“The New York Times is aghast that Jenna Jameson’s memoir/self-help opus is successful and gloriously displayed in mainstream bookstores. (Never mind that Jameson shares authorship with former Times music writer Neil Strauss.) Janet Maslin sneers: ‘When it comes to displaying herself, Ms. Jameson had previously tried everything except her current maneuver: being planted right in the middle of the bookstore. Amazingly, a memoir that once would have won itself a plain brown wrapper can now be found beside books about Henry James.’ And ‘Book Babe’ Ellen L. Heltzel writes on Poynter Online: ‘Jameson, it turns out, is the queen of porn, a woman who has become rich and famous by doing on screen what most people reserve for the privacy of their bedrooms.’ It turns out she is the queen of porn?! That’s like saying, ‘I hear Susan Lucci is on a soap opera.’ While the mainstream and highbrow press may pretend that Jameson is an obscure cultural figure, the pornography industry racks up nearly $10 billion per year, equal to the annual domestic box-office receipts of all of Hollywood’s major film releases. Which means that Jameson, porn’s reigning celebrity, is a movie star on par with Gwyneth Paltrow. As Charles Taylor wrote in Salon, ‘This is the part of the review where I pretend to have to tell you, the reader, who Jenna Jameson is.'”
More here by Sacha Zimmerman in The New Republic. (I had posted the NYT review some days ago here.)