NAKED HAPPY GIRLS Reducing a self-possessed woman to a state of romping nudity in about five minutes flat. |
Collapsed Catholic that I am, I’ve always had trouble with the concept of “erotic photography.” Dirty pictures that aren’t dirty: what’s the point of that? Either you’re masturbating or you’re not, it seems to me — and if you’re not, you might as well be doing something else. It was with some curiosity, then, that I sat down to watch the first couple of episodes of the Playboy Channel’s Naked Happy Girls (Saturdays, 9 pm), which follows self-described “erotic photojournalist” Andrew Einhorn as he bounces around Manhattan persuading “beautiful everyday girls” to disrobe for his saucy little camera. Einhorn, who looks like Eric Bogosian on Ecstasy, is a card: four feet tall, sunnily banal in his chit-chat and loudly insisting on his own fluffiness/harmlessness (‘I’m just a crazy eccentric artist!’), he appears able — on the evidence presented here — to reduce a self-possessed woman to a state of romping nudity in about five minutes flat.
“Andrew’s great!” says his model Iris, splayed cheerfully across a yacht going round and round in New York Harbor. “He’s bubbly, he’s fun, he’s silly!” Well, yes he is. He has to be. If he weren’t, he’d be a pornographer. Einhorn’s whole indecently frivolous enterprise, in fact, is an offence against the terrible gravity of porn. And porn will have its redress: Einhorn takes another of his models into the studio of Sirius fuck jock Bubba the Love Sponge for an on-air photo shoot and the atmosphere is suddenly dense with humorless carnality. “Fuck,” grunts Bubba, his crew around him like a gang of caged, priapic bouncers, “look at them titties. I’ll beat off to that tonight, I’m telling you.” The pull of the Porn Star — like the Death Star, only worse — is strong here, the groan of its tractor beams. ‘Do you like getting your asshole licked?’ asks Bubba. Will Einhorn defend his naked happy girl? No chance. “Bubba was really nice,” he burbles post-show. “He has his job to do, I guess.”
Bubba’s a pig, and porn is ugly, but porn stars themselves are deserving of the highest respect: they are the moral hygienists of our age, and they should all be millionairesses. So I was pleased to see that Chanel St James, one of the quartet of hardworking porn stars featured in Fox Reality’s recently concluded My Bare Lady, has made herself a pile: she lives in a Scarface mansion with some nutter from the WWF and their backyard is a stockade of royally gleaming Hummers. The show’s evil-genius producers sent Chanel, along with Nautica Thorn, Kirsten Price, and Sasha Knox, to London to be groomed for a theatrical appearance on a “prestigious West End stage,” hacking their way through bits of Oscar Wilde, the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and so on.
