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Every week when I prepare for my radio show I come across several songs that I enjoy and can’t play on the radio. This week I happened to start listening to Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and heard “Flower” for the first time in several years. If you’ve heard it you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that “Flower” is one of the most angelically filthy songs ever recorded. It isn’t particularly sexy in the sense of being seductive at all. Rather, it is just shocking in the level of graphicness. It represents an incredibly liberated and powerful female sexuality that probably makes many people uncomfortable. Before Liz seriously sold out, she was the indie rock Lil’ Kim.

Download “Flower” by Liz Phair

I’ve been involved with college radio for 6 years and while the trademark of college radio is “dead air. . . um. . . dead air.” I’d like to think that I’ve still learned a little something about broadcast in that time. I don’t write this list because I think I’m doing things perfectly but because I’ve heard a lot of self-congratulatory and boring podcasts. So I’ve laid out the differences and similarities in podcasting and radio with some helpful tips that the old guard can share with the new.

Why disc jokeys have it easier than podcasters:

Captive Audience. The morning shock jock can piss people off and they will keep listening because of a lack of alternative choices. Podcast listeners do not need to be so forgiving. Unless you have carved out a niche incredibly well and have a huge market for what you are doing, your listeners are pretty mobile. Think of them like the friends that came to see your crappy college band (the theramin was a mistake) play at the student union when you were 19 - you can’t go all rock star on them. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to censor yourself from expressing controversial opinions. It means you need to censor yourself from sounding like a jackass.

Decent audio equipment. Only the most serious podcasters bother to invest in a fraction of the equipment that is available to radio DJs. That said, the best thing you can invest in is a halfway decent microphone perhaps tied with decent audio editing software. I’ve been doing my podcast without either (which explains why it isn’t good).

Legitimacy. It isn’t easy to get an FCC license. There is a certain assumption from listeners that if you are on the radio, you have some honest claim at being there (listeners assume wrong, of course, but this is about perception). Not so with podcasting. It is pretty painfully obvious that anyone with a microphone and some bandwidth can start a podcast. When the burden of proof is on you, you’ll have to do something special to keep your listeners. You’ll have to do something even more special to get high profile interviews.

Why podcasters have it easier than disc jokeys:

Fuck the FCC. FCC guidelines on obscene and indecent material go beyond the “7 Dirty Words” and cover all sorts of fun things that a radio DJ might want to talk about, notably sex. Podcasters don’t have to pay a damn bit of attention to this. And they aren’t!

Niche markets. Podcasts will come and go with the fads that inspire them. Some of the more popular ones deal with very narrow interests. The eBay lesson is being repeated time and time again on the internet and podcasting is the lastest instance of it. You got some shit, someone else wants that shit. Attract a wider audience by making sure that your shit isn’t shitty. Although, there still isn’t a coprophagia podcast that I’m aware of. . .

Personality. Being an internet star is all about a cult of personality (Hi, Mom!). Podcasters can gather devoted minions through their personality in a way that even the most devoted jocks can’t. There is an intimacy that is available in podcasting that can’t (and maybe needn’t be) reached in radio. That said, meglomania isn’t sexy and the best podcasters come off as gracious, confident, and calm. Steer clear of self-important diatribes and remember that no matter how many hits you get, you’re not going to be a household name anytime soon.

Editing. Podcasting isn’t live and that is a blessing. Podcasters get to write scripts, record and re-record, and edit their shows into slick packages. Beware of making it too slick or fretting over tiny mistakes. Treasure the natural cadences of human speech. But still become familiar with a decent audio editor. You don’t have to be going for professionalism to be concerned with quality.

Things I tell brand-new DJs that many podcasters could stand to learn:

Monitor your broadcast. Get some headphones and wear them while you record. This ensures that levels are constant and gives you a chance to hear what the mic is picking up instead of what your voice sounds like in your bedroom. The number one way that DJs I supervise make on-air bloopers is by failing to wear headphones, you’ve been warned.

Beware the co-host. The banter between two clever, intelligent people can be very charming and rivetting, especially for those two people. But, make sure you take a constant inventory of your conversations with a co-host. Is this a conversation that others want to overhear? Are you really that funny? Are your inside jokes going to fly for a listener that doesn’t know you? When I was Station Manager I actively discouraged co-hosting among new DJs because doing it well is so challenging.

Make a pop filter. I’m not an audio engineer nor am I a perfectionist. However, if you have trouble with your plosive consonants, grab an old pair of pantyhose and after you finish sniffing them, you can craft them into a neat home-made filter.

Don’t beg for attention. Until I started listening to podcasts, I thought 18-year-old DJs were the worst attention whores in the world. However, hearing people from all walks of life beg for emails, phone calls, votes, and frapprs has changed my opinion. Podcasters are more attention-starved than drag queens. And it is understandable. There is nothing wrong with wanting feedback on something you work hard on but please limit it to a few simple words, not the extended spastic whine-fest that many podcasters engage in.

If you are starting a podcast because you always wanted to be a DJ, I welcome you to the fold. Rest assured that podcasting is 10 times nicer than DJing but also much harder work. Enjoy your global audience and freedom. However, avoid slipping between the cracks and becoming more background noise. There a many more bad podcasts out there than good and the independently produced ones that are excellent are even more rare. Rise to the top by asking questions before you guess wrong and going in with a real plan. Or record yourself having orgasms, then you can break all of the rules.

