As you may know, Laurence Fishburne’s daughter Montana is releasing a porn movie in hopes that it will make her famous. Inspired by Kim Kardashian, who earned her celebrity via an accidentally (?) leaked sex tape, Montana Fishburne seems to be hoping for a career in reality television. We weren’t going to comment on this story, but someone sent us a link that we foolishly followed down the rabbit hole, and since we can’t unsee what was there, we’re going to dump it on you.

In short, we have to come down on Montana’s side: she could spend the next twenty years developing the chops to be a character actress, or an artist, or a novelist, but if she wants be a celebrity now porn is a surefire method. Since Morpheus, er, we mean Montana, understands that she probably can’t be a real Hollywood star without looking like Zoe Saldana and weighing 100 pounds, she boldly took a step that has made her known to tens of millions of people who had never heard of her just days ago. So she’s already pretty much proved her point, wouldn’t you say? Will she achieve her goal of Kardashian-like fame? Who can say? Is it a sign of cultural decay that people get famous this way? People have always gotten famous this way, as anyone who follows this site knows.

Personally, we could easily picture Fishburne in Pam Grier type roles, karate-chopping men in throat, starting with all the assholes calling her evil names in internet comment chains. In any case, you’ll find no phony morality here. We simply play our role as a cog in the machine. Montana Fishburne, with pure post-millennial pragmatism, had decided porn is her route to fame, and since we always post these kinds of photos, today is no exception. The imagery is courtesy of her partners at Vivid Video. Our work is done.

This golden issue of Confidential from August 1961 contains an article about the one and only Coccinelle, who was a French transsexual performer, almost forgotten outside her home country, but who set the world on fire fifty years ago. Born as Jacques Charles Dufresnoy, he adopted the stage name Coccinelle—Ladybird—in 1953 when he debuted at the nightclub Chez Madame Arthur. At the outset of his career, Coccinelle was a male cross-dresser, but in 1958 he underwent sex change surgery in Morocco with spectacular results, and her re-emergence onto the stage as a woman made her world famous. Adopting the persona of blonde bombshells like Mansfield and Monroe, she was able to parlay her status into film roles, and was also featured in a few shockumentaries, but it was on the stage that she shone, performing at some of France’s most exclusive clubs, including Le Carrousel and Paris Olympia.

Her fame was a controversial subject of course, if not a public obsession, and her marriages caused epic scandals, but also prompted the French government to legalize unions between trans- gendered participants. By 1989 Coccinelle had moved to Marseilles, where she headlined at the Cabaret Spitz. She was still performing there in April 2006 when she had a stroke. She died after three months of hospitalization, but over forty years she had carved out a successful career, made a difference politically and, at the forefront of her own small sexual revolution, helped scores of people in her exact circumstances. We’ll look for more information on the fascinating Coccinelle at our usual French sources and perhaps report back on her later. 

Here’s something you’ve probably never seen before and which we’re glad to say we’re posting for the first time on any website. They’re…well we aren’t really sure. But we think they’re advertising posters for a Japanese strip club in the Asakusa district of Tokyo, circa 1970s. Asakusa is one of the city’s main centers of geisha culture, but you’ll notice the posters don’t feature geishas, but western women, called “kinpathu (kinpatu)” or “blonde” on one poster, and “gaitin (gaijin)” on another. We also see the kanji for “sale” and “skin house” and that’s as far into this as we need to go to draw conclusions. For Americans, going to strip clubs has an unshakeable aura of sin clinging to it, but apparently in Japan, it’s kind of like going to Disneyland. At least, that’s the fun-loving feeling we get from the posters. We’ll ride the spinning teacups while you give the gaijin a try, and later we’ll all meet in front of the Magic Castle, ’kay? 

