Bored with sex scandals

Image via erofantasian.

First, regarding my SF Chronicle column today — no, I don’t yet know why it didn’t go online until 9:30 am today, why it’s not on the front page as it always is (even though my interview with Phil Bronstein about it *is* on the front page), and why I’m not in the columnists’ front page box (as usual). I’m hoping it’s a technical glitch, and not a conservative, sex-phobic one. It’s a concern, despite the popularity and traffic of my column. Right now, as I get ready to head to SFO, it’s only living in the archives, where it just went live. Feel free to comment or email them and ask WTF while I’m in transit…

I’ll post an update when I find out more. 10am update: it’s on the front page like normal, phew.

That said, It was great to see Who’s That Girl?: The Greatest Celebrity Sex Scandals That Weren’t on Fleshbot yesterday, right after turning in my column That Million Dollar Snatch: Violet Blue calls out sex scandals as most redundant marketing trend of the year. A couple days ago I had a brilliant half-hour conversation with pal Phil Bronstein for the Bronstein at Large vlog about the Spitzer kerfluff and sex scandals in general (a video oddly edited down to a mere 2 minutes of VB soundbytes, when I thought our back-and-forth banter was the most entertaining conversation I’d had in some time).

But something that didn’t make the cut was Phil asking me about Spitzer in the guise of the “sheriff of Wall Street” being targeted — in a, do-you-have-a-comment kind of way. And like I said, it’s not in the video and I didn’t have a cohesive comment at the time, but now I do. What should inform you about Spitzer is that according to Greg Palast (former investigator of racketeers for government) Spitzer wasn’t just a Wall Street foe, but Spitzer was the last man standing between Bush and Co.’s racketeering of bilking home buyers across America. To the tune of $200 billion handed over to bankers to bail them out. I hate to get all political on you, but read this midsection snip of Palast’s post (thanks, Eddie) before you dive into my “your tax dollars hard at work” jokes in my column:

(…) Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks. Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bailout. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.

Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon. And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” – made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.” (…read the whole piece.)

The lesson of this particular sex scandal: don’t go after powerful people if you have ANYTHING to hide.

Now, onto the marketing of the ubiquitous sex scandal… Snip from today’s column — which shows the good, the bad and the bizarrely hilarious of the sex scandal’s marketability:

Last week at SXSW: Interactive during the Q and A after the Sexual Privacy Online panel I moderated, one querant asked, “So — those celebrity sex tapes. You mean they’re all…?”

“Bullshit,” I answered. “You think any porn company worth its salt would distribute Paris Hilton’s sex video without all the 2257 federal recordkeeping requirements and face Hilton family legal retribution? They’re all pre-signed, and pretend to be leaked.” Because really when it comes down to sex scandals, it’s all about marketing. After the panel, he emerged from the crowd smiling, saying, “Man, I’m so bummed, I wanted those things to be real,” and we had a good laugh.

Eliot Spitzer, whose name we’re all tired of hearing, brings two deliciously salacious angles (positions?) to the fore. Yes, he’s a big old hypocrite. Yes, it’s really a scandal about money and honesty, not sex. Even though media and moralists — whose differences we may never know — play up the sexual shame while the rest of us sweat through tax time and wonder what’s worse: some guy who really screwed the pooch with the bifurcation of his personal and private lives or if those were indeed our tax dollars hard at work.

The Spitzer-Dupré incident brings out our culture’s age-old fascination with sex work: how much *is* that pussy in the window, and how does it get priced? The pageviews last week said it all: Call-girl business: high pay, brief career was the most-read story last week on SFGate.com, an attempt to explain the going rates for the different classes of straight-up sex work.

Marketing, baby. Like the endless parade of fake “leaked” celebrity sex videos, in the public sphere of media and consumers, the iconic sex scandal is all about marketing. Most likely, Emperor’s Club VIP had the best web presence — of which Spitzer was probably well aware. EC VIP knew how to market, or at the very least, overprice their wares all under the guise of guaranteed privacy and all the usual promises of trust and cleanliness and service that a high price should guarantee in a girl product. And maybe product also meant lots of yoga, the occasional ability to have sex in a stuffy mascot suit, speak fluent Klingon, or not have a total aversion to administering fruit smoothie enemas. After all, we get what we pay for, right?

Though the true sex scandal marketing genius in all of this emerges with the newfound web celeb status of “aspiring singer” Ashley Alexandra Dupré. According to rehashed news stories, she was one of Charlie Sheen’s “cheerleader hookers” who allegedly performed routines of the “gimme a ‘C'” and then “gimme some grindhouse” kind, so no stranger to web publicity was she. Dupré’s web presence led to her being unmasked in less than 48 hours of the so-called scandal’s break. It was that easy. (…read more!)