She had these to say about the moment:

“This is just everyday me after I got outta the shower one evening, haha. Most likely between the IT job and doing schoolwork in the evening. I’m really bad at blurbs”

Note on the Darling House Self Portrait Project: 

A few days ago I asked the contributors to Darling House to send in a self portrait of themselves and an accompanying note about what was going on. I’m fascinated by the lives of Creatives with a relationship to the Adult, Erotic or Sexuality Industry. I’m starting with members from Darling House but I’m really eager to hear from all of you from this very diverse, passionate, insane, complex, tender, brutal and above all dynamic world. If you work in this world in a direct or even indirect manner, send us your self portaits! Directors, models, actors, makeup artists, sound guys, lighting people, photographers, writers, producers. Let’s get windows into what’s going on with you: Anything is welcome. Mundane, intense, cell phone pics, high key, goofy, reflections-small moments the encapsulate what you’re going through.

Warm Regards, Joshua Darling master@darlinghouse.net

“Palms Hotel, Vegas 2012.  A day at the office with team rockstar.  The petite ball o’fury on the left is my assistant Tita and we are shooting Darling Danica. Her husband is on the right, running the empire.”

The Adult Creatives Self Portrait Project: Today Steve Prue

this is me on the coast of Kenya riding a camel back from snorkeling. needless to say, it was a damn fine morning.

Note on the Darling House Self Portrait Project: 

A few days ago I asked the contributors to Darling House to send in a self portrait of themselves and an accompanying note about what was going on. I’m fascinated by the lives of Creatives with a relationship to the Adult, Erotic or Sexuality Industry. I’m starting with members from Darling House but I’m really eager to hear from all of you from this very diverse, passionate, insane, complex, tender, brutal and above all dynamic world. If you work in this world in a direct or even indirect manner, send us your self portaits! Directors, models, actors, makeup artists, sound guys, lighting people, photographers, writers, producers. Let’s get windows into what’s going on with you: Anything is welcome. Mundane, intense, cell phone pics, high key, goofy, reflections-small moments the encapsulate what you’re going through. And end a little blurb about what was happening too! Read below for an example.

Warm Regards,

Joshua Darling

master@darlinghouse.net

TODAY: NATASHA GORNIK, Photographer, contributor Darling House

“this is me on the coast of Kenya riding a camel back from snorkeling. needless to say, it was a dam fine morning”

Note on the Darling House Self Portrait Project: 

A few days ago I asked the contributors to Darling House to send in a self portrait of themselves and an accompanying note about what was going on. I’m fascinated by the lives of Creatives with a relationship to the Adult, Erotic or Sexuality Industry. I’m starting with members from Darling House but I’m really eager to hear from all of you from this very diverse, passionate, insane, complex, tender, brutal and above all dynamic world. If you work in this world in a direct or even indirect manner, send us your self portaits! Directors, models, actors, makeup artists, sound guys, lighting people, photographers, writers, producers. Let’s get windows into what’s going on with you: Anything is welcome. Mundane, intense, cell phone pics, high key, goofy, reflections-small moments the encapsulate what you’re going through. And end a little blurb about what was happening too! Read below for an example.

Warm Regards,

Joshua Darling

master@darlinghouse.net

A few days ago I asked the contributors to Darling House to send in a self portrait of themselves and an accompanying note about what was going on. I’m fascinated by the lives of Creatives with a relationship to the Adult, Erotic or Sexuality Industry. I’m starting with members from Darling House but I’m really eager to hear from all of you from this very diverse, passionate, insane, complex, tender, brutal and above all dynamic world. If you work in this world in a direct or even indirect manner, send us your self portaits! Directors, models, actors, makeup artists, sound guys, lighting people, photographers, writers, producers. Let’s get windows into what’s going on with you: Anything is welcome. Mundane, intense, cell phone pics, high key, goofy, reflections-small moments the encapsulate what you’re going through. And end a little blurb about what was happening too! Read below for an example.

Warm Regards,

Joshua Darling

master@darlinghouse.net

Our first self portrait is from Darling House contributor photographer Steve Prue who had this to say about this moment

“Palms Hotel, Vegas 2012.  A day at the office with team rockstar.  The petite ball o’fury on the left is my assistant Tita and we are shooting Darling Danica. Her husband is on the right, running the empire.”

The bathroom in my hotel room was pretty awesome and got a lot of traffic.  This gallery should give y’all an idea of what the maid saw when she walked in…

Thanks to Tita, Luscious, Christy Mack and Yesenia for being rad in C-Bus.

What am I left with? If (big if) if the people who made you what you are, (an artist, bon vivant, traveler, questioner) are monsters-what does that make you.

I’m in the process of created a series that span a live multimedia who that spans live events and film that deal with this, and other dark art legacy. Here are a couple previews of Dominatrix January Seraph who lends herself to the project. Expect to see, when done, some of the most provocative names in adult making cameo in this exploration in the abyss and hopefully, bliss.

when i see them, i visualize very sheer kind of silky black panty hose attached and no bra and i’m not sure which sort of heels but heels for certain and i question would i be shaved for such delicate fabric? rubbing softly against my skin whenever i move and then i decide to keep the hair and let its fullness be seen through the mesh and some will poke through the panties and it keeps it a secret a pretty secret for a very select few if any maybe just keep it a secret and the color is so creamy and i really want to slip into them and feel them sliding up my leg and thigh over and on my hips the clasps of the garters landing gentle and cold on my thigh skin and i want to try them on in one of those soft floral affluent dressing rooms and a fair maiden comes to tend helping me clasp the hooks on the stockings kneeling to my right and she’s in a milk maid’s outfit and it goes to good places from there. so i buy them and wonder whether i will ever make that happen. tonight i’m eating popcorn for dinner.

I enjoy working on more intense imagery.  I’m a fucking artist.

Here are some screencaps from my latest video My Imaginary Boyfriend:

Cam Damage

Ps. I’m in love with Brooklyn Lee and will stop at nothing to possess her.

I need a tan, also, I look like a mannequin.

This is me masturbating.

This is me and Jenna Rose as nurse and patient respectively.

My face makeup with an artsty filter to make me look hip. Because I'm a hipster.

Man of Many Hats: Surgeon, Psychologist, Ladies Man and Killer of the Black Dahlia: Grandpa

Prepping for my next big LA shoot dates, I’ll be building material with some of the industry’s most well known names in adult for a cross discpline project: cabaret, book and short film. This story is provides the backdrop for the theme of it:

I was just driving with my gracious hostess (and adult film auteur) Nica Noelle and somehow the topic of the Black Dahlia came up. I have some very curious connections to the Black Dahlia. Let me explain

Like most adolescents emerging into adulthood I often felt myself the constant outsider. I was raised by my mother, a Eurasian woman who, perhaps reacting against the sheltered life that coming from a wealthy political Filipino family offered her, found her way deep into the American Flower-Power generation. My stepfather (I had never known my biological father), a British citizen, had grown up entertaining (tap-dancing) for the Allied Forces during the War, was never schooled and proudly hailed from the school of ‘hard knocks’. I was raised, a child of bohemia, on a series of sailboats (that we built ourselves) sailing around the world. Living in more than 40 countries, finding myself on foreign shores not speaking a smack of the local tongue, and coming from a multicultural globetrotting family often left me asking just who the heck I was. It was a question that would linger deep into adulthood and continues to linger to this day.

My identity was anchored, however, by my illustrious grandparents on my mother’s side: My grandmother Hortensia, a Filipino agriculturalist who survived the war, cancer, and went on to become a two term Congresswoman – and my beloved Grandfather George – an American surgeon and psychologist with an IQ that rivaled Einstein’s, a former child piano protégée, an avid art patron and close friend of Man Ray and John Huston. I spent childhood summers with grandfather and it was then that I felt good – proud – like I had an identity. He was Zeus, which made me feel that I was invincible as well. Who was I? I was Dr. George’s grandson. Good enough for me.

My grandfather died on my 21st birthday. While the day was sad, I had somehow negotiated a settlement within myself. With his passing, I should be a man finally and embrace my somewhat scattered origins. I was, in the end, his offspring and I assumed the ‘Who am I?’ demons were to be put to bed.

I found myself an artist living and working in NYC as photographer, direct and actor a bombshell exploded in my family. My uncle Steve , a retired LA police detective published a NYTimes Bestseller, The Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he accuses his father, my grandfather George, of being the notorious killer of Betty Short, aka, the Black Dahlia (as well as many others around the world). This shook the foundation of our family. While the book has some points that are true, there are many claims the truth and accuracy of which even the most staunch readers dispute. While wild in its suggestions, the cases put forth are compelling and in some cases, factual. There had been a dark side to Grandfather. For one, he had been tried, though acquitted, for the rape of his daughter Tamar in a now famous 1949 case. His house built by Frank Llowd Wright Jr. (The “Sowden” house, looks like a Mayan temple featured in “The Aviator”) was home to many bacchanalian orgies and supposed the site of her murder. The actual murder is said to have been committed by a surgeon (which he was, as well as a psychologist) and the act of murder was an act of surrealist art (the placement of the body, coded symbolism carved into Elizabeth Shorts skin) and his best friends were the artist Man Ray, John Huston, Dali and other in the surrealist movement. A little too close for comfort. I still have Man Ray’s photo gear he had given grandpa.

I didn’t know Grandpa then obviously, this was the 40s. I knew him as a kindly older grandfather who handed my a camera and said: “Take pictures of pretty girls and they’ll kiss you” a promised that I have to confess has really delivered.

I’m in LA now, his hometown, completely immersed in a world of sex and beauty due to my trade and people I’ve chosen to surround myself with. In some way, Man Ray and grandpa, having brought me into photography, laid the foundation for this some 60 odd years ago.

I don’t know if Grandpa did it, but I do know that people live many lifetimes and reinvent themselves constantly. I’m fortunate enough to make and tell stories with images and some of the most sublime, beautiful and sexual creatures in this country. So regardless of what happened on the night of Jan. 15, 1947 ( unfortunately Grandpa’s house was bugged bu the police and public record has him bragging:” And what if I did kill the Black Dahlia? They can’t prove it. I’m brilliant.”) I do love the man that manifested me and gave me the gift of being a raconteur and adventurer taking photos of Dahlias everywhere.

Live big and live strong, baby.

Here are some photos.

The shot of the ship is my first photo, the Rock of Gibraltar, the shot of the group in Kimonos is from one of Grandpa’s soirees. The shot of the boy with him is me and my little sister.

It may not be to the credit of men that the smack-down is generally associated with the masculine gender, though I see nothing especially manly in the smack-downs administered in the world of  professional wrestling, from which we inherit the term itself. Personally, I have always been much more impressed with the rhetorical and oratorical smack-down, such as that delivered by Winston Churchill in response to an admonition from his political rival, Bessie Braddock. As the story goes, Churchill encountered Braddock outside the pub in which he had spent the evening drinking and discerning at once that Churchill was intoxicated and eager to upbraid him for it, Braddock remarked, “You, sir, are drunk!” In response, Churchill offered the now legendary riposte, “And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober.” Oh, snap.

Impressive though Churchill’s rejoinder was, and as much as I admire his wit and pugnacity, the greatest, the smackiest smack-down that I have ever heard takes the form of a closing argument delivered in San Fransisco, California in 1890 in The State of California v. Unknown Defendant.

The attorney who delivered this smack-down nonpareil was none other than the redoubtable Clara Shortridge Foltz. In addition to being California’s first female attorney, Foltz was also the first female deputy district attorney in the United States; the founder and publisher of the San Diego Daily Bee, and New American Woman Magazine; the first woman named director of a major bank; a member of the Bar of New York; a gifted lecturer; a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage; and, a devoted (and single) mother of five children. And she also introduced the idea of the Public Defender. She was, by any standard whatsoever, a total bad-ass. I urge you to read all you can find about this extraordinary woman and then aspire to be more like her. If you can accomplish even a quarter of what she accomplished in her lifetime, you will have achieved much.

