Over at Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed me about the strange new world of reality TV porn.
"It's the perfect marriage," Susannah Breslin, a journalist who has covered the porn industry for several years, tells me. "I've always seen reality TV as being a lot like porn -- it's emotional porn." She says both can provide a way "of getting off on other people's desires or failings" -- not to mention their desperation and humiliation. Both thrive on its stars' self-exposure, which is driven by audiences' insatiable voyeurism. "The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long," she says. "This is the beginning of something that I think will be common in just five years. Eventually, the idea of a reality TV show that doesn't have graphic sex in it will seem antiquated and prudish."[Read it]