Who’s Speaking? – Loveline!

Amazing how people change, right?

Let’s take Anderson for example: He blushes whenever embarrassing or not so embarrassing things happen. You can’t show funny vids of him on the show and you can’t talk about the sex habits of Americans or about “bits’n'pieces” or whatsoever without turning Andy’s face into a nice red color. Well that is now…..but what was THEN?

Then…was soooo different.

Googling for new Andestuff I found this nice article on Pop.nography.com. It’s about Anderson visiting Loveline, the sex advice radio and TV show hosted by Adam Corrolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky:

Here’s the article:

Anderson Cooper and his dorky little laugh, sounding less uptight than we’ve heard him in years, confessing to being a teenage compulsive liar, being fascinated by a discussion of how to suppress a gag reflex and strongly disagreeing when Adam says most people are only attracted to people of the same race.

Of course he was hosting ABC’s reality show The Mole at the time, and as far as he knew that was going to be the high point of his career. Witness this early exchange:

Adam Corrolla: Anderson, you’re a journalist, are you not?
Anderson Cooper: Sort of, right.

So who would care — back then — if he joked with a caller, “I whacked off right before I came on here!” Or if he asked substitute therapist Dr. Bruce, “Does Dr. Drew smell so pretty?”

Other highlights, and believe me the context doesn’t add or subtract much:

> “If you watch TV too much, you’ll get hair on your palms.”
> “After you broke up you gave him head?!”
> “Have you heard that Dorothy Parker quote, ‘Those born to the storm find the calm very boring’?” [Close, but no cigar. The quote's actually: "They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm."]
> “Can you get hard and stuff? It’s just not ejaculating?”
> “I like to call it ‘brushing the mole.’”
> “But sex with an old friend can be nice, right?”
> “My banana seat bicycle, it just won’t do!”
> “I had to have separate security guards just for my penis!”
> “He’s the only one who can get hard in the whole rave!”

And, at about an hour and ten minutes into the segment, in response to a caller concerned about her gag reflex, Anderson asks, “Does he do stuff [oral sex] for you?” The girl says yes, and Anderson presses on. “Well, that’s good. Does he, like, coach you at all? Give you advice about what he likes?” When Adam enthusiastically calls out coaching tips for blowjobs, Anderson says: “You’re making me hard!” Adam reports that Anderson has “perked up” for this gag reflex discussion, that he’s “very inquisitive.”

When a caller asks for help with being a compulsive liar, Anderson says he totally understands, because he did the same thing as an adolescent, lied about things as trivial as what he had for lunch. “Ultimately it all comes out and you end up looking like a complete jerk,” he says.

It’s a little depressing, actually — once you get past the hysterical laughter, which, frankly, lasted for most of this 90-minute show. Anderson sounds completely unfazed by the callers’ obscene issues — simply amused and willing to play along, no matter how many sleazeballs an undereducated 16-year-old girl thinks she should sleep with. Now he won’t answer a simple question about who keeps the home fires burning while he’s out dodging bullets. It’s almost enough to make me miss The Mole.

You can even listen to it here.

I know he had some “sex-moments” before, e.g. when he wrote about “Talking Sex With Mom” or “The Agony Of Adult Nails Biters” (“…but really, how often can you masturbate a day?”) on Details Magazine. But these seem to be very rare moments. I wonder if he’s more prudish when he’s on TV and he can be seen by millions of people. He even refused to do Kelly’s workout on Regis & Kelly, because it could act out to be embarrassing.

Maybe he just got more prudish with age. I can’t really imagine, but that would be a reason.

Time to whack?