their prime, having just released the now-classic album Speaking in Tongues.

This is the first of several music films by Demme — he later shot performances by Neil Young, the Pretenders, Robyn Hitchcock, and Justin Timberlake — but this one’s his most iconic. It’s a visceral, visually gorgeous masterpiece (the cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, had just finished Blade Runner), and it’s pure joy. As Demme told Time, “I love this movie passionately with all my heart.”

Something Wild (1986)

Ask any true film nerd and they’ll tell you how much they love this movie. Critics heaped it with praise, but it barely registered with audiences when it was released.

Jeff Daniels plays Charlie, a nerdy, repressed accountant, and Melanie Griffith is Lulu, an alcoholic wildcat who kidnaps him in her ’67 Pontiac convertible and takes him to her high school reunion. It’s a bizarre, unpredictable story (Demme called it a “schizophrenic… screwball comedy that turns into a film noir”) loaded with vividly drawn characters, great music (by X, Big Audio Dynamite, New Order, and a live performance by the Feelies, one of Demme’s favorite bands), and fantastic costumes and production design. Added bonus: a young, crazy Ray Liotta in his first movie role.

The Silence of The Lambs (1991)

We’d be remiss in not mentioning the film Demme is best known for, and which won a whopping five Academy Awards.

Yeah, we know, everyone on the planet has seen this movie, and for good reason — it’s perfect. This was Demme’s big leap from quirky medium-budget indies to Hollywood blockbusters, and, apropos of the subject matter, his style is more serious. But in the film’s most notorious scene — Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) shimmying to Q Lazzarus’s “Goodbye Horses,” barely dressed in drag, his junk tucked between his legs — we get a quick blast of cool, classic Demme: his taste in music, flamboyant costumes, bohemian art direction. (Some trivia for y’all: Levine said he was so nervous about shooting this scene he did a couple shots of tequila beforehand.)

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

This movie gave us a whole new respect for Anne Hathaway, who’s fantastic as Kim, an addict who’s released from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. Demme made a big stylistic shift here, blending his well-honed documentary skills with narrative storytelling, shooting many of the scenes unrehearsed using a handheld camera. The result is a vibrant, nuanced, and shatteringly personal family drama — for which the director (naturally) credited veteran cinematographer Declan Quinn, brother of actor Aidan.

As it was with all of Demme’s films, this one’s a near-perfect symphony of casting, acting, music, production design, writing, and, of course, directing. And rather than hiring extras for the final wedding scene, the director called on a lifetime of friendships and collaborators to fill in as guests, including Fab 5 Freddy, Robyn Hitchcock, and Roger Corman, an early mentor. Shortly after premiering it at the Venice Film Festival, Demme claimed to love this movie more than any other he’d made. We agree.

Can We Talk About Toxic Femininity?

Posted on by Team Penthouse

On June 8th, celebrity chef, author, and food show host Anthony Bourdain hanged himself in his French hotel room. Although Bourdain had openly talked about his battles with addiction and depression, the world was shocked that he had taken his own life. The question on everyone’s minds: Why would he do this?

However, as the days went by and the press storm raged on, another question arose, this one not about why Bourdain committed suicide, but about how his girlfriend, actress Asia Argento, and a friend of the couple, actress Rose McGowan, came to be feminist heroes to so many American women.

How are these things connected, besides the fact that Argento was dating Bourdain when he died?

Hear me out, because what has unfolded in the wake of Bourdain’s death is a display of chronic, predatory narcissism from Argento and McGowan. These two women have used and abused the #MeToo movement—which they have been at the front lines of since the beginning—for their own personal gain. I know it’s uncouth for me to say that, but I’m saying it. I’m uncouth. Kick me off the planet, ladies.

I’m not arguing that Argento’s public indiscretions with French journalist Hugo Clément caused Bourdain’s death. (More on that later.) People cheat on one another. I’ve been there. Most of us have. Lust has a hard time steering your moral compass when you’re drunk on pheromones. It’s not the adulterous sex that eats you up inside, but the lie afterwards.

I, for one, have made a daily—okay, weekly, maybe monthly—commitment to owning my shit. That’s the only way I’ve been able to quiet the noise inside my head and find any kind of peace in my life. (That, along with therapy, exercise, 12-step meetings, antidepressants, and so on.) To me, it’s all about personal responsibility. Which is why I would never blame anyone for someone else’s decision to kill themselves.

That said, it’s ironic that since Bourdain’s suicide, we have witnessed a display of totally irreconcilable behavior from two women who are among the most prominent faces of a movement that centers around accountability.

Born in Rome, Asia Argento was raised in a family of famous Italian artists. Her father, Dario Argento, is a director and screenwriter best known for his innovative and influential horror movies. Her mother is the actress Daria Nicolodi, who starred in several of her husband’s films. Beyond this, Argento has a lineage of family members who were musicians and composers, including her maternal grandfather, Alfredo Casella.

On October 10th of last year, journalist Ronan Farrow published a bombshell New Yorker article in which 13 women made allegations against Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein, sharing accounts not only of sexual misconduct and harassment, but also rape.

Credited with initiating the contemporary #MeToo movement, the article detailed what it called Argento’s “rape” experience with Weinstein, one very similar to Rose McGowan’s own experience with the producer. Wrote Farrow: “Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, said that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her.” Argento went on to tell Farrow, “I know he has crushed a lot of people before. That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.”

And you know what? I wasn’t going to go there. But fuck it. I’m going there. I’m going there because someone needs to. American journalists today are scared. They are cowards. Their opinion pieces are timid when it comes to topics like this, while they share a much different view when texting in private. So here is the ugly fucking truth everyone, because you have all been spoon-fed a bunch of idealistic garbage over and over and over.

