Sure, she's 80 pounds with a face mangled by surgery and she cheated on her taxes. But she has been a kind of amazing hustler ever since she started a middle school baby-sitting ring in high school that became a sort of a precursor to the Madam business. (Did the Baby-sitters Club series inspire a prostitution ring?) "When you walk in Fleiss's front door, you are met by a large white poster of a devilish red man under the words 'Male Aggression Now Playing Everywhere,'" writes ELLE. Also: she lives among a few hundred parrots, was a prison lesbian even though she hates screwing girls, inspired one prison "girlfriend" to get out of the drug business and start her own business, and comes across like a genuinely good person. "Who was it, Oscar Wilde, I think, who said people can adjust to anything. I was perfectly adjusted in the penitentiary, and I was perfectly adjusted to living in a chateau in France," she tells the magazine, in one of the numerous instances you can't help but think "Oh dude wise." Seriously though, a lot of dudes think sex workers have all sorts of fucked-up opinions about men because they only see "clients" but I think this just assumes women are as incapable of appreciating nuance as men are. Sex workers are some of the wisest bitches in this country.

The Once And Future Madam [ELLE]

When I start to feel defensive, my attitude is sort of like, if people are calling me a whore, "Well, what's wrong with being a whore?" You know? I mean, I think girls who are sex workers — and men, all sex workers — they see another side of humanity and sexuality. People who've never worked in the sex industry — people who've never done it — don't know the half of it.

Hmmm. Well. I used to be a phone sex operator, and I wrote a lot at the time about how it helped me understand the world better; but like, aside from the fact that "circumcision fantasy" is actually, like, a thing, I think the main takeaway was more succinctly expressed by the song "Eleanor Rigby." But I used to think Heidi Fleiss was actually kind of deep from all her time spent sex working; but on the other hand dudes are always talking crap about how strippers always assume all men are like the ones who patron strip clubs. So I asked my friend Loren, who used to be a stripper:

it seems terribly naive to think that the men who use sex services are some entirely different animal from the ones who don't. i mean, where do you draw the line between buying a porno mag and buying a blow job? most guys engage in some kind of sex trade at some point in their life at the same time, i suppose it's baldly true that not all of them do. but the question is, could all of them be convinced to? probably.

D.C. Sex Diarist Bares All [Zen Monkeys]

• Former Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and born-again goth writer Anne Rice are coming out to support Hillary Clinton for President. Heidi, who was turned away from a recent Clinton rally, says, "Any woman who's smart, how can you not be [a fan of Hillary]?" Something tells us that Rice, who has traded in writing vampire fiction for some Born Again crap, is not getting into any Hillary fundraisers either. [Las Vegas Review Journal]
  
• The immigration activist who sought refuge in a Chicago Church in order to remain with her son in the United States was arrested and deported back to Mexico this weekend. Apparently, family values don't apply to brown people. [NY Times]
  
• A British woman has claimed the record for oldest woman to give birth, at the age of 59. Funny thing is, she waited ten years to mention it. [Guardian]

• Scrawny models might not be the only thing to blame for anorexia. A recent survey found that 20% of eating disorder patients could be described as having a brain disorder on the autism spectrum. Like we needed a scientific study to tell us that Mary Kate Olsen is a little off — the whole "boho" thing confirmed that months ago. [Telegraph]
• Venice's first female gondolier is calling out her male counterparts for ripping off customers and destroying tradition. Actually, being rowed around Venice was ruined as a romantic activity the minute The Bachelor got it's dirty, grubby paws on it. [Telegraph]
• Proof that Minnesota is indeed a civilized place! The state just enacted a new law that would make it possible for family-planning organizations to purchase birth control in bulk through cooperative purchasing agreements, a move that will result in cutting the cost of birth control to the public by 50%. Convenient, considering the only thing to do in the middle of winter in Minnesota is fuck. [Feminist Daily News Wire]
• Non-stick cookware could result in low birth weights. So how are pregnant women expected to make the perfect pickle, goat cheese, and peanut butter omelet now? [Babble]
• Fuck the paranoia. Taking anti-depressants during pregnancy might not be so dangerous. [Babble]
• As we've pointed out a number of times, the anti-choice movement has been given too much power in spinning abortion research to support their wiggity-wack agenda. Women's Health News has a fabulous summary of some of their doozies. [Women's Health News]
• Sometimes we feel really pissed off about the country we live in, and rightfully so, but the story of this Kurdish woman makes us feel very grateful that we live in a place where at least you won't get stoned to death by a mob of men in front of police officers who sit back and do nothing and oh yeah someone films it and now it's on the fucking internet. [Feministe]
• Analyzing the analysis of Hillary Clinton's wardrobe in major news articles that, generally, have nothing to do with what she's wearing — fair, so long as we remember to mention how sexy John Edwards' $400 haircut is. [Star Tribune]

Moving on! God. Sooooo I was sitting in church on Sunday to memorialize the tragic suicide of a childhood friend. I was thinking about all the things you're not supposed to think about during mass, but stop feeling guilty about when you realize you have those same thoughts during sex and sex is a whole lot less boring and by the way you have ADHD. Anyway, so I was thinking nonspecifically of sex when I heard the priest say the words "contraception" and "not natural." I'm sure he caught the attention of the man behind me, too, because at that moment that guy prayerfully bowed his head down to the optimal position at which to stare at the package of birth control pills sticking out of my purse. I think he chuckled. I admire this generation of people who bow their heads and pray for God to forgive the priest when he takes his chance to inspire them and shits all over it with a rant informed exclusively by his own life's total lack of mirth, but I am not part of it. I stared at the priest. He had been acting spookily all mass. He had beaten his chest and looked at us creepily. He was a one-man case for going back to the old practice where the priest says the mass with his back to the congregation. Which, by the way, they're bringing back, along with Latin. Unfortunately, this guy was speaking English.