By the time of the trial in question, Foltz had been practicing law for ten years and her reputation as an intelligent and capable attorney was well established. Foltz’s reputation, however impressive and well-deserved, was either unknown to or simply ignored by the opposing counsel in the case, a certain Colonel Thetas Stonehill, a former captain in the Confederate army who went by the moniker “Colonel”. Perhaps the good Colonel felt that his case as the prosecuting attorney simply wouldn’t prevail on its own merits, or perhaps he believed that Foltz would simply demure in the face of a direct insult to her and to her sex, but whatever his motivation may have been, he took his summation as an opportunity to deride the reasoning faculties of women in general and to inveigh against Foltz specifically. Addressing the all male jury, Stonehill explained that, “[Foltz] cannot be expected to reason; God Almighty decreed her limitations, but you can reason and you must use your reasoning faculties against this young woman…” And as if the point were somehow in dispute, Stonehill bellowed, “SHE IS A WOMAN!”

The Colonel would find out soon enough that though he had correctly identified Foltz’s gender, he had failed to ascertain something much more important about her: what kind of woman she was. Foltz was the kind of woman who handily out-classed him and readily out-performed him. Superior to him in intellect, character, and much else besides, she was the kind of woman that an arrogant turd like Colonel Stonehill had no business trifling with. The following are excerpts from Clara Shortridge Foltz’s closing argument in the case, in which she immobilizes her opponent on the mat, ascends to the metaphorical top rope of the ring and then delivers the coup de grace in the form of a rhetorical Ram Jam that would incapacitate even the indomitable Hulk Hogan himself. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the greatest smack-downs in the history of the smack-down:

If Your Honor please and gentlemen of the jury:

You well know that I am not before you by my own choice! That in obedience to time-honored rule I am here by order of this court trying as best I can to represent this despairing man. Is it not strange then that the district attorney should make me an object of his displeasure and challenge my presence at this bar because only that I am a woman? The kind indulgence of the court has permitted counsel to range over much matter that is neither of record nor part of the evidence in this case. I would rather the immaterial and irrelevant part of his speech had remained unspoken, for I take no pleasure in the wanton abuse of a jury’s patience nor in burdening them with matter wholly foreign to the case…

Counsel tells you that I am a woman. I wonder that the planets did not stand still in their course and rivers cease to run to the sea at the announcement of this startling discovery. I am amazed that His Honor did not faint upon the bench and that you gentlemen of the jury have survived this awful shock to your nervous systems.

Let me kindly admonish the learned counsel that in a matter of great pith and moment like this he should break the news gently and not plunge such an original thought upon an unprepared jury. A few more such thoughtless revelations and your nervous forces will be destroyed and your reason dethroned. Counsel should beware how he heedlessly enlightens an unprepared jury on such a vital topic.

Again he tells you that I am a woman. By a natural antithesis I presume he would have you infer that he is not. I suppose he wants me to tell you that he is a man and he takes this hurried opportunity and adroit method of testifying to the fact. Though nobody has yet denied it, he seems to be in a fever of anxiety to emphasize that he is a man. I don’t know why he should make such unseemly hast in announcing it. He should remember that a swift and willing witness to a point not controverted is a herald of suspicion. Useless denial has caught more criminals than has silence a long way…

I am that formidable and terrifying object known as a woman—while he is only a poor, helpless, defenseless man, and he wants you to take pity on him and give him a verdict in this case. I sympathize with counsel in his unhappy condition. True, the world is open to him. He is the peer of all men—he can aspire to the highest offices, he can carry a torch over our streets during a political campaign and sell his vote for a dollar and half on election day, and yet he isn’t satisfied. Like Alexander, who wanted more worlds to conquer, he wants verdicts, and in order to awaken your sympathy for him, he tells you that I am a woman and he is only a man.

I confess I do not clearly see the relevancy of the statement to this case. The logic is, I am a woman; therefore, you should find this defendant guilty. The conclusion is rather sudden. We are hurried across the river of dispute without bridge or ferry or fording place. In the chain of his logic an important link seems wanting. There is a weakness somehwere, but mothers are always weak after such extraordinary births, and we presume we ought to be lenient. “Be to his faults a little blind, be to his virtues very kind.”

But counsel insists that I am a woman. Gentlemen of the jury, of the atrocious crime I plead guilty. Into this world I have broght five healthy children. By my industry I have supported them them till some are even now stepping from youth and maidenhood into the broader estate of manhood and womanhood. And I repel the covert slur and innuendo that came with the words, “She is a woman,” words intended to depreciate me and my efforts before you in this cause, words none the less obnoxious because spoken under the cloak of a honeyed compliment. In the name of the mothers who nursed you, and of the wives and maidens who look love into your eyes, I resent this hidden appeal to a supposed prejudice of this jury. I resent this ill-concealed slur and covert innuendo that the presence of a woman in a lawsuit contaminates her and that her sex must militate against her client…

Counsel intimates with a curl on his lip that I am called the lady lawyer. I am sorry I cannot return the compliment, but I cannot. I never heard anybody call him any kind of lawyer at all.

And now let us take it all together. I am a woman and I am a lawyer—and what of it? It is not so new or wonderful a thing. I am practicing law in this city; I have offices in one of its largest buildings, and I go daily to and from those offices in my right mind. I am certainly not unknown to the bench and bar of California. And gentlemen, I came into the practice of my profession under the laws of this state, regularly and honestly, and not by the certificate of another state that required no learning to secure, and I have come to stay. I am neither to be bullied out or worn out. I ask no special privileges and expect no favors, but I think it only fair that those who have had better opportunities than I, who have had fewer obstacles to surmount and fewer difficulties to contend with should meet me on even ground, upon the merits of the law and fact without this everlasting and incessant reference to sex—reference that in its very nature is uncalled for and is as unprofessional as it is unmanly…

Counsel thought I was too timid to resent this miserable inference against women in courts of justice. I am descended from the heroic stock Daniel Boone, and never shrunk from contest nor knew a fear. I inherit no drop of craven blood. If I have remained silent when others would have retorted, it is because of my respect for the courts and the halls of justice, which I grieve to see become the arena of personal encounter. But the patience which at first may have been a virtue would become criminal by longer exercise. This controversy was not of my seeking—a long series of abuses has forced it upon me.

When I so forget the dignity of my profession, when I so trample upon its courtesy, when I so shut my eyes to the honor and respect due this bench as to introduce such irrelevant matter, I hope that I may be barred the profession and banished the country.

Sources:
Ladies and Gentlemen of The Jury: The Greatest Closing Arguments in Modern Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_S._Foltz

Throughout the world, there are plenty of social rules against “staring” and deep-rooted cultural taboos which forbid us from looking too closely at other people. The cinematography experience seems to be a rare exception, being one of the only spaces where it becomes both safe and acceptable to observe the lives of others. While the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, it feeds on us the hope of seeing the more base side of human nature.  More recently, the proliferation of reality TV shows proves that such quest for scopophiliac pleasure does not have to be restricted to the two-hour movie experience only: we are now able to partake on the events around someone’s life 24 hours a day, thriving on observing what unfolds before us as if a game which does not depend on our participation or opinion but, at the same time, is being played to please us as audience.

And scopophilia is not a male only pleasure. Reality TV is aimed at a female audience the same way soap operas are, and some might even argue there is no difference between them, not even in terms of fictionalization.  According to Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, reality TV represents “a new way of telling a story which [is] half fiction — the producers and creators set up a universe, they give it rules, they make a setting, they cast it according to specific guidelines as to who they think are going to provide good pyrotechnics. But then they bring in non-actors with no scripts and allow this kind of improvisation like a jazz piece to occur.”  Psychologically, the popularity of these shows is due to viewer’s identification with the ordinary people who are chosen as participants, and viewer watch tantalized by the voyeuristic thrill they get from peeking in.

Voyeuristic pleasure derives from objectifying a character, and narcissistic pleasure from identification with a character in film (HOOFD, 1996).  But what happens where there is both objectification and identification? And in a world where the cult of celebrity has already surpassed that of gods, the concept of being able to witness celebrities’ private moments shines like gold.  As a result, the once unauthored pornography might be replaced by celebrities’ sex tapes which mirror reality TV in several ways, including the level of fictionalization that is present in such videos.  Therefore, by objectifying myself through the image of the other, I am able to embody both the passive and the active agents of sex, this way subverting commonly held notions which establish a said order in what I know as the world.  Moreover, if the other in question is a celebrity, there is the possibility of overlapping narcissistic pleasure with identification, therefore creating a new paradigm in which I am aware I am not the other but, nonetheless, I am able to forge a temporary bond in which my own needs for self-assurance will take place on the same figure I refuse to leave, but cannot identify with.

When it comes to pornography, the voyeuristic fetish already so exacerbated takes an even bigger form because what is being watched resembles genuine personal footage, or reality porn.  The cinéma vérité set ups enable the audience to elaborate a new level of perception in which the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred precisely because there is no previous agreement between the audience and the film about what is real and what is not: at the same time it all rings true and false, giving spectators room to pretend (or fantasize) that what they are watching is, in fact, lost footage which was supposed to be private but, somehow, is at that moment allowing them to observe the intimate moments of a porn star.

Manuel Ferrara’s series RAW (Evil Angel) is referred to as the director’s private collection: in one-on-one scenarios, Ferrara takes the audience into private and public places in what seems to be uncommitted documentation of real dates, which later translates into unedited scenes resembling informal home videos. Ferrara keeps the camera work to a most basic – gonzo style, his only camera sometimes is on the hands of his partner, who might be filming herself on the shower, a drive to Santa Monica beach, or even talking to the camera as if it was Manuel himself. By mixing POV and voyeur-style shooting (by placing the camera on a dresser, for example), Ferrara makes use of pornographic content and techniques in a way that makes it possible to metaficcionally interrogate porn in its own engine and machinery.  RAW does not seek to emulate the style of amateur pornography because it deliberately plays with exhibitionist awareness and gonzo basic features.

It is not “only” porn.  It is not a celebrities’ sex tape either.  What Manuel Ferrara has inaugurated here differs from the porn we are used to watching because we do not want to feel like we are part of it. On the contrary, the series eliminates entirely the relationship between watching and participating by making explicit that there is no participation of the spectator to what unveils before their eyes.  If anything, the spectator might derive pleasure from knowing that “looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as … there is pleasure in being looked at” (MULVEY, 1975, 200-201), but the commitment between Ferrara and the audience never mentioned this tacit agreement. Instead, it ignores the audience entirely to achieve a form of linguistic pornography that it able to critique the genre itself, without eliminating any of the elements we as audience expect to find in this sort of production.

Manuel Ferrara’s RAW series is initiating a new poetics of porn: one which delivers an exquisite and unique pornographic experience enclosed in a feature with lack of zoom, no anatomy lesson shoots, no forced vocalization, very little camera movement during sex. The realism Ferrara is able to conjure is unprecedent, and there is no doubt he is filming more than just his sexual encounters, but what starts to take form as the future of pornography.

Heel slave, Heel

Follow slave, Follow

Wallow slave, Wallow.

I was shooting Jolene for a tattoo magazine and proposed a quick polaroid set for fun.  She grabbed her friend…and the results were too hot for Zivity.com (even with the gold stars!)

I’ve been having fun with my Polaroid porn project and should be seeing more appearances in print with them.  Please go check out JoleneJolene’s page – she is almost as pretty as she is talented and motivated.  Girl makes me tired when she lists what she does in a day…

Well, she tries to keep it Safe For Work over there.  Luckily, I don’t have that problem here at Darlinghouse.  So after you have read her current workout blog and done some crunches and stretched out a bit, check out the images after Tita decided that taking off her clothes was way more fun than doing another 15min of cardio on the treadmill.

You can see more of this champion of the naked workout on Zivity and her blog- Cupcakedujour.ca.

