Come Hear Me Read! Perverts Put Out, May 25

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Come hear me read dirty stories! In honor of National Masturbation Month, the Perverts Put Out series of sex readings will be holding their Wank Edition, a sterling celebration of self-abuse, on Friday, May 25, with fabled and infamous sex writers Charlie Anders. Meliza Bañales, m. i. blue, Jen Cross, Juba Kalamka, Thomas Roche, horehound stillpoint, emcees Carol Queen and Simon Sheppard… and of course, MEEEEEEE. I’m planning to read my very nasty story, “View from the 14th Floor,” originally published in On Our Backs and reprinted in Best American Erotica 2005.

If you haven’t heard me read, you really should. I realize this sounds totally smug, but if I do say so myself, I’m a very good fun reader, and I have a special way with a dirty story. If you’re in the Bay Area, come by and introduce yourself — I’d love to meet my bloggies in the flesh!

Perverts Put Out
Friday, May 25
7:30 pm
CounterPULSE
1310 Mission Street, San Francisco
$10-15

Come Hear Me Read! Perverts Put Out, May 25
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Reality Porn: British Phone Box Cards

Please note: This post contains fairly explicit descriptions of my personal sex life and my personal sexual practices and proclivities. Family members and others who don’t want to read about that, now would be a good time to stop reading.

No, really.

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I recently came across a lovely set of dirty web pages (the site has several pages , but they won’t all let you link directly) devoted to British phone box cards — those cards printed up and placed in phone booths by British prostitutes, dommes, and submissives to advertise their services. (Thanks to Spanking Blog for the tip!)

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I’ve always been fascinated with these phone box cards, and have always found them very hot and very sexually compelling. More so in a lot of ways than regular porny porn. So when I had a chance to look over this sizable collection of them — a collection full of examples that happen to push my particular sexual buttons, collected by someone who clearly shares those buttons — it gave me a perfect opportunity to, shall we say, meditate, on what it is about these cards that’s so mesmerizing.

I think it has to do with reality.

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I’ve always found real sex, and realistic sex fantasies, much hotter than impossible or implausible ones. Maybe it’s because I have such a literal mind. But there’s an immediacy to real-life sex depictions and realistic porn that I find very compelling. It makes me feel like I’m right there — in the picture, in the story, in the movie. (I write about this a little more in A Sex Writer’s Defense of Visual Porn.) Even when I’m making up sex fantasies for myself, I have a weird compulsion to come up with a plausible back-story before I get to the good parts.

Which brings me back to the phone box cards.

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See, these aren’t just sexy photos and drawings of pretty girls getting spanked. They’re sexy photos and drawings of pretty girls who want you to spank them for money. The cards don’t just give you a fantasy for you to whack off to. The cards represent real women for you to potentially get off with. Who are, in fact, actively encouraging you to get off with them.

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Obviously, dirty photos and videos depict real women, too. But the fact that these cards are the advertising cards of professional women means that the women are, in theory, available — in a way that, for the overwhelming majority of us, porn actors and models aren’t.

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And that gives the fantasy an impact, an immediacy, that regular porn just doesn’t have. It’s so much easier to imagine taking one of these phone-box girls over my knee and spanking her hard — because I could. In real life. (Or if not that exact girl — who knows how old these cards are, and if any of these women are still working — then another one not unlike her.) It could happen. And not just in a “Yeah, sure, theoretically anything could happen,” way, but in an “I could make this happen” way. If I were visiting London, and had a decent amount of extra cash in my pocket, I could find one of these cards, and call one of these girls, and do things with her that I will never in my entire life do with a porn star or a fetish model.

(Or I could do it here in San Francisco, on the Web. But that’s a subject for another post.)

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All of which gives these cards a weirdly intense impact on my libido — one that definitely outstrips the erotic power of the images just by themselves.

Neat.

P.S. I was talking with my friend Tim about this today, and he told me that the Loud Family song “Self Righteous Boy Reduced to Tears” was inspired by one of these phone box cards. (A more dommy one than the ones I’m showing here, I assume.) And I say yet again: Neat. I had no idea.

Reality Porn: British Phone Box Cards

“She Loved…” An Excerpt from “Bending”

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And now, a dirty story.

I’m going to be away from my blog for a few days while I take care of some other stuff. So instead of starting another big heavy discussion topic, I thought I’d give you a nice dirty story to tide you over for a few days. (Family members and others who don’t want to read my porn: Now would be a good time to stop reading.)

This is an excerpt from my erotic novella “Bending,” part of the three-novella collection Three Kinds of Asking For It edited by Susie Bright. FYI: While I usually illustrate my blog posts with lots of pictures, I’m not going to do that here. I want you to be able to picture the characters yourself, the way you imagine them, so I’m leaving this one picture-less. Have fun, and I’ll be back blogging next week!

*****

Bending
Copyright 2005 Greta Christina

She loved being bent over. More than any fiddling that might precede it, more than any fumbling sex act that might follow. The moment of being bent over was like a sex act to Dallas, like foreplay and climax blended into one swooning, too-short moment. A hand on her neck, pressing gently but firmly downward, felt like a tongue on her clit; a voice in her ear, telling her calmly and reasonably to bend over and pull down her pants, felt like a cock in her cunt.

She always masturbated in that position. She sometimes masturbated by getting in that position and then doing nothing else. She would stand by the arm of her sofa, by the side of the bed, at the edge of the kitchen table; and she would bare her ass, slowly, and slowly bend herself over… and then she would stand there, bent over, hands on her hips or behind the small of her back, thinking. Thinking about what she looked like, thinking about what she felt like. Thinking about the feel of the air on the skin of her exposed ass. Thinking about hands on her thighs, paddles on her bottom, dicks and dildos in her asshole and her cunt. Thinking about what a dirty hungry girl she was. Thinking, until she came.