I’ve been so busy car shopping the past few days that I completely forgot to announce that I will be doing a radio interview about my podcast, Bedroom Radio, tomorrow. At 2:00PM EST, I’ll be doing a live phone interview on WNYC 93.9 FM in New York during their Soundcheck music talk show. The theme of the show is podcasting and I’ve been asked to represent the sex and music angle. I’m pretty excited and hope that you’ll get a chance to tune in. If you’re in New York, tune your radio (the radio is that thing you hear in your car before the iPod takes over) to 93.9 FM. If you’re anywhere else in the world (and near an internet connection) you can listen to the webstream. WNYC also podcasts their shows, so I’ll be sure to post a link when the archive is available.

Here is a link to the specific episode notes!

How many more times does this have to happen before people realize that women can also be sexual predators? Maybe I’m insane but over the last few years there seems to be an epidemic of teachers fucking their students. The response from most people seems to be to laugh it off (and many men mention that they wish they had a teacher like that.) Would anyone think this was funny if it were happening to 12 and 13-year-old girls?

Recently, Debra LaFave’s case was dropped by the prosecutor even though she admits her guilt. The article is full of maudlin bullshit about her faith in God and this being a bump on her Christian path. The most interesting thing about that link is that on the right side of the page is a CNN poll asking this question:

“Did Debra Lafave benefit from a double standard on sex crimes?”

90 percent of people say yes. This isn’t a political issue. This isn’t about feminism or mysogyny. This is about our standards of sexual misconduct and expectations of men and boys to be always already sexualized.

I grappled this week with a difficult to stomach passage in Foucault’s History of Sexuality, those who are familiar with it will remember the “curdled milk” story, I’ll post the paragraph for the benefit of the others:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simpleminded, employed here then there, depending on teh season, living hand to mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned into authorities. At the border of the field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins around him; for at the very edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicholas, they would play the familiar game called “curdled milk.” So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intoleracne but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. The thing to note is that they went so far as to measure the brainspan, study the facial bone structure, and inspect for possible signs of degenerescence the anatomy of this personage who up to that moment had been an integral part of village life; that they made him talk; that they questioned him concerning his thoughts, inclinations, habits, sensations, and opinions. And then, acquitting him of any crime, they decided finally to make him into a pure object of medicine and knowledge - an object to be shut away till the end of his life in the hospital at Mareville, but also to be made known to the world of learning through a detailed analysis. One can be fairly certain that during this time period the Lapcourt schoolmaster was instructing the little villagers to mind their language and not talk about all these things aloud. But this was undoubtedly one of the conditions of enabling the institutions of knowledge and power to overlay this everyday bit of theater with their solemn discourse. So it was that our society - and it was doubtless the first in history to take such measures - assembled around these timeless gestures, these barely furtive pleasures between simple-minded adults and alert children, a whole machinery for speechifying, analyzing, and investigating.

I know that at first reading, this seems like a contradiction. Here I am concerned about the exploitation of children and I am quoting an author that comes off as irresponsibly cavalier on the issue. The point here, though, is not whether Foucault rhetorically trivializes child abuse (he does) and whether or not that is a cheap shot (it is in many ways). The purpose of this passage for me is to question our deepest assumptions about sex in society. The assumption that Foucault questions is about the sexuality of children and how we pathologize deviants like the village dimwit. Reading this passage isn’t easy, it makes you angry, and then that anger makes you realize just how much you’re steeped in the ideologies of sexuality that our society proscribes.

The particular one that is upsetting me lately is that men cannot be victimized and if they are it is certainly not by other women. Do you think for a moment that these cases are an anomoly? Certainly, they must be symptoms of a much larger problem. I don’t want to use hysterical language or point to an epidemic that probably doesn’t exist but I also don’t see the point of burying our heads in the sand. Women can be child molestors and sexual agressors and violent criminals just like any other human being. We are so used to thinking of women as victims that that is difficult to remember and regard that fact at its full weight.

This oversight is, in my opinion, the single biggest mistake of modern feminism. My feminism is about challenging gender roles and recognizing patriarchy as an ideology that every human operates within and is affected by. Feminisms have done a terrible job of incorporating men because of this shortcoming and everyone is still playing the same gender roles whether they want to or not.

I was flipping through an old diary of mine from high school and found this entry, a poem I wrote when I was 16-years-old. It is dated October 13th, 1998. I would still be a virgin for another 4 years.

I’ve never stared into my
    lover’s eyes
But his words caress my
    body - he plays me skillfully
    in deft hands
Standing under the hot

    water the idea of him
    sucks my nipples and
    strums my clit
I overflow
His sensuality pounds into

    me, the pure eroticism of
    him
I ache and spread my legs,

    arching my back
I cannot bridge the gap
Exhausted and so hungry
    I part for his touch
Only he can fulfill me
Then his last erotic words
    flash through my head
With my hands still behind
    my back I writhe beneath
    what is truly an “intellectual
    orgasm”

Nerve published a really bad story today. It isn’t bad in the grand scheme of things, but as erotica I’m not feeling it. Priapism by Robert Lopez is infuriatingly stylized, really to the point of sillyness. If you ever wanted to know what existentialist erotica (with a hint of pure absurdism) would look like, this is it:

The man has an erection and the woman is locked in the bathroom. The children are downstairs playing with toys. The dog is in the yard. The back door has been left open and the light in the hallway is on and so is the television in the living room. There is a roast in the oven. The kitchen table is set.
The man loses his erection. The woman emerges from the bathroom. She is clothed.
It’s gone away.
I was in the bathroom.
What were you doing in there?
I was doing what I do in there.
That again.
What’s gone away?

But, Nerve redeemed themselves with a link to this clever quiz, Sex or Something Else. I did terribly, perhaps you will fare better.