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Soft core man-porn on rampage. 

It must be kind of a holy grail for men to be able to say, ‘Yes, I work for Playboy’. Embedded is based upon this principle, that because Ross Dale works for Playboy he must have some hot, crazy stories to tell.

He doesn’t. The book starts you off slow and easy, like a sixteen year old boy talking his virgin girlfriend into giving it up for the first time – I know it seems scary baby, but it’s just Playboy. I mean, it’s not like this is porn. But it is. Slowly, surely, this book leaves the memoirs section of the bookstore and sandwiches itself between Letters to Penthouse and the DK Kama Sutra. A few chapters in, and we follow our protagonist through the world of porn.

Mr. Dale doesn’t seem to know whether the world of porn is a good world or not. He tries to convince us that it’s all good fun, but occasionally, he goes off on a tangent about women having dead eyes during their first real porn shoots, or the obscenity of a woman wanting to be gang banged. He talks and talks, his thoughts meandering this way and that, his pearls of wisdom as useless as a pearl necklace.

What’s worse is the way he talks about women he dates. They’re all skanky, bottomless pits of uselessness. He constantly complains that one is ten whole years older than him (he’s twenty-seven, she’s thirty-seven), one cheats on her husband with him and drinks her own urine (and he often compares this one to a goddess – funny, I don’t remember reading about Hera drinking her own urine), and one he talks into moving to L.A. from Rome only to dump her eighteen whole days later. This guy is a first rate asshole, but on the up side, he frequently admits it.

And now I’d like to talk about alcoholism. If anyone knows Ross Dale, please tell him to check himself into a rehab program. I bet he could get on Celebrity Rehab – they know how to deal with people in the porn industry! If there was anything that he did more than jam useless bits of exposition about hockey into this plot-less pile of garbage, it was drink.

Dale claims he had an editor, and I find this a bit baffling. Surely an editor would tell him that coulda, woulda, shoulda, kinda, sorta, and all sorts of other letter jumbles that rape the words ‘have’ or ‘of’ over and over again are not really words. In fact, as I type this, my spell check lights up like a Christmas tree. How he managed to get a manuscript published like this I have no idea. He has no writing talent past popping porn puns (see that? That was called alliteration. Just a little lesson in writing style for you, Mr. Dale).

I just can’t stress enough how awful this book is. I guess if you were a high school kid who only got scrambled Cinnemax and was too chickenshit to download porn, it might be worth a read. But really, it isn’t. I’ve never been fond of burning books, but in Embedded’s case, I’ll make an exception – but only if we round up and shoot the people who tried to lower societal IQ with this ill-informed god-awful piece of tripe.

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