It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.

The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.

Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.

It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of preference.

It does not make you intelligent/ and/or nonconformist, if you aggressively criticize all erotic media and the people who appear in it, especially members of your own gender.

Someone can appear in updates on your favorite website or the boxcover of your favorite DVD or the cover of your favorite magazine. You can appreciate their work and that is awesome. But they probably are not rich for life off of the work you enjoyed (or didn’t). The world has enough pain in it. Don’t be cruel to someone who was generous enough to share their naked selves with you. Just don’t be a lapdog either. You know that whole rather walk beside me and be my friend thing? Treat models like human beings.

In the internet age, most of us become somewhat reduced to our avatars and how we come across when typing. Nonetheless, models are still human beings and no more or less human, no more or less right, no more of less deserving, for having had more pictures taken of them than the average person.

A lot of models are afraid to go interact in public because people online can be so critical and most models know they are not as beautiful as the best photos where they were lit well, made up just right, dressed in clothing they may not own, shot with good composition, and post processed to perfection. In real life, people tend not to say the sort of rude things they write when in keyboard warrior mode. But, after seeing one’s best efforts nit-picked to death online, not just models, but most creative people find it more difficult to interact IRL.

Photos of models or real world parties or whatever are posted here from time to time. If you have something nice to say about them, by all means do. If you don’t have something nice to say, please don’t fake it, but don’t go out of your way to be a dehumanizing cruel jerk either.

Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

The brilliant Ellen Von Unwerth shot an extensive pictorial of Lady Gaga in vampire drag for Out. The exclusive Out feature is called The Lady is a Vamp. The shoot styling is credited to someone named Nicola Formichetti who is seriously talented and who Bing informs me is the creative director of Dazed and Confused and is responsible for some of the fashion in Vogue Hommes Japan, V, Arena Homme, and others, as well as of course out. Always fun to discover the work of creative people I have not come across before.

Out calls Lady Gaga “Pop’s newest — and gayest — superstar”. One of the things I like about Lady Gaga is that I feel she is someone post-orientation in her approach to sexuality. She has stated often in interviews that she is attracted to women physically but only has romantic relationships with men. I’m not sure if that makes her super-gay, but maybe I am just feeling cantankerous today about people being so bent on labeling sexuality. I do not feel that an individual’s sexuality generally belongs in a tidy little box with a label stickered on it.

Then again, from an editorial perspective, I’m pleased that Out indentifies Lady Gaga as gay, however she defines herself. Because this gave Out reason to publish a beautiful portfolio of images of Lady Gaga shot by Ellen Von Unwerth. They did a ton of different set-ups and have both black and white and color and a whole spectrum of spooky themes. Lots of vampire and gothic tropes photographed appealingly. Smoky dark eyes, coffin, sunglasses at night, blood, nudity (probably sfw nudity) fangs, and cute skeleton in combat boots. Definitely worth checking out.

What do you call a forty-five-year-old guy with a twenty-five-year-old girlfriend? Successful.

What do you call a forty-five-year-old chick with a twenty-five-year-old boyfriend? Cougar.

I’m just going to say right off the bat that I think most people are going to find the most compatibility for the long-term in someone who is around their own age. And, for the short term, I think the age differences are pretty irrelevant. Some sectors of society seem to be all in a tizzy over the idea that decades of women in the workplace have lead to the existence of less gender differentiation in approaches to mating. I don’t think men and women are really all that different naturally, so of course the more the cultural training to be different is removed, the more similarly they will behave.

Cougars are so much a demographic and part of the cultural consciousness today that there are sites for those who fantasize about being seduced by a cougar, Taco Bell ads about hitting on (or being hit on by) cougars, SNL sketches about cougars, and now there is a cougar convention. Goldstar listed something called the National Single Cougars Convention for Younger Men & Older Women put on by The Society of Single Professionals. Would you want to go to a cougar convention? Would you go identifying as a cougar, a younger man (is there a word for cougar-fucker?), or a bemused innocent bystander?