I have spent the last 20 years of my life baring this flag, but I refuse to be a feminist anymore.

When I joined the feminist movement – and this happened while I was still in high school, and started to debate on women’s rights in the (accidentally) all-girl school I attended – I believed the feminist movement was about protecting and fostering opportunities for women in order to grant everyone a better world. Twenty years later, I read a couple of articles written by feminists. I do not want to be like them anymore: they are bashful towards men, irrational about media, and their irony is acid towards their own kin. So I refuse to be a feminist anymore.

I resent having said that feminism was the answer to all the world’s maladies, and I am ashamed to have supported so many bras being burnt.  If I could, I would take back all the books I have read, the conferences I have attended, the marches I have walked. Because I refuse to be a feminist anymore.

I do not want that for me anymore, but I want to address some topics raised by those articles before I can move on. Take it as you want: I call it my 15 top reasons why I don’t want to be a feminist anymore.

1)      FEMINISM is not about treating other women with respect, it is about treating human beings with respect.  So stop being bashful towards people without a cunt.

2)      YOU are not supposed to feel bad for not liking all women. Some women are assholes, like some men are assholes – in fact, some people are even less than assholes, so there is no problem in hating some of them.

3)      I DO NOT care if corporate media feeds the fire of female competition; it does the same to males and they did not turn out as nasty as some women can get, specially towards each other.

4)      MEN are not enemies. So enough with looking at them suspiciously, as if they have a hidden agenda from day one: they might just really like you, and some of them might even have been brought up by a woman who does not see men as enemies and, therefore, was able to raise a nice one.

5)      MEN are not a prize, either. So enough with competing for one, most of the time reducing another woman to nothing based on (a) her intelligence (b) her looks (c) her moral standards.

6)      I CANNOT be nice to people who choose not to be enlightened, so if you belong to middle class – regardless of your ethnicity – and you choose to act like a jerk despite having access to information, I will treat you like the ass you are. This is valid for both genders – don’t think I will be lenient if you are a woman.

7)      ACTUALLY, time for leniency is over. No more excusing women’s behavior by regarding it as a result of male dominance. This was good forty years ago – not anymore.  If you are a woman and you choose to be submissive, please, do so away from me.  It was your choice.

8)      NOBODY over the age of 20 in America – or in the majority of Western countries – is allowed to be ignorant anymore. Hiding behind dated excuses from the 60s which exempted women from responsibility is a coward act, to say the least.

9)      BE a woman. Don’t expect the world to be nice to you just because you were born with a cunt between your legs. If you want respect, demand it by acting in ways that would assure you some.

10)   DO NOT act like a fake plastic being concatenated by masculine minds. If you are overzealous of your body but not protective of your mind do not complain when men treat you like the dumb thing you are.  And, if you are reading this, chances are you had a lot of opportunities in life – you know how to read, to start with – so there are no excuses.

11)   IF YOU are ok with being labeled a man-hater because it means to you that “feminism can better serve those it is meant for”, think again. Feminism should not exist to serve women, but to make the world a better place for everybody.

12)   IF YOU are a lesbian, stop acting like you are better than me because you do not have sex with men. As you yourself advocate, it is not a choice – and if I like dick, there is nothing wrong with me, just like there is nothing wrong with you liking pussy. Some might even like both – equally. That doesn’t place you in a higher sorority in the echelon of life.

13)   STOP thinking everything a man does carries a deep, heavy anti-female meaning. Sometimes they are just being people. It is up to you to be one too, and that means being able to perceive human beings as isolate instances instead of a collective of jerks defined only by their gender. Or would you like me to do the same to you?

14)   IF “men interrupt women more than they interrupt men”, it is because women digress more and are not as objective as men are. Learn to be straight forward or quit whining.

15)   BEING called a “bitch”, a “whore” or a “slut” is not detrimental to women, but to anyone who gets called that. This is convention and will not change. Stop taking it personally. Actually, stop taking everything so personally. Language is only oppressive if you let it oppress you.

Just a final note: as a feminist, I do not have to like you because you are a woman. I have to like you despite of the fact you are one.

This is my first time on television since I did Style Me with Rachel Hunter.  And boy, am I proud that I got to be the psycho nurse for EPIX Drive-in.  H0w much more awesome can you get?

There is nothing better to me than a last minute, improvised photoshoot. Late at night. In LA.

I had been talking with Ash about maybe setting up a planned shoot. Both our schedules had been really heavy. But I called on whim to see if she had a couple hours free to pop by by a motel I was crashing at on an overnight trip. She zoomed over, brought some great clothing choices, none of which we used, some Jack Daniels and her magic. She’s fearless and charismatic in performance mode, I feel and that really comes across.

Hope you enjoy these as much as I enjoyed making them with her.

Love,

JMD

clicking on those photos in the gallery makes them larger.

Peter Driben - Flirt Magazine, Feb. 1949

Dear Ms. Marcotte,

I have just finished reading your article, and I felt the need to write back to you with my views to try to establish a debate over a topic which, it seems, both of us hold close to our hearts and write passionately about: the pornographic industry and its portrayal of female sexuality.

First, however, let me just separate porn performers from actors. These are different categories. To perform sexually in front of camera requires different skills from those who take up acting classes in order to deliver lines and convey emotions in a mainstream, non-sexual film or in a theater. To a certain extent, it might even be said that pornographic performance demands more, for there has to be such a deep physical commitment to the work that it is hard to parallel that to conventional acting. That is not to say that porn performers cannot act; on the contrary, most often than not they are so good on “faking” emotions that we do not even acknowledge that they are not really feeling all that.  But to mix these two categories – performer and actor – is to inhibit any possibility one might have to explore different aspects of the adult entertainment industry, and to belittle performers who are not exemplary in “acting” but, nonetheless, deliver exquisite performances in pornographic film.

Second, anyone who claims that all pornography is degrading to women is looking only at one part of pornography. There are actually films, directors, studios, producers, and performers nowadays worried about empowering the female persona on camera in porn films.  To beat over the deadest of horses, meaning the misogynist side of pornography, is to draw attention to a corpse that should not even be rotting here anymore, but yet remains unburied precisely because we fail to ignore it. It might be that for some people the degrading of women work as an aphrodisiac, and for those I am sure the industry will always carry special features.  What concerns me is not that these films are being made, but that the line between female degradation and female abuse might be crossed at any time. What I mean is that female degradation CAN and SHOULD be staged to please those who are sexually turned on by it, an audience which not necessarily only includes men. I personally do not find that attractive, and politically I can even oppose to it, but that would be restricting sexual fantasies when, in reality, I would rather see men and women acting on their private fantasies aware that those must be staged and consensual.  It is the non-consensual part of female degradation that concerns me, not the degradation per se.

Third, the idea that violent sex is degrading to women is, at the same time, a way to put them under the sex-less category AND a way to perpetrate female submission. Some women like it rough, and there is nothing wrong with it. Yes, there has been an increase on the number of more “violent” acts on pornography, at the same time that old/young roleplaying seems to be what motivates the market now, but that has to do more with the new economic position of porn than on the degrading of the female body itself. Examples can be found on girl/girl movies which explore bondage, spanking, or emphasis on certain body parts without any male participation.  To say, in 2012, that porn is degrading because it is still being ruled and shaped by men is to ignore that a great quantity of films are in the hands of women, and they are the ones who are making the decisions today. Pornography is no longer a man-only realm, it is actually being thought up by women right under our noses.

What you have failed to understand is that if we regard pornography as women degradation we are exempting women from taking part in it when, in reality, they should be active in how their sexuality is portrayed and perceived by any audience. Yes, there are women who are still mimicking what we used to know as “porn”, meaning a world where the female participation is static and submissive and her presence is not really pivotal. It is all about men popping and the female orgasm being faked. That kind of porn still exists and will continue to exist, since it is hard to change not only the male attitude towards women, but also women’s attitude towards themselves.  However, what can be seen in the porn industry nowadays is a change towards a more female encompassing aesthetics; one which observes male and female as equal and is able to free sexualities from pre-concepts, such as that all porn is degrading to women.

I am sorry if I sound too harsh, but the idea of looking at porn as a tool to degrade women sounds just too passé for me, like sitting around burning bras or dissing men – men which we, as women, raise.  I belong to a new generation which has chosen to wear a bra, and who considers men allied and not enemies.  It is time we prove bell hooks wrong, and show the world the master’s tool will, too, dismantle the master’s house… if only we choose to take it in our hands.

Some of us have already taken up the fight. As a woman, what are you doing?

Here is the link to the article: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/11/larry_flynt_hugh_hefner_and_bob_guccione_would_modern_porn_be_less_awful_if_its_founders_hadn_t_hated_women_.html

This is Lydia Lael. Wet and naked…

Good thing I’m never too fat to cam!

Monica Bellucci face.

Megan Fox face.

Gutted face.

What was funny was that he seemed to feel that I didn’t look like the pictures in my portfolio, because when I’d asked him to shoot me for submission to the magazine, he’d looked through my portfolio and wrote me back to say that yes, he would shoot me.

What is ironic, is that when I started modeling I was twenty pounds heavier than I am now.  Holly Randall shot me when I was ten pounds heavier than I am now.  Half the pictures in my portfolio depict me at being much heavier than I am now.  And yet, I had never in my entire career been told to lose weight.

Not because I think I’m thin or perfect, but because I tend to aim for jobs that are made for someone who looks like me, because I don’t have any illusions about where I fit in the scheme of things.

Still mystified.

Maybe its the fasting induced fugue.

BRB.  I’m about to have a religious ecstasy.

is how you make a mean meatball.

I do not fake sexy.

I either feel it, or I don’t. I’m a tease, not an actress.

-          AriDee on Twitter, March 12^th 2012

She finished our interview by quoting Whitman. During the first time I saw her on camera, she mentioned Modigliani, and scolded those who could not understand that Viva la vie bohème, tattooed across her chest, was a reference to Picasso: “Next time, I will get a tattoo in English. You guys are too lazy to find out.”  By then, I was already mesmerized by her: a 24 year old (this month) devilish beauty, who kept me in front of the computer for over eight hours in one week, anonymously observing her interaction with fans. I know how seductive she can be: she has completely glamoured me, and she is going to do the same to you. Believe me.

How long have you been in the industry? I’ve been doing adult modeling for almost 6 years, and have been a cam girl for over a year and a half.

How long do you intend to continue camming? Until it drives me utterly insane.

Why did you enter the cam business? I started normal, mainstream modeling when I was 12. The older I got, I started to realize that the adult modeling industry seemed to have a broader idea of what’s beautiful. Girls with little boobs like mine, were found sexy by TONS of people? This blew my mind, honestly! Seeing girls with small boobs, or some extra meat on their bones, or tattoos, or just – people who were different in general. So I knew, as soon as I turned 18, that I wanted to start “alt” modeling, pin-up modeling, and adult modeling in general. The longer I shot adult photos, the more my boundaries and comfort limit grew and expanded. I came across a video of one of my fellow adult models – Evelyn Cates – that she had made for a cam site. It was so mesmerizing and hot that all I could think was, “I want to do that!!”. So I started shooting videos and working at a cam site. It seemed so awesome to be able to make my own schedule, and get to be a hot tease for a living! Plus, it makes it where I can afford to take creative modeling jobs, without being concerned about how much I’m being paid all the time.

How did it happen? The creator of GodsGirls.com, Annaliese, told a bunch of us girls about camming at OnHerCam. I started there and LOVED how attentive, helpful & trustworthy the staff was. Eventually they offered me my own solo site that I’m working on, and I’ve also started camming at MyFreeCams.

What are your goals in the industry? To inspire photographers as a muse! And simply to be happy and love what I do, as long as I do it! Recognition is great, sure, but it’s not my motive.

What are the top three positive aspects of this profession? Living the bohemian life! Getting to do something freeing, creative, and sexy for a living on MY time, MY way. Money, obviously. I rarely take paid modeling work, but having the opportunity to pay my bills and take good care of myself and some, is a pretty great perk to camming. The fans. Whether you’re having the worst day, or the best day – there are always people willing to share it with you.

