A young woman I’m acquainted with just started a Facebook group dedicated to outing her ex boyfriend as a lying cheating bastard. It’s called “I hate *** ***” and has five members so far. Now the scorned lady seems to have some good reasons for being upset with the guy in question, also an acquaintance of mine. He went on an exotic vacation with an ex, lied about it, reunited with the current girlfriend and then posted pics of the steamy trip (clear water, bikini, frolicking) on, you guessed it, Facebook.

She explains:

So, look I know this group is ridiculous and immature and really classless, but I just cannot get over how unfairly this ended. I am over ****, I’m just not over the disrespect, you know?

You don’t have to actually hate *** to join this group cause let’s face he is pretty adorable and he is pretty great to go to a party with.

The only intention of this group is that *** maybe has to endure a couple of awkward conversations. Like what if a bunch of people went up to *** and were like “You got [scorned lady] pregnant? What the fuck?” That would be a pretty fun conversation.

Anyway, yeah, I think there is beauty in the breakdown and I kinda’ just want to see what life is like if I live totally impulsively. Good things come from bad situations right? And, besides I am about as dramatic as it gets anyway. Me and Britney…

Yeah, well. I think only bad things can come from this situation. It isn’t very nice and it could lead to even less nice developments, for *** and the rest of us. If I were a lying, cheating bitch, I certainly wouldn’t want to be called out on the internet. What about false accusations? Maybe *** is really innocent. I think this is the bad ending I feared from another Facebook group scandal in Portland, Ore. My friend Beth wrote an awesome story about a group, called “Morgan Shaw-Fox is a Piece of Shit Rapist.” It concerned a student at Lewis & Clark college, who several people suspected of being a piece of shit rapist. Problem was, they didn’t go to the police first. Some of my friends thought the group was a good idea, a viable choice in a society where women’s claims of rape often don’t stand up in court. And that’s a good point. But I really, really think the whole rule of law thing is still more important. Right?

Kudos to the New York Times for digging into Spitzer prostitute Ashley Alexandra Dupré’s MySpace page and coming up with this gem:

On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.”

But the Times missed the real draw of Dupré’s site: the user comments. What do you say when your online acquaintance is revealed as a prostitute? Whatever it is, it’s probably in all caps. The highlights:

Read More “My Deepest Sympathies Following Your Being Outed As A Prostitute” »

You may have heard of D.C.-based freelance writer (and former City Paper writer/editor) Charlotte Allen: She wrote that thing about how women are (spoiler alert) “kind of dim.” Needless to say, a lot of people didn’t like it. Yesterday, Allen was kind enough to meet up with me to talk about the Post piece, the Clinton campaign, and why women are good at tending for the weak and the old (sign me up!).

Here are some excerpts:

CP: You’ve certainly gotten quite a response from the piece. What do you think of the responses?

CA: Well, I thought [Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell's] position was essentially ridiculous. She was saying that women are such frail flowers that nobody can make a joke about them, including other women, which is just absurd. You know, we’re half the population.

Read More “Charlotte Allen Interview” »

Did Spitzer do high-priced hooker in D.C.? From NY Times story: “The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13….Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.”

In this week’s Show & Tell, I profile Jae Ellis (pictured) and Allen Bickoff, childhood friends who overcame broken engagements, college sexual dry spells, and crippling “nice guy syndrome” to become Reston’s resident romance experts. Ellis and Bickoff are co-founders of AskRomeo.com, a dating and relationship advice outfit that helps (so far, only heterosexual) men and (yes, sometimes even) women find dates through group seminars, private coaching sessions, and, in extreme cases, week-long sleepovers in the pair’s Reston apartment.

Though AskRomeo.com markets its services to both men and women, their advice tends toward the masculine–dragon-slaying, fire-fighting, Top Gun masculine. Indeed, 80 percent of AskRomeo’s one-on-one clients are men. “Being men, a lot of the stuff that we put together comes from a male perspective,” says Bickoff. “We were never women that needed help, so we don’t know what that transformation is like.”

Michael Karlan, whose social networking site Professionals In The City partners with AskRomeo.com to provide its relationship courses to local singles, agrees that AskRomeo.com “tends to be a more male-centered event.” But Bickoff says they’re working on it: Bickoff, Ellis, and their female instructors are currently conducting research for a female-specific curriculum.

A preview, after the jump:

(Photo by Darrow Montgomery)

Read More “Are We Not Men? We Are AskRomeo!” »

Stetson’s Bar and Grill on U St. is covered with these ads for LifeStyles condoms (up-and-coming frat house decorators can click for a free poster). The ad series features pictures of half-naked ladies along with tags that describe each girl’s particular “lifestyle”: from “Spontaneous” to “Naughty,” “Impulsive” to “Ready-to-Go.”

