Well, in honor of Halloween, I did an interview with Mediaite’s Rachel Sklar (who hates horror with a vengeance) trying to explain the appeal. There is much more to say on this topic (and of course I’ll be saying it in the future — I have a blog, after all). But for now, check out our interview, as well as a slideshow of my Top 10 favorite scary flicks.

I’m not a climate expert by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t have a PhD in geosciences or atmospheric chemistry, I can’t do regression analysis to save my life, and I couldn’t build a climate model if you held a rocket launcher to my head. But I know enough to listen to the people who know a crapload more about this stuff than I do. If you’d like to do the same, go here. Or here. Or here.

Update: To read a lengthy and well-reasoned counterargument by Dubner, click here.

It’s tough to have any kind of rational conversation about porn. People (aka “certain women and/or religious types”) love to leap on it as some Dworkin-esque symbol of universal evil. For women who are not involved in the adult film industry, taking a pro-porn stance is bound to get you pummeled with the “bad feminist” label. Even Christie Hefner, one of the best examples of a powerful and successful businesswoman who took a company from a man and turned it into a moneymaking juggernaut, is getting flak for essentially not shutting down her family’s business in the name of female solidarity. (Uhh, guys? You really think Playboy is porn? Have you been on the Internet lately??)

The thing is, as we’ve discussed before, men like sex. A lot. They want to have it most of the time. And it’s a good thing for our species that they do. The logical extension of this is that men also like porn. And the larger point is that this preference is what it is — it’s ingrained in around 50% of humankind. It’s not going away.

So whether or not it’s “evil” or “sinful” or “degrading” isn’t really worth fighting about — we’ll never agree, and the conversation will never move forward. As such, there’s a fundamental peace that women (myself included) can make with What Men Are — and something tells me that once we’ve hit that Porn Acceptance Nirvana, everyone with a Y chromosome will start breathing a lot easier.

Now if you want to get into a debate about this type of porn being more degrading than that type of porn — well, no thanks. I mean what do I look like, some kind of devil-worshiping pervert who watches this stuff? (Don’t answer that.)

When you break it down, the statement has plenty of nuanced meaning: “We don’t know how to handle conflict.” “We don’t know how to tell women the truth since we’re afraid of pissing them off.” “We don’t know how not to be selfish.” But mostly what they’re saying is “We will do just about anything for sex. Including get rich and famous. And once we do achieve something that gets us laid, we will take advantage of it as much as possible. It is what it is. There’s really no changing it. This is how we’ve evolved. Take it or leave it.” All this, handily encapsulated in three words.

Which is why I just can’t bring myself to get all that worked up about this Letterman thing (and the nonstop deluge of other sex scandals that hit the news). Was it sleazy and gross that he used his fame and position to create a personal office brothel? I guess. Was he causing pain by disrespecting and lying to the woman he was living with? Absolutely. (”Oh, but they weren’t married,” people say. If you’re financially and emotionally tied to someone, regardless of whether you’ve had blood tests and been to a justice of the peace, it hurts like hell when they screw around — trust me, I know.)

But at the end of the day, what’s the big deal? He did what men do, or what most of them say they want to do — he got himself rich and famous and ultra-charming and found he was desirable to women because of it, so he took full advantage. Some might call that stupidity or depravity, others might call it brilliance. All depends on your point of view. We can pass all the judgment we want — it won’t change the fact that there are millions of men dying for a chance to do exactly what he did.

Of course, thinking he’d never get caught — THAT was friggin dumb. Knowledge of the fact that actions have consequences: It’s really the key tenet of being an adult. This idea that you can bang half the women in your office and get away with it scott-free is severely out of touch with reality.

Then again, men ARE idiots — or so they tell me.

I listen to conversations. A lot. Hell, one of the reasons I live in this city is because it’s the perfect fix for my eavesdropping fetish. And I’ve learned that a hefty chunk of what passes for conversation in the human race is judgment. We talk nonstop about what other people are doing — who they’re marrying, who they’re sleeping with, what they’re eating, what they’re buying — as if it matters. Everything is assigned a judgment, be it right, wrong (usually wrong), good, bad, etc. — she’s not raising her kid right, he’s just using women, he’s not saving his money the way he should. As if there was some Great Universal Gauge in the sky that teetered back and forth over “Right” and “Wrong” for every possible action. Bullshit, right? But we act like it’s true.

The thing is, we do what we do. And whatever we do means we can’t do something else. For instance, I ate chocolate cake for dinner last night (to all the vegetable Nazis — you know who you are — save your judgment. Your disapproval won’t make a single Brussel sprout pass my lips). The fact that I ate chocolate cake means I cannot have eaten a steak. I cannot have eaten a salad. Or any other thing. It’s over. Done with. If I got married last night, I can’t go on a date with a new guy tonight. Or tomorrow. Everything we do erases the doing of other things. Economists call this “opportunity cost” — it’s one of the few concepts they get right (Sorry Cochrane.)

And it hurts. It hurts to lose options, and close doors, and eliminate possibilities, and make mistakes. It hurts for all those people who know that if only they’d signed a 30-year fixed mortgage for a higher rate instead of being talked into some “No income no asset” financial atrocity by a blood-sucking broker from Hell, they wouldn’t be losing their houses right now. But they did, and they are. Whether it’s right or wrong becomes less relevant — either way, it’s still happening.

And at some point hopefully we realize that at the end, there’s no winning in life. Even if you’re rich and white and have some fancy education and are surrounded by just-as-rich-and-fancy white people. Even if their TV is a bigger screen or more pixels or their children got into the snootier preschool. Even if you land the most attractive husband/wife and have the cutest wedding photos. We all fuck up, we all have the occasional misery and failure (some of us lots of failure — but that keeps life interesting), we all have moments of triumph (even if it’s just over waterbugs) and at the end of the whole game we all die. Whether it’s “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad,” it happens to everyone. Even the billionaires.

But in the meantime, I’m gonna eat me some friggin chocolate cake.

And so your work, which once existed, is now gone. Poof. No more. Sort of like all those lawyers who specialized in derivatives. Or everyone at Enron.

It happens a lot for writers — a friend of mine covered both the Democratic and Republican conventions last year for Playboy.com, only to find that all of her work had been exorcised from the site to make room for more nudie pics (since Lord knows there aren’t enough of those on the Web). And it happened with a series of movie reviews I wrote for Radar Magazine’s website. Alas, the mag went under, and the review were lost. Except in my hard copies (yah for Microsoft and zip drives), which I’ve been re-posting on this blog under their original dates.

So subscribers, that’s why you’re getting constant emails about new posts that don’t exist. If you have any desire to read these phantom reviews, click here. And if you’re pissed at all the annoying emails, click here.

So look around, see what you think. And if you have any comments/suggestions/rants about how this or that button doesn’t work, shoot me a line.

The blog goes on.

UPDATE: The witty and smart Lindsay Robertson has the best analysis/psychological profile of Tucker Max I’ve seen so far. She nails it. To paraphrase Hyman Roth, “This is the business you’ve chosen.” And it’s not a pretty one. Still, there’s always the repentance story — he could dedicate the rest of his life to halting child trafficking in Malaysia or something.