The furnishings that crowded Dallas’s apartment would be a dead giveaway to anyone who knew what to look for. Sofas and armchairs with wide, firm backs and arms; tables and dressers that were all waist height; a small but varied collection of hairbrushes, vintage and modern. A padded table she had had made for her, its height easily adjustable so her head and torso could be raised or lowered as the mood required. It could pass for a sewing or card table. She called it the bending table. She tried not to use it too often, for fear of using up all the magic.

It was hard sometimes. She saw a video once, where a man bent a woman over a toilet and shoved her head in it while he fucked her in the ass. She thought she would pass out. She watched the scene ten times, pale, wet between her legs, a shaking hand on the remote. She watched it ten times, and then took the video back to the rental place and never watched it again. It made her stomach hurt, the thought that this act had happened — literally, physically, factually happened — to someone who wasn’t her.

She did have lovers. Many of them over the years. Dozens if you counted them all, more if you counted very carefully. More than one of these lovers had accused Dallas of being a black hole, an accusation she felt was deeply unfair, not to mention inaccurate. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to give anything. She simply felt that what she did have to give was sufficient. Her pain, her submission, her ass in the air presented like a jewel on a satin pillow, her willingness to do almost anything a person could do in that position… Dallas felt that all of this was a tremendous gift. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to give anything. It was that she had yet to find a lover who wanted what she had to give. She found this tremendously annoying. Hurtful, too, for sure, and frustrating at times to the point of despair, but mostly just annoying as hell.

And the accusation that “you only like to do one thing” completely baffled her. It wasn’t one thing, she argued to herself on her way home from a particularly frustrating squabble. It wasn’t one thing, any more than so-called regular sex was one thing. Being bent over was a whole field of things, an entire genus, with a zillion details that could vary. Wriggling and weeping versus serene submission; being gently guided to the edge of the bed versus being shoved onto the floor; jeans and cotton panties yanked down to her knees versus a flimsy skirt slowly pulled up to reveal her sluttily un-pantied bottom… these were distinct sex acts, obviously and self-evidently, as different as, say, intercourse and oral sex seemed to be for the rest of the world. The portion of the world that she’d been fucking, anyway.

Certain details about her lovers didn’t much matter to her. Male, female, neither or both, any of these were fine. Age, race, height, weight, occupation or lack thereof, smoking habits, voting habits, all those things that kept showing up in the personal ads; none of them made much difference to Dallas. Lately, it was beginning to make less and less difference whether she even found them attractive. It was beginning to matter only whether they were willing.

For example.

There was Daria, the photographer. Daria loved seducing people into taking things a little too far, loved getting them to sign the release and then leading them, step by gentle step, from a tasteful, soft-focus nude session into something she’d have to take to Amsterdam to get published. She loved the blush, the not-so-reluctant reluctance, the shame and relief on her subjects’ faces at being exposed at last. She was good, and she got what she wanted a lot. And God knows she got good pictures out of Dallas. She got a whole book’s worth of pictures out of Dallas, a book she’d have been hard-pressed to get published even in Amsterdam. But she never got the blush. She had Dallas doing things that almost made her own bad self blush, and she talked to Dallas in a low voice about how many people were going to see these pictures and know her dirty secret, and through it all Dallas just smiled, a beatific half-smile like she was gazing on the face of the Holy Virgin. Daria even got out the video camera, a last resort if there ever was one, and she told Dallas about all the filthy leering perverts she was going to sell the tape to on the Internet, and Dallas just spread her asshole wider, and smiled wider. Daria did finally get the photos published, some of them anyway, and she sent Dallas five copies of the book, and Dallas sent back a very sweet thank-you note with an order for ten more copies at the twenty percent discount agreed on in their contract.

There was Jack. That was good for a while. Jack liked a lot of different things, but he was happy to oblige Dallas as long as she was happy to oblige him back. It was pretty damn fun, actually; he knew where she lived, so he could keep her on the hook for hours, groveling on the floor begging for his cock, smacking herself in the pussy and calling herself a cheap whore, bound on her back with his Jockeys in her mouth while he jerked off in her face and told her what a good girl she was. As long as he held out the promise of bending her over and doing things to her from behind, she’d do just about anything for him, and do it with a song in her heart. But he knew her heart wasn’t in it. He knew that all she really wanted was the bending over part, and someone who craved it as much as she did. And he didn’t. It was perfectly fine, but he didn’t have that sort of dedication to the one fetish. His fetish was variety. And ultimately, what he wanted was someone who wanted him, someone desperate for his particular cock, his Jockeys in their mouth, someone who wasn’t just lending him their mouth as a trade-off for his hands on their ass. So the two of them broke it off. They were still friends, though, and they still did it sometimes, when her ads were running dry and his boyfriend had other plans.

There was B.J., a butch top who’d call herself that to anyone who would listen. She loved having cute girls bend over for her, loved to beat them until they cried prettily and begged her to stop. But Dallas never would. Oh, she’d cry alright; she’d cry and whimper, scream and wriggle, yank frantically against her ropes or beat her fists on the bed. But she never asked B.J. to stop. Not once. B.J. would beat her until the welts ran together; but when she dropped the belt and sneered, “Had enough?” Dallas would inevitably draw a breath and say, “No, sir. I can take more.” Like it was a fucking gift or something. B.J. didn’t think it was a fucking gift. She thought it was a challenge, or a mockery even. The last time Dallas said it, B.J. shrugged in disgust, tossed her paddle into her bag, and said “Fine. You win.” She picked up her bag and her motorcycle jacket without another word, while Dallas stayed in position, bent over with one foot on the floor and the other splayed out on the bed, looking over her shoulder with a puzzled expression. B.J. gave Dallas one last withering look and slammed out the front door — and hovered in the hallway, waiting for Dallas to run out and call after her. She stayed long enough to hear Dallas make herself come, quickly and loudly. She didn’t stay long enough to hear Dallas pick up the phone and call Jack for a lengthy gripe-fest about asshole tricks who thought sex was a competition.