These “lifestyles,” of course, suggest the way that the girls like to have sex. Fine. But they also, obviously, play off the name of the condoms, which is why the above ad, situated directly across from the toilet in Stetson’s upstairs bathroom, rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t mind that the girl with the undersized tanktop on the washing machine enjoys a dirty “lifestyle.” The implication that she enjoys a dirty LifeStyle, though, is significantly less sexy.

For this week’s paper, I wrote a story on the Sex Workers’ Art Show, a touring cabaret-style showcase that brings prostitutes, strippers, and porn actors off the pole, out of bed, and onto the stage. The show presented a twist on the age old question: What is (sex) art?

In the story, I quote porn performer Lorelei Lee, who says that while filming porn can feel like working the assembly line or flipping burgers at a fast food joint, it can also achieve meaningful expression. For Lee, porn DVDs can be art.

Fine. But the Sex Workers’ Art Show seems to want all sex industry wage earners to be considered “sex artists.” I’d submit that they are “sex artisans.” Sex workers are skilled in their craft. That doesn’t mean they’re creating art, necessarily. As Lee suggests, sex workers can be artists. But factory workers and hamburger makers can be artists, too.

Where does one draw the line between sex art and sex craft? Ponder that while checking out our NSFW audio slideshow of burlesque performer and Sex Workers’ Art Show participant Dirty Martini devouring money and then pulling it out of her ass. Naked.

I couldn’t help but notice the photo in the Post of the photographer at City Paper. It’s meta Darrow! Can you spot him??

Also noticeable: It’s harder than a rubber dildo to cover the Sex Workers Art Show and still abide by the vanilla rules of a mainstream newspaper. To wit:

“At the same time, it is very much about, well . . . that word.” (Translation: fucking)

“One performer, dancing to ‘God Bless the U.S.A.,’ pulls a chain of dollar bills from a place money should never be saved.” (Translation: her asshole)

Stay-tuned for the full-on, noneuphemized version from CP’s Show & Tell columnist, Amanda Hess, who has done her post-show homework about the artistes.

There’s an interesting debate over at Jezebel about the subject of this week’s cover story, Ameenah Franks, a young mother from DC who got really good at stealing from highly-secured federal office buildings. She charmed her way into places like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and stole cash from people’s purses and desk drawers. Franks told me she chose to steal because she wanted to keep her family together. She had a husband and, by age 20, four children.

Some of the commenters think she was recklessly irresponsible for having so many children, and make caustic comments like: “another case in favor of forced sterilization.” That really took me by surprise. Obviously, Franks might have had an easier life if she didn’t have children so young. But teen pregnancy isn’t just about personal responsibility. It’s about culture and education and a whole complicated stew of factors that don’t necessarily make sense if you were brought up knowing you’d have a real shot at a stable life. Think how hard it would have been for her, living very much on the periphery, to have gotten birth control pills. And she was married. Doesn’t Bush think marriage + babies = the cure to poverty?

One thing we cut from the article was the story of how Franks first got pregnant. I think it says a lot about the state of sex ed in this country.

When Franks first started dating her future husband, she told him she didn’t want to have sex until after they got married. But she was in love with him and, like anyone, wanted physical intimacy. So she let him rub his penis against her vagina until he came, never letting him go in all the way. She thought it was safe. She didn’t realize she was pregnant until after he’d left for boot camp.

Franks was obviously smart, but she made decisions that seem pretty stupid from the outside. I think the interesting thing here is the fact that someone can have the intellectual capacity to succeed and still fail. If you focus only on her personal responsibility for screwing up, you miss all the other confusing, argument-starting stuff, like education and health care and poverty and race.

I think it also comes through in the story that Franks didn’t steal just to support her family. She got a thrill out of being good at something. Doesn’t make it right in any way — but it is interesting.

This morning DCBlogs notes that Amazon has announced its list of the “20 Most Romantic Cities in America,” based on sales of books about sex and relationships, as well as sales of romance novels. Alexandria is on top, while Arlington comes in at number nine; D.C. is number 11.

Maybe it makes sense that Salt Lake City is dead last on Amazon’s list, but it’s hard to believe that Kenny G’s hometown is the “sexiest city in America”–all it means, of course, is that Ann Arbor sells a lot of bodice rippers. I realize I’m asking for it by using that term–ages back I wrote a story on romance novelists, and was told that “bodice ripper” is a much-frowned-upon term. More disappointing, “wallbanger” doesn’t mean what you probably think it does.

Cheap headline. But am I the only one who thinks there’s something strangely sexy about the language surrounding this whole stimulus bill?

I have been out of middle school for a solid decade, but I still couldn’t get through this Post article without smirking. I mean, we have President Bush describing “arduous, late-night negotiations” between House members (one of whom is named Boehner) concerning a “stimulus package” which Bush insists is the “right size”? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “cautioned against slowing down the process,” resulting in “reaching agreement so quickly”? Then, the negotiations ended with “Paulson, Pelosi and Boehner [meeting] over breakfast at 7 a.m. Wednesday”?

Sexy!

Let’s hear it from Pelosi:

“I can’t say that I’m totally pleased with the package, but I do know that it will help stimulate the economy,” Pelosi said. “And if it does not, then there will be more to come.”