What are the top three negative aspects of this profession? People who devalue your self worth as a human being, based solely on adult work, instead of the content of character. That gets REALLY old. Fans of porn can be just as bad as porn bashers, because they can be equally capable of reducing you to your sexuality alone. People always expect too much. No matter how much you do in your career or what you do to please your fans, there will always be people who will complain. People always want more. This industry can be full of shady people. Both as far as business associates AND fans. In this industry, you have to be that much more careful about people’s motives and your own personal safety. I’m a very open person, but I have to have more boundaries about my personal life than I’d even like to, just because people are crazy.

If there were three things you could change about the adult industry what would they be? That people would respect personal boundaries. I’d love to not have to worry about keeping my location a secret. But the respecting personal boundaries thing can also apply to plenty of photographers or fans who constantly and consistently try to push performers to do things they aren’t comfortable with. Less social stigma. I don’t fear labels and sure, I’d love to say I don’t care about judgmental people either. But the reality is, life would be easier for adult workers if we weren’t compared to pedophiles or fucked up people in general. Instead of acting like sexual acts are immoral, we should as a society focus on acts of cruelty or bigotry, as what makes a person immoral. Less freebie beggars? Haha, I can’t blame people for wanting free porn. I can however, blame people who come up with the lamest attempts ever, to get it. I also loathe people who pay for content only to spread it over the internet for free. I hope you feel awesome with your internet street cred, haha!

Do you think about yourself as someone different from the performer? No. I think I’m the same person on and off camera, in front of the lens or not. Sometimes I wish I had more of an “alter ego” as some other girls do. The days when you get stressed or deal with one too many assholes, I feel like it would be easier to sort of flip a switch and forget about it, if I sort of had a character for myself. But at the same time, I think I’m successful precisely because I’m a real, genuine girl.

In which ways are you similar to the performer the public knows? I’d say the only difference between myself and my performer persona, is that I’m more of a pushover in real life. I’m too nice and too forgiving, but in the adult industry, I simply can NOT be like that, or I’d have advantage taken of me quite regularly.

How do you think you are perceived by the people who watch your scenes? I’m not so sure it matters. But I think they see me as a dorky nerd, who loves to laugh but can get serious when the occasion calls… serious in a sexy way.

How would you like to be perceived? As a genuine girl who puts it out on the line, but still has a little mystery to her. I want people to see something extra in me, something they can’t quite put their finger on. Something that permanently intrigues.

Did you “build” a new personality for your stage name, or did it happen naturally, without giving it much thought? I didn’t build a personality or persona, but it did take a long time to fully decide on a stage name that I felt embodied who I feel I am. It’s kind of a blast to get to name yourself! People who aren’t performers should be kind of jealous of that, everyone should be able to!

What are some of the limitations you feel come with you being an adult performer, be it in terms of your personal life and/or your social life? When adult modeling was just a passion, and not my profession, I had to deal with constant social stigmas relating to children. I taught at a developmental center for kids (glorified daycare where the kids actually learn) and even had to risk losing my job when corporate found out about my nude modeling. They never did fire me, because they knew I was a great teacher, but they told me point blank they would if parents found out and complained. I understood where they were coming from as a business standpoint of making money, but it always really HURTS when people imply that adult workers are somehow dangerous to be around, or like we’ll corrupt your youth! Honestly, I would strongly consider becoming an art teacher for young kids someday upon retirement, if I didn’t feel it would be wasted schooling because they’d just inevitably fire me for doing adult work in the past.

How do you see your work in a bigger scale of economic value in the US nowadays? I know the recession affected the porn industry as well, but when it comes to camming… think about it… we get customers from all over the world, giving money to US cam girls. So my money comes from all over the world, but only gets spent in the US. That can’t hurt!

Do you think there are any politics behind what you do, as in your work as political statement? If so, how does this work for you? We’re kind of a weird country, because I believe the economy is hugely supported by porn, and as a society we promote sexuality EVERYWHERE, yet at the same time, as a society, we socially condemn porn stars and adult workers. It’s like media hypes up everyone on sex, and then punishes anyone who actually fearlessly loves it. I suppose I hope that the more people that keep doing what they love openly, and the more people who openly support the industry in general, the more socially acceptable it will become. We deserve human rights just as much as anyone else. Also, I’ll gladly scare off ANY fan that disagrees with LGBTQ rights, haha.

When thinking about the future, how do you see yourself in five years? Hopefully my solo site is a smashing success by then! I’d love to have expanded my career, & be more outgoing in general.

Curious about which Whitman quote that was? Ask her on Twitter (@TheAriDee ) and stay tuned for her solo site at http://theAriDee.com.

this story doesn’t get a picture.

But, you may say, we asked you to write about porn and art — what, has that got to do with Virginia Woolf becoming a camgirl?  I will try to explain…

They are everywhere, broadcasting themselves from their living rooms, dancing in front of the camera, quoting Nietzsche and declaring undying love for Modigliani while stripping and simulating masturbatory acts to a ghost audience that slips them tokens for the chance to observe.  A self-presentation that requires nothing but a webcam and time: protected by the boundaries of cyber world, they simulate a space in which their performer’s identity can be easily dissolved. When it takes only a click of the mouse for the show to end, it is easy to surround yourself with mystery and fans.

Camgirls are placed in what Arlie Hochschild dubbed “emotional labor” (1984) because their work revolves around inducing an audience into specific emotional states. However, to a camgirl, such emotional states are not restricted exclusively to the sexual realm. Often these women interact with their audience in non-sexual ways. It is an audience that might be as loyal as any other: the performers seem to know some of the viewers, and to a very large extent, witnessing their “daily routine” on camera makes viewers believe they share some sort of connection to the model that goes beyond the virtual world. In the end, the social product a camgirl delivers acts in two distinct levels: at the same time that it implies a trade mode transaction – 200 tokens for topless, 2500 for full anal – it masquerades such exchange by forging a connection between the performer and the audience who follows them in daily shows and, sometimes, seem to partake on the performer’s routine in true fashion. Working under the two different modes of acting also proposed by Hochschild, camgirls are able to “surface act” – acting as a character without necessarily identifying with the role – and “deep act” – by identifying with the feelings they need to project into the audience. This ‘commoditization of feelings’ makes camgirls a new mode of economic trade: no longer is the audience buying her image, but also her self as merchandise. All this in cyber world. And, in a technological post-Bauhaus era, when we can commercialize ourselves as copies through the use of digital technologies, this seems to be opposite to McLuhan’s proposal that “the medium is the message”.  For camgirls, the message is the medium.

The structure in which it all happens, however, oozes reality: often camgirls broadcast from their homes, their personal objects in the background attesting to their individuality, their musical selection coming from their Ipods: it is all decided by the model, with no influence that might alter her identity when posing to the camera but that of the audience she wants to reach.  While some camgirls might chose to present themselves free from specifics, others might create an entire environment and persona that aims at a specific audience: fetish, role playing, fantasies. And this is a key concept in camming: to be able to promote yourself as unique not based on what you do, but on who you are, on who you present yourself as.  Therefore, it is exactly the idiosyncrasies that separate one performer from another that translates into “success” or “failure”: in an environment where everybody is doing the selling the same way, it is what you sell that guarantees your buyers.

And camgirls have noticed long before their audience that what gather fans are not their bodies or moves, but what they offer to the audience in those interstitial spaces between a topless request and stripping. If the way is to make yourself interesting without resorting to visual appeals, they have nailed it: be it through open discussion on historic periods, high art, or the legalization of marijuana, these women have been able to promote themselves as entities independent from their bodies. That is to say a camgirl can easily become famous more for their interaction with the public than for her physical attributes – a paradigm shift from what we conventionally recognize as the exchange between strippers and audience.  No longer are they stripping, but exposing their own identity – even if forged –to the eyes of those willing to observe their bodies, but also interested in their minds.  What the audience is buying, therefore, is not nudity, but intellect. Thoughts.  Ideas these women alone present as part of themselves, be it wrapped on some sort of fetish or not, but nonetheless by their own volition and, most importantly, by subjects of their own story. Even if sometimes they chose to mimic what is conventionally expected from women, even if they chose to spice their bedrooms up to cater for a more fetishist audience, even if they fictionalize their own identity in order to expose themselves to the camera. It is all their choice.

But where does Virginia Woolf enter in this story? Well, wasn’t she who said that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”? Are there still any doubts camgirls have found a way to have both?

PS: A couple of weeks ago, I was mesmerized by the performance of one camgirl – AriDee. Her profile will be part II of this series.

Here are a few previews from a much larger project I’m working on which I’ll be announcing soon. I’ve begun shooting with a new photo collaborator, Veronica Ricci, and I think you’ll see lot’s of special material from  us soon

Her she is with Twix.

That bitch is a babe. See what I did there?…

From youth to old age, she just gets sexier, like a man.  She reminds me of the castrati that used to rule Italy in the seventeenth century.  She seems like a man, but that voice, is one of the most incredible voices ever recorded.

I think the word is compelling.  You just can’t look away, can’t stop trying to figure out what it is exactly that you’re looking at.

Hush Sweet Lover:

I, Confess:

Singing Hallelujah:

On being butch:

Fernando Leite | Andy Warhol goes porn

I do not know who raised the flag first, but it has been around for a while: the idea that art can contain pornography and, yet, not fall under any kind of questionable category. I am not talking about nudity. Nor am I talking about erotic depiction which is often justified as connected with fertility cults and rites. Many temples in India, built between 900-1300 AD, blatantly exhibit erotic art, but I doubt there was any pornographic intent.  Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings, the Turin Erotic Papyrus, sexually explicit paintings and sculptures in Pompeii: all these are going to be interpreted simply as depictions of daily life with some erotic but not pornographic intent, since the concept of pornography as we know it did not appear until late Victorian times.

The Webster Dictionary defines pornography as ‘a depiction of licentiousness or lewdness: a portrayal of erotic behaviour designed to cause sexual excitement’. It seems like there are a lot of carefully worded attempts of separating pornography from erotica, placing the first as having as its primary purpose the graphic depiction of sexually explicit scenes, while that erotic displays sexually explicit scenes in a more realistic and equal fashion. Some even claim that eroticism is the exploration of the feelings and emotions inspired by sex and sexuality, while pornography focuses exclusively on the physical act, and by creating this difference they ignore the physical effects eroticism – or even art itself – might have on someone. I am not going to debate over the level of sexual arousing that erotica can generate in contrast to pornography for a great amount of people, mostly women; this has been extensively done, and it is old news.  My demand is that art should be included on pornography to cater the needs of an audience who gets off out of art expression. Like me.

What I want to talk about is pornography in its essence, and how much art can be applied to it without removing it from its primordial intention (for I am a firm believer that nothing – not even art – is born out of unintentionality, even if unconsciously). The notion that pornography has no space to host art comes from the idea that art is something more elevated than and superior to regular living. To a certain extent, that is true – to a society which dwelled exclusively on basal modes of reality, to which art and imagination were too expensive to be bought, and to whom struggling to survive meant hours of physical labor that bordered slavery; to that society, which disappeared centuries ago when the borders between classes became something less distinguishable exclusively as a result of social rights and economic revolutions that promoted a less animalistic way of living to less privileged spheres of social life; to that society I can understand that art would be an unattainable reality. However, since even the most “simple” artistic representation, that which holds not only an aesthetic proposal but also a functional one, like the designs on pottery found in underprivileged groups located in remote places in Brazil, for example – is considered art, I can no longer accept the idea that art belongs to a separate category from that of living, nor that it holds a superior or more sublime character.

