Monday, January 27, 2020

ONE TREE HILL's Sophia Bush: A Teen's Rack in Underwear


We were doing research for news of nympholepsy in the pop culture while listening to the Celeb News Ride [Subway] Home podcast (January 23, 2020) when Cait Raft related a story about Sophia Bush who claimed on Ashley Graham's Pretty Big Deal podcast (January 21, 2020) that the show runners of The CW's One Tree Hill (2003-2012) sexualized Brooke Davis - her 16-year-old character. 


Bush related to Graham:

"I fought a lot with the writers. I was sort of unaware of the power dynamics at play and I would just say things. I'd be like, 'I'm not doing this.'"

There was this sort of really weird thing. You look back at it, at the time, I didn't realize how inappropriate it was, but again, this was a long time ago. I remember my boss kept writing scenes for me to be in my underwear.

"And I was like, 'I'm not doing this, this is inappropriate. Like, I don't think this is what we should be teaching 16-year-old girls to be doing, and to be seeking validation this way.'"


Allegedly, Bush's boss replied, "Well you're not 16." (Bush was 21 when the first season aired.)

"And I said, 'But I'm playing 16, and if you want somebody to do it so badly, get somebody else to do it,'" 

"And he literally said to me, 'Well you're the one with the big f***ing rack everybody wants to see.' 

Frankly, we're flabbergasted that Bush was flabbergasted that her boss, the show runners and the writers wanted to use the allure of nymphets to get a rise out of the ratings. 

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Piper Weiss' YOU ALL GROW UP AND LEAVE ME: A Manhattan Private School Teen Obsessed with Men


In her New York Post piece, Piper Weiss summed up the story of Gary Wilensky well:

[56-year-old] Gary Wilensky was a popular tennis coach on the Manhattan prep-school circuit, well-liked by students and parents alike. Piper Weiss was a [14-year-old] student at Chapin, the all-girls private school on the Upper East Side. She was taking private lessons from Wilensky in 1993 when he attacked one of his students [17-year-old Jennifer Rhodes] in a failed kidnapping attempt and subsequently killed himself in a scandal that rocked the private-school world. In her new memoir, “You All Grow Up and Leave Me” [...] Weiss writes about the abduction and its aftermath.

But Weiss' memoir adds some intriguing and relevant details, one of which is hinted at in the subtitle: "A Memoir of Teenage Obsession". 

Weiss confessed in her memoir that not only was she obsessed with Wilensky, she was jealous of Rhodes:

I wanted it so much when he was alive, but even more now that he is dead. I know I'm not supposed to think this. I know he did a bad thing. There was a cabin with chains inside it. [...] I knew they had to do with sex or violence or both [...] He picked her and now she matters. Everyone wants to know what she has to say and how she feels because he chose her. She matters and I do not.

Weiss raised an issue that was similarly related in Anne Rice's Belinda. Weiss wrote:

The private in private school means just that. It is a class distinction. Ours is the world others want to expose, and it must be closely guarded. [...] Privilege is based on secrecy. Our parents know what others want to know, and so do we. Privilege comes with a certain trust that if broken results in the loss of such privilege [...] 

However, like Emily Jane Fox, who shared in Born Trump: Inside America's First Family, that Ivanka Trump and her 8th grade classmate flashed a hot dog vendor from the Chapin's third floor window, Weiss shared some secrets from the Manhattan private school world:

In the eighth grade [...] We took Latin and algebra. We read Romeo and Juliet. We drew on our legs [...] and cupped the soft underside of another girl's breast in the locker room.

Weiss wrote about her 9th grade science teacher. She shared that she was advised to flirt with him for a better grade, because it was easy if he deemed a private school coed to be a "sexual creature":

He has difficulty looking students in the eye, I think, out of fear that his thoughts might be heard. The year has just begun and it is already clear whom he favors - the girl with the see-through skin [...] When she speaks in class, he flares up with an allergic crush. Anything she says is very good

Everybody knows he has pets and they are an undeniable type - long-limbed girls with billowing horsetail hair who are soft-spoken [...] When I found out he was my teacher this year, a junior told me to flirt with him for a better grade. It is believed to be that easy if you are a sexual creature in his eyes [...] 