There was Jeffrey — Jeff, Jeffrey, he didn’t care — who met her through her ad online. He couldn’t believe his luck; they’d been talking in the coffeeshop for maybe five minutes when she looked him up and down and said calmly, “So if I take you back to my place now, will you bend me over and fuck me in the ass?” At first he thought it was a scam, thought her boyfriend would jump out from behind her door and mug him or something; but she sighed impatiently and said “Fine. Your place, my place. A motel. Whatever,” and he dropped a twenty on the coffeeshop table and took her to a motel down the block. And then he really couldn’t believe his luck. The door shut behind them, and she tossed her purse in the corner, jerked up her skirt, flopped over the dresser, spread her ass cheeks apart with her hands, and started begging him to stick it in. She didn’t have to beg him twice. He scrambled out of his pants, shoved a condom onto his dick, and hastily guided himself into her open, gentle asshole. He fucked her slow and sweet until she squirmed and bucked and whimpered for him to fuck her hard and fast, and then he slammed her, five or six good slams before he came. But then she started getting weird on him. She stayed bent over the dresser even after he pulled out, and she started talking about him putting things into her ass. She had some things in her purse, she said. When he went silent she started sweet-talking, saying they could do it anywhere he wanted, on the floor, against the wall, in the bathroom over the toilet seat. Her voice trembled a bit when she mentioned the toilet seat. When he stayed silent, she looked abashed, said she knew she was hard to deal with sometimes, said she could see why he might be angry, said if he felt like he had to punish her she’d understand. At which point he remembered an urgent appointment, scrambled back into his pants, and made the most graceful thirty-second exit he could muster. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw her reaching for her purse as he closed the door.

There was Betsy.

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Most of the rest of the story concerns Dallas and Betsy. If you want to find out what happens next, you’ll have to buy the book.

“She Loved…” An Excerpt from “Bending”

When Art Porn Works: “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926”

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Once again, I’m trying to inject a little sex into this increasingly less sex-oriented sex writer’s blog, and am posting one of my Adult FriendFinder magazine porn reviews. This is one of my rare straight-up raves — and as is so often the case with my porn reviews, it’s simultaneously a review and an analysis of what makes porn work. Enjoy!

*****

Ecstasy in Berlin 1926, DVD
Produced, directed, and edited by Maria Beatty
Available at Bleu Productions and at Last Gasp.

Yes. Oh, dear Lord, yes. This is what I’ve been waiting for, what I’m always waiting for and so rarely get. “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” is art porn that’s actually both artistic and pornographic. It’s smut that’s exquisitely framed and impeccably timed and created with a passionate creative vision… and that is, at the same time, filthy and nasty and explicit, catering to my most perverted and degenerate voyeuristic lusts.

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The movie is set in Berlin in 1926. A blonde beauty, sensual and delicate and a bit like Jean Harlow, injects herself with an unnamed drug, and slips into a fantasy about a dashing brunette woman who appears from nowhere and kisses her passionately, a gloved hand at her throat. The fantasy lover takes control with an increasingly firm hand, slicing the blonde’s lingerie off with a straight razor, and caressing her breasts with a touch that’s both sensual and sadistic.

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As the blonde woman sinks deeper into the drug, the fantasy changes scene. Her lover is now clad in a corset and severely high laced leather boots — boots for the blonde to grovel at and worship with her lovely mouth. At this point, the fantasies become increasingly intense and perverse, as the submissive girl is bound with ropes, flogged, spanked, paddled, caned, whipped, chained up, and more — all flawlessly pictured in her mind’s eye.

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The film is the love child of Maria Beatty. Beatty has produced and directed a number of erotic videos for her company Bleu Productions: most of them featuring lesbian SM, and many of them quite extreme. I’ve been a fan of Beatty’s for years, and her kink videos The Black Glove and The Elegant Spanking are among my favorites. She has an eye for the perfect moment, the pose that perfectly captures the moment of submission or pain or taking control. “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” is a beautiful example. When the blonde is bent over her mistress’s lap, or on all fours in front of a mirror, or on her knees with her face on the floor and her ass in the air, the position is always classic, an iconic example of that pose, perfectly blocked and framed to make a delicious picture for the viewer.

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But unlike many other “perfect moment, perfectly framed” porn directors (like, oh, say, Andrew Blake), the performers in Beatty’s movies aren’t merely standing and modeling. They seem like they’re really there. The tongue on the boot, the paddle on the bottom, the lash on the back, the look of concentration on the dominant’s face, the look of fear and bliss on the submissive’s — all of these feel genuine. The performers aren’t thrashing and screaming, to be sure, but they seem very much intent on what they’re doing, and deeply satisfied by it. Maria Beatty is herself a lifestyle submissive, and she’s clearly devoted to making videos that capture both the intensity of her fantasies and the truth of real SM play. And when she’s at her best, her videos are an exceptional blend of artistry and authenticity.

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And “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” is definitely one of her best. Filmed mostly in black-and-white and sepia-tone with only occasional color, the movie’s perverse pleasures are expertly filmed and deftly framed, giving it an air of luxurious decadence. Watching it made me feel like a wealthy sybarite in an elegant bordello, with lovely and expensive girls performing a series of degenerate sex acts carefully staged for my benefit. It looks like a German art film of the 1920s, like a dirty movie by Murnau or Fritz Lang, or like vintage porn photographs come to life. (“Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” was, in fact, inspired by a series of vintage girl-girl kink photos, and one of the extras on the DVD is a gallery of those photos.)

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There are a few things you need to be prepared for. One of them is the slow pace of the film, the long, lingering buildup before you get to the “good parts.” Personally, I think this is one of the movie’s strong points: I think foreplay and teasing and excruciating anticipation are “good parts,” some of the yummiest good parts, and one of my biggest complaints about mainstream porn is that it rushes straight to the fucking or the whipping without giving me time to get excited about it. But even if you do get impatient with the teasy buildup (which you can, of course, fast-forward through), I think you’ll appreciate the movie’s patience. Because once it gets to the juicy bits, it stays with them. It doesn’t jump from fetish to fetish or from shot to shot like a music video on speed; it finds a groove and stays with it, letting your eyes linger on the leather boots being lovingly tongued, the chains being carefully wrapped around the naked torso, the bare bottom being paddled again and again. When you come to a bit that you really like, you can relax and trust that you’ll be able to watch it for a little while.

