The Jeff Booth Show

Internet Radio with Pictures

Show Transcripts

November 15th, 2009

You can contact us at:

Jeff@eroticuniversity.com

(818) 613-9248

  This week in sex and politics, we look at using hate to combat the Hate Crimes bill, how they are prohibiting adult sex education in Rhode Island, Maryland University stands up for obscenity, and the Catholic Church’s attempt to extort Washington D.C. In sex and entertainment, a porn star officially challenges hooker luvin’ Senator David Vitter for his seat, more about the only woman in America who thinks Larry King is too tough of an interviewer,  the latest in Who is Getting Naked Now?, and just how gay is Playgirl? We’ll also discuss why we think Gossip Girl was a bad influence on teens, and porn legend’s Seymore Butts new book. Plus, our Sexvestigation gets very personal when an anti-porn crusader insults both me and my wife. All this and more, on the Jeff Booth Show.

Welcome to the show. We got to speak to a college sex education class this week, which is always interesting. Views on sex and dating are changing- and are very different from when I went to college. This is an issue we plan to cover more extensively in the future- as things they are a changing. I think for the better in a lot of ways.

Politics

The abortion restrictions built-in to the House Health Care Reform Plan via the Stupak Amendment are very disturbing. It is a complex issue, which we will research in more detail in next week’s Sexvestigation.

Don’t like the Hate Crimes Bill? Feel that it infringes on your rights? You are not alone. Pastor Gary Cass of the Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, is organizing a protest for next week. Is brilliant idea is to go out in front of the Justice Department, and, as he says, do what some may consider inciting a hate crime. They are challenging the Attorney general to come down and arrest what he calls a group of peaceful clergy. Peaceful clergy that are intentionally inciting a hate crime. Bad news for Pastor Cass. The bill has no provision for general incitement. His group would actually have to physically attack some gay people just because they were gay to get arrested. Maybe in the name of peace and love, they’ll decide that is just what they have to do to challenge this horrible law.

Cities are constantly trying to shut down or prevent the opening of any type of adult business. Pawtucket, Rhode Island is taking it a step further. They have denied a permit to the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health, which provides adult sex education and information to institutions of higher learning. The city claimed that the building was not zoned for educational purposes, despite the fact that there are other educational businesses in the very same building. The City’s Director of Administration is on record saying they did not want this type of business in their city. A woman run feminist oriented sex education center founded by a board certified sexologist.  That’s too scandalous for the city. Because god forbid, if women learn about sex, they might actually go out and enjoy it safely without getting diseases or pregnant when they didn’t want to be. The ACLU sent a letter to the Mayor explaining the legal reasons he might want to change the city’s position on this issue.

Props to the University of Maryland Regents. In April, when Maryland legislators learned that a campus would be screening the highly acclaimed special effects driven adult movie Pirates 2- they informed the campus that their state funding would be cut if they screened.it. They also ordered the regents to draft a policy to control "the displaying or screening of obscene films and materials" on all 11 Maryland campuses. They had until December 1st. The Regents have come to a decision- they respectfully declined to draft such rules. They would probably be unconstitutional, would violate federal law, and  would be extremely difficult to administer. The Regents “just said no” to censorship.

The forces of censorship on college campuses across the country are alive and well. At Duke University, there has been an outcry over some current research. Researchers were looking for young women students to attend a sex toy party, engage in sexually explicit conversation, and purchase items if they so desired. Now, before you cry out about the excesses of this sex scientists, the study is actually coming from the Economics department. So it is not, as some have complained, some psychological attempt to turn women away from promiscuity on campus and cuddle up with a nice warm sex toy instead. And yes, some of them are self-warming.  Father Joe Vetter, director of the Duke Catholic Center, complained: "I think it can give the impression that the university is endorsing behavior that I don't think the university should endorse."  And what behavior is that? Using sex toys? As millions of Americans do? Something allowed even in Alabama where selling sex toys is illegal. And who the hell cares what anyone who has no interest in having sex themselves (I’m assuming he is not fucking children) has to say about sex? When will these assholes realize that in this country even the adherents of their own religion tend to completely ignore them on issues of human sexuality? Maybe a few Catholics will listen to them, but they don’t even speak for most of them, so they really need to stop shoving their 12th century anti-sex anti-women ideologies down the throats of everyone who is not Catholic. Speak for Catholics and continue making them miserable, but leave the rest of us alone.

