Condit is a computer nerd who runs a horror movie website and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. While working as the head of e-commerce for Tantus, a sex toy company, Condit noticed that a lot of the site’s traffic was coming from twilighted.net, a “Twilight” fan-fiction website. And voilá: Two years and several dozen moldings later, the Vamp was born. Broadsheet talked to Condit about copyright battles with “Twilight” lawyers, how to imagine a vampire phallus (sparkles and all), and the future of pop culture-related sex toys (watch out, “True Blood”).

How did you think up the design? How do you know what a vampire penis is supposed to look like?

Well, it was a pretty fun act of the imagination. The color was the biggest thing. It had to look like vampire skin.  It took me and the head of production two and a half months to get the color we were looking for. She has 10 other ones that are various shades that didn’t work. Way too pink, way too pale, it took a long time to make a pale flesh tone. The other problem was the sparkle: It had to sparkle in the sunlight. If it didn’t sparkle in the sunlight, the whole idea was dead. It was kind of poking fun but it’s also supposed to tie into the whole fantasy. The glitter on hand didn’t sparkle in the sunlight, so we had to have some ordered specially. We did have people write in and tell us that Edward was bigger than that.

Who buys the Vamp? Does it cater mostly to “Twilight” fans?

It’s actually been a huge crossover hit for us. It was originally going to be a website exclusive, but sex shops all over the world started calling us up, wanting to put orders in. It became their top-selling toy. I don’t think that since “Sex and the City” talked about the Rabbit has a dildo been so mainstream. A lot of people buy it just because it’s vampire-inspired. I shared some ideas with another toy company called Fleshlight, and a couple months later they came out with their own vampire toys. There were plans to do a “True Blood” line as well. There were going to be two, one  called “the Nordic Warrior” and one called “the Southern Gentleman,” for Eric and Bill.

And you also got into some trouble with lawyers representing “Twilight.” What happened?

Originally, the ad copy on the website used all the book titles, like “in the twilght glow of the new moon … don’t let this deal pass into the breaking dawn,” something like that. We tried  to work it in for people searching for it without outright saying it was a “Twilight” dildo. If I got it close enough people could infer the rest. A month after I launched it, the lawyers sent a cease and desist order, wanting it taken off the website completely. Our lawyers told them they didn’t have a leg to stand on; we just had to take the book titles out of the ad copy.

Apparently, we got another request to edit the user reviews. The reviews are probably the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. People have the weirdest things to say about the Vamp. One person wanted  four of them to tie to their cats so they could have were-kitties. Some people [made] a fur cozy to make it a Jacob. We’re talking about making a werewolf paw.

 Had you ever designed a  pop culture sex toy before?

This was the first. I had talked about doing some other ones — the really big franchises are hard to get around.  Any time I think of something, I’ll call them. Before the “Twilight” dildo we had an electric blue dildo called the Goliath. I looked at it and thought, “If only it had come out when ‘The Watchmen’ premiered — this is a Dr. Manhattan dildo!” We also have an aluminum line that I thought about making LED visors for to make “Battlestar Galactica” toys. I’m working on a pop culture line to be sold  under the brand “Nerdy Love Stuff.”

The idea of a “Twilight” sex toy seems to clash with the books’ message of abstinence.

A lot of people have pointed that out but, from what I’ve seen, the majority of  fans are just not concerned about that.  The whole thing is a fantasy; it makes sense to sort of have fun with it.

Does Stephenie Meyer know about the Vamp? Has she ever contacted you?

I am sure she knows about it, but I’ve never heard official word one way or another. Some people wrote in to say they were trying to take the dildos over to the set, to get Robert Pattinson to sign them. Hasn’t happened to my knowledge, but who knows?

UPDATE: CEO of Tantus, Michael Smith, responds: Jon Condit is no longer employed by Tantus, Inc. and does not speak for or represent our company. In fact, many of his statements are simply erroneous. The “Vamp” product was not designed with the Twilight series in mind; rather, the idea was to simply create a general vampire-themed toy and have our consumers use their imaginations to create their own specific fantasies. As such, Tantus has never targeted Twilight fans as the consumer base for the “Vamp,” and it never marketed it as a “crossover” product.

But over the past 23 seasons, “The Real World” has become a caricature of itself. The once-edgy show is now mostly populated by recognizable types — the meathead frat boy, the small-town princess, the fame-hungry model wannabe — and, more often than not, overflows with manufactured drama. After forgettable trips to Cancun and Washington, D.C., “The Real World” returns to New Orleans for its 24th season, which premieres tonight on MTV.