Argento and McGowan describe Weinstein giving them oral sex, and both say they faked an orgasm in hopes of getting the experience over with as fast as possible. Calling this “rape” is doing our society, including sexual-assault survivors, a disservice on so many levels. I was raped when I was 15 years old. I know a lot of women will accuse me of victim-blaming, but at some point, we have to remove the impenetrable shield that one receives when she is considered a victim.

Argento went on to have a consensual relationship with Weinstein for several years. The New Yorker article is what thrust the Italian actress into America’s cultural conversation. Before this, the American media knew little about her.

Make no mistake, Weinstein is a monster. He is a total predator, and I consider the women who spoke out against him to be very brave. But what Argento and McGowan are doing is not brave. In fact, it’s disingenuous. Rape and sexual transactions are worlds apart, and they need to stay worlds apart.

Argento was not blackmailed. She was not threatened. She had a sexual relationship with Weinstein which resulted in a transactional, consensual union, because—let’s be honest—that’s how Hollywood works. Fast-forward a few years and Argento saw a bigger opportunity: She could brand herself as a survivor.

Anthony Bourdain met Argento on the set of his wildly popular CNN show Parts Unknown when he was filming in Rome. Argento, a single mother of two and Italian celebrity, ended up a guest on the show. In February 2017, not long after they met on camera, the New York Post confirmed the two had started dating. One quick scroll through the couple’s individual social media accounts reveals that Bourdain was completely smitten with Argento, posting photos of her on the regular with heartwarming comments.

Bourdain was openly supportive of Argento’s involvement in the #MeToo movement as she rose to be one of its most prominent and vocal crusaders. Bourdain never held back when standing up for her or any part of the #MeToo movement, even defending McGowan and her feminist activism. The #MeToo movement had accrued a strong new male ally in Bourdain.

Bourdain had built his brand around captivating storytelling and a “no fucks given” attitude. He was honest about his shortcomings—struggles with drugs and alcohol and depression—while also detailing the craziness of the culinary world. My sister Sarah put me on to him after she read his memoir Kitchen Confidential. I stole her book when she was done, and I was hooked. We both were. How could you not be? Tall, successful, smart as fuck, bad boy, deep with a dark streak. The country swooned for Anthony Bourdain. He became our very own American ambassador. He made us proud, representing our nation while he traveled the world filming his series.

Bourdain gushed publicly over Argento, and when it came to her career, he was her biggest supporter. This is what you do when you love someone and believe in them. He wanted her to succeed because he adored her. His influence led to her new role as a judge on the Italian version of X-Factor, and he hired her to direct an episode of Parts Unknown when the series filmed in Hong Kong. The segment aired on June 3rd. In the closing scene, Bourdain stated what many of his fans had already figured out when it came to his feelings for Argento: “To fall in love with Asia is one thing. To fall in love in Asia is another. Both have happened to me.”

But in the days leading up to his suicide, things between the couple seemed to get rocky.

On June 5th, three days before Bourdain’s suicide, paparazzi photos of Argento and the young French reporter Clément, 28, were published in the Italian gossip magazine Chi. The photos showed the two holding hands, kissing, hugging, and dancing in a bar in Rome.

Argento fought to have the photographs pulled. Bourdain was mysteriously no longer following his girlfriend on Instagram. Argento then posted an Instagram story of herself in a Sid Vicious shirt that said Fuck Everyone, and captioned the image: “You know who you are.” Three hours later he killed himself. And she deleted the image off of her Instagram story.

Hours after it was confirmed that Bourdain had died, Argento quickly posted a statement regarding her boyfriend’s death on Instagram. We’ve all seen the message. It floated through the American media for weeks. Argento inserted herself into the coverage surrounding Bourdain’s suicide, and received an outpouring of sympathy, while Bourdain’s wife of ten years, Ottavia (the couple separated in 2016), remained silent and removed from the circus.

Why was Argento—who had only been dating Bourdain for a year and a half—speaking out on his behalf, instead of the woman he was legally married to at the time of his death, the mother of his 11-year-old daughter? Why has the American media been tiptoeing around the scandalous, romantic photos of Argento and Clément?

As numerous eloquent tributes to Bourdain were published, Argento decided she was too grief-stricken to continue speaking publicly and handed the torch to Rose McGowan. The former Charmed star penned a letter to the public on behalf of Argento, which McGowan’s publicist, Nathaniel Baruch at Brigade Marketing, promptly emailed to Rolling Stone.

McGowan’s letter opens by saying Argento is now a victim not only of rape but of suicide.

“Sitting across from me,” she writes, “is the remarkable human and brave survivor, Asia Argento, who has been through more than most could stand, and yet stand she does. She stood up to her monster rapist and now she has to stand up to yet another monster, suicide. The suicide of her beloved lover and ally, Anthony Bourdain. I write these truths because I have been asked to.”

McGowan then discusses Bourdain and Argento’s alleged “open relationship” in an obvious attempt to justify the photos with Clément. It’s too bad Bourdain isn’t here to confirm her statement that he and Argento were “free birds” who “loved without borders.”

McGowan reminds the reader to “NOT do the sexist thing and burn a woman on the pyre of misplaced blame,” and then says that Bourdain allegedly reached out to a doctor for help with his depression but did not take his advice. (How the fuck she knows that information and why she chose to disclose it remains a big fat question mark.)

McGowan also states that both Argento and Bourdain suffered from depression, but “she did the work to get help, so she could stay alive and live another day for her and her children,” while Bourdain’s depression usurped him. “His decision, not hers,” McGowan writes. “His depression won.”

What is brave about manipulating a narrative surrounding a man’s death? What is courageous about having McGowan speak on Argento’s behalf, while Ottavia Bourdain has to tell her 11-year-old daughter that her father is never coming home? I can’t even find a word to describe what that is. It is stomach-turning. To hide behind the story of being a rape survivor and to shelter one’s self with the #MeToo movement is disgusting.