Piper Weiss
Just like the Manhattan prep school coeds in Nick McDonell's national bestselling novel Twelve, Weiss swallowed pills as a teen: 

My mother's bottle of Valium, for when she flies, is in a cosmetic bag underneath their bathroom sink. (I swallowed three.) 

All through my teen and twenties I would scavenge her room when she was away, rifling through cabinets for old prescriptions, jewelry boxes for stale weed [...]

Weiss got the part in a TV movie, but her mother wouldn't let her act, because: 

It was a movie about a man who loves a little girl. That sounded okay, I told her, because some men are nice and some little girls are wise and, I imagined, sometimes they could be friends. 

Apparently, one of the popular girls on the all-girl private high school campus had a "breast-first swagger" and Weiss shared a sexually charged rumor about her that was based on her short stature: 

There was a rumor among certain private school boys that I give blow jobs standing up. 

As if the private school kilts aren't short enough, Weiss and her classmates had a habit of making them shorter: 

Bianca and I are halfway to school and our rolled-up skirts are riding up our waists. [...] The teacher's ruler to our kilt hems, the assessments of our clothing as "too short" and "too tight."

On a related note, Weiss wrote that her classmates opined that their young bodies were currency: 

Our currency is our bodies. We have what others want, what they feel they deserve. [Consequently] [a]t school, we trade stories of being groped by strangers [...] [For example], [...] when a Rollerblader glided downstream along Lexington Avenue, stopping short to cup my chest [...] 

Weiss shared that her first obsession with men began with Jim Morrison: 

It was an obvious choice, an early teenage-cult follower move, spurred on by my newbie sexuality and Oliver Stone (i.e., The Doors (1991)). 

This "obsession," as my mother calls it, began when I was twelve, before the movie came out, I swear. I saw the real Jim perform on a PBS documentary my dad was watching and bought the paperback biography of his life, which is better than the movie. 

Weiss described giving a tip to Tony, a Serbian hairdresser, at European Hair Design: 

The slick act of sliding a tip to someone else is so out of my league, small, breast-budded me presenting a secret gift to a full-bodied man, something he needs that I have.

We already wrote a post about the Agnès b. Lolita backpack.


Piper Weiss @ 13 | A Year Before Gary Wilensky 

In the chapter titled "girl: x rated", Weiss described her teen voyeurism:

WHEN THE BOY IN THE WINDOW flicks his bedroom lights on and off, it means pay attention. [...] Then he puts down the blow-dryer, walks to the window holding himself with one hand. He waves with the other. 

His is the only penis I've ever seen, and it appears to be half an arm's length [...] He is instructional in the way he touches himself - as if he's teaching a group of students the techniques of a sport. It's all about form, control, consistency. 

I have seen this boy's most intimate body part countless times.

Subsequently, Weiss returned the favor: 

I've stuffed a hot pink satin bra from my sister's drawer with balled-up tissues and tightened the leather strings on my suede hot pants. [...] Across the alleyway, the boy flicks his lights fast and furious. A silent applause. 

Towards the end of the memoir, Weiss describes teens:

You are a walking fetish - a child in adult prosthetics.  You are a sensationalized news story. ("Shocking transformation: Underage teen sprouts sex organs.") [...] All around you, they purr and coo, they psst. Your body brings out the worst in them - fear for your safety, fear of their own perversions. You can read their minds. 

We know from Slut: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism and Sexual Violence that things happen between Manhattan private school girls and their doormen. Weiss described an encounter with her doorman:

Kilt rolled up at the waist, hair in a bun, frizz at my temples, homework half done and shoved in my book bag, I'm ready to go. I can feel it. [...] By the time I reach the lobby, one of the doormen, a young blue-eyed man with a goatee, who is too pretty [...] to look directly in the eyes, hands me the house phone.
"It's your mother."
"You forgot breakfast," she says. 

Lastly, Weiss describes a scene with Wilensky that relates to the title of her memoir You All Grow Up and Leave Me : 

"I won't leave you," I say. "I promise." His arms gather loosely around my back [...] 
"I love you, Gary," I say, because it's different from We love you, Gary [...]
"I love you, too," he says.
And then I get out of his care like a girl who has just been kissed. 