Salon called Murray to talk about the upcoming season, why reality TV has made television better, and just how “real” “The Real World” really is.

There’s a running joke that “The Real World” doesn’t reflect the real world. What do you think about that?

Well, we don’t restage anything. We either catch it when it happens or we don’t. It’s funny because there are so many people who find it hard to believe that we get the things that we get and the things that happen really do just happen on their own. But “The Real World” is one of the only shows out there that shoots for 16 weeks. And when you’re shooting for that long, stuff happens. Whereas, if you were trying to shoot it in five weeks, you’d have a really hard time getting enough material for 12 shows.

How has the casting process changed over the years? With people growing up with the show, people have obviously become more comfortable with cameras.

Once any show has been through its first season, you have to really examine the reasons why someone wants to be on a program. That first season, in 1992, we were all virgins, the crew and the cast. No one knew quite what to experience. The people did it because they thought it would be interesting — or because it would bring them some fame, or help them with a career. Eric was interested in modeling, Julie wanted to dance, so even then there were motivations based on advancing their careers. But what we look for are people who do this because they want to be exposed to people different from themselves, want to challenge themselves and grow.

When people are auditioning, what are some danger signs that someone is just looking to be on TV?

Certainly if they’ve applied to other reality shows then you really want to question if they’re just trying to get on a TV show, it doesn’t matter which one. That’s a warning sign. Our casting process is really extensive. For a show like “The Real World,” when you don’t have a game format, we live or die on our casting. We spend about three to four months getting to know these people through multiple interviews with their friends, with people who used to be friends with them. We really want to see who they are and know throughout the casting process that they’ve been consistent with who they are. We want to know who we’re putting into that house, and we want to make sure they’re not putting on an act for us.

We have found, certainly in the last 10 years, that you want to not only talk to the people who send in a tape or come to an open call. You want to go out and meet people who hadn’t thought of applying to be on “The Real World.” There was a girl on the D.C. season, Emily, who was working at a Starbucks that was a couple doors down from where we were casting in Columbia, Mo. The casting director went to get some coffee and met her, and found her really interesting, and she was invited over for an interview. We try to reach out to communities whose numbers might not necessarily apply to be on the show. In New Orleans, we have a young woman who is Muslim, because we did outreach to that community. We’ve done that from the beginning; we did a big outreach to the HIV/AIDS community in Season 3 and we found Pedro.

Why return to New Orleans?

Obviously, a lot has happened to New Orleans since we were there last. It’s a city that’s being reborn, and in a way, it’s a metaphor for what’s going on inside “The Real World” house, the way people are changed by the experience.

But isn’t it also exploitative?

We actually waited to go to New Orleans for a couple years after Katrina. We didn’t want to be a burden to the city. We waited until we felt that the city was back together enough that we wouldn’t be a problem; we would be an asset. And we are an asset, I think. There’s always going to be people who are suspicious of a TV show’s motives for coming to the city. That comes with the territory, and that’s always the case, no matter where we are. These are young people, you know? They’re going to party too much and maybe grow and learn from that. I think it’s easy to forget what we were all like when we were 21 and 22. We judge everyone as an adult now. You forget your own experience.

What does it take to break the fourth wall? What is the threshold you have to cross for the crew to intervene?

Well, there’s a curfew for the cast. The curfew is prior to the bars closing in the city. We find that if we can get them back before the bars close, it avoids conflict. It’s when the bars close and there are drunk people on the street that most concerns us. It’s not always the cast members that are the problem. Sometimes it’s that drunk guy down the street who sees the cameras and decides to challenge the cast. When that happens, sometimes the crew will put the cameras down and turn off the lights, hoping that the person will go away. It’s only a television show, so the crew is told that if they see a dangerous situation, to put the cameras down and get the cast out of there.

In some seasons the roommates have jobs, and in others they just sort of hang loose. What has your experience been in choosing between those, toggling between being entertaining and imparting some sort of social message?

We’ve tried different things over the years. For example, when we were in Cancun, it’s very much a tourist city and we ended up working with StudentCity, an organization that books Spring Break trips for students. It provided a safe and fun environment for the cast. When they were on the job they weren’t allowed to drink, and they had to be worried about other people’s safety and other people having a good time. Whereas, when they were off-duty, they only worried about themselves having a good time. It worked for them because I don’t think having them involved in a social thing would have been appropriate in that environment. And it wasn’t a city where they would have been able to pursue their own goals.

