July 28

July 28, 2006

Two years ago today I was writing my first Waking Vixen post on Blogspot.

One year ago today I was finishing up a month of studying sexuality at the University of Amsterdam.

And today I commence shooting my porno directorial debut.

Dang.

I need a minute.

And: go!

Posted by Dacia at 05:22 AM | Comments (7)

Porno week!

July 24, 2006

Begins today! With a hangover! Ouch. Damn you rock and roll, making me unable to leave the house til two pm.

I have this ridiculous list of things I need to do and get in the next few days. The shopping list includes cupcakes, viagra, pool supplies and enemas. Gotta love it.

I am extremely excited about the team I have assembled to make this movie happen. I’m still going to be a little secretive about precisely who is involved, but as a bit of a teaser and to promote one of the bits of press fun for this week…

I’m going to be on the Derek & Romaine show (on Sirius, but you can also listen through their site) on Wednesday at 8 pm this week with two performers who I’m really really exicted about - Trixie and Tucker, who you may have seen on such awesome websites as SpyOnUs.com, TastyTrixie.com, BloodyTrixie.com, TrixiesHouseboy.com and DeliaCD.com.

Yep, they are two of the amazing people in my movie, and we’ll be yakking it up with Derek and Romaine on Wednesday. If you’re so inclined you can even call in to talk to us.

And you can expect more interesting stuff and behind the scenes coverage over the next week.

Posted by Dacia at 03:39 PM | Comments (2)

Above and beyond raunch

July 23, 2006

Is it still cool to blog about Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs? Eh, whatever – so I reveal that I’m horrendously behind the times. If something wasn’t published on the internet or in a book I read for class at grad school this past year, I haven’t read it. I am reading FCP now, so I will write about it now.

First let me say this – I do think Levy has a lot of interesting points and insights that have made me pause and think about my life and the weird worlds of sex and debauchery (paid and un) that I’m entwined with.

However, I’ve been thinking a lot about her frequent assumptions that women in raunch culture are trying to act “like men,” a phrase which she often italicizes. Tonight my understanding of what precisely is so irritating about this crystallized – at the Gotham Girls Roller Derby bout.

Though Levy does spend some time breaking down what “men” might mean and recognizes that “men” is a not entirely useful construction, she’s still very much dividing the world in men’s and women’s work (and play).

Are the Gotham Girls acting “like men” because they are athletic, competitive and strong? No, goddammit. They are acting like women – strong, sassy, stylish and amazing ones at that. One could argue that there’s an element of raunch in roller derby: short skirts! Boobs! Women getting physical! Woo-hoo! And this aspect is enjoyable, for certain.

But just because women are getting physical and even flaunting their sex appeal a bit doesn’t mean that they are trying to be like men or that they are being female chauvinist pigs and prioritizing the sexual over everything else. To assume that women enjoying themselves through enjoying their bodies is raunchy is narrow-minded and just kinda dumb.

So maybe its time to really look at and accept the ways that women express themselves in a different way – not trying to be like men and not being straight up raunchy, but something else, something that can be sexy and powerful but not demeaning. This is not to say that all forms of women showing off and showing their bodies are empowering across the board – they aren’t – but that maybe just calling it raunch is missing the point.

Posted by Dacia at 12:33 AM | Comments (4)

$pread updates

July 21, 2006

One of the things that devoured my life in the early part of this week was driviing to Cape Cod to only have half-success in picking up the summer issue of $pread magazine. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that the stresses of the trip yielded numerous phone calls to friends that started with “I hate everything.” But that’s all behind us now, and the summer issue is here. It has been mailed to subscribers and will be making its way to distributors very soon as well.

Check it out The cover story, “Up in Buck’s Business: One Transsexual Man Takes the Porn Industry by Storm,” is an interview that I did with the sexy and fabulous Buck Angel. Oh, Buck. $pread has a big girly crush on Buck Angel. I’m also really excited about my interview with Lily Burana about her new book, TRY, and the extent to which she’s been branded a “stripper writer.” Its cool stuff.

The other big $pread news is that we just moved into our first office. Its right in publishing central on 43rd street. Being the classy operation that we are, we decided to paint it pink and blue. Midway through doing the pink, someone among us said that the painting looked like cityscape (the result of using rollers and being short) and we decided to go with that and make it so. It was a damn lot of fun. I don’t have a good picture of it, but the other thing we did was spray paint a gold dollar sign on our office door. Yes, we are awesome. And classy, did I mention classy?

Look! Painting!

We also have our very own MySpace page, and you should befriend us!