Therefore, it is no longer acceptable that artistic intention might not be found inside pornography. However, there seems to be a refusal in the placing of art inside porn, be it for market reasons or for the mechanic repetition of the format under which pornography has existed in the past centuries. As a result, while everybody seemed to be worried about the amount of sex and skin inside museums, pornography was excluded to a second position one more time, being left out of discussions which surrounded art or being even degraded to a position of object, and not subject. The subjectification of porn, and the idea that it can contain different façades and, in them, to find art included – that is what I propose as discussion. The discussion on the separation between art and pornography is old. The debate about to which extent art can contain pornography is outdated. By the time you finish reading this article, even my request for the inclusion of art in porn films will have been outgrown. But I am still waiting for something new to show up on my screen.

The two gentlemen in the row behind me had absolutely no idea what the film was about.  They nattered pleasantly about art, residences both here in New York and abroad, and about the meaning of “swag” as used by one of their younger students, but the dapper fifty-something queens eventually began wondering what screening, exactly, they had decided to drop in on.  I turned to them as they voiced their confusion and explained, “Well, it’s about an industrial music star and his dominatrix wife, who underwent plastic surgeries to look more and more like each other.”

They clutched their French Institute monthly guides and pursed their lips.  “Oh, MY.  Really?”

“Really.”

They looked both scandalized and pleased.  I never got to check in with them after the screening, but I hope they enjoyed The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye as much as I did.  As portraits of transcendent love, Marie Losier’s documentary has few equals.  How could it?  Have you ever heard a story like it?

Shot largely on grainy, hand-cranked cameras, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is in no sense a conventional documentary.  It operates more like an organic memory, comprised of equal parts the mundane, the bizarre, the ethereal and the digressive.  Much of it is montage, though sometimes narration helps us along.  It only really takes a narrative shape occasionally.  And yet perhaps this was the perfect way to capture a romance so idiosyncratic that nothing short of entering the heads of the people involved could do it justice.

Genesis P-orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson) is perhaps best known as the bomb-thrower behind Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, a musician and performance artist of virtuosic and sometimes daunting eccentricity.  Ballad presents Gen (as we soon come to know him/her/them) as something of a goofball wizard, sometimes doing silly little dances, sometimes creating genuinely extraordinary noises, sometimes pottering around doing the housework.  Occasionally we get glimpses of Gen’s past life, screaming at adoring audiences and urinating into bottles on camera.  A portrait emerges of the artist as misfit, a boy never quite comfortable in one place or body.  Indeed, the dominant motif of the film is Gen running in circles, and that’s where she seems happiest, glad to be exhausted and giddy.

Though the film gives us a terrific amount of backstory and archival footage for Gen (we glimpse an archive room that stretches on and on in which Gen’s life and career are obsessively catalogued), Jaye’s life is no less interesting.  A professional domme in her mid-teens, she became a performance art fixture downtown, and we see glitched video of her appearances, which take on fetish and gender concerns.  We come to realize that the yearning to escape the constraints of convention, expectation and biology are not exclusively Gen’s.  And it is this aching frustration with the inadequacies of the corporeal which forms the backbone of their strange, touching bond.

Gen and Jaye’s story begins with a meet-cute of sorts: the middle-aged Gen is sleeping on the floor of a friend’s dungeon, covered head to toe in a sheet and lying stiff and flat as a board, when in walks a young woman, Jaye, in perfect 60s clothing.  Gen watches as she changes into strict fetish gear and marvels that someone could so ideally embody “my two favorite things.”  Shortly thereafter, romance sparks up and marriage is soon to follow.

The conversation determining the course of their relationship is recalled rather sweetly.  “Instead of having children, what if we made ourselves the new person?”  And so they do.  Through a number of procedures (breast implants, facial restructuring and more) the two lovers consume each other, vanishing into their shared identity as Genesis Breyer P-orridge.

Losier doesn’t even try to simplify the complex issues at play here.  Pandrogeny is talked of at length, the movement to transcend DNA to create a perfect hermaphroditic state.  This is probably the film’s most revolutionary strand.  Where some would paint this as the story of a man undergoing a sex change, Losier accurately and with great artistry makes us understand that what we’re watching is two souls merging into one.  This is what people talk about figuratively when they speak of romance, but how many of us would be willing to go to the lengths that Gen and Jaye did?  How many of us would willingly sacrifice our individuality in the service of love?  If we assume that two souls occupy the same space when entwined in love, is it not possible for two bodies to do the same?  How important is it that we hold on to the bodies we take for granted?  Some people seek to obliterate the cage of the physical through BDSM, some through drag, some through transsexuality.  Gen cites the work of Burroughs and Gysin as an inspiration.  Life is a collage: cut it up and rearrange it and it’s possible that everything will make a strange sort of sense.

(On a personal note <for this is nothing if not a film that inspires deeply personal reactions>: My own journeys into submission, masochism, objectification and humiliation have always been made with the intent of vanishing.  Disappearing into a function.  All that prevents me from happiness is an embarrassment that stems from my middle-class upbringing.  It’s an embarrassment at total abandon.  It limits me in art and sex, two things I care about more than almost anything else.  Watching Ballad, I was humbled by the sight of two people so willing and eager to abandon everything the straight culture demands of them.)

Astonishingly, the rage and discomfort of young Gen dissipates as we watch him transform into them.  The jagged, discomfiting sounds of Throbbing Gristle become something more lilting and psychedelic, and the anguished, violent youth becomes a creature of good humor and domesticity.  A scene in which Gen describes dressing up as a film starlet to do the housework is both hilarious and sweet.  Jaye, meanwhile, is absorbed into Gen’s band, often a silent observer but, according to Gen, a vital artistic component.  She is adopted with great warmth by Gen’s artistic and biological family (Gen’s children are wry and compassionate about their father’s transformation).

At a certain point, one might wonder why Jaye isn’t getting more say in all of this.  For a film about two people merging, one seems to have the monopoly on telling the tale.  The story, unfortunately, has a tragic turn.  After two out-of-nowhere seizures, Jaye simply died one day.  And that’s it.  This is presented with wrenching plainness, and the moment that the penny dropped, my eyes flooded with tears.  How could it end like this?

Of course, it is not the end.  As long as Gen lives, they live.  Perhaps this is why she’s so sanguine about recalling the day it happened.  When two people have so effectively conquered the physical, have they not conquered death as well?

This is an extraordinary documentary.  It has no distribution, but it has received festival play.  See it any way you can.  See it with someone you love.  And the next time you gaze into that person’s eyes, ask yourself if you have what it takes to love the way Genesis and Jaye do.

Get friendly with your favorite book...

Meow…. Hello! Hope you all had a wonderful weekend.  I realize my last post was a tad heavy.  But heavy seems to be my specialty.  I think we can disregard any need for pretense and dive right on in….

My last entry was specific in dealing with my gender identity. I made sure to leave out other elements of my identity to make that admission easier to digest.  But now seems like a good time to come out about these other elements as well.  Not only do I identify as Queer and omnisexual, but polyamourous and kinky as well.  In my small world that is the New York burlesque circuit, these elements of mine are becoming more and more known… because, well, I have a lot of lovers. I currently have 1 serious girlfriend, 2 serious boyfriends, 1 husband… and 1 suitor.  I find it easier to juggle men, whereas I find it takes all my energies to have a girlfriend, so I honor us both by not having more than one.  All of the men in my life fulfill a different need… I have a debonair top, a role play partner, and a slave.  But to phrase it like that it makes it sound like the arrangement is only for sex, which is in fact the furthest thing from the truth… each one of these people, I love.  I love them so much it is nearly impossible to describe how lucky I feel to be just one person in their lives who can adore them in my unique way and make them feel known. The last few sentences read to me like someone else’s life. As I have said before, I grew up Roman Catholic, and I always felt like the life I wanted deep down was never something I was strong enough to reach for… and therefore not something I could ever enjoy.

I said in my last post that a lot of my life had been about suffering.  Some of that suffering did come as result of living in the closet, some came at the hands of cruel men and women alike, and some came from my natural predilection towards being a “flower child”.  Because our society as it is now has no way of accommodating people who live so freely. If you had asked me when I was young about how I wanted to live, I never wanted to marry, I wanted to live in a big house with many lovers both male and female, and adopt lots of children…. basically what I now know is an art commune. I really did and still do desire a kind of completely free existence.  If I meet you and we hit it off and I fall for you, then we will be lovers. Simple. And for the most part my lovers are all friendly to each other, and in fact, the unique bond between them all has created a kind of community all its own.  The Rosebud Vagina Community, I guess. I do impose structure but that is because I know not everything that is allowed to blossom organically is an accident. I make sure everyone gets quality time, I make myself available when they are having rough spots emotionally, I focus only on them when we are together, I respect their privacy, I cheer them on with other lovers, I try only to bring joy to their lives, and I never let drama take hold.  They are all real, committed loving relationships…. there just happen to be many of them. I’m currently trying to figure out how many is too many… I have a lot of love you see.

When I look back over my life, I see how that mountain of love has gotten me in trouble too.  I committed myself to monogomous relationships with abusive men, because when I was young and stupid I thought they needed the most love.  I sublimated my love for women because it went against the church.  And whenever I found myself developing feelings for someone else while I was in a monogomous relationship I would berate myself for being weak, sluttish, and unworthy of whatever jerk I was with at the time.  It never dawned on me that non-monogamy was an option. The closest thing to a non-monogamous situation I had ever heard of was when my Mother told me a story about how a French lady who used to live next door to us had once proposed that my Mother stay on birth control even after my Dad had gotten his proposed “snip” so that she could still have affairs if she wanted.  That mentality was scandalous.  And French.  Therefore doubly scornful.

When I was 17, I moved here to New York to pursue classical acting, and while I was at school I became friends with a girl from Switzerland who blew the dust off of many dark and dangerous thoughts I had long assumed dead. Funnily, now she is a very well known Burlesquer by the name of Roxy Diamond. But to get back, in the same way that my Mother had thought the French lady next door was trouble, so was Roxy.  Roxy was and still is confident, sensual, exotic and free.  She was not non-monogamous but she never judged others for it. That was what opened my eyes. To be in the company of a woman I respected, who I thought of as the ambassador of class and excitement, who never judged anybody. She never hated women.  Though we were both roundly judged, she didn’t give a shit and went on living how she pleased… and she yanked me along for the ride.

I had a real nightmare for a boyfriend at that time, and I was very depressed.  But Roxy had gotten me into Dita Von Teese… looking at her picture, I saw things that appealed to me, things I knew.  Camp, artifice and power.  And so I can honestly say that my 16″ waist and 6″ heels saved my life at that point… the only thing I had worth getting up for was hooking into my stocking and roll setting my hair.  The feminine discipline Roxy had enlightened me to was something I could lose myself in, only to find myself being better and stronger. This wasn’t the only thing she showed me.  She also gave me my first copy of The Story of O and Venus in Furs… She let me peek at her copy of the Satanic Bible, while I feared for my soul. Roxy taught me that if you’re strong enough, you can have your cake and eat it, too, even trussed up in leather from head to toe while you sit on a human chair and eat it off your fabulous human table.

Roxy in her furs and glory...

Roxy also taught me that being a woman of sadistic impulses didn’t make you bad as long as you were responsible about them, and about communication.  Something my mind has a hard time grasping to this day.  When I desire to punish my slave, I always mentally bump into old, tired ways of thinking that urge me to judge myself… but then I remember that I am not evil, I just enjoy doing horrible things to people, when they have made it clear that is what they want.  Because loving people the way they want to be loved is endlessly delightful. Because love is beautiful, because real love is consensual to some degree, and aware of how it improves the quality of life of each lover.  Because people are strange, and wonderful and deserve to be seen honestly and without shame. Because even when you’re beating someone, the love you have for them can be pure and innocent.  Not that innocence matters.