And speaking of Catholics trying to make everyone else miserable, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington threatened this week that it will be forced to discontinue social service programs it runs for D.C. if the city doesn't change its proposed same-sex marriage law. This law does not allow same sex marriage in D.C., but it does allow them to recognize same sex marriages as legal from states where they are legal. They are horrified that they might have to obey non-discrimination laws. They claim that they will be forced to provide spousal benefits to same sex couples. As if they would hire a gay man in the first place. With the exception of their priests, who can’t marry. And let me point out again that child molesting priests are not gay- they are pedophiles. They are in their own class. And in the church, they have been a protected class. But protections for gays to prevent discrimination clearly goes beyond the pale for them. The reality is that they so oppose gay marriage and gays in general they would punish not just the city, but the 68,000 people who have depended upon their services. Don’t do what we want and we’ll take our ball away and go home. Oh, wait. It’s not their ball. From 2006 through 2008, Catholic Charities in D.C. received about $8.2 million in city contracts. The shelters they manage are owned by the city. It is public funding they are using, and with public funds, they want to continue to discriminate. And tell the city what it can do. Take away their public funds, take away their non-profit status, and let them discriminate all they want to. On the public dime, they should play by the rules. I am sure other organizations can fill the gaps they will leave behind, and there will be fewer strings attached.

Entertainment

Threatening to walk off an interview show is never an effective tactic. The audience is always on the host’s side, so you pretty much look like a jerk. And if you threaten to walk off of Larry King, king of the softball questions? Then maybe you are just too thin skinned for public life. But that is exactly what the notoriously self-loving Carrie Prejean did when interviewed by King this week. And by self-loving, I am not referring to her obvious narcissism, but her sex video, which turned out to be of her masturbating. She claimed on another interview that because it was masturbation, rather explicit masturbation, that it was not a sex vodeo at all. In her hate filled fundamentalist Christian world, though, that might be a bigger problem than if it had been sex with a guy. Because now, her hand is clearly a lesbian. It has had sex with a girl. They might tolerate glad handing, but gay handing? After this came out, she wound up not being the featured guest at the Defender’s of the Family fundraiser. They wouldn’t even be able to shake her hand because they know where it has been.  It has already been claimed in fundamentalist circles that masturbation makes you gay, because it focuses your sexual energy inward. And don’t try and give me that liberal pervert argument that technically, that would make everyone in the world gay.

When Larry King asked her about the settlement with pageant officials, which happened quickly when they showed her the I touch myself video, she gets huffy and repeatedly tells him he is inappropriate. Refusing to answer his obvious questions, he takes a call, and when the man says “I am a gay man and I love pageants”, she takes her microphone off. But here is where it gets bizarre. When you walk off a show, you have to literally walk off. Storm away. Stomp out. Make a production out of it. But Carrie? She just sits there. Leaving Larry King asking questions she is ignoring. Bleeding airtime. He keeps asking can you hear me, and she finally says, “no I can’t hear you”, something she probably wouldn’t have said if she actually could not hear him.  And she continues to sit there in the remote studio. Then she says “Yeah, I think you are being extremely inappropriate right now, and I am about to leave your show.” He tries talking to her, but she continues to ignore him, and she does not leave. She just sits there smiling, her smug but vacant self-satisfied smile. She is really showing Larry King who is boss. She sits there for almost a minute completely ignoring King, until they go to commercial. She claims the on-air passive-aggressive tantrum was because she wasn’t supposed to answer call in questions. On a call-in show.