As the mother of an 11-year-old girl, I’ve tried to imagine being in Ottavia’s shoes. I imagine having to tell my daughter how her father died. Then I imagine that the most grief that Ottavia is feeling is not that Bourdain is dead and gone, but that she can’t fix it. She can’t take that pain away from her child. Thinking about it makes me feel so sad. Yet, Ottavia remains stoically silent. She has to protect her family. It blows my mind that McGowan and Argento never thought about Bourdain’s daughter before kick-starting their media circus with that open letter.

Why is the American media protecting Argento and McGowan’s victim narrative? Why are they feeding it like the ugly, insatiable beast that it is? Have we forgotten that the #MeToo movement was started in 2006 by 44-year-old Tarana Burke to inspire healing for sexual assault survivors in her black community in the Bronx? I interviewed Burke on my podcast, Improper Etiquette, and her selfless story is so far removed from the celebrities like Argento and McGowan who have co-opted it. That said, would #MeToo have the power it does now without Hollywood’s endorsement? Probably not. But that’s a matter separate from the behavior of Argento and McGowan in the aftermath of Bourdain’s passing.

Although Argento claimed she was so distraught that she required McGowan to be her voice, she has been very active on her social media, filling her Instagram feed with stories and posts. In one of them, she posed wearing a Suicidal Tendencies parody shirt while touting the hashtag #stayingalive.

In mid-June, a mysterious Instagram account called @justicefortony emerged, then shut down some days later (there were people on social media pushing for the account to be stopped.) However, when it was initially live, the first post was a black box with the following cryptic comment:

“Not surprised she blocked me. Having the truth out there was becoming too uncomfortable. She was a monster to him. She took an already very damaged and very sensitive man and destroyed him. His friends and coworkers tried their best to make him see what was going on, but he would just push everyone away. No one could say anything negative about Asia or Tony would try to remove them from his life.”

The post went on to describe how Bourdain had one of his longtime crew members fired at Argento’s request, and how much Bourdain had changed after dating the actress.

“In the end those pictures were too much,” wrote the creator of @justicefortony, referring to the paparazzi photos of Argento and Clément. “He must have finally realized what she was doing and his world came crashing down.”

So what led to Bourdain’s death? Do we just say it was depression? I think suicide is a lot more complicated than that. It goes against everything our brain and body tell us to do. Most of us wake up every morning and try our best to stay alive. Basically, we do shit to avoid dying. But perhaps a person can hit their pain threshold, and everyone’s is different.

Men don’t deal with humiliation the same way women do. Men sometimes murder their lovers over humiliation. They also kill themselves over feeling humiliated. That doesn’t mean that we women should be held responsible for men’s behavior. Fuck no. But we should recognize how powerful we can be. We can choose to use our power any way we want. Maybe we should acknowledge that power, so we can proceed accordingly?

In the comment section of @justicefortony, its creator went on to detail the fighting that took place between Bourdain and Argento before his death.

“They started fighting on Tuesday,” the person wrote. “Tony had to leave the set multiple times to talk to her on the phone. Things escalated on Wednesday when by all accounts she told him she no longer wanted to be with him. Everyone was keeping an eye on him all day and night because he was incredibly distraught.”

@justicefortony went on to state that this was not the first time the couple had broken up, and that by Thursday, Bourdain seemed to be better and “kind of wanted everyone to back off.”

Days later, @justicefortony continued, “Knowing this, her posts about Tony being her love and her rock were particularly distasteful. If she just disappeared and stopped harassing everyone, if she didn’t have Rose write that awful letter, if she didn’t try to gain from his death, I wouldn’t be here writing this.”

I would be skeptical of this random, anonymous reveal if it weren’t for the fact that Ottavia Bourdain was following @justicefortony.

On May 20th at the Cannes Film Festival, Argento gave a speech about her 1997 alleged rape by Weinstein. (From the audience, Clément filmed her address and posted it on his Twitter.) The Washington Post and other media outlets hailed the moment as “powerful.”

I wouldn’t call it powerful. Argento was onstage to present the award for Best Actress and used that spotlight to talk about herself and further her #MeToo agenda. Then she had the audacity to throw shade at Ava Duvernay for not giving her enough support as they shared the podium during her impromptu speech. Argento later tweeted to Mia Farrow that no one came up to her and acknowledged her speech except for Spike Lee. Did she give this speech with the expectation of praise, or to advocate for a movement she claims to deeply care about?

Earlier this year, McGowan published a memoir called Brave. It details her fight against the evil showbiz industry. Ironically, she then came out with an E! network reality show, Citizen Rose, to promote her book tour. So much for dismantling the evils of Hollywood.

When I first saw McGowan in the 1995 movie Doom Generation, I thought she was iconic. I was obsessed with that movie and her entire look. She had so many great moments during her career that I supported, including her barely-there chain dress on MTV’s red carpet in the late nineties. And she had my support when she came out against Weinstein, but in hindsight, I question her claims and motives. I question if she understands how irresponsible it was to call her #RoseArmy to action when Weinstein released an email from her former manager that challenged her rape claims. (Her former manager, Jill Messick, committed suicide after the harassment from #RoseArmy.) So yeah, I question McGowan’s movement. And it’s my right to be able to do that.

Last month, McGowan hired accused child killer Casey Anthony’s lawyer, Jose Baez, to represent her in court as she is facing up to ten years for cocaine possession. She claims that Weinstein planted the drugs in her wallet in an effort to delegitimize her.

Two women who dreamt of being famous movie stars have now selfishly and irresponsibly used the #MeToo movement to suck whatever amount of attention and fame they can from it. They have used this movement to help only themselves.

I don’t think either of these women has a grasp of or are capable of understanding Tarana Burke’s movement. And as much as I hate the term “white feminism” (that’s the white feminist in me feeling defensive), these women are the epitome of what that is.