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You also need to be prepared for the complete lack of dialog. The movie is silent: there’s music, but no conversation at all. Again, I personally think this is a huge plus; most porn actors can’t act for beans, and most porn dialog makes me want to crawl under the sofa and die from embarrassment. In “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926,” there are no awkward, wooden, ineptly written, clumsily memorized speeches to distract you — the focus is entirely on the image. If what you like in an adult video is the image, this movie will come as a huge relief — but if you’re a fan of dirty talk, it may be a bit disappointing.

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Finally, you should be prepared for the somewhat abrupt finish. This is my only actual complaint about the film. The blonde girl’s fantasy scenes follow on one another with grace and heat, expertly edited and overlaid, building from firm but gentle dominance to increasingly intense scenarios of blissful pain and submission. But then they just kind of stop. There’s nothing to mark the last scene as the last scene — nothing but the credits. I don’t insist on a classic Big Porn Finish, a final orgy scene with six guys shooting on the star’s face and boobs. But I do like some sense of closure, something to give shape and context to all those beautiful dirty images, something that tells me to breathe again, or to come. This video doesn’t have it, and it’s a bit… well, anticlimactic.

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But this is a minor nitpick, really, like ragging on Dickens for having a spelling error. I love this film, and I recommend it passionately. “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926” is that rarest of all rare creatures: art porn that works, where the filthiness makes the art more beautiful, and the art makes the sex more hot.

Copyright 2005 Greta Christina. Originally published in Adult FriendFinder magazine.

When Art Porn Works: “Ecstasy in Berlin 1926”

Cheese Factory: Dream Quest

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It’s been a little while since I’ve posted one of my porn reviews here. And for an assortment of reasons that I don’t feel like going into right now, this isn’t a great time for me to be writing new stuff. So here’s an entertainingly bitchy porn video review I did for Adult Friend Finder magazine, with some commentary at the end about why it’s so much harder to make seriously good porn videos than it is to make good porn in other forms, like writing or photography. Enjoy!

Cheese
Cheese Factory
by Greta Christina

Dream Quest
Directed by Brad Armstrong. Starring Jenna Jameson, Stephanie Swift, Alexa, Temptress, Asia Carrera, Sydnee Steele, Amber Michaels, Johnni Black, Felecia, Inari Vachs, Jessica Drake, Teri Starr, Bridgett Kerkove, Devin Wolf, Herschel Savage, Randy Spears, Evan Stone, and Brad Armstrong. 130 minutes. Wicked Pictures/Adam & Eve Productions. Available at Extreme Restraints and at Good Vibrations.

And I was so in the mood for it, too.

Really, really in the mood. I’d just gotten back from my honeymoon, all relaxed and happy and horny, and definitely ready to enjoy a high-quality porn video. “Dream Quest” looked like just the thing: a multiple award-winner, critically acclaimed, carried by more than one high-quality sex-product company with excellent taste.

So what happened?

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Let’s start from the beginning. A sword-and-sorcery costume drama, “Dream Quest” stars Jenna Jameson as Sarah, a sexually repressed young woman who’s irritated at her boyfriend and is longing for more romance in her life. After a frustrating date, Sarah is visited by two fairies in glitter thongs (Stephanie Swift and Felecia), who call Sarah into their magical world on a quest to save fantasy. (Fantasy, as it turns out — warning, spoiler alert — is a sort of glowing, bejeweled dumbbell about the size of a six-pack, but that’s not important right now. It’s been imprisoned by an evil wizard. That’s the important thing.) Sarah undergoes an awkward, hasty transition from uptight good-girl to horny slut, and begins her journey into the magic land of half-naked, constantly-boffing witches, elves, gnomes, and the like.

Yes, it’s a dippy premise. But I’ve seen pornos with dippier premises that have worked just fine. Yes, it plays like it was written by a horny Renaissance Faire nerd. But I’m a horny RenFaire nerd myself, so that’s not necessarily a criticism. In fact, you’d think that’d make it a slam-dunk.

So what happened?

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Well, for starters, this video has a seriously high cheese factor. The sets and costumes are reasonably pretty, with a lot more imagination than you typically see in porn. But they still look totally Vegas, with gold thongs and high-heeled boots and enough body glitter to suffocate the cast of “Showgirls.” And while the box cover raves about the Hollywood-level special effects, the effects are in fact mortifyingly lame. I’d cringe if I saw them in an original “Star Trek” episode, much less a Hollywood production. “Dream Quest” is clearly trying to look like “Lord of the Rings,” but it doesn’t even come close. Hell, it doesn’t even look like “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It looks like the cheesy cover art for an embarrassingly bad fantasy/sci-fi novel.

It wouldn’t be so painful to watch if it didn’t take itself so bloody seriously. But the video is clearly aiming for something lofty and transcendent, a haunting, otherworldly beauty that inspires new heights of erotic imagination, or some damn thing. When people who think they’re reaching for the stars end up landing in a giant cheese pile, it makes you cringe in embarrassment. Especially when they don’t have the sense to be embarrassed for themselves.

But all of that could be forgiven — if it weren’t for the sex.

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See, in the midst of all the zany Tolkien-in-Vegas costumes and sets and makeup jobs, someone forgot to come up with the zany sex. The sex in “Dream Quest” is the same old goddamn mainstream porno sex that you’ve seen a million times. Since the premise of the video is about the importance of fantasy and how awful life gets when it disappears, you’d think they’d come up with some sex scenes that are more… well, fantastic. Imaginative. Something other than just the same old sucking and fucking in somewhat more interesting sets and costumes. Instead, in the place of genuine erotic variety, they put the actors through a standard series of awkward positions, clearly intended, not to make the sex pleasurable, but to make the sex visible to the camera.

