Pornography Will Ruin Your Teaching Career

The sad story of Tera Myers, who was unable to escape her past involvement in pornography:

A Parkway North High School science teacher has been placed on administrative leave and will not return to her job after disclosing she had worked in pornographic films before becoming a teacher, according to school district officials. The teacher, Tera Myers, requested the leave Friday after a student approached her about her past, according to the district. Previously, Myers had been suspended from a Kentucky school district for similar reasons.

Why Movies Succeed And Fail

Drew McWeeny on why you shouldn’t give Universal crap for deciding not to finance Guillermo Del Toro’s newest film:

There are so many reasons good movies fail to find an audience, and it is myopic to claim marketing is the only key. I’ve seen good movies that were marketed well die. Just plain die. And you can sift through the ashes of a disaster and proclaim this and assert that, but all you really know for sure is that people did not want to see the movie in the theater. Maybe the movie was misrepresented to them, and they would have loved it, and they will kick themselves years later, a la “The Shawshank Redemption” or “The Iron Giant.” Maybe so. Or maybe the general audience just plain didn’t want something. And no matter how good it is, no matter how sure you are it deserved an audience, it just wasn’t meant to be. It happens. Sometimes it’s about timing. Harry kept telling me how “The Thing” was mismarketed back in 1982 today, and I’m afraid I don’t agree at all. That was the same summer “E.T.” came out, and if you look at what did well that year, there was an optimism that was embraced, and it simply looks to me like audiences wanted their aliens sweet and cuddly that year, instead of shape-shifty and nightmarish. It happens. You can’t control that. You can’t make the audience go see something. There was 100% nothing anyone in 1982 could have done differently to make “Blade Runner” into a $300 million grossing hit movie. Nothing. Absolutely no trailer or poster would have changed that movie’s fate. You take Han Solo and Indiana Jones and you put him in a movie where he’s an emotionally vacant “hero” who murders one woman in cold blood, gets his ass beat by another, and who has one of the most ineffective final showdowns possible with a bad guy who wins and who chooses to spare his life. I love that film, but I can understand why it failed.

Universal’s been on a pretty spectacular run lately, and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. They’ve made some pretty ballsy moves and when I read about the box office returns in the news, I see more misses than hits. Nonetheless, I agree with McWeeny’s overall point: at least they’re trying. Movies like State of Play, Land of the Lost, Paul, Duplicity and Your Highness might not all be your cup of tea, but they are all, to a significant degree, different than the big studio pap that they are shoving into our faces. Universal deserves our support.

The Case Against Anonymity

Facebook has recently rolled out Facebook Comments, an exciting new commenting system for blogs and websites. Why is it so exciting? Because it forces people to comment using their real names (or at least, makes it more difficult to continue creating fake ones). TechCrunch has tried implementing the system, and it’s had some pretty interesting results so far.

Steve Cheney, for one, claimed that the new comments were killing authenticity:

People yearn to be individuals. They want to be authentic. They have numerous different groups of real-life friends. They stylize conversations. They are emotional and have an innate need to connect on different levels with different people. This is because humans are born with an instinctual desire to understand the broader context of their surroundings and build rapport, a social awareness often called emotional intelligence.

In the beginning, Facebook catered to this instinct we all have. But FB in its current form, a big graph of people who may or may not know anything about one another, does not. And forcing people to comment – and more broadly speaking to log-on – with one identity puts a massive stranglehold on our very nature. I’m not too worried about FB Comments in isolation, but the writing is on the wall: all of this off-site encroachment of the Facebook graph portends where FB is really going in pushing one identity. And a uniform identity defies us.

The argument is basically: you’re only free to be yourself when you’re not being yourself.

Robert Scoble responded thusly:

Where did my authenticity come from? I knew that REAL change comes from people putting their necks on the line. I couldn’t remember a time when an anonymous person really enacted change in, well, anything. It’s why I sign my name to everything, even stuff that could get me fired. Hell, I live in an “at will” state. THIS post could get me fired! My boss could wake up tomorrow and decide he doesn’t like the shirt I’m wearing and fire me. People have been fired in Silicon Valley for less you know. Look at all the images from Egypt (and I hope you don’t think I’m comparing myself to those heroes who sacrificed their lives there) but they put their necks on the line and they signed their name to the ultimate sacrifice. They were NOT cowards. THEY LOVE FACEBOOK AND THE VOICE IT GIVES THEM!