Monday, January 20, 2020

Woody's A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (2019): Amy, Gorgeous & Sexually Advanced, Performed Oral @ Bar Mitzvah


Woody Allen appears to have broken a record. A Rainy Day in New York (2019) contains not one, not two, not three but possibly four age-gap affairs:



After Gatsby (Timothée Chalamet) and Ashleigh (Elle Fanning), two Yardley college students, visit New York City, Ashleigh becomes infatuated with Roland Pollard (51-year-old Liev Schreiber), a famous film director, whom she is interviewing for the school's paper. Ashleigh said referring to Roland, "I can see why all the leading ladies fall in love with him."

Later in the film, Roland asked, "I want us to get to know each other Ashleigh. Would you consider coming with me to the South of France?"

That left Gatsby wondering, "What the hell is it about older guys that seem so appealing to women [...] All they are is [sic] decrepit. What's sexy about short term memory loss [...]"

Moments later, Gatsby ran into Chan (Selena Gomez), a fashion student at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, who has a date with a "[...] very handsome, very rich [and] very clever" dermatologist. In addition, Chan is Amy's younger sister, and Amy was Gatsby's gorgeous and sexually advanced Jewish high school sweetheart. 

Gatsby shared, "Amy was gorgeous and so sexually advanced. Word on Amy was she performed oral sex at a Bar Mitzvah. I think they should make that a part of every Jewish holiday [...] And what a great Hanukkah gift."

 

While accompanied by Ashleigh, Ted Davidoff (46-year-old Jude Law), a writer, gets into an argument with his wife who assumes that Ashleigh is Ted's 15-year-old concubine.


Subsequently, Ashleigh meets the actor Francisco Vega (39-year-old Diego Luna). Francisco asked. "Do you have a boyfriend?" To which Ashleigh replied, "He's a mere youth." Consequently, after a joint and some whiskey, the age-gap couple proceeds to have sex until Francisco's girlfriend arrives unexpectedly. 

In the end, Gatsby summed up the movie well when he said to Ashleigh, "You were loved spiritually, emotionally, and physically by three different gifted men."

Saturday, January 18, 2020

VICE's Teen Teleiophile Billie JD Porter: Old Men Are Greater Than Boys

Billie JD Porter

An anonymous reader sent us Billie JD Porter's Vice memoir-like post "Billie JD Porter's Half-Life Story" where Porter, a British journalist, model and documentarian, shared aspects of her life as a nymphet. Here are some relevant excerpts:

YOUTH (AGE 10–12)

Porter went to "[...] a fucking terrible school, EGA, nicknamed “Every Girl Available”. EGA had only just turned single sex in an attempt to try and improve the behaviour [sic], but it hadn’t worked." The separation of the sexes didn't work because "[...] lots of boys snuck into lessons."

INDEPENDENCE! (13)

"I started dating the son of Pinhead from Hellraiser (cool!!!!) and almost got fingered, but didn’t."

“COUNTER CULTURE” (14)

At 14, Porter related that she was "[...] hanging around and ["transient binge"] drinking Aftershock with emos on Camden Lock during the day [...]" 

SEX / PURPLE CONTACT LENSES (14–15)

When Porter was between 14 and 15, she realized that old men were greater than boys: "I lost my virginity to a socially inept drum ’n’ bass DJ who brought our pet goldfish to his sets at Fabric. It died, just like our love, when I fucked a more successful DJ and realised [sic] old men > boys." (Note: If you don't remember from math class, > is the greater than symbol.)


LOL-ITA (15)

Porter's confessed that her Lolita phase was her favorite:

"My precocious nature and snaggletooth started to attract lots of older guys. I spent a good year or so rinsing rich men for drinks and drugs with my friend Amy Green. We spent a lot of time in hotel bars hanging out with investment bankers from Dubai, forcing them to take us for rides in their yellow Ferraris and pay for our Champagne Shimmers. Sometimes we wound up smoking weed with Eurotrash and other times we found ourselves at awkward lock-ins at cocktail bars with lawyers. I remember one man wheezing in my ear, “You’re the fire of my loins” (he really said that). But for all the midlife crises we had to pretend to sympathise [sicwith and the Old Spice we had to inhale, that was probably my favourite [sic“phase” of life so far. Classy."

BECOMING A WOMAN (16)

Did you know that the age of consent in the UK is the same as it is across the Hudson in New Jersey.

"Sixteen! I could finally stop lying about my age and worrying about turning everyone I hook up with into a statutory rapist! Hooray! Although, once you’ve started lying about your age, it’s hard to stop while keeping your story straight [...]"