Whereas in D.C. and in Brooklyn, we let the cast members focus on the things that they wanted to pursue. In New Orleans, because of what’s going on, we thought it was appropriate to work with the city to come up with some opportunities for social work. It really depends. They can’t just have nothing to do, otherwise the whole show would be partying and hooking up. And the partying is more fun if you have somewhere to be the next morning.

A lot of people think that “The Real World” — and subsequently reality television — ruined entertainment. How do you respond to them?

I think that, on the contrary, “The Real World” has reinvigorated scripted programming. I think when we came on the air in 1992, scripted TV was pretty soft, pretty boring, not trying to do something new.  I think shows like “The Real World” have made writers and producers work harder. And as a result, I think both scripted and nonscripted TV is much more vital now, thanks to “The Real World.”

The rules are the same as bros icing bros, but with the Smirnoff replaced with — you guessed it — a Busch, and the “Busched” party is required to take two knees instead of one (the woman pictured above displays poor form). The site explains that “there is nothing more insulting than being forced to take two knees and publicly slam down a Busch.”

Here at Broadsheet, Riddhi Shah previously pointed out that the “icing” phenomenon has some not-so-endearing sexist undertones. Girls Busching Girls aims to flip the misogynist-leaning dialogue of the game to exclude bros and enforce “the girl code.”

But Girls Busching Girls hasn’t taken off the way that Bros Icing Bros did, and I’m not that surprised — for all the site’s commenters’ bluster about people with vaginas being out of the game, girls have been getting in on the icing, myself included. We live in an equal opportunity icing society, bros and bro-ettes. For weeks, I have been engaged in an ice war with my younger brother — who isn’t a certified bro, but certainly has bro leanings (a fondness for Keystone Light and aggressively patterned shorts). Is it juvenile? Totally. Most things in frat culture lean that way. But is it also hilarious to whip out a pineapple malt beverage from your purse at a movie theater and see that “Oh shit, I’ve been iced” look? Yes, yes it is.

Women are often excluded from these frat games by definition, but also because of the stereotype that ladies are downers and dudes are all about having fun. (See: Every Judd Apatow film ever.) But in the ice wars, that also gives ladies a pretty clear advantage. Now, I’m not saying that you should go Hatfields vs. McCoys on your friends with this busching thing. The truth is that it’s just a pretty amusing and, hopefully, short-lived game. But if Busching is what it takes for women to get in on an enormous male-centric prank war, then I’m all for it.

Nor has it ever been easy to predict Anderson’s next move: During the big-haired, glam-rock, shoulder-padded 1980s, Anderson sported a sleek, androgynous look and set bizarrely lovely poetry to winding, eerie music. In the 1990s, she introduced a documentary on the history of the face before becoming a voice actor on “The Rugrats Movie.” Her multimedia performances have been inspired by everything from “Moby-Dick” to NASA. This month, Anderson is releasing her first studio album in a decade, “Homeland,” written on the road about America and co-produced by her husband, Lou Reed. Salon reached Anderson on the phone to talk about gender experiments, the humor in Lady Gaga’s work, and why she hates the avant-garde.

You recently played a concert tuned so that only dogs could hear it. What was the inspiration for that?

The idea came to me about a year ago when I was backstage with Yo-Yo Ma. We were giving commencement speeches and sitting backstage and going, “Oh man, what are we going to say to these recent art school graduates?” I was just saying that my dream is to be playing some music and look up and see that the whole audience is dogs. And he said, “That’s mine, too!” And we both said that if we ever get a chance we’re going to do that. So when I was asked to curate the Vivid festival in Sydney, I asked if we could curate something for dogs and they said, “Yeah, why not?”

At first the piece was really within their hearing range. As it got closer to the date, I talked to a lot of doctors who said, “We do not recommend that, because you really don’t know what will happen. You could be inciting a riot.” So I dropped a lot of those pitches down. Frankly, we don’t know what kind of music dogs like. I think people assume that they like classical, but there were a lot of rockers at this concert. As soon as we went on they were bouncing off the walls. We played songs to dance with your dogs and others were about finding the one spot that really gets to your dog as music does with people. There was a lot of contact between people and their dogs during the show. It was one of the sweetest concerts I’ve ever done, and it was on my 63rd birthday too, so it was a little bit dreamlike. I realized that if I’m an average person and sleeping an average amount of time, then I realized that on that birthday I had been asleep for 21 years. I thought, “Today is the day my dream self has become an adult. It can drink. It can drive.” So it was kind of a celebration of that, too.

Your new album, “Homeland,” comes out this month. You’ve been working on some of the songs in some cases for several years in your live set. How did they change since you started playing them?

