(Advisory: Today's installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)
IN THE '80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.
You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.
Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize "arty" camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.
The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of "Fo' mo', three mo', two mo,' and one. Take it down.")
While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.
Later, Harris went on to producing softcore "erotic" videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.
Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won't work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful 'n' sexy.
Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris's nudie videos, "Not all pussy was created equal."
To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris's supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they're doing this because they don't want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris's video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.
(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris's other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on "Ron's Angels" and also on Harris's more explicit sites.)
Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. "Choosing eggs from beautiful women," Harris vows, "will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children's children, for centuries to come."
Particularly if they're willing to appear in "tasteful" photo shoots called "Girls Who Love Girls." (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.
Maybe Harris is a better showman than I'd given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.
IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company's just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel--sorta. On the cable system's schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I'm getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions--particularly during commercial breaks....
MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?
ELSEWHERE:
- You had to know egg-auction parody sites would quickly show up....
- This fake sex-machine ad would be funny if I weren't suspicious somebody somewhere's trying to invent something like it for real (found by Bud)....
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