Larry did ask her several questions about the sex video, all of which she should have been prepared for, and all of which she refused to answer. At all.  One of the unanswered questions he asked was that since the tape was made when she was 17, would she legally try to have it blocked since it could be considered child pornography since she was legally underage? Okay, typical unresearched stupid question by King. If she was 17, no one is going to put the tape out there because they could be charged with distributing child pornography. She does not need to do anything. Which is exactly why Prejean claimed she was 17 at the time. This is the same ploy she used for pictures taken obviously after her pageant funded boob job.  But as anyone following the Prejean spectacle would know, it is extremely unlikely that she was 17. In fact, her boyfriend claims that she was actually 20 at the time, and sent him a whole bunch f these cell phone videos. Repeatedly sexting him. And he says she even called screaming at him and telling him to lie and say she was 17. Have you noticed that in the end, everyone turns on her?

And King was also unaware that underage girls have been charged with distributing child pornography just for sending a sexy picture of themselves on a cellphone to a boyfriend. A good question would have been to ask her if she should be charged with distributing child pornography? Carrie Prejean- former Miss California and child pornographer. That might help sell her book.

RadarOnline reports that there are at least 30 more to-less photos of Carrie, and at least 8 more masturbation videos. In her book, Carries says her body is a temple, so it makes sense she would return repeatedly to the alter for a little worship. Who could love her more than she loves herself?

Speaking of her book, which I assume shows the same adherence to truthfulness that she displays in her daily life, she includes an interesting whopper about why she is not homophobic. She can’t be, because homophobic is just a made up word that really means a fear of men. This from a woman who I suspect has not actually cracked a book other than the Bible- and that just to look along as her pastor tells her how to interpret it to mean God hates gays. She may even be waiting for the books on tape version of her own book to find out what is in it.

Carrie, all words start as just made up, until they come into common usage and then get recognized by dictionaries.  You know, those big heavy books filled with words but short on plot. Like the Random House dictionary, where homophobic is defined as unreasoning fear of or antipathy toward homosexuals and homosexuality. Or the Oxford dictionary- an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexuals. Or Merriam Webster: irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against homosexuality or homosexuals. But none of these definitions could apply to you Carrie, because they are all just made up. As is, I suspect, much of the content of your book.

Oh, and Carrie- I read an interesting article by a woman who had been married to a closeted gay man. I understand that a lot of your antipathy towards gays has something to do with the fact that your mom slept with women and that your dad was perhaps gay, or at least accuse of it, and I am guessing you blame this for their breakup, which was quite brutal and clearly very hard on you.  This writer argued that gay marriage would save a lot of heartbreak for women who wind up getting married to gay men who are just trying to fit in and be normal. If gay marriage became normal for gay men, a lot of straight women might wind up avoiding this situation, that seems to always end in tragedy. Makes sense to me. Maybe your parents would never have gotten married and had to go through such a difficult divorce if gay marriage was legal. Unfortunately, then we get into the old anti-abortion style argument that then you never would have been born. I’m just not going to convince you not to hate the gays, am I?

This is both political and entertainment news- porn star Stormy Daniels has officially decided to take on Senator David Vitter in the Louisiana Republican primary. In a Marie Clair magazine interview, she said: "I'm not one to judge someone's sexual activity, but what annoys me is that he's so hard-core "family values," and he puts his wife and kids out there, saying he's a Christian family man. Then he's caught up in a prostitution scandal. He's a hypocrite. I have nothing to hide. A sex tape of me isn't going to pop up and shame me; there are 150 of them at the video store."

In Who is Getting Naked Now, it’s the latest batch courtesy of PETA and their I’d Rather be Naked Than Wear Fur campaign. Atlanta Falcons tight end Tony Gonzalez and his wife October appear together, but it is tastefully posed so you can’t actually see his tight end. Twilight star Christian Serratos also joins the campaign, standing naked next to a tree with a great view of her ass in one of the sexier pictures in the campaign that is often very nude but demure. It’s a very artsy sexy photo.