When I started doing this, it was very loose improv, and some of them were called “Homeland.” Instrumentals talking about Karl Marx and Herman Melville, nothing to do with each other. And gradually I put this together on the road. Eventually around 30 songs came out of it, and a lot of them are really political because it was at the tail end of the Bush years. I’m not a big flag-waver, but I do get some of my identity from my country. So when I started hearing about torture, it just made me lost and angry. And the word “homeland” for America has air quotes  around it. No one ever says that word. Ever. No one asks, “How do you feel about your homeland?” That sounds like a bad translation from a small Balkan country. The Department of Homeland Security put an oversentimentalized word like “homeland” and sandwiched it between these really bureaucratic words. In the end, it’s not about your homeland, it’s not about security, it’s about a certain kind of government control. 

On your album, you perform in “audio drag” as Fenway Bergamot. How has that character evolved?

I’ve always done audio drag. I love it because it’s a kind of weird puppetry. I use it not for itself, but to find another voice. You know, to say stuff and not just [drops voice a register] sound like this. It gives you a different take on things. Plus, I get so sick of hearing myself talk. Sometimes I’m in the middle of a sentence and just think, “Oh, no, I’m saying that again? It’s just so pompous.”  It means that I don’t have to be the woman, New Yorker, artist that I am.

Some of the gender experiments you worked with, like audio drag, are now the stuff of college curricula.

That’s kind of ominous. They’re teaching that stuff? Uh-oh. Those kind of phrases like “gender studies” or “performance art” kind of give me the creeps. For me, it’s not about gender. It’s about telling stories. It doesn’t matter much that I’m a woman telling the story. I did a lot of school and I enjoyed it, but when I’m around there now I just think how glad I am that it’s over. When anything gets institutionalized, the life goes out of it.

You spent a year as NASA’s artist in residence. What are your feelings about the recent pullback on unmanned space flights?

I don’t think we actually have to go there ourselves. It’s risky, and we have some pretty sophisticated and beautiful machines for looking. They’re not us. They aren’t going to write songs or poems about it, but they can still be really inspiring. I think it’s probably good not to be sending living creatures up on the tail end of huge explosions.

One of the elements of your work that I’ve always found compelling is the humor in it. Is that a conscious part of your shows?

Oh, yeah. I have secret ambitions to just be a comedian. That’s what I’d really like to do, stand-up comedy. I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone, but that’s a really big part of what I do.  I really trust laughter. It’s really physical, and you can’t fake it. I mean you can fake it [fake laughs], but then it becomes so creepy. 

You worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the 1970s. How did he influence your approach to comedy?

Oh, enormously. We used to go out to Coney Island to work on stuff. I was his straight man, and I used to tag along with him because I adored him. I was just a major fan. So we would go out to the “Test Your Strength” booth and we would stand around and just make fun of everyone who was doing it. I was supposed to beg him for a stuffed bear. And after a while, people would get sick of his taunting and say, “Well, why don’t you try it?” And he tried it and hit, like, level one of 20. And then he would start complaining, “This is rigged. I want to see the manager!” It was really very funny.

You worked with Lou Reed on this new album. What’s it like collaborating with your husband?

We don’t usually work together, but on this record — especially at the end — I needed his help. Record budgets are not huge. I got to the end of my record budget when I was working on this and still had thousands of audio files to edit. Plus, I was doing it as a hobby for something like two days a month. And when you work on something for two days a month, it’s hard to remember what you’re doing. I was complaining about it a lot and Lou said, “OK, I’ll come into the studio and work with you until you’re done.” And I sort of thought, “Is this a good idea to have your husband come in?” I would play something for him and he’d go,”This is done, move on.” And I’d say, “Oh, no, that’s not done. We have to redo the vocals.” And he’d be like, “No, really, it’s done.” So that was a little different. But he’s a great producer, and the record ended up having a lot of air in it. It wasn’t just going from one digital box to another. 

There’s recently been a resurgent interest in performance art in the museum world, thanks to Marina Abramovic’s work at MOMA. What do you think about the installation of performance art in a space like that?

Marina’s a completely different kind of artist. I think a large part of the show is about documenting living things. It’s a hard thing to do without getting a little bit theatrical or Madame Tussaud’s kind of feel. I love Marina’s work, but I felt uncomfortable seeing it re-created live because without the mentality, it’s just not the point for me. On one level, I’m just not interested in it. But on the other hand, whenever I go see Marina’s work I’m completely absorbed in it. I think that museums have a hard time representing certain kinds of work. One of the things I love about being a multimedia artist is how undefined it is. You don’t have to be writing a book and have people ask “Why are you writing a book? You’re a performance artist!” The thing is that I often start working on one medium, and it turns into a different one. I start working on an opera and it turns into a potato print. What I do is tell stories, and how do you fit that in a museum? They fit in your head, but they don’t fit into the room.