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Example. There’s a scene with the evil wizard Vladamir (Herschel Savage) and his wood-nymph slavegirl (Jessica Drake), where the slavegirl says “I would do anything to please you, my prince.” Emphasis on the “anything.” And all he can think of is to get his dick sucked and then fuck her in the cunt and the ass. Please. Have a little imagination. Given a half-wild, half-naked slavegirl kneeling at my feet offering to do anything to please me, I could come up with half a dozen more interesting pleasures just off the top of my head.

Even standard fucking and sucking would have been fine, if it had some oomph. But the sex in “Dream Quest” is depressingly oomph-less. With a couple of exceptions, there’s no passion, no intensity, no sensuality, no erotic suspense. It’s fine, it’s perfectly pleasant to watch, but it’s really nothing special.

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Here’s the thing: You can’t just take the same old sex and put it in different sets and costumes, and expect the movie to be different. It’s like the parable of the old wine in new wineskins. Or new wine in old wineskins. Or whatever. I’ve seen this in all too many supposedly high-end porn videos: they put a huge amount of attention into sets and costumes and lighting and camerawork and even writing, and then they run the actors through the same old sexual paces that we’ve all seen a hundred times. It doesn’t have to be that way: the wild sexual ferocity in the vampire flick “Dark Angels,” the hilariously imaginative “sex restaurant” scenes in “Barbara Broadcast,” the elaborately painted pussy that you watch seductively breathing in “Zazel,” all come to mind. But “Dream Quest” is nowhere near that league.

Dumbbell
And I hate, hate, hate the moral of the story. See, the movie begins with Sarah being irritated at her boyfriend Steve (Devin Wolf) for constantly pushing sex and trying to grope her even when she says no. At the end of the movie (warning: spoiler alert), after Sarah rescues the Jeweled Dumbbell of Fantasy and comes back to her normal life, her boyfriend shows up to apologize for his crass behavior. And then — get this — she says he doesn’t need to apologize, that she should apologize to him for not being open enough to sexuality and fantasy. Let me repeat that: Her boyfriend pushes sex on her when she’s not in the mood, continues to push and grope after she’s said no several times, repeatedly promises to knock it off and then repeatedly breaks those promises — and she’s apologizing to him? How fucked up is that? Sure, she’s repressed and shut down and needs to let sex into her life — but that’s hardly a sin on the level of refusing to take no for an answer. And frankly, if I had a lover as clumsy and disrespectful as this guy, I’d probably shut down too.

Condoms
There are things about the video I like. There’s some nice use of long shots interspersed with the genital close-ups, letting you see whole bodies and giving a feel of the setting and the mood. The long shots are nicely done, too, well-framed with some real attention to beauty and sensuality. Jenna Jameson’s swimming scene is a sweet delight: you get to just gaze at her lovely nakedness and watch her enjoying herself and her body at a leisurely pace, without racing impatiently towards the fuck scene. The scene with Jenna and Tundra the ice queen (Alexa) is fairly tasty as well, with some interesting uses of pretty sex toys. And the movie has consistent condom use — good for them.

Asia_carrera
And despite the overall “taking itself way too seriously” tone, there are a few moments of clever, self-aware humor. There’s a hilarious bit when Arachna (Asia Carrera) gives Sarah new clothes for her magical journey, saying “You’ll blend in better”… and in the next scene, Sarah’s wearing lace-up fur-topped boots, a tight blue bodice with a puffy off-the-shoulder blouse, and a shimmery hip-baring loincloth. (Even funnier — she does in fact blend in better that way.)

Laundry
Really, except for the embarrassing sword-and-sorcery thing, “Dream Quest” isn’t actually flat-out bad. It’s just — mediocre. But mediocre is its own kind of bad. When porn is so average that you take breaks from it to fold your laundry… and to watch Jeopardy… and then to watch “Whose Line Is It Anyway”… and then to fold laundry some more… well, that’s pretty gosh-darned mediocre. You should not be wanting to take breaks from your porn.

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As for the music… well, it varies. None of it is actually good, but very little of it is awful, and at least it’s varied. Some of it is like a Carmina Burana knockoff set to a disco beat-box background, and some of it is Enya-wannabe material, and some of it is reasonably pleasant Renfaire-inspired ambient stuff. But very little of it is your standard thumpa-thumpa synth-disco retread porn crap. I do have to give them credit — at least they’re trying.

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And now that I think about it, that’s not just true for the music. That’s true for the entire movie. I didn’t care for “Dream Quest,” I thought it was pretentious and cheesy and not very hot. But I will give the filmmakers this: At least they were trying. They were trying to make a porn video that was beautiful and magical, inspiring and poetic, something that transcended porn conventions and reached into genuine art.

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Which is much, much harder to do in video than it is in almost any other porn medium. In erotic writing or comics or art, all you need is one person, one sex freak with talent and imagination who’s willing to give up being seen as a serious artist in order to explore their erotic vision. Even in adult photography, all you ultimately need is one good artist and one good model (although additional models are certainly helpful) who care about erotic art and don’t give a shit about the effect that making porn will have on their career.

Film_set
But film and video is a collaborative medium. To make a good film, everyone involved needs to be good. Everyone. Actors, director, writer, cinematographer, set and costume designers, you name it — all of them have to be skilled and inspired for a movie to come together. And in porn, that’s extremely difficult to pull off. People who are serious about a mainstream or even alternative film career, whether in front of the camera or behind it, tend not to go into porn. And the folks in the porn business who do have real talent and passion still have to work with a whole lot of folks who don’t so much. You can have all the vision in the world, but unlike writing or comics or art, you need other people to help you realize it. It’s a damn near impossible thing to do, and I guess I should cut the people who are trying to do it a little slack.

But not much.

Cheese Factory: Dream Quest

Make Kink, Not War

Armory1
(Advance warning: This will probably only be interesting to people who know San Francisco.)

You know on Mission and 14th, that huge, beautiful, decaying Armory building that hasn’t been used for years? You know how every time you go by it, you think, “God, what a waste, it’s such a grand space, somebody should really fix it up and do something with it”?

Well, somebody is. And it just tickles me pink who it is.

It’s Kink.com, the online fetish video production company.

