Publishers Weekly says: "NPR host Sagal (Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me) offers a hilarious, harmlessly prurient look at the banality of regular people’s strange and wicked pleasures. In the wake of the late-1990s obsession with other people’s fun, notes Sagal, the hoi polloi have pursued their own indulgences, such as sex joints, swinging couples’ clubs, gambling and pornography. He describes the three necessary elements of vice that distinguish it from sin and give it that irresistible frisson: social disapprobation, actual pleasure and shame. A buttoned-up journalist and family man, Sagal visits the respective dens of inequity, interviewing the principals in the name of research while preserving his academic irony, e.g., during the shooting of a hardcore porn sequence for Spice TV, he remarks of the actors: I began to appreciate how very well Evan and Kelly did their work. Indeed, the dedicated hedonists, such as the regular joe habitués of San Francisco’s Power Exchange or the normal-seeming couples who frequent the Swinger’s Shack, face the same problems of meeting supplies, logistics, expense versus income, and time management as does any warehouse foreman. Sagal is a terrific, lively writer, and while some of his segments are repetitive and stretched, he is admirable in humanizing the participants."
I call Peter Monday evening. He’s on a plane about to take off. Here’s the audio from my tape recorder of death. It sounds like we’re talking underwater.
In his book, Peter calls me a "weirdly obsessive historian of porn, imagine James Boswell, if Boswell were a conflicted religious Jew who followed porn stars around rather than Samuel Johnson)…"
Yep, a real Torah weirdo, as Rabbi Aryeh Markman would say.
Peter: "I love to write what I don’t know."
Luke: "What surprised you in your research?"
Peter: "People ask me a lot. I was never, ‘Ohmigod, I can’t believe people do that!’ It was more a confirmation of what I expected, that all the people I talked to were basically people with all the same anxieties. I don’t know if you know Nina Hartley. You know a lot of these people. You’ve spent your life there, certainly your writing career. I had the experience that you’ve probably had a million times and it doesn’t even surprise you anymore that you talk to them and they turn out to be people. Nina will talk your head off about her family, her first triad marriage…"
"I kept getting interested in them as people."
"Whatever you think about them morally, practically they are a part of our economy. There’s no reason to shun anybody morally that has been capitalistically so accepted. We should treat these people as any other kind of professionals. We should demand humane working conditions… Not that this would be a career choice I’d recommend to my daughters."
"There’s an analogy to the way we think about gay people. There are probably a lot of people who think gay people are immoral. Good luck to you considering how ubiquituous and accepted gay people are in every facet of life. Everybody who thinks they’re bad is better off sitting in a corner and talking to themselves."
Luke: "Do you think human nature is basically good or bad?"
Peter: "Jeez. I don’t know if I am in any position to judge that. In the book, I try to avoid making any generalization about that. None of the people I spoke to were bad. They were pursuing their own dreams and capitalistic goals with an enviable determination and ambition that I can’t help admire. None of them were in the business of hurting anyone else unless they want to be hurt. If there is evil in the world, it ain’t the people I’m writing about. They’re not the problem."
"Out of all the experiences I had, I found the Power Exchange [San Francisco s-m club] the most depressing…because it was a scam. I saw a lot of guys and talked to… They were expecting something they weren’t going to get. People’s vulnerabilities to their own desires is a sad topic. There’s a certain sadness in all porn because it is about a fantasy most people will never attain. People spend too much time trying to attain that fantasy rather than getting on with their real lives."