You can’t hide shitty, awful behavior behind the excuse of misogyny. Not everything has to do with gender discrimination and the patriarchy, and to pretend that it does is a disservice to the feminist movement. I am all about fighting toxic masculinity, but to demand that all women must agree and support one another because we are the same gender is ridiculous and illogical. (Toxic femininity exists. We can’t continue to deny that.) Maybe McGowan and Argento are just two really damaged human beings? I don’t know. What I do know is that you cannot heal unless you own up to your shit and get real honest with yourself about who you are. These two women seem to be completely incapable of being honest with themselves.

In this new climate of public reckoning, #MeToo, and the Trump regime, we are all walking on eggshells, terrified to criticize anyone at the risk of being branded a sexist, a racist, or a homophobe. The kind of outrage that disagreement causes in 2018 makes it nearly impossible to seek truth through an exchange of ideas. I am saddened that this discourages people from speaking up. But I refuse to live in fear. I refuse to live my life worrying about who I will offend by speaking my mind. And I encourage you to do the same.

Melissa Broder

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Then in 2012, she started doing something that would eventually lead to the national profile and universe of fans she has today. She created the Twitter alias @sosadtoday and began barfing out dispatches from her anxious brain. The account quickly took off, and soon even celebrities like Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus were retweeting @sosadtoday. The writer struggled with anxiety and depression, it was clear, but she used dark, brilliant, self-deprecating humor to deal.

Fans couldn’t put a name to the tweeter until May 2015, when Broder unmasked in a Rolling Stone interview. A book deal soon followed, and in 2016, Grand Central Publishing released the essay collection So Sad Today. Vanity Fair called Broder’s book “a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose,” while GQ named her “the internet’s most powerful merchant of feelings.” The suburban Philadelphia native blew up like confetti.

After a bazillion more neurotic, hilarious tweets and popular columns in Elle and VICE, Broder is back in the spotlight with her debut novel The Pisces, a strange, sexy, and addictive story about a disastrous woman who falls in love with a Venice Beach merman.

“Falling in love with a merman is not for everybody,” Broder tells Penthouse. “But if you’re the type of person who craves the intoxicating potentiality of the first weeks of an affair, who wishes that an erotic moment could sustain itself infinitely, and who doesn’t understand why fantasy can’t just be reality, then you are merman bait. I am that person.”

Broder writes fearlessly, with humor and depth, examining the manic highs and lows of fucking and falling in love. “If I’m not turning myself on when I write erotica, I’m doing something wrong,” Broder says. “The writer should be wet.”

Elaborating on her approach, the L.A.-based author says, “It’s about physical empathy, the ability to inhabit different bodies. It’s also about writing from other places within oneself besides the brain — the gut, the pussy, the subconscious — and allowing oneself to access those places without self-editing in the first draft.”

To bring about that access, Broder prefers to draft by dictating into her iPhone. She likes to write in transit, in places where she shouldn’t necessarily be writing. In New York City, where she got her MFA, she wrote poetry while riding the subway, using her iPhone’s Notes app.

In L.A., Broder writes in traffic, while shopping for groceries, or working out. “Sometimes I’ll be dictating while jogging and say, ‘It was a cock that she had no idea she had — I’d found her cock,’ and people on Santa Monica Boulevard look at me weirdly.”

Image by Maggie West

Brainwash Rock

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I’m no art historian, but it strikes me that the “art” of modern art takes place at some point after its creation. You paint a skyscraper-size donut, say, and then spend years talking about it: what it symbolizes, how it comments on what came before it, what it’s trying to say.

Successive modern movements upended the traditional “pretty picture” aesthetic established during the Renaissance, and in the process traditional formal skills became irrelevant. It’s all about the concept.

But in popular music, it wasn’t that simple. Ornette Coleman brought an avant-garde approach to jazz music, and at the time people thought he was just playing out of tune. Why the difference?

Unlike visual art, it takes time to listen to avant-garde music. And when so much music is so awful, how likely is it that the awful thing you’re listening to is awful for a reason? Like the giant donut, can you come to appreciate a piece of music just by talking about it?

Consider the 1969 album Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. This record has legions of fans, a thing I know because at least 10,000 of them have tried to get me to listen to it. To the untrained ear, it’s the sound of stoned teenagers in a garage, not actually playing together but all playing different songs as they tune up or try out different amp settings. On top of that racket, there’s a guy spewing half-funny beat poetry in a near-perfect imitation of blues icon Howlin’ Wolf. So what makes it art?

Captain Beefheart (real name Don Van Vliet) recruited musicians with the idea to live the material, which meant communing in a small house outside Los Angeles for eight months and blocking out everything else. But what started as a hippiefied attempt at deep expression quickly turned into a hostage situation, later described by drummer John French as “Mansonesque.”

With no money, the band ate cold beans out of cans and took turns sleeping in various corners on the floor. They suffered constant emotional and physical abuse by Van Vliet, who demanded loyalty and ostracized those who questioned him. Straight out of the cult-leader playbook, he broke their wills by keeping them hungry and exhausted.

Van Vliet wrote melodies on the piano, an instrument he couldn’t play, that were then transcribed by John French for the band. Not knowing anything about keys or time signatures, Van Vliet assembled compositions bound together only by the paper they were written on. Thus you can hear, in just the first track, more than twenty melodic motifs in various keys and time signatures, stacked on top of each other.

But what sounds like chaos is actually an incredibly precise matrix of themes bound together by impossibly skillful musicians. With modern technology, it would be easy to overdub or program these parts, but they didn’t do that.

Captives of a megalomaniac, the band rehearsed for fourteen hours a day for eight months and their performance was recorded live. If they did the whole thing again, it would sound exactly the same.

Knowing this, when I hear the record, well… I still don’t like it. But in an art-historical sense, and considering the plight of those poor musicians, it’s hard not to stand in awe of it — kind of like the Pyramids, which were also created by slaves.