Posted by Dacia at 10:55 PM | Comments (2)

The safer sex conundrum

July 19, 2006

Bi porno sits at a very strange place on the porno spectrum. Straight and gay porn are separate and kinda-sorta equal things, and both have a big range, from the sleazy to the high glamour. Then there’s lesbian and queer porn – and by this I mean porn made by and for actual lesbians and queers folks by people from that community (SIR Productions, Pink & White Productions, Sex Positive Productions) – which has a very small part of the market share but consistently features hot (and safe!) sex, if not always top notch production values.

And then there’s bi porn, which technically is gay porn, because if guys do it (even if they also do women) that shit is gay gay gay. At least it’s classified as such – the “Best Bisexual Video” award is given at the GayVN awards.

But that’s one thing.

Another thing entirely is the health aspect of it all.

The thing is, the straight industry requires HIV testing (most companies require clean bills of health on chlamydia and gonorrhea also), standardly administered through AIM and its nationwide draw centers, but does not require condoms. In many cases, companies enforce no-condom rules if you want to shoot with them – this is often called “condom optional” which is basically a euphemism for “you either don’t use a condom or you don’t perform for this company.” The gay industry does not require testing, under the idea that it is an invasion of privacy, but the more reputable companies require condom use. GayVN will not consider a film for a GayVN award if there is barebacking in it. As I discovered during my casting process in trying to hire gay porn stars, HIV is pretty rampant in the gay porn industry.

So what does this mean for a bisexual movie? It makes life complicated – performers in the straight industry accept testing as a matter of course, but gay performers (including HIV negative ones or people who don’t want to know their status) balk at mandatory testing. It’s a cultural difference maybe, but certainly two different interpretations of a solution to the problem of sexual health in the sex industry.

Let’s for a minute agree that porn directors and producers want their talent to be healthy and happy – in that same minute I’m going to acknowledge that some directors and producers don’t really care because the bottom line reigns supreme. But, in a perfect world of caring, there would still be differences of opinion on the topic of safety and how it should be ensured.

In some countries where prostitution is legal, health check ups are legally mandated for workers (though never for clients) and condom use is perfunctory. On one level, this is excellent, because healthy and well being are being made a priority – however, one of the major theories behind decriminalizing prostitution is that what consenting adults do in private is no one’s business – which means both that it isn’t the state’s business to arrest people, but also that it isn’t the state’s business to mandate health practices and responsibility. So the next step away from the state is to have the sex industry regulate its own health practices – and that’s the role that AIM plays. Step further away from that and individual performers make their own decisions about their safer sex practices (testing is a kind of safer sex practice) – just like in consensual non-commercial sex.

So maybe this all boils down to a few questions: do we trust sex workers and sex industry business people to make good decisions about their health? What makes the decision making process so different for people who are being paid to fuck? Do we really believe in the tenets and effectiveness of safer sex?

Complicated, right?

Posted by Dacia at 05:03 PM | Comments (0)

Bad dreams begin

Keeping a notebook at my bedside is a must in these days running up to my directorial debut, because I startle awake in the middle of the night and am compelled to make lists of shit I need to get done, questions I need to ask, all that.

Worse than the middle of the night startles, however, are the bad dreams. The dreams that are tangibly awful and with a heady dose of bad luck, could come true. The ones where my talent flakes out. Or I didn’t rent the right equipment or buy the right tape stock. Or the power blows. Or I don’t know how to direct a movie, and my leadership skills suck ass and my director of photography makes fun of me and my not really knowing what I’m doing stops being endearing. Ugh.

Overall, I feel optimistic, but I have a goddamn lot to do in the next week and change. Its manageable, and I don’t think I’ll be pulling all nighters or anything stupid like that, but whoa. Its crazy.

And I swear, I’m going to get on this whole blogging thing I’ve been hearing about… from the little nagging voice in my head.

Posted by Dacia at 01:23 AM | Comments (1)

New York New York

July 13, 2006

I’m headed home! Hanging out in the airport in Vegas, enjoying the wireless, but eager to head back to New York. After the end of the conference yesterday I headed to New York New York (the ridiculous casino) to drink vodka and get retarded with my friends, befre a little more casino hopping (sans gambling) and a night of after-partying at a gay bar in the neighborhood known as the Fruit Loop. Good times, if I remember correctly (and its quite possible that I don’t).

I have a whole backlog of posts to put up on the Desiree Alliance blog, but just wanted to put a post up here before I start working on that.