Armory2
Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase “make love, not war,” doesn’t it?

I don’t actually have a whole lot more to say about this. I just think it’s cool that the space will be used, and double-cool that a registered landmark building and former National Guard training center will be used to make fetish movies. It’s just so very, very San Francisco. (If you want more details, there’s an article about it on SFGate — one that’s more newsy and one that’s more chatty — and some TV news clips on Kink.com’s site.)

I just hope they decide to rent space out for private parties. I’ve wanted to see the inside of that building ever since I saw it. Maybe I’ll have my 50th birthday there…

Make Kink, Not War

Why I Keep Watching Porn: Jenna Loves Pain

Jlp_front_cover
Yet another attempt to keep this sex-writer’s blog at least occasionally focused on sex. Here’s another porn review I wrote for Adult Friend Finder and Alt.com. It’s one of my trademark blends of a smut review and a meditation on what does and doesn’t work in porn. Only this time, for a change, I get to use a piece of good porn as my example — including a scene that’s among the best I’ve seen. And I get to ponder why I keep sitting through mediocre porn in order to get to the good stuff (aside from the fact that I get paid to do it, that is). Enjoy!

Why I Keep Watching Porn
by Greta Christina

Jenna Loves Pain
Starring Jenna Jameson, Amber Michaels, Ava Vincent, Emily Marilyn, Dru Berrymore, Fujiko Kano, and Nina Hartley. Written and directed by Ernest Greene. Club Jenna Productions. 80 minutes, plus DVD extras. Available at Good Vibrations and at Extreme Restraints.

I’m so glad it turned out this way.

It could have gone either way. An SM/fetish video with mainstream porn stars and style? It could easily have been the worst of both worlds — the rote, plastic, fuck-by-numbers sexual energy of so many mainstream videos, combined with the clumsy, inept, “some guy in a basement with a camera” filmmaking technique of so many fetish flicks. Porn stars prancing around in fetish gear, giving each other a few half-hearted swats on the butt in between the standard fucking and sucking. Corporate kink. Andrew Blake on an off-day. That sort of thing.

But it’s not. It’s the best of both worlds. (Mostly, anyway.) “Jenna Loves Pain” gives you authentic, heartfelt, high-energy SM sex — with the production values of a top-level mainstream porno.

Which I have to say is a nice change.

And there’s this one scene… but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Jlp1
There’s no real plot to this one. The setup is that Jenna Jameson is in some sort of secret society or private club or something, dedicated to dominance and submission. Jenna doms in a couple of scenes, subs in another, and muses to herself about “the allure of erotic servitude” and how “each of us has a dark side and a light side.” (This voiceover is one of the few real flies in the ointment — it’s insipid and dorky, and it creates an annoying distraction at some lovely times when it really shouldn’t. Fortunately, there’s not much of it.)

So it’s a plotless wonder. That’s actually fine with me. Pornos with plot are fine when they’re done well, but they aren’t very often, and a stupid porn plot is much worse than no plot at all. What I do care about in porn videos is (a) sex that looks enthusiastic and real and like the performers are into it, and (b) a filmmaking style that enhances this realness and enthusiasm — or at least doesn’t get in its way.

And “Jenna Loves Pain” gives you both.

The main thing, of course, is the sex. And the main thing about the sex in “Jenna Loves Pain” is that the performers are having a wildly good time having it. They look transported. Whether they’re being bound and displayed, or spanked and whipped, whether they’re spreading their pussies for a riding crop or offering their breasts up for clamps, whether they’re licking their mistress’s pussy or licking her feet — or whether they’re dishing out the binding and spanking and getting their assorted parts licked — they look excited, and energized, and intensely focused. And they look like they’re *there* — like they’re actually in the moment, experiencing what’s happening, instead of being a million miles off. It’s pathetic to realize how rare all this is in porn, but it is.

Plus they have orgasms. Vivid, thrashing, screaming, unmistakable female orgasms. And lots of ’em. Again, it’s unbelievably depressing to realize how uncommon this is in video porn — but oh my God, is it beautiful to see it here.

I’ll admit that I’ve never been crazy about Jenna Jameson. She always seemed like the epitome of the generic blonde porn star to me. But she does a fine job in this video. She’s not the best thing about it — the best thing by far about this video is the scene with Nina Hartley and Amber Michaels, which I’ll get to in a bit. But this is clearly Jenna’s video — she’s in three scenes of the four — and she more than holds her own. The enthusiasm, the energy, the feeling of focus and presence and connection in the video… a lot of it comes from Jenna, and I have to give her props for it.

What’s more, the sex is a lot more creative than you usually get in mainstream porn. You’ve got all the kink, of course… but you’ve also got frottage, and foot play, and ass licking, and a clever and sexy use of a ball gag for cunnilingus, and more. I get so sick of porn videos that run through the same five or six sex acts over and over, as if human beings hadn’t spent thousands of years coming up with thousands of variations on the classics. But “Jenna Loves Pain” has a lovely sense of freedom about it — the sense that the actors are having the kinds of sex they want to be having, instead of the kinds of sex that the marketing department told the director to tell the actors to have.

And it’s nice to see a video that freely mixes both hardcore SM and hardcore genital sex. I realize that this is more common than it used to be… but I came into porn in the ’80s and ’90s, when there was a huge Berlin Wall between sex videos and kink videos, and I still get excited about it when they mesh.

Plus there’s this scene with Nina Hartley and Amber Michaels… but I’ll get to that in a moment. Promise.

Jlp_back_cover
As for the filmmaking style… well, it’s no “Citizen Kane,” but it more than does the job. The camerawork and editing were clearly done by people who gave a damn — not just about flashy technical tricks, but about how style can add to the sexual heat. The best example of this is how the movie uses flashbacks and flash-forwards, with quick, teasing flashes of the nastiest images — Jenna’s mouth held open wide with a metal gag, Amber Michaels writhing face down with her hands bound behind her back, a hairbrush landing on Fujiko Kano’s upturned bottom, and so on — cut in periodically throughout the movie.