Tee Hee!

Note: Video is two days late due to 48-hour news cycle.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty continues to endear himself to the District’s civil service, today announcing that nine government employees have been fired for looking at Internet porn at work.

Fenty made the announcement this afternoon at One Judiciary Square, one of the District’s largest concentrations of municipal employees, flanked by City Administrator Dan Tangherlini, Acting Attorney General Peter Nickles, Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra, and Department of Human Resources Director Brender L. Gregory.

“This behavior isn’t just egregious,” Fenty said. “This behavior is reprehensible.”

The nine employees fired represent four city agencies: the Office of Property Management, the Office of Contracting and Procurement, the Office of the Attorney General, and the Child and Family Services Agency (who saw six employees fired recently in the wake of the Banita Jacks case). Fenty & Co. declined to release more details about the fired employees, citing likely appeals. Fenty did confirm, however, that the fired employees included both men and women.

One fired employee, according to figures released at the press conference, racked up 48,002 hits on allegedly pornographic sites during 2007. That works out to about 200 hits per business day. Besides the nine fired, 32 more were reprimanded in a more than a dozen other agencies, including the police department, the D.C. Public Schools, and the Executive Office of the Mayor.

Tangherlini said thresholds were determined as to how many hits warranted termination versus other forms of punishment. About 20,000 hits for the year was considered sufficient grounds for immediate firing, which represents about 100 hits per working day. “That seemed to be a logical cutoff,” he said. Anything over 20 hits a day, he says, represented “something that’s no longer possibly accidental” and required a lesser sanction.

And just who decided what was pornographic or not? Potter Stewart? Kundra told reporters that the District used the WebSense filtering program, which had been installed on about 10,000 of the District’s 30,000 total computers (which had apparently been logging sites but not blocking them), to determine which sites were pornographic or not. A definition listed on a graph posted at the press conference referred to sites “that display full or partial nudity in a sexual context but not sexual activity; erotica; sexual paraphernalia; sex-oriented businesses [such] as clubs, nightclubs, escort services” and sites that “depict or graphically describe sexual acts or activity, including exhibitionism; also, sites offering direct links to such sites.”

Kundra said that the District has had an acceptable-use policy for its computers in place since 1999 that bans accessing porn, among other things. Since the investigation began, he said, the District has purchased an additional 20,000 licenses to install WebSense on every government computer—no immediate word on what that costs—and the software has been set to block access to any explicit sites as of Jan. 2.

“We’ve set up this system so it will not happen again,” Tangherlini said.

Why just investigate porn? Nickles said that the cost of looking at other things, such as gambling or other banned personal uses, would have been more costly. “And I would suggest that one is more egregious that the other,” he said.

Nickles said there was no evidence that child pornography had been accessed.

The investigation, Fenty said, was kicked off in December after the Office of Property Management contacted the chief technology officer about an employee’s complaint concerning a co-worker’s porn use. The technology department then did a “detailed citywide forensic analysis” on the 10,000 computers that were running WebSense for the calendar year 2007. Those who were fired had their computers seized for a more in-depth investigation of their Internet use.

Exactly how much this hunt cost the District in money and man-hours was not immediately available. Will pass that on as soon as I get it.

UPDATE, 4:31 P.M.: The additional 20,000 copies of WebSense are costing the District $142,000. As far as how much the investigation cost, mayoral spokesperson Dena Iverson says that’s “hard to quantify,” given that the work was done in-house by OCTO’s security department. More info hopefully to come.

“Mayor Fenty Announces Administration Crackdown on District Employee Pornographic Internet Use”

At 2 p.m. Will report back soonest.

My friend Beth Slovic, at Willamette Week (where I used to work), just wrote an excellent piece on a Facebook fatwa launched by female students at Lewis & Clark College in Portland against an alleged rapist. Student Helen Hunter initiated the fateful encounter with Morgan Shaw-Fox, sending him a text and going over to his place, drunk. But the make-out session quickly got violent, Hunter said. She struggled against him, tried to get him to stop, he told her to “choke on it.” Hunter realized what had happened was wrong, but she didn’t know exactly what line it crossed, or how to deal with it. She described it as “gray rape.” Thanks a lot Laura Sessions Stepp.

So Hunter wrote an anonymous letter to the school newspaper, not naming her assailant, which quickly became the talk of the campus. Soon Shaw-Fox’s name got out. It turned out many other young women had had similar experiences, and I don’t know how you call them gray. But before anyone could file an official complaint, or a police report, students started a Facebook group outing Shaw-Fox as a rapist.

My first reaction is that this is the wrong way to go about things. I have this thing about due process. And I remember our historical tendency of accusing innocent men of rape when they’re, you know, the wrong color. But friends who’ve been victims of date rape say there’s no other solution. I’ve watched murder trials where the guy gets off and “everyone” knows they did it. At least in those cases, someone filed charges.