referring to Hollywood ethics. No, Senator, it’s not an oxymoron. Everyone who was raised by their TV and cineplex has been stuffed like foie gras with an unending supply of predigested moral pap, a dizzying tableau of Tinseltown tenets. Corporations are evil. Cripples are nice. Ambitious executives always learn to loosen up and “seize the day.” And liars always come clean in the end, usually in front of a big crowd. Screw that. You want one to grow on? Repeat these words: free will. Free will. Free will.
And I’ll tell you something else for free: the whole nude experience was more rewarding for the women than it was for the men. Trust me. I was there. It wasn’t that sexy. And I’m saying this as a securely heterosexual man who, until that night, hadn’t been laid in three years. There was just too much skin. It desensitized me pretty fast.
I wasn’t alone. It took five minutes for the boyfriends’ raucous cheering to die down to obligatory applause. Once the hotel staff arrived, the guys were completely faking it. By then the whole thing was about as sexy as macrame.
“It’ll be better once we start obscuring the nipples and stuff,” David told me while snapping pictures. “Strange, isn’t it? Maxim ’s selling like hotcakes while Penthouse keeps losing half its subscribers. Gee, you think maybe men are starting to use their imaginations again?”
I smiled. “That’s crazy talk.”
“I’m serious. Look around. It doesn’t get any more naked than this. Where the hell else can we possibly go from here but back?”
Where indeed? If there’s one thing I learned from Jurassic Park , it’s that life finds a way. But David did convince me of one thing: he wouldn’t be around at Maxim much longer. Midlife crises aside, burnout was extremely common in the magazine trade. I mean how many times can you write the same “Please Your Man in Bed” piece for Cosmo before developing a facial tic?
Meanwhile, the Orono women were off on their own journey. At first they struggled to hide. The most exposed girls fought their way deeper into the crowd, causing the new outer layer to fight their way in. From above it must have looked like a kaleidoscope. Or Busby Berkeley’s dry dream. I’m not sure what psychological force took over, but it spread like current. In eerie synchronization, they simply stopped hiding and started cheering.
Makes sense, I suppose. The weather was gorgeous. They were out in large numbers. And they were defiantly breaking convention, like the Torches of Liberty brigade. By the time the men stopped hooting and hollering, the women euphorically took over. Some of the guys even asked me if they could join in on the nude thing and, you know, help the cause. Uh-uh. I was all for equal rights, really, but if we made this thing coed it would seem more like an orgy than a social protest. People would smell the marketing.
By 7:30, the next wave of staff arrived on the scene. Then the next. And the next. Within the hour, the courtyard was overflowing with spectators. As I’d hoped, the employees showed no ill will toward the protesters. It was kind of hard to take this seriously when being confronted with signs like fairmont unfair to monk seals!, hey fairmont! ‘aloha’ also means goodbye! , and my personal favorite: don’t you know you’re gonna shock the monk seal?
At 9:15, a DC-10 touched down on the airstrip. The press had finally arrived. The demonstrators were quite surprised to learn that the fourth estate, in this case, was simply a petite reporter and a three-man production crew. The reporter, Miranda Cameron-Donnell, worked for the Associated Press. The production crew worked for me.
“That’s it?” yelled one of the boyfriends. “You said the media would be all over this.”
And now they were. Yesterday, while most of the students were booting into the Pacific, I called the producers at each of Hawaii’s four major TV news markets. Since the Fairmont Keoki was a
And I’ll tell you something else for free: the whole nude experience was more rewarding for the women than it was for the men. Trust me. I was there. It wasn’t that sexy. And I’m saying this as a securely heterosexual man who, until that night, hadn’t been laid in three years. There was just too much skin. It desensitized me pretty fast.
I wasn’t alone. It took five minutes for the boyfriends’ raucous cheering to die down to obligatory applause. Once the hotel staff arrived, the guys were completely faking it. By then the whole thing was about as sexy as macrame.
“It’ll be better once we start obscuring the nipples and stuff,” David told me while snapping pictures. “Strange, isn’t it? Maxim ’s selling like hotcakes while Penthouse keeps losing half its subscribers. Gee, you think maybe men are starting to use their imaginations again?”
I smiled. “That’s crazy talk.”
“I’m serious. Look around. It doesn’t get any more naked than this. Where the hell else can we possibly go from here but back?”
Where indeed? If there’s one thing I learned from Jurassic Park , it’s that life finds a way. But David did convince me of one thing: he wouldn’t be around at Maxim much longer. Midlife crises aside, burnout was extremely common in the magazine trade. I mean how many times can you write the same “Please Your Man in Bed” piece for Cosmo before developing a facial tic?
Meanwhile, the Orono women were off on their own journey. At first they struggled to hide. The most exposed girls fought their way deeper into the crowd, causing the new outer layer to fight their way in. From above it must have looked like a kaleidoscope. Or Busby Berkeley’s dry dream. I’m not sure what psychological force took over, but it spread like current. In eerie synchronization, they simply stopped hiding and started cheering.
Makes sense, I suppose. The weather was gorgeous. They were out in large numbers. And they were defiantly breaking convention, like the Torches of Liberty brigade. By the time the men stopped hooting and hollering, the women euphorically took over. Some of the guys even asked me if they could join in on the nude thing and, you know, help the cause. Uh-uh. I was all for equal rights, really, but if we made this thing coed it would seem more like an orgy than a social protest. People would smell the marketing.
By 7:30, the next wave of staff arrived on the scene. Then the next. And the next. Within the hour, the courtyard was overflowing with spectators. As I’d hoped, the employees showed no ill will toward the protesters. It was kind of hard to take this seriously when being confronted with signs like fairmont unfair to monk seals!, hey fairmont! ‘aloha’ also means goodbye! , and my personal favorite: don’t you know you’re gonna shock the monk seal?
At 9:15, a DC-10 touched down on the airstrip. The press had finally arrived. The demonstrators were quite surprised to learn that the fourth estate, in this case, was simply a petite reporter and a three-man production crew. The reporter, Miranda Cameron-Donnell, worked for the Associated Press. The production crew worked for me.
“That’s it?” yelled one of the boyfriends. “You said the media would be all over this.”
And now they were. Yesterday, while most of the students were booting into the Pacific, I called the producers at each of Hawaii’s four major TV news markets. Since the Fairmont Keoki was a
Similar Books
A Family Affair: A Novel of Horror
V. J. Banis
No Trouble for the Cactus Kid
Louis L'amour
The Can't Cook Book: Recipes for the Absolutely Terrified!
Jessica Seinfeld
VOLITION (Perception Trilogy, book 2)
Lee Strauss, Elle Strauss
Ghosts of Manila
James Hamilton-Paterson
Mina
Elaine Bergstrom
Killing Spree
Kevin O'Brien
Girl Overboard
Justina Chen
Hot Decadent Rising (Breath of Darkness)
Candice Stauffer