Shutterbabe parallels Roosh's format by chronicling photojournalism travel and sex. Kogan, the "shutterbabe" author graduated from the "Beverly Hills 90210" high school near Roosh. She fits the typical role of a modern woman who wants to be taken seriously because she worked for a few years before becoming a stay-at-home mom.
The story is unremarkable: a cute young photographer trades sex for access. I wonder whether she used similar skills or connections to get the book deal. A female reviewer excoriated her:
Alas, “Shutterbabe” is not so much a cowgirl memoir as a “bang-bang” memoir: a self-aggrandizing story of the lusts and yearnings of a bored, post-feminist bad girl with a hankering to “see war.”
Journalists who write about their lives generally have made some kind of a dent in the field; at a minimum they’ve had experiences that qualify them to speak authoritatively. Kogan was a minor player in photojournalism, barely remembered by the major photographers of that era. She began her career at age 22; at 26, she’d quit the business. A memoir written by an unknown young male photographer with an abbreviated, and unremarkable, résumé would never have made it past an agent’s first read. That he screwed his way through a couple of wars would make it even more unappealing. Men boast of their conquests around the bar, but no serious male journalist would ever write about his affairs in such detail.
For all the romantic overlay she gives her story, Kogan makes it clear that she screwed strategically. “The plan … was fairly simple,” Kogan writes of Pascal, a French photographer who invites her to join him in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988. “Since he had most of his journey paid for with assignments from various French and German magazines, and I, the ingenue just starting out, had zero in the way of assignments, I would take advantage of his free hotel room (and it was understood, his warm body) before finding a group of mujahadeen to take us … into the heart of Afghanistan, to bear witness to the atrocities of war. Or something like that.”
... her lack of preliminary research is often astounding. At one point, Kogan is sent ... without a tent, a map, a compass or any idea where the war was being fought.
Salon.com Review
The story is unremarkable: a cute young photographer trades sex for access. I wonder whether she used similar skills or connections to get the book deal. A female reviewer excoriated her:
Alas, “Shutterbabe” is not so much a cowgirl memoir as a “bang-bang” memoir: a self-aggrandizing story of the lusts and yearnings of a bored, post-feminist bad girl with a hankering to “see war.”
Journalists who write about their lives generally have made some kind of a dent in the field; at a minimum they’ve had experiences that qualify them to speak authoritatively. Kogan was a minor player in photojournalism, barely remembered by the major photographers of that era. She began her career at age 22; at 26, she’d quit the business. A memoir written by an unknown young male photographer with an abbreviated, and unremarkable, résumé would never have made it past an agent’s first read. That he screwed his way through a couple of wars would make it even more unappealing. Men boast of their conquests around the bar, but no serious male journalist would ever write about his affairs in such detail.
For all the romantic overlay she gives her story, Kogan makes it clear that she screwed strategically. “The plan … was fairly simple,” Kogan writes of Pascal, a French photographer who invites her to join him in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1988. “Since he had most of his journey paid for with assignments from various French and German magazines, and I, the ingenue just starting out, had zero in the way of assignments, I would take advantage of his free hotel room (and it was understood, his warm body) before finding a group of mujahadeen to take us … into the heart of Afghanistan, to bear witness to the atrocities of war. Or something like that.”
... her lack of preliminary research is often astounding. At one point, Kogan is sent ... without a tent, a map, a compass or any idea where the war was being fought.
Salon.com Review
