Diagnosis

I found out I have breast cancer. The good news is that it appears to be early stage and the most treatable kind. I guess this is what they call a best-case-worst-case scenario.

"The Business About My Breasts":

I’m at Costco when the call comes the next day. The call was supposed to come between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., but the call comes at 2 p.m., so as soon as I look at the phone, I know something’s wrong. The radiologist asks if this is a good time to talk. I look around. I’m in a Costco. What am I supposed to say? No, let’s talk when I’m at McDonald’s. Or, How about you call me back in a week? Or, If it’s possible to not have this call at all, that will be preferable. Instead, I tell her, Yes, now is a good time to talk.

Are you sitting down? the radiologist asks.

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Letters

Letters from Men Who Go to Strip Clubs is proving to be the most popular letters project thus far. I've posted several new letters. There are a total of 17 letters at this time.

A literary agent approached me about turning the project into a book, but I am dubious regarding an editor buying it. Editors don't seem to get the value of these sorts of projects. They come from another world.

She’s only been dancing for 2 weeks and confesses she’s still nervous. She won’t do all nude and says 'I don’t know if I’ll ever be that kind of girl.' I get a private dance with her and though I can’t touch her (others will let you) having her lissome body pressed against mine feels great. It’s the only touch I’ve had with a woman in a long time. And yes, the fact that I’m having to pay for it does come into play. It makes it feel less substantial, like I’m trying to embrace her form in front of me but keep closing my arms around empty air. It’s not backed up by the meaningfulness of intimacy with someone you love (or at least really like). Still, it starts to fill me up even as it awakens more unmet desires.

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Salon

Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed me about Letters from Men Who Go to Strip Clubs.

"Men's Strip Club Confessions": 

Getting back to the latest “Letters” project, what have you learned from it so far?

The “Letters” projects have been of varying success, but I love it as a genre because I find the letters very endearing. I’m always kind of surprised by how enamored men are by women. What I see as a sub-context in the latest project is how much power the stripper has. She’s the focus. It’s not about a guy manipulating some woman to get what he wants, it’s about, “I have to pay to get this girl to even pay attention to me and when she does, she gives me the thing that I want that I can’t get at work and I can’t get from my wife and can’t get by myself,” and I think they’re sort of awed by that.

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Vegas, baby

The Strip, Las Vegas, Nevada

Porn and misogyny

O, HAI, it's my good old friend porn.

A Slate blogger wrote an almost willfully stupid assessment of porn, which I saw fit to write about on my Forbes blog.

She said porn is misogynist. I say you are not the male sexual fantasy police, feminism.

"Why the Porn Business Isn't Misogynist":

Here’s the truth about porn: It’s an expression of male desire. Watch a porn movie, and you’re seeing male fantasies projected onto a screen, a facsimile or simulacrum of real fantasies that exist in real minds in real men. Unfortunately for Marcotte, she cannot control those desires and those desires are not always politically correct. What men want — in their dreams, in their masturbatory reveries, in their sex lives — doesn’t adhere to what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s sexist and what isn’t, what’s OK with Marcotte and her feminist sisterhood and what the truth is that a man thinks about when it comes to sex.

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