I explained to her that I had her back [internationally speaking]

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/05/08 14:28 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/05/08/8770668856267196417.aspx

Several years ago when I was at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) and AEE (the Adult Entertainment Expo) while talking to some companies about closed captions and subtitles (not for Microsoft of course!), I met Shawna Leneé, an adult model and actress.

She asked me what I did for a living and I said today's blog post. ;-)

I pointed to that E Acute in her last name, her stage last name I mean: (U+00e9 in Unicode) and explained that I was trying to enable her chosen career since not everyone could handle her name properly. ;-)

I was introduced to her work not too long before, at the bachelor party of a colleague who realized that neither strip clubs nor strippers would a be good way to go. One of the people planning the party realized that his fiancée had a high school graduation picture with more than a passing resemblance to Shawna Leneé, so it became a theme for the party (and both Digital Playground's Cheerleaders and Penthouse's Bring Me the Head of Shawna Leneé were rented.

Now to be perfectly honest, the whole party theme disturbed me on multiple levels:

• watching two such films with a bunch of guys seemed a little strange;
• quality of such films is usually not great, and finding a film that won't make people feel uncomfortable is a long shot at best;
• the surprise ending to the second film, enough said about that;
• what would the upside be for him to imagine his bride to be when she was so much younger?
• what would the upside be to having a bunch of other guys fantasizing about your fiancée anyway?

After the two films were done, I broke the silence caused by the unexpected plot twist at the end of the film and pointed out the technical problems in supporting the name of a performer when her name contained a diacritic (I had proof of this since the first film had the name without the diacritic).

Everyone was rolling their eyes at that point, but I said I was just getting started. So in that second movie where Steven St. Croix sent Evan Stone to "fetch him the head of Shawna Leneé," between three of the actresses in the film there were five different vowel combinations producing the same Arthur Fonzarelli "Aaay" sound: Shawna Leneé, Jayden Jaymes, and Faye Reagan.

And I went on about how we all knew the pronunciation of Leneé was correct because it was pronounced by many of the people in the movie as a plot point. Which means that the film actually had a plot, albeit one was disturbing.

Getting back to Shawna, like me she mostly grew up in the metropolitan Cleveland area, and she was already aware of the problems caused by the "é" in her name, from incorrect billing to website mistakes to the fact that even a half decade later the IAFD site only lists Shawna Lenee' with a simple apostrophe as an alias. Even though I'm told that some areas have improved, most of the industry has continued to disappoint, internationally. 

# Michael S. Kaplan on 2015-05-08 10:21:39:

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