It Might Be a Thing

I went out to dinner tonight with friends. Our waitress was named Ryan, she came out to our table and took our drink orders, then returned with some sliced bread and a small cup of balsamic vinegar with olive oil poured on top of it.

"Does anybody else think that our server looks a little bit like Stephanie Swift?" I asked when Ryan had left to tend to another section.

The three adult American men at the table looked back at me blankly. "I don't know who that is," one remarked.

Stef interjected. "Is that a porn star?" she asked me. Stef is sharp like that, or probably just keyed into the fact that I only really know eight women and the rest all live in California's beautiful San Fernando Valley, getting increasingly obscene breast implants.

This puts me in an awkward situation. I was unaware that men, the target audience of the inquiry, do not universally know who these people I mention are. To add insult to injury, I had to instruct one of the dinner guests on the names to look out for on an upcoming trip to London that he was preparing to take: Sophie Howard, Lucy Pinder, Keeley.

How have we lost our way? Back in the day one girl would appear on the cover of the video and her name sold the tape. Nowadays we have, if you could call them such a thing, "ensemble" casts of girls in unrelated scenes. Gonzo has won the war on shelf space, and as a direct result of this, American porn is becoming industrialized, genericized, and interchangeable. That's sad in its own right, but it also means that the guy across the table from me doesn't even remember who the starlets from eight, nine, ten years ago are.

From now on, I'm going to cry when I masturbate. I'll need two tissues.