But you must have some boundaries when you’re working on something. How do you impose structure on your work?

If I’m trying to decide on a project, it has to have two of the three following things: It has to be fun, it has to be interesting, or it has to make money. The third one sounds crass, but when you’re an artist, you do actually have to make a living. And you only have to have two of those things. It could just be fun and make money, i.e., doing work for “The Rugrats Movie.” It’s a really handy formula. Just to be interesting is, to me, what the avant-garde is about, and that’s not enough for me. 

That’s interesting. Many people, myself included, consider you the leader of that avant-garde scene. 

Oh my god, I’m just feeling myself more and more deadened by that kind of stuff. I don’t mean to be a plebeian, but I think it’s so repetitive. I go to some shows and think, “I went to the same concert about feedback in 1971 in a loft.” It’s the exact same thing, I mean, exact. It just feels a little precious for me.

Another person who’s been bringing performance art into the mainstream is Lady Gaga. What do you think about her?

She makes me laugh my head off, and I love that. Is it really good art? I don’t know. But I think that anybody who breaks the boundaries, I’m interested in. We’ll see where she goes with it, because right now it’s kind of Fellini stuff. She’s a lot of fun, but I’ve never had my heart broken. That’s what I’m always looking for.

10. While growing up off the South Shore of Long Island, Benatar — born Andrzejewski — used to horse around on her friends’ clam boats. Once, she helped cause a boat collision that required her to be towed back ashore by the Coast Guard.

9. On her first marriage, to Dennis Benatar: “I knew the day we wed that I was making a terrible mistake … I looked up and saw the man I thought I wanted to marry and suddenly my brain said, Run! I wish I’d done that.”

8. Benatar was classically trained as a vocalist in high school, but gave it up after she married. She was motivated to go back into music when she saw Liza Minelli in concert and thought “This is ridiculous. I’m a better singer than she is.”

7. When Benatar began singing in New York night clubs, she became fast friends with comedian (and “Law and Order” veteran) Richard Belzer. “I finally figured out that Belzer waited until I had just taken a big gulp of coffee to jump in with a one-liner … I think I had coffee and milk shooting out of my nose every 15 minutes.”

6. Benatar and Giraldo began dating soon after she divorced her first husband, but broke up for a year. Benatar would get livid at Giraldo’s female fans: “At one concert in particular, some obviously drunk girl in the front row opened her blouse during the first set and proceeded to bleat, ‘Neil, Neil’ for the entire show. Occasionally she’d put her hands onstage and when we got to the show’s closer, “Heartbreaker,” I stepped on them and stood there until the song was over just to shut her up.”

5. The video for “Shadows of the Night” features Benatar as a Nazi-hunter. Two of her bandmates played Nazis. The video also had the young guild actors Bill Paxton and Judge Reinhold.

4. When she was promoting “Crimes of Passion,” Benatar’s label ran an advertisement in “Billboard” that had been airbrushed to make her look naked. When Benatar saw it, she threw a fit: “Aside from being embarrassing, the photo was stupid. Didn’t they understand that people already knew how I was built? All people had to do was take one look at me. Were Billboard readers suddenly going to flock to my album because I’d miraculously grown new breasts? … I was aware that the sexy image was something I’d created. I’d never meant for it to be the focal point. My problem wasn’t that people thought I was sexy, it was that [they] only wanted the sexy part. It was offensive, but also boring.”

3. It took 48 hours of intense rehearsal for Benatar to get the choreography for the “Love is a Battlefield” video down. “Afterwards, I couldn’t walk for days.”

2. The version of “Love is a Battlefield” in “13 Going on 30″ got Benatar’s blessing because her daughter, Hana, loved the movie. Benatar’s other daughter, Haley, formed an all-teenage girl band named GLO that opened for Benatar on one of her tours.

1. Benatar played the 90s alt-rock festival Lilith Fair, and has tried to support fellow female musicians throughout her career. “For every day since I was old enough to think, I’ve considered myself a feminist … I see women everywhere doing their thing and throwing themselves into situations headfirst, and not taking shit from anyone. It’s empowering to watch and to know that, perhaps in some way, I made the hard path they have to walk just a little bit easier.”