EXPLORATION (17)

When Porter was 17, she slept in the basement of a New York City deli. Why? She wrote, "I lost my phone and had $50 to last three weeks."




PRIME OF MY LIFE, M8 (18)

Porter wrote: "I’d travelled [sica bit. I had a short-lived television career under my belt [...]" Porter wasn't specific, but we're assuming that she was referring to her stint as the 18-year-old host of UK's The Joy of Teen Sex (Channel 4 [UK])




Sunday, January 12, 2020

"The New York Review of Books" & Meek's TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME: Exchanging Teen [Nymphet] Wives


We have more sources than we can keep up with and consequently, we have not used The New York Review of Books as a source - until now. 

We have a free subscription and only ten pages into our first issue we read of a review of James Meek's To Calais, in Ordinary Time where:

"It is 1348, Berna has stolen a book from her father's library, and now she is getting the gardener to cut her a rose from the grounds of their manor house in Gloucestershire [...] Her father is forcing Berna, who is fifteen, to marry a man of fifty. In exchange, Berna's father will be gifted the groom's daughter as his new young wife."


Saturday, January 11, 2020

SQUARE PEGS: "Out of Control" Jewish Teens, Drugs, & DEVO Musicians


We read about Anne Beatts in Jen Chaney's New York Magazine (January 6-19, 2020) piece "Anne Beatts Was Always More Interesting Than John Hughes". Chaney related that "Beatts got her start by working at National Lampoon [...]" And "[s]he was also a member of the original writing staff of Saturday Night Live (SNL)  [...]" Eventually, Beatts left SNL and created and produced Square Pegs - a CBS teen situation-comedy starring 17-yea-old Sarah Jessica Parker. 

Chaney made two relevant reverences: "[...] a New Wave-themed bat mitzvah [episode] that featured the actual band Devo performing "That's Good." and "[...] a 1984 TV Guide expose titled "Anatomy of a Failure: How Drugs, Ego, and Chaos Helped Kill Square Pegs" [...] [after one season (1982-1983)]."

The Cast of Square Pegs & Devo
Those references led us to Gwen Ihnat's AV Club article "Behind-the-scenes chaos derailed Square Pegs’ new-wave promise" where she shared that: "[...] Square Pegs was billed as a show “about the problems, joys, and experiences of being young and in [Weemawee] high school” (Beatts based the series on her own adolescence) [...]"

Ihnat reported that Unlike Happy Days, Square Pegs' actors were actual teens and Ihnat opined that the bat mitzvah episode where Devo performed "That's Good" was "downright Shakespearean".


Ihnat linked to a Heeb magazine article that connected the show's teens, drugs and Devo:

When DEVO appeared on ’80s sitcom, Square Pegs (which starred Sarah Jessica Parker), they whipped everyone—from the censors to the actresses—into a frenzy. On the episode, the band headlines a “New Wave Bat Mitzvah.” Tame stuff, but behind the scenes—safe from the gaze of its teeny-boppin’ following—it was pretty wild.

“The girls were out of control—they were doing drugs and they were making out and they were coming on to us in a big way,” says Gerald V. Casale, DEVO bassist/synthesizer player. The musician vaguely recalls doing coke with Jami Gertz and SJP in the talent trailers. 

“They might have been 15 or 16, but in their heads they were already 40. I don’t think there was a virgin on the set, except maybe a couple of the guys,” he adds.

He [34-year-old Casale] had the hots for [17-year-old] Jami Gertz, who played [14-year-old] Bat Mitzvah girl Muffy Tepperman. “Why didn’t I do something about that?” he says.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait": An Enthralling Young Bride


Chelsea Hodson made a reference to Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962) in Tonight I'm Someone. And Godard made a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait". 


Here's the Wikipedia plot summary:

The tale begins with an injured narrator [...] seeking refuge in an abandoned mansion in the Apennines. The narrator spends their time admiring the paintings that decorate the strangely shaped room and perusing a volume, found upon a pillow, that describes them.

Upon moving the candle closer to the book, the narrator immediately discovers a before-unnoticed painting depicting the head and shoulders of a young girl. The picture inexplicably enthralls the narrator "for an hour perhaps" [...] The narrator eagerly consults the book for an explanation of the picture [...]