For me living multiple relationships many with heavy BDSM qualities, Burlesque, and growing a harem of men are all of a piece.  I view these things through a nostalgic lens, as following in the footsteps of women who sought to bring knowledge, feeling and joy to the world. Women like Roxy, The World Famous *BOB*, La Belle Otero, Violet Gordon Woodhouse, Theda Bera, Lola Montez… the list goes on and on.  These women live(d) how they want, they’ve inspired and entertained many, they’ve become legendary sources of scandal and joy.  They bring balance to the world with an injection of both feminine and androgyne power.  I may identify as more male, but I understand who gives life, the kind of life that makes life worth living.  Women and femininity provide the hidden source of immortal energy that stimulates the fantasy consciousness of the world.  Who wouldn’t want to respect that, honor that, worship that, impersonate that? That, of course, is a rhetorical question, history has shown us: not most people, including most women.  Only up to certain point is self-directed behavior to be tolerated.  When “wild” women become too much of problem, then burn them, put them in institutions, rape them into submission.  These are the facts, sad but true. I hope everyday that I will hear less annoyance in the voices of people listening to the plight of women, but until then I can take comfort in confronting them with the most powerful artistic rendering of a woman I can create. Some have argued with me that I play too much with stereotypes, or that I have become safe in my art. But to that I say, “Look at my life, it’s all a part of it”… The power I try to embody on stage is not something I just put on anymore. For better or worse, I live it.  Because that is the natural evolution of life as art.

I was recently reminded how much all this honesty with myself has changed me.  I went on a few dates with a new suitor, who disappointed me by treating me like a piece of livestock.  A dumb animal that made annoying noise, that was too curious, and too clothed.  After he roughly handled me… I was even sadder. It dawned on me: he hates women, or at least resents them.  I realized then why he was so frustrated with me: my autonomy was a problem.  I never felt shame, or that this was my punishment.  I just felt sadness, because I realized there was nothing I could say that would make him realize he could trust the words coming out of my mouth.  That I was smart enough to understand what I was saying, and that I was strong enough to bear those convictions.  Poetically, he later called me “the Devil,” which makes me laugh because he’s not the first (and I know not the last).  But what continued to depress me was that he meant it. He feared me, and when I have so much love to give I find that soul crushingly tragic. Because loss of a lover, even when you have a harem, still hurts…

The universe offered up to me an overt and delightful joke in response.  I randomly selected Boccaccio 70 one night after said date, and skipped along until I got to Fellini’s contribution.  Watching Anita Ekberg has always been spiritual for me, but her performance in the film as the quintessential seductress and Devil made me laugh til I had a stitch!  Really, we are all that little man wedged in her bosom. We can either fight it, drawing her wrath, or we can accept it and, along with it, whatever love she wants to throw our way. And yes, also some wrath. Of course now I have a tribute act in the works, because when magic happens, I just say yes.

I will close in saying I have read many books on non-monogamy.  I have a habit of being overly analytical about life.  But the one book I always come back to because it has helped me the most, the one book I read once a year, is not really about the topic at all.  It’s about women, all kinds of women, old women, fat woman, ugly women, smart women, legendary women who lived ferocious lives.  This book, my favorite book, is called Seductress by Betsy Prioleau.  My experience in reading it is not entirly dissimilar from my relationship with Roxy: a warm, intelligent, sensual hand guiding me without judgment to my free-est self. I highly recommend it!

XO

I strapped on a corset and some stilettos, slicked back my hair and donned some red lipstick for the lady.

This is an instagram preview of what she shot.

 1) As someone who works with it in an academic level I cannot be naive enough and believe pornographic films exist only for my pleasure – all puns intended. It is a political tool, an economic trade, a virtual space for the questioning of so many aspects of society that it would take me hours to name them all. Therefore, in order to get a more approachable mode for discussion, I need to embrace all formats, contents, functions.

2) I can perceive how such change will enable the porn industry to be dealt with in a less “hidden and ashamed” manner, meaning this can facilitate in terms of sex workers rights, on-set health safety, decriminalization of sex workers and their empowerment face an economy that highly relies on them and, yet, denies them a voice. I am not sure of figures, but I ballpark it in very high numbers the amount of revenue the pornographic industry generates for a state like California, so I can only imagine it on a world wide scale. Yet, workers are not able to count with basic workers’ rights, and once porn is no more a “hidden” industry it will be easier for them to demand to be treated like other entertainment industry workers.  If a way to diminish – if not to eliminate entirely – the distance between both sides of the industry is by a less “amateur” production of porn movies (meaning to mimic the expected levels of pre-production, on-set production and post-production, not to mention the qualification of performers in terms of acting – something to be considered on a second moment, I propose) then so be it.

3) A “plot and dialog porn” might go along better with the narrativization of sex which is characteristic of the feminine desire in comparison to the masturbatory fantasies of sex performed by men – a great name for this discussion is Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in his film “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema”. So a “plot and dialog porn” (and this will totally become a genre to me) might foster better the feminine sexual desire, therefore enabling them to explore this façade of their sexuality without feeling oppressed and compelled to comply for their male partner’s pleasure only.  I have recently come in contact with some movies from New Sensations’ Romance series, which presents a very “basic” and “romantic” story line not as a background for sexual plays, but having the same value and weight in the cinematic experience. I am yet to study the reaction of females (in market terms) towards these films, but I have friends who have served as “guinea pigs” for me and, as heterosexual married women who are not into porn, they confessed to be much more attracted to “plot and dialog porn” than to “regular porn”. Maybe this new genre will be able to restore female sexuality not as an extension of the masculine ideological woman, but as an entity which stands for itself.

4) The industry has already noticed there is space for the marketing of scenes and not full features, meaning, there is an audience who prefers a 30 minute sex scene in detriment of a 2 hour porn movie. The old joke that says that a porn film is never watched until the credits is about to change not because the format will disappear, but because the industry is making available shorter versions as well and longer versions: audience can now purchase whatever caters their own needs. The intention is what shapes the format and not the other way around. Form follows function. Again.

5) On a personal note, I like both shorter objective scenes and long, “plot and dialogue” films. It all depends on my mood.  Strange… isn’t this what sex is all about?

The ABCs of boobs.

Since writing this first draft, I have chosen an approach through which I want to further – and more academically – analyse “My Sister Celine”. Stay tuned.

I approached “My Sister Celine” with some caution: for the past couple of weeks I have been dealing with the topic of incest and family related issues being overly explored in the adult film industry, and I am tired of it, to be honest. But Noelle hints at the very title that this is not the usual incest fantasy movie: it is actually Liam (well played by Richie) who is introducing the film to the audience: Celine is his sister, it is her we have to follow.

Like in all Nica Noelle’s movies, technical aspects which would normally go unnoticed by the public are impeccable.  There is obvious attention being paid to features of film making in a way only Noelle is able to pull: the setting is flawless, dialogs are delivered in a spontaneous manner, and the incidental music is precise and descriptive of the scene it is covering, even though in some moments it disappears when it could go on playing – in some transitional fade outs and in Sovereign Syre and Jasmine Jem’s first scene, for example.  Camera wise, Noelle is able to innovate once again by filming with cameras which are more static than normally one would find in a contemporary adult movie and, yet, her film is more dynamic than the vast majority out there.

The plot is round, and although it lacks some tying (such as the sudden disappearance of Dylan Ryan, Katie St. Ives, and Kate Kastle, for instance), it is an accurate portrait of a family which fosters a “problematic” adult, with both the mother (Veronica Hart, who delivers the most sublime interpretation in the film) and the brother coming to constantly justify any odd aspects of the “problem” child. At certain moments, the camera even seems to partake in their embarrassment, moving from one face to another as our eyes would do in such situation. Hart’s constant reassurance to Julia that Celine is a good person makes explicit her awareness that there is something extremely “wrong” with her daughter, an aspect which must be turned into mere “eccentricity” not to scare the future daughter in law away.  Liam seems naïve, oblivious, “dependable”, as Celine herself poses: however, we can trust him when he points out the movie is not about his fiancée, but about his sister.

Jasmine Jem’s character is shy, fragile, distant, cold. From the very beginning of the movie we notice a certain instability in her, as if she was recovering from something. It is exactly this frailty in Julia that generates such extreme contrast to Sovereign Syre’s Celine, who seems to be solid, centered, and who dominates the camera from the first time she appears. Mystery, danger, madness, seduction: Sovereign’s gaze corner Julia without subjugating her but, rather, carrying a defiant tone which is going to appear in the garden scene (one of the most erotic scenes of the movie) and be sustained throughout the party hosted later that night.

Although at first the transition from the garden to a bedroom made me feel uncomfortable, in what I consider to be one of the boldest moments of her career, Noelle films the first sex scene in this movie in a two-dimensional setting: Dylan Ryan and Sovereign Syre have an intimate, less cinematographic, much more realistic sexual encounter on a single bed propped against a wall.  The impossibility of getting the amount of different angles a centered bed would provide is made redundant by the positioning of three cameras which capture brilliant frames, perfectly balanced zooms, textures, flavors: for we are able to even forgive a less active Syre (when compared to the masterly Dylan Ryan) so dynamic is the cinematography in this scene.  The only aspect I do not like is the amount of light over the performers, something which is redeemed later by an exquisite lighting throughout the rest of the movie, mainly in the scenes with Katsuni and Sinn Sage (an award winning scene by itself, definitely solidifying them as two of the most important performers in the business nowadays) and Jasmine Jem and Sovereign Syre.

The atmosphere created during the party evokes a certain late 70s/early 80s era which goes together with the role the party plays in Julia’s storyline: to expose her to new sexual situations. Katie St. Ives and Kate Kastle appear briefly to please our eyes with one of the most delicious kisses on screen, but disappear short after, being given only brief seconds in the middle of Katsuni and Sage’s scene.  I do understand that to avert the cameras from Katsuni and Sinn Sage would be outrageous, but it could have been done in a way that allowed the viewer to have as background the other participants at the party, either watching or engaged on activities themselves. At first, it seemed to me this was the intention: however, it soon was dropped, and St. Ives and Kastle simply vanish in midair, leaving me wondering why their scene did not continue.

Sovereign Syre has such intensity in her that watching her is like we have never watched her before, while always having watched her.  She is dubious, dangerous, seductive, deadly gorgeous, and terrifying, when she needs to be.  Her finals scenes are excruciatingly beautiful and beautifully painful, and when the camera leaves Jasmine Jem standing still in the kitchen we are all feeling as lost as she is.

“My Sister Celine” can become a classic like other films with unsimulated sex scenes – such as Baise-Moi (2000), Intimacy (2001), and 9 Songs (2004).  It is groundbreaking because it does so leaving no doubt its intention revolves around pornography, whilst not relegating plot to a second position.  Yes, there are flaws. Yes, there are untied knots. But it compensates by being interesting, well filmed, visually appealing.  If I did not know how, I could learn lesbian sex with Nica Noelle’s “My Sister Celine”. For me, however, it is still a great lesson on film making, and on how to end a partnership on g/g features in the most superb and glorifying way.

Before hair and makeup, making up the bed.

After makeup, still in hair.

My first feature, My Sister Celine just came out.  It was cool seeing press releases for it on AVN next to a huge blinking AEBN banner with a huge picture of me on it.  My life is very surreal right now if you know me and where I come from.  Which you can’t and don’t.  But this feels real, right?

You can read a write up of my movie by porn scholar Anna B. Volk here: http://darlinghouse.net/beta/annabvolk.

I also have a scene with Skin Diamond that came out today on AEBN for our movie Lesbian Masseuse.  You should definitely check that shiz out.