And in Who is Getting Naked Now for Sweet Revenge, its Supermodel Stephanie Seymour, in a bitter divorce battle. Her parting gift is her nude shots in the December Vanity Fair. At 41 she looks incredible- and he can say get a copy of the mag to say goodbye to what he’ll be missing.

Christina Ricci has given us some great nude scenes in “Prozac Nation" and "Black Snake Moan”, and she’ll apparently give us another in the upcoming After.Life. Reports are that there is quite a bit of nudity. Not sure of the plot but it has something to do with her hanging out nude in a funeral parlour hiding from a creepy funeral director.

The movie Spread, starring Anne Heche and Ashton Kutcher, did not do much at the box office, but it is now out on DVD and maybe worth a look, just for the unusual amount of sex and nudity in it. Kutcher plays a male escort who uses sex to advance himself.

We reported earlier on the casting of Nicole Kidman in the very interesting story of the very first sex change operation. We were quite familiar with the story because of our research on erotic artists for our Art, Sex, and Censorship project. Kidman will play Einar Wegener, the man who became a woman in the 1920’s. Gwyneth Paltrow has now been cast as the wife, Gerda. Gerda Wegener created some wonderful erotic Sapphic art. Look her up on Wikipedia and checkout the erotic art link. It is very distinctive, sexy and well worth a look.

Gossip Girl is the show designed to intentionally horrify parents and delight the viewers it is intended for. The latest from last week may put a few parents into cardiac arrest. Hilary Duff, Jessica Szohr and Penn Padgely all joined in on a threesome. The shocked Family Television Council urged a boycott. “"To include a storyline like this on a program that is expressly targeted to impressionable teenagers is reckless and irresponsible. We are asking each CW Network affiliate to use their common sense and preempt this episode.” Which none did.   They continued: "Gossip Girl routinely depicts teenagers engaging in promiscuous, consequence-free sexual behavior, and that's bad enough. But will you now be complicit in establishing a precedent and expectation that teenagers engage in behavior heretofore associated primarily with adult films?" That’s right. Teenagers would never think of a threesome until they saw it on Gossip Girl. But I am a little concerned about the episode giving young people the wrong impression as well. All three are clothed- there is a little girl-girl kissing, but virtually no touching.  I have been involved with a lot of threesomes, and in my experience, they usually include nakedness, some giggling, actual touching and skin contact, and quite a bit of rolling around. If teenagers are going to follow the guidance of this episode, I don’t think they will enjoy their threesomes nearly as much. And that would be a shame. Because they are really fun. So shame on you, Gossip Girl, for making threesomes look kind of boring. So boring, that according to the demos, boys were tuning out and switching over to the Big Bang Theory. Let me make it clear, though, that I don’t want to see Penny, Sheldon, and Leonard in a threeway. That really would be wrong.

Levi Johnstone is getting Playgirl a lot of attention- especially since so many people did not realize it still existed. It does, sort of, as an online subscription Website. But the attention has also inspired former managing editor Jessanne Collins to write about why the magazine failed, and the odd promotion behind the current Levi publicity. Their current PR person is gay, and seems more interested in promoting the site to a gay audience. I don’t know how Levi is going to feel about that. Their PR guy complained about how the old women running the magazine ran it into the ground by not properly catering to gay men- you know- those out of touch women in their late 20’s. As Collins points out, the real problem was that it was owned by a straight male focused porn company that neither understood the women’s market nor the gay market, but tried to appeal to both. That is a nearly impossible balancing act. Playgirl as a magazine disappeared not just because magazines have been disappearing, but because it was no longer relevant.

Girls- which is a group fronted confusingly by Christopher Owens- not himself a girl, has released their reedited video for their song Lust for Life. There are a number of naked girls in the video, even one girl caressing another girl’s naked breast. The reason for the controversy, though, is the less often seen view of one man caressing another man’s erect penis. Not that here’s anything wrong with that. I just don’t think we’ll be seeing this on MTV anytime soon. I liked this a lot better than the official version on YouTube, though.