Taking a Pass at Marriage

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I only know I did this because I was informed of it, by her, the following day. The subject line of the email read “Last night,” and its body detailed my slurred attempts to make a play for this unsuspecting woman.

None of it was lecherous, just clumsy and extremely uncouth. I, of course, replied, offering my sincerest apologies and clarifying that, had I been anywhere in the vicinity of my right mind, I never would have thought of, much less attempted, such an insane venture. I sent my slighted buddy — her spouse — a text stating the same. He was cordial, though I suspect I won’t be invited to Thanksgiving dinner this year.

In the days following my faux pas, my conscience took very few breaks from tearing into me, which I was fine with. I deserved it. The last thing you do after taking a figurative whiz on a couple’s marital vows is look for sympathy. In under a week, I believe I had three marginal panic attacks, four sleepless nights, and a roughly 120-hour stomachache.

Again, all of this was fitting penance for my incredible misstep.

While I was seeking counsel, some dear friends of mine, both male and female — incidentally, I refer to them as “dear” because they spared me the obvious “you fucked up” lectures — gave me open-minded guidance and advice.

They said, “You’re only human,” and “It happens,” and “This will pass in time.” Their kind words were appreciated, whether they meant them or not. My friends allowed me, and me alone, to kick myself while I was down, as they realized two pointed feet were more than enough.

But where was the lesson in all of this? What was the takeaway? Was it that, in a perfect world, you could betray a friend’s trust and he and his spouse might eventually just get over it? When posed with this question, my faithful companions should have responded with, “Get your brains out of your balls and stop looking for poetic meaning in making a pass at your friend’s wife.”

But nobody gave that, or any other, answer. So I continued to haplessly search for my own meaning in all of this and stopped pestering my pals for a life lesson in a complicated situation they didn’t cause.

This treasure hunt, at times aimless, at other times infuriating, eventually drove me to the greater realization I’d hoped for: Traditional marriage is not for me.

After years of stressing over my commitment issues, questioning my reluctance to settle down, and the idea of long-term relationships giving me the same sick feeling I had every night the weekend I headlined at a fish restaurant called Off the Hook in Marco Island, Florida, I finally understood that it wasn’t me. It was you, Marriage.

But what the fuck does this have to do with the shitty thing I did to my friend and his wife? I’d like to think there’s a profound connection. I haven’t been living my truth. Ugh, I hate that expression, even when it applies. But not living my truth led to not loving my life, led to not seeing my worth, led to not realizing my potential.

The undercurrent of discontent in my head, even though unrealized and unnoticed, is probably what caused me to attempt to sabotage someone else’s happiness, albeit inadvertently.

I’m not trying to put too fine a point on the matter. I get that sometimes we drink, sometimes we drink too much, sometimes we blackout, and sometimes we hit on the wrong person: bosses, coworkers, a friend of your mom’s, a distant cousin, a less distant cousin, and so on.

But I can’t help but believe that the mom in A Christmas Story had a lengthy string of subconscious motivations that started well before she accidentally broke that leg lamp. The dad knew what was really going on. “You used up all the glue ON PURPOSE!”

A healthy senior sex life is a nice notion if we all have the money and opportunity to age like Christie Brinkley. Problem is, you’ll still end up having to fuck John Mellencamp.

The actual conception of marriage is a bit hard to pin down, but I do know its initial roots lie in legend. And that’s a fact. So it’s time I put marriage on the same shelf on which I’ve set other storied illusions to collect dust. I’ve previously let go of voting, belief in teamwork, faith in progressivism, and my chances of ever actually constructing a working lightsaber. Wedded monogamous bliss must now join the aging pack.

Not to say I’ll pursue lovelessness and die alone. No way. I’m gonna get married someday. And as I ask you to wipe that “What the fuck are you talking about?” look off your face, I’ll state that I’m aware of my contradiction and, better yet, I have a solution for it: platonic marriage.

Here’s how it works: A friend and I — neither of us having any interest in standard matrimony — will pledge to live and grow old together, through the good times and bad, without the bond being muddied by sex or romantic intimacy. I love the friend, the friend loves me, so we take care of one another and keep our respective boning out of the house.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a couple who swings and swaps. That lifestyle works well for certain people, but I want a union completely devoid of sex — nothing to do with making love, everything to do with sustaining it.

Besides, I don’t know about you, but I’m not exactly worried about getting laid into my twilight years. I’m tired now, for Christ’s sake. But if I really need to get some squish at eighty-four, I’ll go see a hooker…a much, much, much younger hooker.

A healthy senior sex life is a nice notion if we all have the money and opportunity to age like Christie Brinkley. Problem is, even if you do, you’ll still end up having to fuck John Mellencamp. If that’s the fate that awaits me, I’ll gladly keep my companionship separate from my coitus.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to recognize intercourse as merely a means to an end. There’s nothing sacred about it. That’s why it’s called “getting off,” as in, “I’m done here and I need to quickly abscond from this situation.” If sex were truly special, it’d be called “getting on,” as in, “I’m here for the full ride, the long haul.” When it comes to fucking, I don’t need a life partner. I need a brief cooperative.

And if you’re wondering about kids…don’t. For starters, I don’t want them. But if the unlikely day that I do ever arrives, there’s no shortage of ways to obtain them outside of the act of marital conception: laboratories, adoption, fostering, and more. Hell, I bet I could even find one abandoned on the street if I really kept my eyes open. However, in that situation, I’d do my research to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN the child had been legitimately discarded before I took it home.

I don’t want to deal with the issues that traditionally complicate a marriage. Do we want a big family or a small one? Are your sexual desires identical to mine? If not, do I really have to try that? Are you still attracted to me? Why do we always have to fall asleep to Top Chef?

None of these issues matter in a platonic marriage. All that matters is that I’ll be with someone dear to me — someone who’d give me advice like, “Get your brains out of your balls” — and we’ll have each other’s backs, unconditionally, till death do us part. And if someone tries to fuck my friend, I won’t care.