Featured in “Supplementaire 7, Pictorial story “Forbidden Fruit” pp. 114-131, at: http://issuu.com/supplementaire/docs/supp7_issuu?mode=window&pageNumber=1

At the age of 22, Dani Daniels seems to be taking over Porn Valley. She has been featured in main releases from several studios and her fidelity to girl/girl porn does not seem to be restrictive: it has actually granted her female and male fans, both genders submerged on their own Dani exclusivity fantasy. Penthouse Pet of January, Daniels is quite active on Twitter and on her blog, At Home with Dani Daniels, which receives daily photographs and hosts a space for her to communicate with her fans, in her “Ask me anything” section. She is quick, witty, and sharp, and not afraid to go off on the fans if the question is too personal or the writer offensive; yet, she seems to be perceived mostly as American Porn’s new sweetheart – a position made vacant by Sasha Grey’s early retirement in 2011. By the content of her tumblr and what she has hinted about her upcoming website, Daniels has been slowly but steadily preparing a place for herself in the porn industry founded not on her performance, exclusively: self-proclaimed “Your girl next door who just so happens to be a pornstar!”, she might resemble the idea we as public might have of an adult performer, but her path is carefully being paved in what seem to be strategic movements to allow her slow taking over of the hood, bringing with her a lot of energy and eyes that seem to know more than she lets out.

Recently, Daniels took on the challenge to write and direct her first feature, “The Yoga Instructor” (Filly Films, 2011). The storyline does not bring any surprises: Dani plays a yoga instructor who seduces her students – Lily Carter, Brett Rossi, Elle Alexandria, and Heather Starlet. If keywords were to be assigned, I would guess flexibility, fitness, and gym would be the ones for this movie. However, a most accurate tagline would gravitate around female body adoration: Dani Daniels is able to create an ode to the female forms by directing a movie that, although not surprising in its format and technical aspects, innovates by making us ask not “Who is the film being made for?” but rather “Who is the film being made by?” Daniels seems to take her work quite seriously and, despite a little goofiness that surrounds her persona, she leaves no doubt that she aims high. Described as one of the most hard-working professionals in the industry nowadays, she is preparing for the release of her second feature as both writer and director, “Fantasy Girls”, also by Filly Films.
The most interesting aspect of Dani Daniels’ “The Yoga Instructor” lies on the places in which some of the scenes happen. Her scenes with Lily Carter and Heather Starlet initiate in open-air, and proceed to move inside a house only when things are about to get really graphic: something which would not call my attention wasn’t for the fact that something seemed odd while I was watching the film. I was already watching it for the second time when it finally hit me that hardly ever had I seen sunlight reflected on the skin of adult performers: the idea of porn taking place outdoors belonged only to more specific fantasies, being a genre on its own. And, like Dani Daniels herself embodies a new category of adult performers, to a certain extent her movie is emblematic of the new position porn is taking in society.
Since being contrived to the locked bedroom of Victorian bourgeoisie, sex and pornography have walked hand in hand if they dare to appear to public eyes. The relationship between sex and pornography is not as obvious and intrinsic as one might think: the coinage of the work pornography, in 1865, related not exclusively to sex, but to a set of knowledge which was supposed to be kept from minds more susceptible to corruption – namely the minds of women and children. Men – and especially upper middle class Caucasian scholars – have always had full access to the world of pornography under the excuse of cataloguing and registering it, aiming at collectively deciding which images and ideas were apt to be presented to the average public eye. The recovery of Pan and the Goat from the underground of Pompeii might have started the whole cataloguing of pornography, but it did little in restricting it to sexual realm. Therefore, when Victorian morale hit, a lot of things were restricted to the interior of the house and, even more, to the interior of the bedroom. Sex no longer could circulate in the mouths of social salons: its existence was supposed to be ignored and forgotten, and pleasure deriving from it would generate the perversions and abnormalities that a society which feared itself dreaded to see in its participants. The sexual active had no role and no space in open air anymore: it should only exist hidden from the eye by the darkness of the night. Any being who failed to comply with these – and so many others –standards was doomed to inhabit the underground, alternative spaces of dungeons and whorehouses.
To a certain extent, these places which hosted the “perverted”, the “oversexualized”, are still present in our daily lives disguised as internet chat rooms, adult video streaming websites, and in the porn industry itself. The dungeon, however, can now be recovered as an alternative space, not as restrictive walls. From the dark, hidden, illegal places, pornographic movies have erupted and are now being filmed in open spaces. Even if still restricted to foreplay and minor sexual movements, it seems to point towards a change. No longer must sex exist exclusively under artificial light: it is more than ready to heat up under the sun.

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Anna B. Volk holds a bachelor’s degree in English language, a masters’ in Irish Literature, a doctorate in Comparative Literature, a bachelor’s in Architecture and Urbanism. She also holds plane   tickets from Brazil, latte filled mugs, and cigarettes. And she watches porn. And writes, and talks about it. And she sometimes does all this at the same time, while listening to jazz. She lives in Rio de Janeiro.

So for this one I had a blue gelled constant light and used a 6 second exposure and them popped a couple flashes at random intervals and got some neat results. Hey worst case Sylvia is still beautiful and naked!

I just HAD to create a “porn scholar” version.  And it is so, so true:

Like how to show off your body in the most flattering way while in the supine position.  How to become like a one woman John Stagliano film.

Also, how to get carpet burn on your knees.  How do butt tricks.

How to make people want to see your  natural tits.

That its always better to be listening to classic rock.

That people love hearing stories about your life.

That cute gets more tips than sexy.

And that garter belts and black lingerie remind men of “trannies.”

The most common compliment for me to get on cam is, “I love small tits!”

I wear a 36C/34D.  No one ever referred to my tits as small until I entered the adult industry.  No one ever paid me a ________ dollars a pop to take pictures of my pussy back then either, so I guess I can deal with it.

In his new film, Haywire (2012) Soderbergh’s proposal is to place yet another leading role on a non-actress performer.  For this movie, he casted Gina Carano – a former MMA American champion – for the role of a spy who works for the government and gets betrayed by it, turning the plot into a cat-and-mouse routine.  However, the interview published today – and I could not find it in an English version, unfortunately – casts Soderbergh into a completely different light to my eyes, mostly because of the following excerpt:

- Action films nowadays seem to be like porn movies, in which you just stay there waiting for the next fight, what is left does not matter.  I wanted to do something more realistic in this genre. (my translation)

Can it be one of my favorite directors has been, all this time, hinting prejudice towards pornography and the movie industry without me noticing? Of course the whole Sasha Grey incident made me aware of Soderbergh ‘s ability – and disposition – to discuss the porn movie industry under the frame of mainstream movies; however, nothing hit me as bluntly as that statement, and for two reasons.

One, and most primarily, because it made me uncomfortable to see Soderbergh belittle porn movies for their whole structure. Alas, nobody here is judging Erin Brockovich (2000) for its legal purposes, nor qualifying Che (2008) for its historic accuracy. However, Soderbergh thinks it is okay to rank a porn movie under any other movie format based on its lack of plot. Porn for porn’s sake equals art for art’s sake, dear Soderbergh; and only this way will it be as true and meaningful as art can be.

Secondly, and this only hit me while I was conjuring up this article, who wants to see plot on porn films? Let’s face it; no one is watching porn for the articles! We watch it because we want to see sex, not because we are interested in a story. Now, if the film has got a good plot, that is a major plus: hence the success of Portrait of a Call Girl.  But to think that by comparing action movies to porn movies is, in any way, to belittle the action industry, think again, Soderbergh: plotless porn is much more able to succeed in attaining its goals than any psychological distress slash deep philosophical gunnery dispute will ever be able to. I am sorry you do not see it this way.

So, please, rethink your comparison, Mr. Soderbergh. Or, better, do not compare.  Apples and bananas together make a better fruit salad than different sorts of grapes would. Throw in a little porn star or MMA fighter or two, and you might have the most superb desert.

PS: On a personal note, Mr. Soderbergh, I loved Heywire. Almost as much as I loved Dana Vespoli’s Lesbian Ass Worship #2.  It is just a matter of point of view, I guess.

* Read the interview, in Portuguese, here: http://oglobo.globo.com/cultura/steven-soderbergh-tenta-evitar-cliches-de-filmes-de-acao-4009312

i only took one photograph the first time i went to Paris. Mel and i were eating at this fabulous little bistro in the Latin quarter and she saw the Taschen store from our table, i thought this was coolest thing and we made a plan to come back first thing in the morning which turned into first thing in the afternoon but nevermind all that we went into the shop and across the room in back there it sat, the biggest hugest monster of a book i had ever come across. it must have weighed about forty pounds and it was Tom of Finland, god it was sexy. i opened it up and laid it out on the table. it was an illustration spread of about five muscular men with cocks bigger than Jesus in a forest watching as a naked man tied to a tree got his ass whipped. the man holding the whip had a cigarette dangling from his half smile. i had never been so turned on by a drawing before, i didn’t even know it was possible. the reflection of the store window hit the page in a way that made the work glow and i had a silent little moment right then and there. a few days later in Le Marais we stumbled upon a wall with a huge Tom of Finland drawing and text about an art opening. needless to say this piqued my curiosity and i went to the wall and then i noticed a door and then i opened the door which was very heavy and i only got it about four inches and it closed with a thud but before it did i saw a red glow and heard a dull thumping of electronic music from inside and i looked back at Mel with an Alice in Wonderland sort of smile and i attempted to open the door again and the same thing happened and i knew that i needed to be in there and third times a charm and this time it opened all the way and there i was standing in the front door of this amazing gay bdsm boutique filled with all sorts of masks and hoods not unlike the one in this image and i felt kid in a candy store, a french candy store, and that night i thought about how life is filled with these precious little moments that add up and become an experience and how magical the whole thing is.

http://www.dominarosafletcher.com/

http://xpeeps.com/video/33832

Here you learn about how I used to put on a Russian accent and pretend I was Eastern European to get work as a model when I lived in Manhattan.  I wonder if getting a tan and calling myself Brazilian will have the same result out here in Los Angeles.

My mom always tells me, “Baby, love is some serious shit.”

My body is an endless source of pleasure and neurosis.

Someone will want one.

Valentine's Day Lingerie. We cammed in Dana's old place. I may or may not have rubbed myself all over everything and licked every surface in the bathroom.

This is my face. I DO HAVE ONE!!!!!

My weird camming outfit from the side.

Mon cul. That's French for "My Ass." See, I'm sophisticated and shit.

Photo 2010 Walt Cessna

Valentine’s Day!

I love Valentine’s Day. I say it every year — people that like to whine about how “I don’t need a holiday to tell someone I love them” or “This was invented by the greeting card companies” can K my big porcelain A. If Valentine’s Day DIDN’T exist and someone said “Hey we should make a knew holiday. What if we had a holiday for love!” everyone would think that person was a genius, so bite me, it’s awesome.

I am hosting a blowjob workshop at The Pleasure Chest New York the day after which should be fun. My workshops always get such sweet feedback, and I always try to use that feedback from my audiences to keep my workshops fresh, informative and interesting. If you’d like to attend check out The Pleasure Chest’s workshop page for a list of all our upcoming workshops.

I have to go get dressed cute — my Valentine is picking me up from work today and I told him to dress goth and bring me flowers so that we can make everyone at the bar jealous of us.

Have a great Love Day!

Manchester is a model that is pretty much down for anything creative and smutty and is generally willing to indulge my little creative experiments.

We teach a lot of classes at SOPHA, the studio where  I shoot, and there is a LCD projector permanently mounted on the ceiling in one of the studios. I thought it would be cool to use it to light a shoot. I hooked my PowerBook up to it and having found a bunch of trippy artwork on Google, proceeded to project the images on Manchester and make some photographs. Here are the results.

Some classic moves- some belly dance moves- just a fun “workin the foot lights act” <3

Here are some preview photos by Joshua Darling from my first set for SovereignSyre.com…which will be launching soon….Special thanks to AVN Award Winning Crystal D Toys.

My new tattoo an homage to balance...

