Being Amber Rhea

At this point, I’ve been to half a dozen social media unconferences, and at almost all of them, there has been much discussion about how/why/if PR and marketing folks should “reach out” to The Bloggers.

Should PR and marketing departments be embracing social media? Of course they should; and fortunately, a lot of them seem to be past the if and focusing on the how. But for some reason, that’s where there seems to be a major roadblock to understanding.
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Via Figleaf (who quoted me again; aw shucks), everyone should read this post by Tony Comstock (who makes some of the best porn there is, in my opinion) about the myths surrounding the porn industry and how it’s damn hard to get actual numbers while everybody’s busy losing their shit because of ZOMG teh s3x!!1! Also there’s a lesson in there (again) about why you can’t trust mainstream media. Anyway, Tony Comstock always has interesting and insightful things to say about the business of porn; this is no exception.

Porn’s supposed to be this mult-billion dollar a year business, so big and dangerous there’s an entire department at the DOJ devoted to it; and it churns out thousands and thousands of titles each year, seeming to serve every nitch fetish, but it can’t seem to serve the wide-spread and basic desire that many people have to see a well-crafted depiction of two people who really seem to be enjoying having sex with each other.

People know in their gut something’s not right. People know there’s a disconnect. People know that what they want to see isn’t some specialized nitch, it’s a basic human desire. Yet it goes unserved. Why? To me the answer is quite simple.

The restrictions on the distribution of erotic images (as in you won’t be able to find MATT AND KHYM at Walmart, Blockbuster, etc.) has restricted the business to making money in a very few, and not especially lucrative ways. Porn margins are razor thin, and the result is that “the industry” vastly overserves niche sexual interest markets, where issues of production quality, or even simple honesty in packaging will be overlooked, while it vastly underserves sexual interest with broader appeal, but much higher expectations.

As an aside, have you noticed that the people who like to go on and on about Porn the Monolith™ and why it’s sooooo horrible, have either 1) not seen much porn at all, or 2) seen only a very specific, generally shitty subset of porn.

The Georgia Dept. of Revenue sent me a weird, random letter demanding that I show up at their office in Athens on June 12th to produce “sales and use” documentation for Tangerine Computer Services. There was also a “payment envelope included for [my] convenience,” but no dollar amount anywhere.

Now, if you’ve known me for a while, you might know that TCS hasn’t existed since roundabout 2002 (but the domain lives on, as you can see).

Obviously I cannot go to Athens on June 12th. I called the number (they actually had someone’s direct line, with their name listed) and left an earnest voice mail last night, and now I wait.

The timing of all this just seems extremely weird. I’m trying not to get paranoid. Last night at dinner Rusty mentioned that if the government wanted to silence all the dissenters, a great way to do it would be to sic the IRS on them.

I don’t know wtf this is about and I hope to get it resolved as soon as possible, because Tangerine Computer Services has been defunct for years and I cannot take much more stress-inducing shit being piled on.