But what is a cougar? (I prefer definitions where people do not feel compelled to invoke Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.) Having perused a number of articles on the topic, I see that apparently cougar is a term for an aggressive variety of MILF, generally one with some dough, between the ages of thirty and fifty, who is sexually predatory, noncommittal, and prefers to hunt men under the age of twenty five. In society circles in places like Washington, DC or Miami, an attractive young man who squires about ladies in their sixties or seventies (or the wives of men around those decades) is called a walker. A walker is not necessarily putting out and is expected to be well-spoken, able to dance, and know which fork to use. It appears nobody has a term yet for gents who are cougar prey. Cougar prey apparently has no requirements other than being youngish and doable by someone wearing champagne goggles.

The upcoming cougar convention has some extra requirements to be crowned Miss Cougar America: “To be eligible to win, the lucky Cougar must be present at the convention, legally single and at least 40 years of age.” (You can’t make this stuff up because truth is deeply stranger than fiction.) The upcoming cougar convention is in Silicon Valley, which is apparently the only city in America with a surplus of single men. (Is computer nerd the correct term for cougar bait then?) The event takes place on August 28 and includes an “Entertaining Keynote Address with author Francesca Gentille and Tahil Gesyuk, her romantic partner, who is 14 years younger.”

A lot of 80’s movies, such as Weird Science, featured an older experienced woman who showed a young man the ropes as part of his coming of age. That theme in movies seems to have fallen out of favor, but one kinda gets the point of that sort of thing in movies about growing up and gaining self-confidence and so-forth. If a chick bangs a guy who is fourteen years younger than she is (but of legal age) that just falls under dog bites man i.e. so commonplace and uneventful in 2009 as to not be news.

Incidentally, Francesca Gentille is a kama sutra and tantric sex expert. She is pretty, educated, sensualist, works out, and eats right. She has met lots of famous people, enjoys travel, and has diverse life experiences. She is known for her work on managing hormone levels and related body functionality for anti-aging and great sex. Who wouldn’t hit that?

The new season of AMC’s Mad Men starts this Sunday. I will be at Vampire-Con, so I’ll be TiVoing it, but I’m looking forward to this new season of one of my favorite shows. Pre-season rumor has it that this time out, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner has in store more drinking, more gender relations of both the sexual and social issue variety, and will start off a couple more years into the 1960’s.

We’ve got a beautiful Mad Men promo photo gallery for your viewing pleasure here. The colors of past seasons were a bit different from these and I can’t say whether the new season will fully match prior seasons or evolve. I love the look here, though, and one of the most impressive things about Mad Men is the hyper real look and feel. The show’s costuming is convincingly period, but somehow makes each time it covers look more fabulous and glamorous and beautiful than it probably looked at the time. The lighting and color palette is always just gorgeous and makes this one of the few shows I always TiVo at Best Quality, so I don’t miss a bit of the look and feel.

Over on the AMC site, they also have a MadMen Yourself avatar creator. The image above is the one I did for myself. There was no option for iced latte, as it would have been an anachronism in 60’s Madison Avenue, so I opted for a hot coffee. There was no option for purple hair, but I was able to select stripes.

Webcomic JEFbot has a comic strip panel set where actor roommates JEFbot and The Cornfather discuss the embarrassing videos they have posted of one another.

As a kid, I recall being repeatedly told a story about how, when I grew up and brought dates home, I should expect that my family would tell really awful humiliating stories about me. The idea was that this would be humorous. I don’t know whether or not it would have actually been funny as, by the time I passed puberty, my family was indifferent to meeting my dates whether they were the offspring of sitting US Senators or international drug dealers.

I did, however, do a print zine called BLT ::: Black Leather Times where my unsavory pals and I would often post embarrassing things about one another. This was definitely very funny. Unfortunately, it has proven potentially either less hilarious or much much hysterical since the advent of the internet. See, when Forrest Black was teaching himself HTML, he practiced by creating digital archives of a whole bunch of issues of BLT. BLT’s editorial policy at the time was very punk and so there are some people where the number one search engine result for their name is an extremely witty descriptions of a sexual peccadillo from 1990 which they might prefer went forgotten. Now, these are all people who absolutely deserved whatever was said about them, or at least certainly deserved it in 1990. After the first year or so, BLT’s circulation tended to be 2,000 to 3,000 copies, so probably many people have print archives of all this regardless.