And finally, "Rock Her World: The Sex Guide for the Modern Man" was released this week. This is the new sex guide from Adam Glasser, better known as adult porn star Seymore Butts. I have not seen it yet, but at least it comes from someone with actual wide range of sexual experience- both personal and observational. True, a lot of that sex was with women who were getting paid for it, but those women often know a bit about sex themselves. The porn world does often have a distorted view of sexuality, but at least they are having lots of sex. There is clearly something to learn from that.

Sexvestigation

This is technically not a Sexvestigation, since it involves a lot of personal observation rather than investigation. But it was inspired by comments on the Pop Tarts site by model and Dancing with the Stars contestant Joanna Krupa. She is also the December Playboy covergirl. She commented about critics of women who appear in Playboy, saying: “I think they suffer from lack of knowledge and tunnel vision. How many of those self-important, so-called ‘feminists’ have been on the set when a celebrity shot a Playboy spread? There you go. What is feminist about discriminating a photo shoot just because it involves female (partial) nudity that happens to give men pleasure? Pathetic. There are several great reasons why female celebs line up to shoot Playboy: finally a woman gets paid more than a man for comparable work, she gets to set the rules, gets to be in a real team work with other women, as many key positions at Playboy are in fact held by women!"

I have been on a lot of photo shoots, and a lot of porn sets. I have never seen the work as degrading. It can be a lot of work, but it is also fun, flattering, ego-boosting, and sexy. There is usually a lot of laughing on a set. Women enjoy the work. I don’t see it as degrading, unless you have a negative view of sexuality and women’s bodies- an attitude you don’t generally find on set. Sure, there are some who don’t enjoy the work, but that is the exception. And no one is forcing them to do it.

I have had this same argument with anti-porn crusaders who feel that all women who pose nude or sexily are degraded and they know it. If they say otherwise, they are lying. They have been coerced into it.

There was an anti-porn activist we have had some dialogue with on this show, going back and forth via email. I’m not going to name her, as she’ll just Google herself and email me again and I am not really interested in hearing from her. She was a former porn performer, but briefly, and many, many years ago. And she is convinced that her brief time in the industry as a drug addict is applicable to literally all women today.

This is where it gets personal. I pointed out that my wife had done porn, not for money, but because it was a fun lark. It was not a career, although it was nice to get paid for it, and she had fun doing it. She did some videos, and was a cover girl and a centerfold in a men’s magazine. This anti-porn critic’s response was that if Kris liked it so much, why was she not still doing it? As if I knew nothing about my own wife. And that she had to lie to me about it.

I never responded, because it was an insulting question, but it seems to the point here. As we get older, we notice our own flaws more, primarily because we have more of them. Kris and I have both appeared naked on national television, on separate shows, but neither of us does that anymore. For me, I don’t have that fresh out of the box look I had when I was much younger. I am a lot more self-conscious of my aging. Frankly, I am not as pretty as I was in my twenties and thirties. That is one reason a lot of people eventually end their on camera naked careers.

But that was not the reason Kris did. It was not a career. She had a job. And it was one where they would not fire her because she appeared naked in public. It was not even a problem at work after she appeared on national television talking about swinging. As long as she did not talk about her personal sex life at work, it was not a problem.

But jobs change, and hers did. She began working at more conservative companies with a higher profile. She could not afford to be as public as she was. She could be fired. And one of the reasons she could be fired is because of the sex negative rantings of the anti-porn crowd, who insist that women who pose naked or in sexual situations are somehow flawed. They are bad. They have poor judgment. And that alone is a perfectly good reason to fire them.

We need to stop painting people, especially women, with a scarlet P for porn. A wide variety of people pose for a wide variety of reasons, and in a wide variety of situations, from simple lingerie shots to full hard core. Some of them may be bad people. But the majority of them that I have met have been quite delightful people. People whose company I enjoy far more than the dour holier than thou and often insulting anti-porn advocates.