And I’m BACK in New York City!  Amazing what a month away sequestered in a small town focusing on your art will do, how it will change you.  This retreat more than any other in my past has drawn conflicting elements together that I truly thought were forever at odds.  I spent countless hours doing research alongside my mother, mapping out the acts I will develop for the next 3 years.  I have never worked in this way before, but for some reason rather than feel stifling it felt freeing to know what I would be sharing with the world.  I felt ready to accept a direction, because it felt organic to accept it.  Which is something I’ve never felt before. I have always been an extreme personality…. yes its true. I’m either fully immersed in something or I symbolically kill it because I can’t stand it.  I’m either completely in love with something or someone, or I can’t remember it or them because I’ve blocked it out.  Slash and burn.  All or nothing.  Commit or die.  That has always been what has driven me as human being. But rather than make life simple as you think it might, it has always caused me a great deal of panic and pain.  When you don’t know yourself because you have not been allowed to, how really can you commit to anything?  How can you make an informed choice without the essence of self knowledge?  That has always been my conundrum… But ever since I came out of the closet 2 years ago those black and white feelings have begun to transform into something much more forgiving.  My heart and mind have become accommodating to my soul.  I no longer look in the mirror and see only half of what I should be, and an ugly shapeless half at that.  My identity as a “Polyamourous Omnisexual Gender Fluid Queer” is there staring back at me now, a strongly male feeling androgynous being in the body of woman.  “It” is inside me, not he or she… but the freedom to move back and forth at will,  sometimes within seconds.

Sitting alone at night in my bedroom growing up I used to wonder if I should get a sex change,  because as I used to tell my Mother ” I feel like I’m a man inside”… I had ferreted out articles and Date Line specials on the subject as young as 9 and I was scared: did I really want to say good bye to the trappings of the female sex?  I thought even then boobs and vagina’s were fun! Women were pretty! I wanted to be pretty even though I felt like a boy. I thought “if I have a sex change and become a man I will be frumpy, I won’t have boobs when I grow up to wear in dresses, they will lock me up for becoming a man and then dressing like a girl.” I hated growing up, because no one could ever see the real me, boys thought I was a girl, and girls thought I was a flat out freak. All I ever wanted to do was put on on a red dress and be Jessica Rabbit and then take off and be acknowledged for my masculinity.  But growing up where and how I did, you had to choose- boys had to biological boys, girls the same, and sexy girls were whores.  In my mind I kept thinking what is the use of having a vagina if you can’t be a campy over the top sexy girl?! That’s like giving someone a slice of the most delicious cake in the world and then telling them “don’t eat it, and whatever you do DON’T SHARE IT!”

And thus began my epic conflict of extremes.  I put myself through my own version of finishing school where I studied the female icons I thought performed glamour the best.  I belted my waist at night starting in the 5th grade.  I taught myself how to run in high heels up and down our steep driveway.  I was born with a deep voice, and I deliberately trained it higher to more effectively be perceived as girly.  Because I thought “I was born in a girls body, and I’m going to be the best damn girl ever”.  Feminizing myself became my obsession- and then one fateful day I stayed home sick from school and flipped on the Donahue Show.  There they were the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, like old time movie stars.  They were conscious of every move,  their gestures delicate, their backs straight,  their long legs encased in sheer hosiery, their feet tucked into gloriously tall heels.  They had on the kind of make up that makes most women think “well, she’s that kind of… you know what”.  They had long provocative bouncy hair, or tall ornate up do’s like you just don’t see anymore, they were unafraid to be painted and sexualized. They flirted with Donahue himself, breathy answers and coy glances, it was was performed seduction by a group of professionals.  Then our housekeeper knocked on my door to check on me and and I asked “have you ever seen such beautiful ladies?!” and she watched for less than a minute and said “those are not ladies those are men dressed as ladies, annnd I don’t think you should watch that.” Just like that my whole world was turned upside down. They were better at being ladies than any ladies I’d ever seen. And I knew then that whatever I decided to do with my body, I would be one of those ladies… So I trained harder. I obsessed more.  Then I became a 6th grader.

When I started junior high everything changed. I earned a nickname for no reason other than I started parting my chest length blond hair on the side rather than down the center. It fell coquettishly over my eye… and I therefore became a “slut”.  I was the only slut at that point, though there would soon be many others for similarly minor offenses.  That was when I started to get angry, I put on all that fake girly stuff because I liked it but also because nothing has ever made me more happy than to see a beautiful woman. I wanted to put that on like a costume a share it with the rest of the world, to bring joy like a goddess. If I was going to be abused for it then what did I have? I had nothing. I had unresolved conflict. I had self loathing. I was empty.

Now I didn’t know what to do or to be.  I couldn’t be what I wanted.  The harassment was unbarable and terrifying. So I decided to live as not what I wanted to put on as a gift to myself and the world but as what I am.  A masculine male being.  I chopped off my long beautiful white blond hair and began dressing as a man.  I accepted my title as a freak. Because at least the bullies left the freaks alone.  And I stayed that way for many years.  Into high school, I continued dress, act, walk, and talk like a man. Unless I got the occasional itch to dress like whore.  Then it was on with the dominatrix boots and the tall black gloves.  But I never tried to be feminine again.  If did decide to dress as a female I let my masculinity hang out, I didn’t try to make it easy for anyone… because I hated them anyway.  Because the world is extreme too, black or white, up or down, gay or straight.  No one would ever listen to me, every one has always told me I had to choose,  or they have tried to steer me in whatever direction makes them most comfortable.  My little finishing school experiment was very effective, I come off as feminine without effort and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard “but your soooooo feminine” from people who just wanted me to be a girl or oppositely “your pretty macho” from (mostly) guys who have trouble accepting my female body.  All of those comments hurt, each one like knife, cutting me up into easy to swallow pieces.

And so I did that too,  I began to hate my body around 14.  I cut myself, I burned myself, I starved myself, I beat my head against walls till I was dizzy so I could fall asleep at night, I stapled myself as a pass time, I put myself in horrifically dangerous situations for fun, and tried to commit suicide twice.  I was a MESS. A hot mess to be sure.  Now I’m glad I lived,  25 was a major mile stone for me- because at 15 I really didn’t think I’d live to see it.  The only way I made through was because of acting.  I had been a dancer my whole life, but I began acting in high school and that was my ticket to freedom.  I could play men on stage, and when I cast myself I frequently did.  I could play draggy campy vixens without consequence and I always did. Playing Cherry in Bus Stop was me at my happiest moment- playing a role made famous by Marylin Monroe a  commonly accepted female drag artist herself.  Me at 16 with my curvy body, my high heels, my tits all pushed up, my big painted on lips, my roll set hair… I was in heaven.  But at the end of the night it always had to come off… and I was alone again with my anger and my conflict.

Flash forward to me coming out,  my first step as real living person.  Not 3/4 in the dark, not half dead to myself and the world… It was only the beginning.  There was till the issue of polarities to figure out: did I want to transition? Did want to keep my vagina? Could I fathom myself as a drag artist? Did I have the guts? Was any of this really necessary? Was I crazy? What WAS I? Now that I was out and I had the freedom to choose what was my choice? This was the first time in my life I tried keep my extreme impulses at bay, I didn’t want to rush into anything.  Now that the cat was out of the bag I wanted to enjoy exploring what was to be a major life choice.  I lived as man, I took a male name… I met with FTM’s frequently… all while performing Burlesque.  I did my face for the stage, but off stage I was Max.  I met with Buck Angel in a LES Cigar Bar to talk to someone who had been my hero ever since I saw his photo in a doctors office when I was middle school.  And it slowly started to dawn on me as much as liked the world affirming my masculinity and acknowledging that truth about me, I liked performing femininity better.  I liked the put on, the ritual, the discipline of drag most of all. And so rather than schedule my mastectomy last year, I scheduled myself a breast augmentation. Because even though I don’t identify as female I’m proud of my body, I’m proud to present femininity to other females, I’m proud to tell a part of both our stories because putting drag on is a means to do such a thing with joy.

That was what I was missing: Joy.  So much of my life had been about suffering whether it was loudly, angrily, or quietly.  And while I was home this trip I sat alone in my bedroom at night as I did when I was young and I found kinship. I happened across an incredible documentary called “She’s a Boy i Knew” an extremely honest and deeply felt film about one persons journey to find themselves as female, a lovely woman named Gwen.  So many questions she asked were ones I’d asked,  so many fears were the same.  But how she feels now, after making her choice gave me comfort- because I too feel that way.  Because I am not alone, and I’m not crazy. At least about this one thing any way.

http://youtu.be/oUz1JpIHCsY

I had a good laugh too, when I visited my doctor for my yearly physical.  The same doctor I’ve had for almost 12 years, and she said “you’ve evolved beyond gender, your glowing, and it all makes complete sense”.  A nice thing to hear a doctor say, especially when you’ve been expecting an insanity diagnosis your whole life.

XO

Dana is a gonzo icon and has been in over 140 movies.  She has a face like a doll and an insatiable appetite.  I like it when she turns me out.

The show will be on http://xpeeps.com and my second ever.

Come watch me get sexed super good by my Mistress.

Penthouse Pet Veronica Ricci has a habit in popping up naked in public places and who was I to not pass on the flaming redhead torch of a tradition. We agreed to meet late afternoon at the Old Los Angeles Zoo. Two things. One, I’m not from LA and can barely get anywhere let alone an amazingly hidden ruin in the middle of the hills. We when finally convene (she’s a vibrant, lovely , charismatic muse) we start two hours late. Little light left and a surprisingly large number of passers by didn’t deter us from snapping furtively as fast as we could. I literally took the first (and last) shot of her playing pussy cat’s pussy when an emergency matter (all well) ended the shoot leave us both wanting more photos and adventures.

Until then, here is on delightful kitty, sometimes in a cage. (And dogs make cats uncomfortable, as you shall see).

Anyway I am popping by briefly to give a shout out to my friend Travis Williams. It’s his birthday! Travis was nominated one of OUT/GLAADs 2011 up and coming New York artists, and I have the privilege of getting to be his friend as well as live with him.

Here is a candid shot he took of me recently in our home.

(For the record I was massaging my feet, not picking them)

Bromance. Happy birthday Travis. xo

Is there a Mike Patton marital aid yet?  I like that.  Marital AIDs.

http://youtu.be/zaUrzMeS4xg

Anna B. Volk holds a bachelor’s degree in English language, a masters’ in Irish Literature,

a doctorate in Comparative Literature, a bachelor’s in Architecture and Urbanism.

She also holds plane   tickets from Brazil, latte filled mugs, and cigarettes.

And she watches porn. And writes, and talks about it.

And she sometimes does all this at the same time, while listening to jazz.

She lives in Rio de Janeiro.

http://darlinghouse.net/beta/blog/2012/01/03/dr-anna-b-volk-scholar-reviewer-writer-brazilian/

Hold that contact.

i once shot a video for RaptureVision where the domme, Miss Varla, tied up a submissive, Paratoos, to the bondage bed arms and legs spread nice and tight and then she straddled him and slowly took her silky nude thigh high stocking off of her left leg all while looking at him and then softly caressed his face and neck and stomach and legs with foot of the hose so it was barely a whisper barely a feather of a feel and he writhed and groaned and it was so quiet and sensual and all i could hear was the sound of the leather bed mattress creaking and crackling underneath his movements and she was in a leather bodysuit which i could hear too and she dangled the silk and dragged it over his eyelids and lips and adam’s apple and left nipple and ribs and down his thigh missing his cock by inches and i could feel his desire and it was hard and breathing on its own longing to be touched aware that it wasn’t going to happen and she had the sweetest breathiest voice that told him how much he liked it and wanted it and he was melting and putty and i was so turned on and it was right then that i began to understand tease and denial.

Ms Olivia Black

Is that enough parenthetical?

Sometimes now he says, “You drink so much.  Maybe too much.”

What’s funny is that for that year when I was hooked on meth, he never once questioned me during my weekly trip to his liquor store to buy a bubbler to smoke my shit (that’s tweaker speak for crystal methamphetamine, a popular recreational drug of choice for women and queers) out of.  Never. Said. Shit.

The thing about being a blonde is, guys just want to fuck your ass.  When you’re a brunette, they want to eat your pussy THEN fuck your ass.

XOXO,

Sovvy