Jill Soloway: The Mr. Skin Interview

In your new memoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, you bemoan the "pornoization of America," but do you feel any responsibility for this prurient downward cycle, what with your early theater productions such as The Miss Vagina Pageant and Not without My Nipples?
I just named shows those names because I knew it would help them get more of an audience. And it always worked!

You also talk a lot about your seemingly contrary stance on feminism, advocating a separatist nation called "Lesbo Island" while obsessed with a beauty magazine's view of good looks. How do these disparate opinions keep peace in your head?
They don't. It's a big mess in there. Second wave feminism, third wave feminism, a love of reality TV and Jessica Simpson and Andrea Dworkin. Writing the book is a way of sorting out the ambivalence. Writing in general is. But I still haven't come to any big place of answers.

You were a writer on HBO's recently defunct hit Six Feet Under. Is it accurate to say that you generated the story line regarding Rachel Griffiths's character's sex addiction? And would you have ended that narrative with her in recovery if you were the show's creator?
Wow! Good question. You have the inside scoop somehow. Did we have a conversation about this? I did lead a debate in the writer's room trying to get away from the sex-addict-recovery storyline. Sadly I did not win. I find 12 Steps pretty boring as a TV plot. We've all seen those meetings. And politically I felt it would be bold to allow a woman to venture into wild sexual activities without pathologizing her. But I lost that argument.

Speaking of sex, which is all Mr. Skin does, you have also published a novella called "Jodi K" in Susie Bright's anthology Three Kinds of Asking for It. The story, told in the voice of a teenage girl about her affair with her best friend's father, reads almost as a fictional autobiography. So, well, did you lose your virginity to your best friend's father?
No. Sorry. Parts of Jodi are me, but parts aren't. Jodi was a suburbanite and I was a city girl. I did have a crush on my best friend's dad but he never knew a thing about it--'twas all in my head.

At the beginning of your memoir you somewhat facetiously write that you're "done writing about sex." But are you, really? Is there going to be more erotica or dirty TV scripts and movies, etc.?
I think writing about sex from an authentic female point of view--writing about LIFE from an authentic female point of view--will always be my goal. I've written a movie I hope to direct as well as a TV pilot, and always, because it's me, the intersection of love, sex, plus a little bit of God and pop culture will be explored.

Now you're beginning to see that this interview isn't like, say, "A Night Out With" column in The New York Times Sunday Style Section, which you were featured in. Were you familiar with Mr. Skin prior to this interview?
I heard about him on Howard Stern.

The editorial director at Mr. Skin, Mike McPadden, a.k.a. Selwyn Harris, says he knows you. Is there any truth to this, or is he just glomming on to your celebrity?
I think I met him once, through the cartoonist Tony Millionaire's wife, Becky Thyre. She's an actress and good friend of mine. I remember him being shy.

A boilerplate Mr. Skin question is this: Do you recall the first time you saw nudity in a mainstream movie?
The Blue Lagoon (Picture: 1 - 2). There's a section in "Jodi K" about them going to see that movie that pretty accurately describes how I felt. Feel free to put that paragraph in here.

Another is to ask which actresses you think are hot, and this can be past or present.
Natalie Portman. Rachel Weisz. She's not an actress but a cooking show maven--Nigella Lawson. I pick Jewish women or women who look like Jews who I wish I looked like. I guess it's a pretty obvious form of narcissism.

Finally, any plans to write Mr. Skin into one of your upcoming projects?
Not that I know of. But I'll peruse the website more closely and see what inspires me.