All right, bitches, I won’t sugarcoat it:

Rome is burning.

Lately, I’m looking at everything — everything — around me and finding it all fucked-up. Mass hysteria has set in. I wouldn’t trust this clown car cast of Republican Presidential hopefuls to give me a passable handjob, much more pull this nation out of decline. All I could do this past Saturday as I beheld international recording sensation Lana Del Rey performing a song on SNL about a chick apparently getting cock-blocked by frickin’ video games while looking like a doped-up cocker spaniel and sounding like an IBM computer that got roofied was think how much dick she had to take to get that record deal. Why is Smirnoff employing a glorified replicant hooker as their spokesmodel? Was Denise Richards busy? Half the cast of Jersey Shore has book deals under their belts, and the other half is presumably preparing albums of spoken word poetry.

I feel like the misanthropic offspring of a doomed one-nighter between Travis Bickle and Tyler Durden, neither paying my ass a dime in child support.

Even gay porn, which used to provide me a shameful thrill and carefree break from reality has been leaving me feeling hollow. Is it that as the condoms have come off the star quality has diminished exponentially? Maybe it’s that the newest title in my library is from 2004? Could it be that I’m sick to my dick of all the callow Timmys, Tobys, Colbys, Kellys, and Rileys whose names end with naughty, naughty boy Y vowels?

Anyway, I was reminded of everything excruciating that currently plagues the medium last week upon receiving an email press release via Cybersocket. Now, there’s nothing more transparently self-serving than a press release, but this bitch — which was blasted to millions of addresses — took the cake. Apparently, some twink named Riley Price is — No! Please! Don’t say it!” — retiring and leaving a huge hole in our collective consciousness. Stop. The. Fucking. World.

The hell are they talking about?, I mused, slack-jawed, as I read this incredible piece of tripe. “WTF!? Who gives a shit!?” my esteemed colleague David K. emailed. What we encountered was akin to the Pethouse Plaything confessional sequence from Amazon Women On The Moon, and I’m still laughing out loud.

Prepare yourselves to believe again. (read the full article)

There are two red-flag, deal-breaking traits that can instantly make a man repellent, and both start with a V.

Violence and Vanity.

Look, we all go for a certain manly vigor, but if a guy flips out over everything and starts bashing his head against or wall or has a stockpile of weapons, that’s a whole other bag.

Conversely, you don’t want a guy who’s such a supercilious, preening peacock that he instantly seeks out any reflective surface and acts like he’s gracing you with his presence. No, that kind of excessive self-regard is enough to send me clamoring for the nearest window, and boy, is it everywhere lately.

What maketh a douchebag? It’s a sobriquet everyone throws around, but do you ever ask yourself what that state of being entails? I would define ‘baggery as being comprised of at least two of the following elements:

1) An aggressively macho swagger usually manifested by ostentatious clothing and hairstyles, curious gesticulations of the hands, a reliance on a Zoolander pout as a go-to expression, and the tendency to drape yourself in gold and jewels.

2) The penchant to ascribe to a sexually mercenary ethos in which any and all sex partners are just minor collisions you hit and forget.

3) An unjustifiably self-aggrandized level of self-esteem of both your personal charm and physical pulchritude — I would argue many is the douche who suffers from a weird body dysmorphia that makes his mirror image look better than it actually does — that must be the result of too much parental positive reinforcement and too few peer-delivered beatings.

4) The embracing of a morally bankrupt Bad As I Wanna Be, Bitch! ID-based personal philosophy that totally overrides the Superego while simultaneously colluding with the easily swayed and solipsistic Ego.

5) Far, far too much easy access to electronic and digital media.

So yes, Douchebaggery is tough to singularly define, but like obscenity, you know it when confronted with its distinct presence. (read the full article)

Class: you don’t need money, titles, or status symbols to have it, but — but — it’s either in you or it’s not. Some men move through life with a poised, quiet, dignified stoicism that’s magnetic in its gravity. Other guys, well… their big contribution amounts to throwing it around town like paperboys.

There’s countless epithets you can hurl at a woman’s easy virtue, and society tends to bifurcate the female identity into a virgin/whore mirror image, yet I found myself struggling to come up with derogatory terms to classify a less-than-courtly man in my title. We wouldn’t even have gay porn if it weren’t for a certain type of man with boundary issues who says “A daisy chain on top of a bar?! Where to I sign!?” with nary a reservation, and some men are just born with the perfect hustler mentality that allows them to take risks the rest of us would balk at. As bad as the cliche is, I imagine deep down that most of us crave a hot piece who’s a dreamy angel in the kitchen and a heat-seeking whore in the hay. (read the full article)

More uproarious homoeroticism from the definitely Not Gay Daniel Tosh.

It was a joke my father told me he once heard a hooker shout out from her corner:

“The fucking’s free — it’s the room that’ll set ya back fifty dollars!”

Let’s just say that line proved all to apt while watching Showtime’s Gigolos — an experience that at once managed to be trashily explicit and lamely skittish about the prospect of men on-the-take letting cameras in on the action.

With virtually every other type of fame whore — aspiring actors, amateur models, celebrity chefs, cut-throat real estate agents, personal stylists, pampered trophy wives, and even lady hookers — having already been expended in the Reality TV landscape, I guess it was inevitable that male escorts would get their turn on the rack. Gigolos would probably feel more at home on Logo or Bravo, its presentation by Showtime justifying the strictly female clientele the men frequent. Male-on-male exploitation (the best kind) is apparently too taboo for even cable, and so we the audience are privy to what I would assume is the comparatively niche-marketed Straight Male Escort scene — Showtime’s cams following around five studs-for-hire from a Las Vegas escort service as they navigate the high-end sex worker circuit. (read the full article)

The top three things that people who don’t do them for a living think are oh-so-simple: teaching, writing, and comedy.