Partly this is hot simply because it keeps your attention. It definitely kept my clit sitting up straight, even during stretches that weren’t quite doing it for me. But it’s also hot because that’s what sex feels like a lot of the time. When you’re fucking, you’re not just thinking of all the great stuff you’re doing right this minute — you’ve got memories of things you did a few minutes ago, and fantasies of things you hope you’ll be doing soon, all flashing in your mind like a slideshow. I do, anyway. That’s a huge amount of what keeps my libido worked up and interested. And the quick, dirty flashes in the video are a great example of how a simple stylistic technique can work to make porn feel more immediate, more urgent, more like sex.

It does overdo the technique sometimes — as well as some other tricks and effects — and sometimes it’s distracting. But I can live with that. I’d rather have someone at the editing board who’s over-enthusiastic than someone who’s just going through the motions.

And I love that the video spends time on the performers’ faces, and their whole bodies, instead of just showing you hands and toys on flesh. When a whip lands on a back or a hairbrush lands on an ass, you get plenty of images of the impact — but you also get to see the women’s faces cringing in ecstatic pain, their hands tightening into fists, their torsos contracting in shock and then opening up again to welcome the next blow. This is the stuff that actually conveys the energy of a sex scene — the stuff that shows you how the performers are, you know, feeling. And way too many porn videos forget about it entirely.

The video is somewhat uneven. Like I said, the voiceover is dippy and annoying, and the camera tricks and effects are sometimes overdone and distracting. And the scenes themselves vary in quality and heat. The last scene in particular is somewhat disappointing — Ava Vincent and Emily Marilyn just don’t seem as excited or connected as the women in the other scenes (although they do have their moments, and their scene does pick up near the end when Jenna shows up to play). Jenna’s submissive scene with Dru Berrymore is a lot stronger, and her dominant scene with Fujiko Kano is stronger still, and one heckuva lot of fun.

Jlp2
And then there’s this scene with Nina Hartley and Amber Michaels…

… which may be one of the best porn performances I’ve seen.

Ever.

No kidding. This scene is one of the most staggeringly beautiful things I’ve seen in porn, and I’ve been watching porn for years. Nina and Amber just seem so happy to be there, and so intensely focused on each other, that it made me want to cry. And it made me scramble for my vibrator — again and again and again. There’s a moment when Nina takes the gag out of Amber’s mouth, and Amber smiles — a sweet smile of wicked delight, a smile that radiates pure, spontaneous sexual joy. And when Nina’s beating her, Amber rocks her hips frantically and bucks her torso like she’s an animal in heat, like she’s getting fucked by God. It’s completely gorgeous… so gorgeous that it’s almost hard to watch. There’s a rawness to it, a nakedness that’s as much emotional as it is physical. They look transcendent. They look like they forgot the camera was on.

Of course they didn’t forget about the camera. They’re professionals. But this is an example of porn professionalism at its best. This isn’t the kind of porn professionalism that makes sure the pussy is in the shot, no matter what. This is the kind of porn professionalism that knows how to keep the pussy in the shot — and then knows how to forget about it, and just blissfully fuck.

And this is the reason I keep watching dirty videos, the reason I’m willing to sit through hours and hours of mediocre porn — because I know that scenes like this are out there. I know that this is what porn is capable of. Even when it’s not aspiring to profound insight or staggering technical skill or other qualities of Great Art, porn at its best can do this. It can give you a vision of sex at its best, at its most beautiful and most touching and most ecstatic, and make you feel it down to your bones.

It doesn’t get there very often. Even without the commercial pressures and limitations of the modern porn industry, moments of complete sexual rapture are hard to come by, and even harder to capture on film. But when it gets there, there’s no other art form that comes close. And when it gets there, it reminds you of why porn is worth making — and why it’s worth watching.

Why I Keep Watching Porn: Jenna Loves Pain

Best Erotic Comics 2008: Call for Submissions

Last_gasp
(Note: This news has now been updated.)

Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, Best Erotic Comics 2008 (the first in a planned annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting — and most sexually arousing — recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make “Best Erotic Comics” enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality… and as a fun dirty book.

*****

Thus begins the call for submissions for my brand-new book project, “Best Erotic Comics 2008.” (The complete call for submissions is on my Website, but I’m also including it at the end of this post.) If you’ve talked to me in the last couple/few months and I’ve said I had a potential new book project in the works but was cagey about the details… this is it.

I am dying of excitement. I am so proud of this project — and am having so much fun with it — that I could just fall into hysterics at any time.

And here’s why I’m doing it.

Black_hole
If you’ve been paying attention, you know that the last 20 years or so have seen a tremendous blossoming in the world of comics and graphic novels.

Bae2006
And if you’ve been paying attention, you know that those same 20 years have seen a similarly fabulous blossoming in the world of erotica, especially erotic writing and photography.

But erotic comics have not been getting their props. Adult comics are very much ghettoized in the comics world, shunted off to the side with the expectation that its readers want jerk-off material and nothing more. As a result, the work has suffered, in the same way that stigmatized, low-expectation, commerce-driven art forms and genres have always suffered.

Lost_girls
There’s good work being done, though. There are adult comic artists doing work with excellent literary and artistic merit. There are serious art/literary comic artists and graphic novelists creating some wildly hot and dirty scenes in their work. And Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s impossibly beautiful Lost Girls (drool, drool — but that’s a post for another day) has made the potential for this field — and for the fusion of its literary/art side and its dirty side — unmistakably clear.

The time is clearly ripe for a blossoming in the field of adult comics. With the “Best Erotic Comics” series, I want to help foster that growth. I want to spotlight the good work that’s currently being done — and I want to encourage comic artists to do more of it.

So if you’re a comics fan and you have suggestions for work you think should be included in this book, please look over the call for submissions, and send me your suggestions/nominations. If you have friends/colleagues/etc. who are comic artists, please pass the call for submissions along to them. And if you’re a comic artist, for the love of God, check out the call for submissions, and send me your work.