Also, I’ll no longer be acting out in the unhealthiest of ways. Instead, I’ll be (sorry!) living my truth.

Sexual McCarthyism and Art

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So now the #MeToo movement is pressuring museums not to show the work of artists who have been accused of sexual improprieties. One current high-profile case involves the great portrait artist Chuck Close, a paraplegic, who has been accused of asking potential models to get naked when they audition to pose for him. This has made several women uncomfortable and they have complained.

There are other allegations as well, regarding his reference to their body parts, but he has denied doing anything improper.

“I’ve never had a complaint in 50 years — not one,” said Close. “The last time I looked, discomfort was not a major offense.” He acknowledged having a “dirty mouth,” but added, “We are all adults.”

Without any semblance of a trial, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., has indefinitely postponed an exhibition of Close’s painted and photographic portraits.

What’s next? Will Picasso’s paintings be removed from museums around the world? Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, expressed precisely that concern: “Pablo Picasso was one of the worst offenders of the twentieth century in terms of his history with women. Are we going to take his work out of the galleries? At some point you have to ask yourself, is the art going to stand alone as something to be seen?”

Artists throughout history have had sexual encounters with their models. Even if consensual, there is obviously a power structure involved. Some artists, like Egon Schiele, have used underaged models and painted them in the nude. In 1912, Schiele spent 24 days in jail, charged with the seduction of a female minor (that charge was dropped) and convicted of exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children.

I recently saw an exhibit of Schiele’s paintings in Vienna, which included some artistic renderings of children. Should the paintings be taken down? And what about the work of French Impressionist Pierre-August Renoir, who said some demeaning things about women?

A few years ago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum had an exhibit of works collected by Gertrude Stein. The exhibit never mentioned that Stein was a Nazi collaborator who worked closely with the head of the Gestapo in Occupied France, and later helped him escape.

When I brought this to the attention of the curator, the museum agreed to sell a book that documented her despicable collaboration with the Nazis. No one suggested taking down the exhibit. I guess it’s worse to ask a woman to pose naked than to collaborate with genocidal murderers.

There are no standards by which museums make these kinds of decisions. They simply seem to follow current public opinion. It used to be right-wingers who demanded that offensive art be taken down; now it’s the censorial left.

The implications of museum censorship of great artists, based on their personal behavior, goes well beyond sexual misconduct. Some of the greatest artists in history have lived deeply flawed lives, behaving in predatory and even criminal ways. The great painter Caravaggio was accused of murder — and he’s not the only artist to face such an accusation. As the New York Times recently pointed out, both the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the contemporary sculptor Carl Andre have been accused of homicidal crimes. Furthermore, many artists, particularly in France at the turn of the twentieth century, were rabid anti-Semites who supported the persecution of Alfred Dreyfus. Others were members of the Nazi party in the 1930s and 1940s. Still others, like the great abstract painter Mark Rothko, were communists or “fellow travelers” sympathetic to the Soviet experiment under Stalin.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement targets Israeli artists — even those who disagree with Israel’s current policies regarding the Palestinians. Should museums go along with BDS? Once the decision is made to judge artists by their personal or political actions or affiliations, there is no stopping the process. If every artist whose actions offend someone is banned, the walls of our museums will be bare.

I have no problem with museums disclosing to visitors the sordid activities of exhibited artists, so long as there is a neutral standard and a fair process by which both sides of the alleged misconduct can be heard and evaluated. Museumgoers could then decide for themselves whether to view a particular artist’s work. But censoring art based on unproven and disputed allegations is a modern form of sexual McCarthyism.

After a Day of Stupid: Journalism

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White House stories, Russian influence stories, political shenanigans — it seems like every day since the 2016 election a fresh twist or brewing scandal has set headline writers and cable-news bookers scrambling. With people following closely, online readership for the New York Times and Washington Post reporting has skyrocketed, right along with digital subscription numbers. The Trump bump, it’s been called.

And at night, legions of cable-news anchors, correspondents, and pundits dissect what’s going on, with passionate audiences tuning in. This month we salute some of those who bring us breaking news or comment smartly on it in the evenings. And since this is Penthouse, we went ahead and selected ten accomplished women who combine intelligence, news chops, and on-camera appeal to leave a memorable impression every time out. After a day of stupid, here are women who bring sense and insight to news of the world.

Katy Tur, MSNBC
A daughter of journalists who majored in philosophy, Tur worked as a Weather Channel storm chaser and an award-winning local reporter in L.A. and New York before joining NBC News. She rose to prominence as an embedded reporter shadowing the Trump campaign. More than once Trump singled her out during his rally media-bashing. Tur wrote about that experience and others in Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. Wild cards: Her middle name is Bear. She once dated Keith Olbermann.

Michelle Kosinski, CNN
A graduate of Northwestern, Kosinski received an MA from that same university’s prestigious journalism school. Following reporting stints in Charlotte and Miami, Kosinski became a London-based foreign correspondent for NBC, covering the war in Afghanistan, European terrorism, and U.S.-Russia relations. She won an Emmy for live reporting on the 2008 presidential election. In 2014, Kosinski became CNN’s White House correspondent and now serves as senior diplomatic correspondent covering the State Department.

Eboni Williams, Fox News Channel
A lawyer educated at the University of North Carolina and Loyola University in New Orleans, Williams has worked as a public defender, criminal attorney, and legal analyst for CBS News. Joining Fox in 2015, Williams has co-hosted several shows, including Fox News Specialists, where she debated legal and political matters. Author of Pretty Powerful: Appearance, Substance, and Success, Williams works in radio as well. In 2017, she co-hosted alongside Curtis Sliwa for three daily hours on WABC Radio.