Well, we’re glad to see somebody finally went and put together a website of Tijuana bibles. The site is called tijuanabibles.org. Above you see six covers from their collection, and below is the entirety of a raunchy and racially charged Esther Williams bible entitled Get a Li’l Like the Fishes Do. We had doubts about posting it, but whenever we self-censor we end up kicking ourselves later, so this time we decided screw it. We consider ourselves mainly a history site, and censoring history is always a bad idea. Consider that a content warning. Anyway, Esther Williams was of course a famous swimmer who used her skills in an acting career, so the underwater theme of her bible is a play on her many aquatic roles. It was probably printed in the late 1940s, a time during which its IR content would have gotten the hood and noose crowd pretty riled up. But they would have been clueless whom to blame, because, as we discussed before, these American-made books may have been called Tijuana bibles for the sole purpose of misdirecting crusading citizens and curious authorities. For more examples of these little treasures, pay tijuanabibles.org a visit.

It’s come to our attention that, in advance of the big Copenhagen summit on CO2, city officials placed tens of thousands of flyers in hotels, bars, and other establishments urging visitors to avoid a different type of emissions altogether—namely the sticky kind associated with patronizing the city’s many sex workers. We can just picture the bureaucrats patting each other on the backs after coming up with this idea. But the prostitutes are cunningly offering discounted rates to any customer who presents a flyer to them. Not only does this make the suits look like amateurs for being so easily outmaneuvered—in effect, it turns the flyers into coupons. We aren’t scientists, but that sounds like true sustainability at work. Now the question is: Can we somehow put the sex workers in charge of the summit? They’d put together an emissions deal that leaves everyone satisfied.     

For years the sex blog belledujour was one of the most scandalous and popular blogs in Britain. Funny, explicit, and well-written, its popularity led to a series of bestselling books and even a television series called Secret Diary of a Call Girl starring Billie Piper. But it was all driven by an anonymous mystery woman—until this weekend, when the pseudonymous Belle du Jour revealed her identity in an interview with London’s Sunday Times and followed that up with a posting on her blog. Turns out she’s Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist from Bristol, England.

Whatever her motivation for coming out of the closet, one of the questions she did answer was whether Belle du Jour was even real. Many of her critics thought not, and had also routinely blasted her for glamorizing her work. But Magnanti has said she stands by everything she wrote. Now, with her books certain to climb the charts again, and the television series ongoing, the only question left may be whether she plans to continue as a researcher, or be a full time celebrity.

We try to take a philosophical approach to these continuously leaked nudes of b-grade starlets. Which is to say, we know that they know that we know that they usually do it for the free publicity. And we’re happy to play our part because, as Yeats once wrote, how can we know the dancer from the dance? So for the second time in her brief career behold!—nude shots of Vanessa Hudgens. We think she looks great, but the girls of Pulp Intl. are tired of all these breasts and just started a rain dance for some celebrity schlong. Or maybe it’s a rain dance for any schlong. Could that be a sign we boys spend too much time on our website?     

Here’s a July 1962 issue of the tabloid Vice Squad, with several interesting items on the cover. Cadillac girls—self explanatory. Sexual cripples—ditto. Same with sex roulette, perversion unlimited, and the phobic feature on lesbians and homos. But, aha, the story on Farouk’s $400,000 libel suit is worth detailing. In brief, Ruth Barnes, a Miami madame who went by the nom de directeur Sherry, published an autobiography called Pleasure Was My Business. Her book named a raft of celebrity clients, including the ex-king of Egypt, Farouk I. Furthermore, she claimed he was not only a regular client, but that he once snuck into the U.S. via some helpful port authority folks and rented Madame Sherry’s entire house for a night of fun and games. When Farouk learned he'd been outed, he flipped and sued for libel, specifically claiming he was never in the U.S. at the time in question and he was outraged and infuriated and so forth. Long story short—he lost. So not only had he entered the U.S., he’d also entered Madame Sherry’s house, and followed that up by entering a few of her employees. The epilogue on this guy is so fascinating. Always a bit of a gourmand, he started life thin, and remained so through his heyday, but as middle age approached the eating caught up with him and by age forty he was tipping the scales at nearly three-hundred pounds. One night, after gorging himself as usual, he collapsed and died. He was 45. We’ve taken the lesson to heart here at Pulp Intl., and we’re cutting back on the fatty foods and getting more exercise. But we’re never, ever giving up the hookers so don’t even ask.