Last week, Deadline.com announced that HBO is currently developing a comedy based on former Village Voice writer, Mara Altman’s memoir “Thanks for Coming: A Young Woman’s Quest For An Orgasm.”
As you can pretty much conclude from the title, the book follows Altman–an attractive a 26 year-old career woman living in New York who has never experienced The Big O–as she launches an entire investigation into getting off.
This adventure included scouring sex shops for various pleasure devices, attending sex conventions, living with an orgasm commune, seeing a therapist, and even masturbating in an MRI machine.
“It’s not everyday that a dysfunctional vulva gets to move out of marginalization and into the limelight,” Altman said when asked by Deadline about the possibility of her memoir becoming a TV series.
It remains unclear whether it’s really a done deal, but the Web site does report that writer, Mark Steven Johnson (Simon Birch, Grumpy Old Men, Daredevil) and director, Howard Deutch (Pretty In Pink, The Replacements, The Whole Ten Yards) have already been recruited.
Now, I haven’t actually read the book–mainly because I assumed it would be full of unnecessary how-tos and trite vibrator horror stories–but it’s adaptation to the small screen definitely re-sparks my interest.
I do however still have one initial qualm: the whole “attractive and successful twenty-something New Yorker” just absolutely reeks of Carrie Bradshaw and far too many female-driven TV shows, past and present.
Why can’t she be an average-looking gal from Brooklyn with a crappy job and limited disposable income? Seriously. Shake things up.
Yet, what ultimately sells me on both the book and TV series is the promise of raunchy vagina jokes and the fact that the story is about, as Altman puts it, “much more than a curious pussy with problems.”
In fact, she says that what she concluded from all her adventures is that lame orgasm metaphors (explosion, volcano, ect) and the exaggerated depictions of climaxing woman circulated by our media must be stopped.
The reason: “They prime us for a particular experience when the experience is actually entirely unique.”
Preach it sister!
[Image: Deadline.com]
