People often like to get me alone and confide that they would really really love to pose nude for me but they are concerned about their future careers. When I lived in Washington, DC, I just took this at face value. I’m proud of how I have lived my life. I was class president in 10th grade. If I felt like running for some community office, I don’t think I would be daunted by my – gasp – association with artistic and activist depictions of naked people. Nonetheless, I understand how someone who aspired to be a beltway insider might be concerned about limiting their career options. But I live in Los Angeles now. These are actors, models, musicians, and celebutantes whispering to me about how they crave to have their bodies in front of my lens. But they can’t, they just can’t. Maybe the conversation is titillating and erotic for some people. I don’t know. It isn’t for me.

Did getting naked on camera hurt the careers of Marilyn Monroe or Sharon Stone? How about Ewan McGregor or Bruce Willis? I’m not even going to take a stab at naming naked models because there are nudes in existence of every single successful high fashion model I can think of. Tyra Banks devotes a whole episode of America’s Next Top Model to getting wannabe models to get naked. Has on-camera nudity hurt the careers of Madonna or Marilyn Manson?

When it comes to entertainment careers, the public’s response to nudes is generally either positive interest and applause or a complete lack of awareness. Except of course for poor beleaguered Fred Durst, but the public’s brutality for him is a subject for another article.

Do you usually watch mainstream pageants? You know, the kind where kinda regular pretty girls walk around in bathing suits and say they want to become veterinarians because they love children? Thinking about it, didn’t posing nude and having the photos run in Penthouse cause one Miss America to be stripped of her crown? Yes, yes, it sure did. That Miss America is Vanessa Williams. To the best of my knowledge, Vanessa Williams is the only Miss America to have a real entertainment career, starring in movies, recording albums, and being directed by some of the top people in the world. Wow, I bet she cries herself to sleep at night every night, knowing that she won Miss America and is the most famous person ever to wear that crown, but, like, some officials don’t count her win. Because Penthouse ran some photos of her looking sort of sensual with another woman.

Does this remind anyone, besides me, of something going on in the tabloids today? Donald Trump publicly chastised Miss USA, the winner of a pageant he owns. A lot of people had, not only never heard of reigning Miss USA Tara Conner (whose name I found by Googling +“miss usa” +lesbian), but they had never heard of the Miss USA or Miss Teen USA pageants. How convenient that it was Miss Teen USA Katie Blair who Tara was making out with. Now Trump can get promo for both pageants at the same time. Had you ever heard of Miss Teen USA before? Ever watched it?

Tonight, on The Apprentice: Los Angeles, the product placement is apparently supposed to include Playboy. There is also a tabloid rumor circulating that Playboy offered Miss USA Tara Conner the opportunity to pose for the magazine. Gee, but didn’t Trump threaten to strip the pageant queen of her crown if she didn’t straighten up and fly right? How could Hugh Hefner buddy up to Donald Trump on his show and simultaneously try to corrupt his virginal pageant lesbians?

And the most famous Miss America is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who canoodled with another woman and had nude pictures of her published. The whole world talked about it when Miss America had her crown stripped from her and I do believe the Miss America pageant’s ratings went way up. Hmm, I wonder if the Tara Conner and Katie Blair scandal could be cynically modeled on the Vanessa Williams scandal.

Nah, what kind of cyberpunk social manipulation lunacy would have to be the norm for Donald Trump and Hugh Hefner to conspire to recreate the Vanessa Williams Miss America scandal? Oh yeah, the lunacy all around us every day of the digital age we currently live in. I should really work in television.

I wonder if television execs have to deal with people, they barely know, pulling them aside to whisper about how badly they would like to get naked for them. I guess they probably do.

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.