What we think is sexy.

My brief work at Mr Skin!

For those german speakers out there (shout out!) I’m going to start with a snippet of one of my jobs fresh out of grad school, translating and providing voiceovers for Mr Skin (Craigslist you source of wild and unexpected tasks!) If you don’t speak the language, feel free to the bask in the not understanding. Ignorance, in this case, truly is bliss.

“Die Berühmtheit der blonden Granate Heather Graham kam als “Roller Girl” im Film

Boogie Nights ins Rollen.

Heather ist nackt in dem erotischen Thriller Killing Me Softly.

Aber ihre geilste Szene ist in in Adrift in Manhattan, als ihr Mann sie hart von hinten

nimmt.”

Yes, For a brief moment in time, I would get the English version of a script, translate it to German, and then go to a recording booth in Wicker Park and talk about some celebrity’s boobs in the sexiest voice I could muster. (“Sound more BLONDE”, the engineer kept saying and all I could think was…what a terrible acting note). It was kind of gross and also funny and I was making some (dubiously funded) money. But I was up for anything and everything related to my recent theatrical training, and that included Smut.

Here’s the cheery face of Mr Skin:

I have to give props to whoever designed this, by the way. If you were going for “grown man who just saw boobies and LIKEY, you nailed it!”

ANYWAY.

The main thing about this was first, translating the material. I’ll give you just a taste of the lines I was handed.

“This blonde beauty sped to stardom on wheels, playing a porn actress in the hit Boogie nights.”

“Her best movie for nudity is the drama KILLING ME SOFTLY.”

“But her hottest scene happens in ADRIFT IN MANHATTAN, where her man

takes her from behind – hard!”

Ew, I know. But I do love a translating challenge! One of the niche complexities of translating is that it’s an art, not math. Sure, you can just find the matching word in another language but words are a cauldron of history and society. You can’t just translate “she went rolling into boogie nights” literally, because if you did, the translation would just be “went fast towards a star, on roller skates”. It’s not the greatest line in the world, but “went rolling into something does have SOME poetry in it… And so even in the fantastically low brow world of Mr Skin, I needed to learn what the low brow poetic GERMAN version of that was. So I spent time researching the ways Germans talk about a rise to fame, the adjectives they use, what their cultural equivalent is.

And of course, I had to figure out how translate the sex stuff. What I found interesting about this particular…”material” is that NO culture just describes experiences or body parts anatomically, when it comes to sex. Sexy is NOT the doctor’s office, so having to figure out how to say things about breasts or life in a horny German ways was ALSO a challenge. There hundreds of ways to describe life and breasts in the English language, and they’ve all got a particular flavor. We all know that describing them as “jugs” is totally different than calling them “moonlit globes”. (And if you don’t know which one most women respond to…well then you need to do a little more research yourself).

Germans have their own weird ways of talking about boobs. Their “jugs” is closer to something like “Donnerstollen” which literally translates to “Thunderbreads”. The more poetic way might be “Zaftige Busen” which means “full and strong breasts”. Thunderous, strong, and bread-like. They do love their baked goods, those Germans.

And it made me realize that language is the vehicle into the kind of erotic you want. The experience you understand and are seeking. Everyone’s life and sexy is different. Everyone’s desire for depth is different, And the DEPTH of the Mr Skin experience, as you can tell is… limited…commercial…objectifying. I didn’t feel sexy saying the words, or describing the movie, and I I did not find it sexy to see 15 second clips of celebrity boobs. But somebody does, I guess. Somebody connects to it. It can be a very lonely world and I guess you can’t blame someone for how they try to fill that void. We all have our kinks. Life-wise. Sex-wise.

Eventually, the project was scrapped and the “15 second nude celebrity clips uploads” market seemed to dwindle. And I was an out of work actor again. Fun career, right?

I wonder what took its place.

Or maybe Mr Skin got a conscience…?

…Nah, probably not.

Probably, it stopped making money, which is ultimately the sad thing about those things, because they exist in a realm where the person is not actually being PRAISED, but USED. There’s no real interaction. When you divorce sex from experience, it’s impossible for it to create anything lasting. And when you use something and you tire of it, you are not in it for the long game. Bodies fall, people get bored, new streams of stimulation are found. That’s something that women (though I know men in part might share in this), learn in particular learn as they get older. Finding out ways to NOT be expendable means knowing you need to cultivate ALL of your parts, not just the pretty shell you might have been handed. We live, we learn. We define what really matters. It’s a process.

So, that’s the silly little story of my foray into German smut content. And for the record, my dad actually read my translations and was amused and proud of me for using my linguistic skills to make a little money. He liked the using my brain part of it, and discarded the rest. He was cool that way.