"It's very clear what the Catholic Church says about abortion," he was saying. "And yet you're not listening. Look at how you voted in November."

My grandmother rolled her eyes. "Abortion has never looked so good!" whispered my sister.

He continued with a speech about the breakdown of the family. Um, did he not hear the one about the plummeting divorce rate?

And then: "I would make my homilies 10 minutes shorter if more of you showed up to mass."

LOGICAL.

Then everyone rose to shake one another's hand in the ritual that is still called the "Kiss of Peace" (even though, duh, Catholics aren't actually literally gay like that), a tradition most people think of as one of the church's nicer, more heartening, more worthwhile practices. But the priest didn't want to have anything to do with it. He skipped right past it. When the time came for Communion, he refused to allow the volunteers (this is something women are actually allowed to do in the Catholic Church) to pass it out, and when the time came to bless babies he refused to do that, too. At the end of the mass my mom, who'd organized the thing, approached the priest, shaking slightly, and said, "So Father, what do you have against the Kiss of Peace?"

And he said, "It's an option. You have all week for such superficialities." There was a weird sociopathic look in his eye. Who was this man?

He turned out to be a retired nuclear physicist named Vincent P. Bork. Rumor had it that he was the son of the crazy psychoconservative Robert Bork, which would make sense in the vast right-wing conspiracy sense, though it didn't show up on Wikipedia. Anyway, here's the thing: Christopher Hitchens is right. Something is fucked with organized religion! And it's somehow gotten worse.

God and Jesus and the Ten Commandments and all the stuff that taught us how to act is not worth the sanctimony and hate and warped bile that churches are peddling these days. People are probably just better figuring out this shit for themselves, and forming personal mottoes to inure themselves to the contagious effects of other people's craziness. For instance, I once had dinner with Heidi Fleiss, who, like Jesus, has two personal commandments she repeats to herself to get through life. They happen to be "Men Will Fuck Mud" and "All Men Cheat," and while that might seem like some cynical sex-worker talk to you, to me it's sort of a message of acceptance, forgiveness, and not taking personally the slights (or dalliances) of others. Like what they tell you in AA! Where I am totally not headed.

• Lindsay Lohan celebrated her entrance into the ranks of legal drinkers at Courteney Cox's Malibu home, which we can only imagine portends an appearance on Courteney's show Dirt wherein Lindsay works for an upstart celebrity news service that gets tipped off to the scene of a young starlet's drunk driving crash. Because at this point that is, like, "funny." Ha ha! [Gatecrasher]
  
• President Bush's decision to play Sheriff Lee Baca to Scooter Libby's Paris Hilton is condemned by Dems, defended by Rudy and Fred Thompson and given the "uhh, I need to actually go back and figure out what this case was about" by the other Republican candidates.
  
• Pete Doherty framed a forlorn scribbled message of love for on/off girlfriendKate Moss. She did not accept it. He then, somewhat histrionically, smashed it in a driveway. Ah, love! [The Sun]

• We can't decide whether Spice Girl Geri Halliwell is the J. Mascis or the Lou Barlow of the Spice Girls reunion. [The Sun]
• Lily Allen imagines the American prison system is probably nicer and more accommodating than the English one. Perhaps because it is run so profitably? [NYMag]
• Prince William and Kate Middleton canoodle from three seats away. [The Sun]
• You know how they say the stars are just like us? When an empty can of cat food stolen out of our trash fetches $305 on Ebay we'll agree with you. [Yahoo News]

• Scarlett Johansson totally did the drunk-bathroom-crying-to-Stella-McCartney-thing at the Costume Institute gala, presumably because her boyfriend and "great writer" Ryan Reynolds penned the next Grapes of Wrath and let her read it just before the event. [Gatecrasher]

• Dina Lohan shocks the nation by using her deadbeat husband's name to try to score Rosie's role on 'The View.' Also, her friends call her the 'White Oprah.' [Page Six]

• Apparently Jessica Biel has a purpose in life other than losing boyfriends to Scarlett Johansson, which is: Losing movie roles to Scarlett Johansson? Wait, are we the only ones who have never actually seen Jessica Biel appear in anything other than those men's magazine foldouts? She acts too?? [The Sun]

• Penelope Cruz and Josh Hartnett hang out with other famous people in ridiculous venues, presumably get it on, about which we have nothing to say except that it's pretty irrefutably hot. [Page Six]