Beaten Track Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1910635339
Contemporary Romance, 2015
In Debbie McGowan’s Cherry Pop Valentine, Flavier is happily shacked up with Sven from the band Jet Set.
The first time I saw him, his hair was dyed purple, and he was taking part in a shoot with a group of first years making a film about drugs. Sven was super-slim and pretty tall, which made him seem even slimmer. In fact, in uni he was almost gaunt-looking, more heroin chic than anything, but he’d filled out in the years since we graduated. Still just as glam, and fucking hot, especially when he wore those suits—the jacket and pants with no shirt underneath. That was how he caught me, that first Valentine’s Day night, with his stylish allure and a shared cocktail. Even without the suggestive drink and too much alcohol, there was something so appealing about knowing that he was right there, under a single layer of clothing, the cut and weight of the fabric enhancing his finest features.
I can smell the edgelord just from reading that paragraph.
Here’s the drama: Flav accidentally uploads a video of the two of them engaging in a session that is completely different from the kind that one is supposed to upload onto YouTube.
People start speculating about how the video had to be some kind of hack, or maybe a sabotage attempt by homophobes or something, and… and…
There’s Flav, in the corner sobbing like a sensitive Muppet, because he doesn’t dare to admit that he’s the one that accidentally uploaded that video. There is no hacker, but if Sven had known what he’d done, he would lose that man forever, so oh, here comes the waterworks again.
What is this, 1995?
One, a genuine hacker or whatever word we want to use here will not upload a sex tape on YouTube. Their online filter system will catch that thing and automatically delete it in a jiffy, earning the channel a strike. A halfway sane person would upload it on one of those adult video platforms instead, or leak it on the edgier side of social media. So that part about people immediately believing that this sex tape leak is the work of a hacker will only work on folks that watch Rachel Maddow religiously.
Two, this story is set in the present year. So why would anyone be shocked that a band that portrays itself to be edgy and woo-hoo will have members that make sex tapes? Besides, these days it’s easy to find celebrities that have nudes or sex tapes floating around out there and they still have a career, so I don’t know why the band members and their manager all act like the world has ended.
Three, it’s 2015. The band’s following will not be shocked or horrified that gay people have sex like everyone else.
Seriously, this is one story that feels really dated and out of place when set in the present day. It is as if the author was still stuck in the 1980s or something, There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, as the 1980s were filled with great music and hot hairy hunks, but this also means that the people in this story are being unnecessarily melodramatic over something that is actually very trivial.
Heck, if I were Sven, I’d be far more curious about the number of views my sex tape is getting, and think about starting an OnlyFans. After all, a musician’s shelf life isn’t that long. One may as well start thinking of a fallback career before they get too old to wear mascara and leather pants three times too small without coming off as ridiculous!