So does the internet actually make embarrassing ones compatriots, even in a humorous context, better and more fun or much much less of a good idea?

The Cornfather: The video I shot you being attacked by your ferret and hamster has already gotten 50,000 views on YouTube!
JEFbot: Awesome.

JEFbot: Last time I checked, that video I shot you doing your best Flashdance impression while playing Wii Fit was at 800,000 views.
The Cornfather: Cool.

JEFbot Remember when humiliation was a personal thing, shared only with family members and close friends?
The Cornfather: I know, it’s so much better now.

Torchwood season two came out on DVD last week. A lot of you have probably been watching it on BBC America, but, if you’ve missed this Doctor Who spin-off for adult fen, I definitely recommend picking up the DVDs. You can watch seasons one and two straight through in an orgy of science fiction consumption now.

If you are not familiar with Doctor Who, allow me to give you the basic overview. The Doctor is a regenerating, very long-lived, highly-curious, extremely intelligent womanizer from outer space. Gallifrey in the something or other nebula, if memory serves. The Doctor Who SF serial has been around for ages and gone through many iterations with different actors playing the man who invites strange women to come for a ride in his penis car TARDIS and see the world. And other worlds. In the past, present, and future. When they start to age, the dashing Time Lord ditches them. If guys sometimes being a little piggy towards their lady friends troubles you too much, you may want to go re-read some Ursula LeGuin instead of watching, but these BBC shows really are fun.

In the Christopher Eccleston Doctor and Billie Piper companion iteration of the show, the character of Captain Jack Harkness was introduced. Jack is a 51st century kinda guy, omnisexual and happy to make sexual conquests of men and women. For a while, Jack, the Doctor, and Rose travel together in the TARDIS on Doctor Who and, although it is never explicitly stated, the implication is that they are having hot three-way space-faring sex.

Although many of the earlier incarnations of Doctor Who were pretty cheesy in the effects department, the Russell T. Davies version is more pleasing to the eye and more convincing. He ups the anti even farther with the sleek production design and good looks of Torchwood.

When John Barrowman’s Captain Jack Harkness gets spun off to his own Torchwood show, however, the erotic undertones become much more clearly stated. The whole first season is mostly a sexy and always-on Jack seductively leading a team of alien hunters who sometimes police the Cardiff rift in time and space and more often experience sexual tensions amongst themselves.

The first season of Torchwood is reminiscent of frosh year of college in the way the characters have some mix and match attractions and jockey for position as they get used to and attached to one another. Jack is slightly more queer than bisexual in season two, but he still appears delightfully prepared to eat anything. Even Freema Agyeman’s incredibly annoying Martha Jones who followed Rose Tyler as the Doctor’s companion on Doctor Who and never even got into his pants. The second season also has a bit less alien-hunting and playing with cool extraterrestrial technology than the first. But the second season has lots of fun with the character of Captain John Hart, ably played by fandom veteran James Marsters. Captain John is Captain Jack’s former Time Agent partner and, of course, because Jack is a slut and a half, Jack’s former lover.

One of my favorite things about Torchwood is that it is not made for children. Science fiction books acknowledge that the fan base is not exclusively eleven-year-old boys, but television and movies rarely do, so Torchwood is a welcome difference in the field. A lot of science fiction, fantasy, and horror television assumes its audience is young, can’t handle difficult themes, and needs to be whomped on the head with any point. Torchwood maturely, in every sense of the word, addresses adult themes of sexuality. It is a very nuanced show which assumes its audience is intelligent and able to pick up on subtleties in how the characters interact.

And, for your immediate viewing pleasure, we’ve got a hot and sexy Torchwood season 2 photo gallery courtesy of the nice folks at BBC America.

For bonus dork points if you’d like to win bets in the con hotel bar: Doctor Who’s companion is named Rose Tyler. Jack Harkness’ policewoman hire is named Gwen Cooper. The woman the gay romantic lead falls in love with, in Torchwood show creator Russell T. Davies’ script for Bob & Rose, is named Rose Cooper.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.