Show Me by Carole Hart Read Free Book Online Page A

B-list celebrities. At that point, the show became something that was written about in Newsweek : a symptom of a decadent age. Emily was suddenly famous as an emblem of the “pornification” of media.
    It had never occurred to her to think of herself in that light. Porn had always existed (well, as long as people could draw). And she wasn’t selling sex on a major network; it was a porn channel. A place people went to specifically for porn. And, once she thought about it, she herself didn’t approve of pornography becoming a part of mainstream culture. She found herself in a bar one night with her friend Jared (internationally renowned star of Mile-High Club) , both of them tipsily denouncing pornification. “It’s horrible how kids’ first experience of sex is Internet porn nowadays,” she was saying. “I mean, I never had that. I got to come to it from my own . . . you know . . . my private fantasies that were really about falling in love.”
    “Yeah,” he said, “up to a point. Like, I watched porn when I was a teenager, but it wasn’t so normalized. You didn’t think that was all sex was about.”
    “And it’s different for girls,” she said with a touch of anger. “I just think of thirteen-year-old girls seeing something like In Depth and it makes me feel sick.”
    Here she noticed two men at the next booth eavesdropping intently and looked fiercely at the floor. She heard one of them say to the other in an undertone, “You’re right. That can’t be Emily Lister.”
    It was also then that the hate mail began, in tandem with a flood of love letters and proposals of marriage. Looking back on it, she didn’t know how she’d maintained any balance at all. Jared was helpful—he was going through his own crisis, giving up on-screen sex just as she was getting used to it. He and Emily would spend long nights together, talking about all the stresses and the moral dilemmas until the sun came up. He was also the first person she had private sex with in the In Depth era. He turned out to be a thoughtful, sensitive lover as well as a wonderful confidant, although their relationship never had a romantic component. It was the only time she’d been able to have sex with someone whom she loved as a friend.
    And then she’d met Evan. Their relationship had started on the show. He was a fashion designer with a bad-boy reputation. Being a straight male designer gave him privileged access to models, of which he took full advantage—before and after he began to go out with Emily. When she found out he was still sleeping with other women, he said, “You do remember how we met, right? I mean, I can go get images of you cheating on me from the Internet right now, if you really want to have this argument.”
    And when she said she would give up her job, he stammered and said, “Oh . . . you couldn’t do that. It’s your dream.”
    It had never been her dream. Maybe, in a weak moment, the five-room apartment she’d just bought overlooking Central Park was her dream. When she was an awkward teenager, being on Hottest Women lists, as she routinely was now, could have been her dream. But . . .
    “My dream, for your information, was to be a veterinarian,” she’d told him furiously.
    Well, she could hardly blame him for laughing.
    Babylona was no help at all. She wanted to be a help, but she just didn’t understand Emily’s psychology. She admitted as much herself.
    “I am sorry about Evan,” she’d said with real sympathy. “He was such a beautiful man. But only one man for the rest of your life? I don’t know how you people face the idea. It’s like only eating steak for the rest of you life. However good the steak . . . I suppose Evan is still taboo. Oh, I see. Well, I will tear up his number, cross my heart.”
    Now, in her third year of In Depth, Emily was both more comfortable with the unsavory fame, and more certain that she wanted to leave. Some days, the only thing that stopped her from writing a