Far be it for us to question journalists and their facts, but Sixty Minutes started it. First off, they leapt without looking onto the “sex sells” bandwagon. Such is their girth that they never once realized that the soft landing was due to the many stories published on the topic about six months ago. Okay, we thought, we can forgive them. There’s a lot of news to cover, and they do not have our razor-sharp focus.
Then we meandered down to the middle of the story and stopped. Cold*. Yes, we encountered a sentence that made us ponder and, then, forced us to do research:
It’s [porn] so acceptable that Regan recently published what has turned out to be one of the raunchiest books ever to be near the top of The New York Times bestseller list. It’s called “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale.”
Granted, the idea of raunchy is in the eyes of the beholder, but a quick glance at a recent NYT bestseller list reveals something rather startling: the presence of another raunchy bestseller. One, in fact, that is not only raunchy, but laughably so. This may the first time Tom Wolfe has ever beat out Jenna Jameson in the sex department. We’re not sure who should feel more embarrassed by this.
By the way, if anyone cares, on the raunch scale (which we are not going to produce because we just made it up), the Jameson book is pretty tame. Heck, even the photos are pretty innocuous. Especially if you subscribe to women’s fashion magazines. It is, in fact, the kind of book you can safely leave on a coffee table (in a child-free household — we are not all evil) so that male guests who are pretending they’ve never watched a moment of porn can pick up your copy and pontificate on how they’ve heard the book is quite good. Also, can they borrow it when you’re done?
* – It’s unseasonably chilly in Southern California
- Raw Profit On The Printed Page
- Hardcover Fiction (January 2, 2005) (Note: you are seeking a title called I am Charlotte Simmons; we think it’s languishing somewhere around number ten)