Pamela Brown, CNN
Formerly CNN’s justice correspondent, Brown now covers the Trump administration as senior White House correspondent. Daughter of 1971 Miss America Phyllis George and a Kentucky ex-governor, Brown was one of few local-news reporters to cover the 2010 Haiti earthquake, sending stories back to her D.C.-area station. Joining CNN in 2013, she has reported from Paris after the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, from Brussels after the 2016 attack, and has done major investigative reporting on sex trafficking.

Katherine Timpf, Fox News Channel
A magna cum laude graduate of Hillsdale College in her home state of Michigan, the witty libertarian cohosted on Fox News Specialists in 2017 and appears often on Fox News evening shows. Timpf is also a stand-up comic, writes for the National Review, and had a weekly Barstool Sports show. “You may recognize me from being mad at me,” her Twitter bio quips. After criticizing — live on Fox News Specialists — Trump’s reaction to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville last August, Timpf received death threats.

Rebecca Berg, CNN
Named a CNN politics reporter in late 2017, this San Diego native studied journalism and political science at the University of Missouri and was selected as a New York Times political reporting fellow after graduation. She’s reported on politics for BuzzFeed, RealClearPolitics, and the Washington Examiner. Berg cut her journalistic teeth reporting on the 2014 midterm elections and the Republican field during the 2015-2016 presidential campaign.

Julia Ioffe, CNN/MSNBC
A history major at Princeton, Ioffe is a widely published journalist who writes about national security and foreign policy for The Atlantic. Based in Moscow for several years while working as a correspondent for The New Yorker and Foreign Policy, this fluent Russian speaker is also a Putin expert. Former senior editor at The New Republic, Ioffe has generated in-depth reporting on Russian election meddling, Russian sanctions policy, and Putin’s goals.

Alexandra Field, CNN
A French and history major at Hamilton College, Field holds an MA in journalism from Syracuse. As an international correspondent based at CNN’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Hong Kong, Field covers breaking news globally. She has reported on terrorist attacks in Istanbul, Dhaka, Brussels, and Boston. Along with filing in-depth stories on Islamist killings in Bangladesh, Field has done investigative reporting on Pakistani “honor killings,” Vietnamese bride-smuggling, and North Korean nuclear testing.

Natasha Bertrand, MSNBC
Early this year, Bertrand joined The Atlantic as a staff writer on national security and the intelligence community, focusing on the Trump-Russia investigation. Previously she was at Business Insider on the same beat. A graduate of Vassar and the London School of Economics, Bertrand once worked at a politics think tank in Madrid studying EU relations with the Middle East and North Africa. Biography wild card: handlebar-mustached Trump attorney Ty Cobb asked her if she was “on drugs” in a September e-mail exchange.

Clarissa Ward, CNN
A Yale grad who speaks seven languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Russian, Ward has been in the news business since 2002, working for ABC, CBS, and now CNN, where she’s a London-based senior international correspondent. One of the bravest and most decorated reporters in broadcast news, Ward has won multiple Peabody, Emmy, and Edward R. Murrow journalism awards. Since the start of Syria’s civil war, she has entered the country more than a dozen times to do high-risk reporting. In 2014, she became the first journalist to interview an American Isis fighter inside Syria. Ward has covered numerous European terrorist attacks and often reported from Moscow since Trump became president.

Pomp and Circumstance

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Is it necessary? No, it’s really not. It’s not like twenty-first century America’s lacking for pageantry when it comes to war and the military. Is it responsible? We’re in year 17 of an endless war on terror and extremism, and estimates peg this parade in the area of $30 million. It is decidedly irresponsible. Will it be fun? You know, even this crabby Irishman has to admit it’ll probably be a really good time.

We’re still months away and I already know I’ll use it as an excuse to get away from the family for a weekend and drink too much with friends and former brothers and sisters in arms and wake up on my brother’s couch wondering why and how there’s a bruise shaped like the state of Missouri on my leg.

Tanks and artillery guns and polished infantry soldiers rolling down Constitution Avenue may prove a strange sight, but something similar happened post-Gulf War and the soul of the republic didn’t immediately go black. We’ll be okay. (That we clearly and definitively won that earlier war is an aside perhaps worth noting. Anyhow.) What unsettled me most is the parade’s scheduled date: Veterans Day, on the centennial of the end of World War I.

Parades remembering the past (even a nostalgic past) can convey the complexity, the mix of pride and sadness that war should conjure in a citizenry.

Veterans Day, of course, grew out of Armistice Day, an old holiday that honored the same World War I anniversary in an ultimately futile attempt to keep human beings from killing each other for resources and power. Having an inaugural tribute to a military mired in perpetual conflict on the centenary of that seems… vulgar is one word that comes to mind. Dense is another. Here’s World War I vet and writer Robert Graves with some thoughts on the subject, from his poem “Country At War”:

“And what of home — how goes it, boys/ While we die here in stench and noise?”

A hundred years later, it shouldn’t be about us. It should still be about them.

Then there’s the whole Veterans Day overlap.

In theory, I get it. We have three main patriotic holidays in America. One — the Fourth of July — is reserved for fireworks and good times, while another — Memorial Day — is for honoring the fallen… and holding mattress sales. So when Pentagon chief Jim Mattis and others got tasked with the new parade, their options were limited. But there’s a not-insignificant difference between veterans and active service members, and it’ll be interesting to see how that difference is navigated in the planning and at the event.

By honoring veterans and Veterans Day, society is paying homage to a fixed past — things that cannot be changed or altered, but perhaps learned from and studied. Something occurred, sometimes just, sometimes not, unfortunately, and now it’s in the annals of history. Men and women who were part of that history serve as living touchstones for those annals — walking connective tissue in a way. It can’t be said enough that war, no matter how just, is not glory. It’s state-sanctioned violence. Who knows that best, and can speak to it personally? Vets.