As usual, I think the true answer lies somewhere in between. We can’t all be like Robert Scoble. Not everyone has his outsized personality, his willingness to put himself out there, his defiance of any potential consequences that could arise from the things he says. That being said, Facebook Comments seem like they’d be a boon to any website that finds itself in a never-ending battle with trolls. As Scoble points out, for a site such as Techcrunch, “the flow has gone down,” but “the quality has gone way up.” Facebook Comments still have a long way to go to compete with more flexible commenting systems like Disqus, but you can’t really argue with a system that makes your website a more pleasant place to be.

Update: Laura June at Engadget has weighed on this debate with a thoughtful piece on the costs of forcing identity disclosure.

[I]f I have to be the Laura June that my step-mother (who was friends with me on Facebook, back when I had an account) knows when I’m commenting on Gawker, well, my behavior will be much different. In fact, I might not comment at all. The problem isn’t that idea: it is of course, absolutely true. The problem is that very few people seem to be questioning whether or not that is, in fact, a good thing. Because… is it? Am I no longer entitled to some separation between who I am when I’m talking about technology rather than when I’m talking about my political beliefs, should I choose to separate those things? Is a teenager no longer entitled to explore and even comment on blogs about, say, homosexuality, without logging in to Facebook to do so? Does everybody need to know everything that I like? Do they even want to?

If I was that exploring teenager, of course, and the whole world had flipped the Facebook switch, I could always just make a fake Facebook account, for sure. But it seems to me that this is a false necessity, where we force people to lie about who they are, rather than merely enabling them to choose not to disclose who they are to begin with.

Past instances in which I professed to like you were fraudulent

Tablet magazine reveals that those pitch-perfect call-ins for talk radio shows might be a little bit TOO perfect…

The job, the email indicated, paid $40 an hour, with one hour guaranteed per day. But what exactly was the work? The question popped up during the audition and was explained, the actor said, clearly and simply: If he passed the audition, he would be invited periodically to call in to various talk shows and recite various scenarios that made for interesting radio. He would never be identified as an actor, and his scenarios would never be identified as fabricated—which they always were.

“I was surprised that it seemed so open,” the actor told me in an interview. “There was really no pretense of covering it up.”

…[A] great radio show depends as much on great callers as it does on great hosts: Enter Premiere On Call. “Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service,” read the service’s website, which disappeared as this story was being reported (for a cached version of the site click here). “We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts. Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we’ll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won’t hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.”

Charlie Sheen’s War Against Women

Jezebel founder Anna Holmes has written a NYTimes op-ed detailing Charlie Sheen’s violent run against his fairer halves. It’s not only a smart piece about Sheen, it’s also an incisive look at how society devalues certain types of women, and the implications that that devaluation has:

The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so.

This hasn’t been the case with Mr. Sheen, whose behavior has been repeatedly and affectionately dismissed as the antics of a “bad boy” (see: any news article in the past 20 years), a “rock star” (see: Piers Morgan, again) and a “rebel” (see: Andrea Canning’s “20/20” interview on Tuesday). He has in essence, achieved a sort of folk-hero status; on Wednesday, his just-created Twitter account hit a million followers, setting a Guinness World Record.

But there’s something else at work here: the seeming imperfection of Mr. Sheen’s numerous accusers. The women are of a type, which is to say, highly unsympathetic. Some are sex workers — pornographic film stars and escorts — whose compliance with churlish conduct is assumed to be part of the deal. (For the record: It is not.)

I had the privilege to speak with Holmes today by phone. While I haven’t always agreed with all of her viewpoints, I’ve constantly looked up to her and respected her as a writer and thinker, so it was a thrill to chat with her regarding her thoughts on the whole Sheen situation. We also discussed my (extremely negative) thoughts on Piers Morgan, as well as the fact that Jezebel was recently parodied by 30 Rock. I’ve released the conversation as this week’s Chencast.

You can download the episode by clicking here (right-click and “Save As”).

Or, even better, subscribe to the Chencast in iTunes to have future interesting conversations downloaded automatically!