*****

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Best Erotic Comics 2008, to be published by Last Gasp

Last Gasp is seeking submissions for an anthology of adult comics, “Best Erotic Comics 2008” (the first in a planned annual series). The series is intended to showcase the most artistically interesting — and most sexually arousing — recent erotic comics, from both the literary comic side of the field and the smut comic side. We believe that the divide between literary comics and adult comics is unfortunate and unnecessary, and we plan to make “Best Erotic Comics” enjoyable both as a literary and artistic exploration of human sexuality… and as a fun dirty book.

In keeping with this vision, submissions to “Best Erotic Comics” should be both:

a) Hot.

b) Interesting in some way in addition to being hot.

Here are some more details:

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A SMUT COMIC ARTIST:

Submissions to “Best Erotic Comics” should not simply be hot sex comics. They should have some literary and/or artistic quality, as well as being arousing. We are looking for hot sex comics that are also thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn.

IF YOU ARE PRIMARILY A LITERARY COMIC ARTIST:

Submissions to “Best Erotic Comics” should not simply be about sex. They should also be hot. We are looking for thoughtful, insightful, engaging, funny, poignant, political, and/or exceptionally well-drawn comics that make the reader want to have sex and/or whack off.

IF YOU ALREADY WORK IN LITERARY SMUT COMICS:

Excellent! Send us your best work.

We are looking for a wide variety of erotic content — straight, gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and other; kinky and vanilla; from the points of view of women, men, and others. Both single-panel and multi-panel comics will be accepted. We are primarily looking for black-and-white work, but will be including a limited color section. We are accepting both original and previously-published comics; previously-published work should have been published or reprinted fairly recently, ideally after January 1, 2000. You can submit individual stories or excerpts from longer works. Work should be in English or wordless. Deadline for submissions: November 30, 2006. The pay starts at $20 a page, depending on length and other considerations.

The editor of the anthology is Greta Christina. Greta has been writing about sex professionally since 1989. She is editor of the anthology “Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients,” and author of the erotic novella “Bending,” which appeared in the three-novella collection “Three Kinds of Asking For It” edited by Susie Bright for Simon & Schuster. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, and the Skeptical Inquirer, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Erotica 2003 and 2005. She has worked for Last Gasp Books and Comics since 2002.

Please send submissions to:

Last Gasp
Attention: Best Erotic Comics
777 Florida St.
San Francisco, CA 94110

Please include a self-addressed stamped envelope. Do not send originals, or your only copy. All submissions with SASE will be answered, but submissions will not be returned. Deadline: November 30, 2006.

If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].

Best Erotic Comics 2008: Call for Submissions

Perverts Put Out returns — and I’m reading!

Greta
Come hear me read dirty stories — along with faboo sex writers Simon Sheppard, Carol Queen, Kirk Read, Charlie Anders, horehound stillpoint, and Lori Selke — when Perverts Put Out returns to San Francisco! Perverts Put Out was a long-running sex-writer forum/salon thing, which ended prematurely when host Bill Brent inexplicably decided to do what he wanted with his life and moved to Hawaii. But now Simon Sheppard and Carol Queen are reviving it as a benefit for the Center for Sex and Culture — and they very kindly invited me to be one of the readers at its debut!

Perverts Put Out always had a great and hilarious variety of sex writing — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, queer and straight, kinky and somewhat less kinky — and the return engagement promises to keep that tradition alive. I’m thrilled that it’s back, and I’d be going even if I weren’t reading. It’ll be on Saturday, September 23, starting at 7:30 pm, at CounterPULSE!, 1310 Mission St. (that’s at Mission and 9th, near Civic Center BART) in San Francisco. Admission is a $5-$15 sliding scale to benefit the Center for Sex and Culture, but no-one will be turned away for lack of funds.

I’d give you a taste of what I’m going to be reading, but I haven’t decided yet. Probably the story about the college girl getting spanked by her professor, but I might change my mind…

Perverts Put Out returns — and I’m reading!

Tee Corinne, and my other mothers and fathers

Corinne_dreams
Someone I never knew died on August 27, and I sat at my computer at work yesterday writing an obituary and trying not to cry.

Corinne_cunt
In case you’re not familiar with her, Tee Corinne was one of the earliest pioneers of the modern lesbian and women’s erotica movements — in photography, writing, and art. She’s probably best known for the “Cunt Coloring Book,” but I mostly knew her from her photography. She was one of the first women to create sexual images and writing for women, from a woman’s point of view, outside the male-driven porn machinery — and to do it publicly and shamelessly.

And by “one of the first,” I don’t mean she was doing it before it was cool. I mean she was doing it before it was being done. Her doing it is one of the things that made it possible for the rest of us to do it. She paved the way. She made a space.

I never met Tee Corinne. But she’s one of the people who made my life easier.

Corinne_intimacies
No, strike that. She’s one of the people who made my life possible. I’m not a pioneer — I’m an early adapter, but I’m not a pioneer — and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t have had the nerve to step into those woods if there hadn’t been Tee and people like her cutting through the brush and stamping out a trail first.

I feel bad that I never took the time to write her while she was alive and thank her. So I want to do that now — not just Tee, but all the people who’ve made talking about sex, and making art about sex, and providing/getting accurate information about sex, that much easier. I always get pissy when young sex writers/artists act like it’s always been this easy and don’t acknowledge the debt of gratitude they have towards the people who came before them. So I want to say thank you now.

Corinne_intricate
I want to say thank you, not only to Tee Corinne, but to Joani Blank and Betty Dodson, to Pat Califia and Honey Lee Cottrell, to Felice Newman and Frederique Delacoste, to Priscilla Alexander and Scarlot Harlot, to Michael Rosen and Mark I. Chester, to Layne Wincklebleck and Kat Sunlove, to the founders of San Francisco Sex Information, to Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle, to Isadora Allman and Susie Bright. And I know there are more. I know I’m forgetting some people, and for that I apologize. If you think you should have been on this list, you probably should have.

To all of you I want to say: I am not an ungrateful child. I am more grateful than I could possibly say.

Tee Corinne, and my other mothers and fathers