Parades remembering that past (even a nostalgic past) can convey the complexity, the mix of pride and sadness that war should conjure in a citizenry. Can parades honoring the present do the same? I’m not sure. I hope so. We have parade-like events already, of course, involving the active military — Fleet Week most prominently.

But a parade modeled after France’s Bastille Day, as the president wants, goes well beyond even the Fleet Week celebration and ceremony. (That Bastille Day commemorates a toppling of the rich from power is another aside perhaps worth noting. Anyhow.) What does it say about the state of America — and America’s relationship to war and service — that the spectacle of the immediate trumps all, even memory?

Can parades honoring the present do the same?

Hell if I know. But my man Graves might. Here he is again, from his classic 1929 memoir Good-Bye to All That: “Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians or prisoners.”

So that’s who the parade will really be for — which is fine, in its way. Let’s just be honest about it. Vets and civilians alike.

Which brings me back to that intersection between veteran and active servicemember: I’m sure come November, everyone will be good and respectful. Vets will feel bad for the marching slick-sleeves, promising to buy them drinks once it’s all over. The slick-sleeves will be eager to hear some vet stories, as something in the tales may prove helpful to their future combat tours.

That vets will be watching this Veterans Day will be an oddity noticed by many but understood by few. (That’s an assumption on my part, and I suspect a couple veterans groups will play roles in the parade — but you really think the powers that be are going to let the angry and the righteous in our ranks march past Dear Leader on his dream day? I’m skeptical. Though a platoon-size element of long-haired grunts who met at the VA marching down Constitution Avenue behind all the pomp and polish would be a sight to see.)

There won’t be any Bonus Army-type nonsense between veteran and soldier. Not in 2018, at least. But this parade will serve as a marker that separates the two groups a little bit more than time and experience already has. That’s uncomfortable. Not a doubt in my mind it’ll still be so, come the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in Washington.

See you there.

Hollywood Remakes: Take Two?

Posted on by Team Penthouse

If anything, it’s getting worse. So prepare yourselves, people, for reimaginings/reboots/rewhatevers of films like An American Werewolf in London, The Crow, Dirty Dancing, American Psycho, Scarface, Romancing the Stone, and Weird Science. We kid you not.

Looking back at the last few decades, when remakes of classic, foreign, or just plain old movies really took hold, there are plenty that should be banished for all eternity — 1993’s The Vanishing and Spike Lee’s godawful Oldboy (2013) are high on our list. On the flip side, sometimes a remake can totally work. Here are three of our favorites.

Sorcerer (1977)
William Friedkin was still riding high after The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) when he decided to direct Sorcerer, a “personal project” based loosely on Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 film, The Wages of Fear (itself an adaptation of a best-selling novel).

The black-and-white French original impressed critics, but received a limited release in the U.S.; distributors considered it anti-American, and, honestly, the first hour is slow as shit. But Friedkin reworked its plodding start to set an international thriller tone, and then got down to business: An American oil well explodes in a South American village. Irish-American gangster Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider, in a role originally written for Steve McQueen) and three other criminal exiles are hired to drive trucks filled with nitroglycerine through 218 miles of dense jungle to stent the burning geyser. It’s a veritable suicide mission, but one with a life-changing payout at the end.

Sorcerer was a commercial flop, vastly overshadowed by the contemporaneous release of George Lucas’s Star Wars, but critics and film lovers still worship it. A 2014 high-def remaster restored Friedkin’s 35mm negative, along with the fantastic Tangerine Dream soundtrack, so now everyone can enjoy this overlooked treasure in all its original glory.

Solaris (2002)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi opus Solaris, based on the 1961 novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, is an epic arthouse mindfuck — long, slow, and totally bizarre.

Critic Roger Ebert revisited the classic Soviet film in 2003: “We can be bored,” he mused, “or we can use the interlude as an opportunity to consolidate what has gone before, and process it in terms of our own reflections.” Fine, whatever. But this explains why only the nerdiest of film nerds saw it when it was released in the U.S.

The concept behind it is pretty cool, though: A psychologist is summoned to a floating space station above the planet Solaris after a crew member kills himself and the remaining two cosmonauts go loco. Turns out the alien planet has figured out how to infiltrate the men’s minds, creating flesh-and-blood facsimiles of memories and people from their past. In the psychologist’s case, it’s his long-dead wife.

Enter director Steven Soderbergh (The Limey, Ocean’s Eleven, Logan Lucky, etc.), who distilled the weighty ideas behind Tarkovsky’s film and Lem’s book, cut the running time in half, and cast George Clooney and the ridiculously gorgeous Natascha McElhone as leads. The result is a visually stunning sci-fi psychodrama — an unusual combo, which is probably why it was a box-office dud. But we can live without robots shooting death beams out of their eyeholes for one goddamn film, right?

A Bigger Splash (2015)
Based on the 1969 New Wave thriller La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), A Bigger Splash takes its title from a 1967 David Hockney painting — and it’s as sensually striking as a Hockney, too, with its prurient, oh-so-lux “lifestyle porn” setting.

The original film was a huge hit in France, with 60s megastars Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, and Jane Birkin. This saucy update (by Luca Guadagnino, who directed this year’s Oscar-winning Call Me By Your Name, as well as the upcoming remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic Suspira) has an equally impressive cast.

Alien-beauty Tilda Swinton plays Marianne, a Bowie-esque rock star recovering from throat surgery at her house on a remote Mediterranean island with her younger beau Paul (Dutch actor Matthias Schoenaerts). Their taciturn pool-fucking is soon interrupted by the arrival of Marianne’s manic, party-dog ex-lover and former producer Harry (Ralph Fiennes), who totes along his newly discovered sex kitten daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson).
From here it’s beautiful people in a beautiful setting, all behaving very badly until someone ends up dead in the pool. Don’t miss Fiennes dancing like a coked-up chicken to the Stone’s “Emotional Rescue” — easily one of our favorite movie scenes evuh.