The book describes a tragic story involving a young maiden of "the rarest beauty". She loved and wedded an eccentric painter who cared more about his work than anything else in the world, including his wife.

The painter eventually asked his wife to sit for him, and she obediently consented, sitting "meekly for many weeks" in his turret chamber.

The painter worked so diligently at his task that he did not recognize his wife's fading health, as she, being a loving wife, continually "smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly".

As the painter neared the end of his work, he let no one enter the turret chamber and rarely took his eyes off the canvas, even to watch his wife.

After "many weeks had passed," he finally finished his work. As he looked on the completed image, however, he felt appalled, as he exclaimed, "This is indeed Life itself!" Thereafter, he turned suddenly to regard his bride and discovered [...]

And here's a link to the short story.

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Hodson's TONIGHT I'M SOMEONE ELSE: A Sexually Explicit [Pre] Teen


Along with two stacks of other paperbacks, Ashleah Gonzales (@ashleahelena) gifted Kendall Jenner Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson. The green post-it on the paperback reads: 

THIS BOOK 
This is my FAVORITE BOOK! 
you Should Start here!


Here's part of Amazon's description of Hodson essays:

From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing.

Here are the relevant excerpts:

Hodson shared that when she went to an interview for a $8 per hour filing job, the Russian man, with a heavy accentasked, "You don't mind if I make massage?" Then "[...] he picked up the phone and began making an appointment. He put the phone on speaker and looked into my eyes as he asked the receptionist for the youngest masseuse they had."

Hodson wrote that when she was 12, she played Purple Moon, a computer game about navigating middle school. In addition, Hodso visited the game's online message board that "[...] attracted young girls who played the game, so men also joined the site with girly usernames and talked to me about sex." Hodson admitted that she wasn't repelled by the erotic messages, that she loved them and that her posts were sexually explicit: "I was not repelled by the messages: in fact, I loved them [...] I remember being as explicit as the men were being [...]"

Like a number of teen girls, Hodson and her middle school friends had a major crush on a member of a boy band. Hodson's crush was on Brian of the Back Street Boys. But the age gap between teens and members of boy bands isn't always obvious. Hodson wrote:

I knew how famous they were, and that they were in their twenties while we were only thirteen, but it's hard to explain how close they felt. I filled an entire wall with magazine photos of the Backstreet Boys, and I looked at them with such focus and for such long periods of time that it became like a prayer. It was the first time in my life that I remember feeling physical side effects of longing --- I preferred to ache than to feel nothing at all [...]

When Hodson was 17, she invited Tyler, a college-aged lead-singer in a local band, to her house while her parents were out of town:

[...] Tyler rubbed his jeans against my jeans like someone lighting a hundred matches in a row. I closed my eyes and came, and then I asked Tyler if he wanted to go ahead and take my virginity. He said, I'd just feel too bad, and I didn't ask again.

There was another Chelsea at Hodson's high school who: "[...] lured boys into her bedroom by saying, I want to show you something. [...] She was beautiful enough that the boys would have gone into her room even if she didn't have a line, or if her line was a murder threat, but there each of my friends went, one by one, disappearing into the other Chelsea.


Hodson met Bianca, a blonde 13-year-old, at beach camp on Catalina Island.  Bianca was "effortlessly cool". Her favorite movie was Welcome to the Dollhouse: "So then he [Brandon, a middle-school bully] says to her [eleven-and-a-half-year-old Dawn], three o'clock, I'm gonna rape you, Bianca said laughing." And "What's under your towel anyway, Will [a fellow camper]? Bianca asked, and added, Chelsea's never seen a dick; let her see it." 

After camp ended, Hodson regretted not having a teen lipstick lesbian affair with Bianca: "I wish I could say Bianca and I traveled through the night and the tall grass, desire clearing our path, stronger than a machete. I wish I could say we held hands or kissed or touched in some way as soon as we were alone."


Lastly, Hodson referenced Der Fan, the 1982 German film, where "[...] Simone is a high school girl who falls in love with a famous pop star, known to the world only as R." 


Interestingly, Tonight I'm Someone Else showed up in a stack of books in the last scene of
the last episode of Netflix's You (season 2).



And Kendall Jenner reading the essays was featured in New York Magazine's Approval Matrix (January 6-19, 2020).