I just spent five nights sharing a room with four other $preadsters - and I’m going to actually miss spending every waking minute with them. That’s good stuff. Although it strikes people as weird that none of the (now) 10 of us were friends before the magazine, I think that’s actually a really good thing. We have all become friends through this project, and its just awesome and we’re going to continue to do incredible things together.

So - back to NYC! Entering the homestrech for porno pre-production! Wheeee!

Posted by Dacia at 09:04 PM | Comments (1)

Vegas!

July 08, 2006

Oh, what? I didn’t say I was going to Vegas, did I? I’ve been busy and having trouble with internet access - that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

Sooo, what am I doing in Vegas? I’m hanging with the $preadsters, making mischief with Bella Vendetta, and going to the Desiree Alliance’s Re-visioning Prostitution Policy: Creating Space for Sex Worker Rights and Challenging Criminalization. On Wednesday I’m co-teaching a workshop called “Journalism for Sex Workers” and in between I’m on the official media team.

This means you’ll have another blog to look at over the next few days - its set up by the indomitable Melissa Gira over HERE. So far you can check out audio and photo posts of her roadtrip to Vegas. I’ll definitely be posting over there and probably here as well with up-to-date info on happenings and conversations at the conference. And maybe some mischief too.

Posted by Dacia at 06:15 PM | Comments (2)

Fear and need

July 04, 2006

There is this bit in Lily Burana’s forthcoming novel (which I have read and you have not because I am a magazine editor and therefore special), TRY (out on July 11) that has stuck with me over the weeks since I read it. I don’t have the text in front of me, but to paraphrase without butchering the meaning, the context of the scene is a young woman freshly out of college is starting to fall and be fallen for by an older cowboy, and there is this moment where she recognizes, as Burana puts it, the “fear and need” in his eyes. And it’s just – so beautiful, and something that I am beginning to get in a big way.

I have worked so hard pretty much all my life to conceal my fear and need, but I know more and more that that mask is by no means airtight, and it all just leaks out the edges and reveals itself anyway. Maybe even in a more burning and desparatescary way than if I was more honest about my fears and needs.

Its interesting the ways that the professional and personal tangle together in this for me – sometimes I think I’m much more capable of professional achievement than I am of personal achievement (I wrote about that about two months ago – here), and I’m trying really hard to pursue personal openness and awesomeness. I know its absurd in some ways, but I’m starting with what I know I can do, and that which I feel more motivated to do well at – the professional.

When I curated Sex Worker Visions, I didn’t ask for help. I delegated last minute tasks (ack! I need someone to get the wall text printed! Ack! this frame broke and I need a new one!), but otherwise I very stubbornly did the whole goddamn thing myself. Not for want of volunteers, but for want of asking.

And now I am learning a lot from making this movie – namely that I cannot and should not do this on my own. Not just because it is preposterous to run the whole show on my own (which is true) but also because the final product will be ten or fifty times more awesome if I ask for other awesome people’s help, input and creative awesomeness. Yes, collaboration is risky – any number of these people I’m counting on could flake out or fuck me over and whatnot, but that is a risk worth taking - hey kids, that’s life!

That’s life. And I should take my own goddamned advice, and translate this wisdom from my professional life to my personal life. And I think I am, but it’s freaky. Constructive criticism in the professional realm – I’m all for it, I get pumped up on it, even when its somewhat harsh. But in my personal life – I’m full of so much fear that sometimes it masks my need (or I think it does), staunches my ability to pose the tough questions, pumps me up full of cool-acting when I’m anything but.

The thing is – I am so afraid of seeming weak and needy, but I haven’t been able to figure out precisely what is so terrible about needing. Probably my world will fall apart and people will scoff behind my back about what a lame-o and an overemotional basketcase of a girl I am (in my imagination, where everyone is pointing and laughing). Or my dreams (the secret ones that aren’t at all out of the ordinary, the ones I fear most) will come true, my needs will be fulfilled, and that will be the scariest thing of all.

Posted by Dacia at 12:32 AM | Comments (3)

Faith in men

July 01, 2006

The funny thing about porno casting is that despite popular assumptions to the contrary, it is the most difficult thing in the world to find and cast men. Holy fucking shit. Yes, there is a small stable of reliable pros, most of whom are in California, but I had to go and think that making a bisexual movie is a good idea, and that presents myriad problems (and there’s a whole other post in that).

I find myself growing weary of dudes and treating potential male performers differently than I treat potential female performers – sexism exists in strange ways. With the ladies, I am straight up nurturing and concerned for them and their decision making process – yes, making porno is a choice, but many choices, especially ones that involve fucking for money, are constrained choices. I’m keen on hiring girls who’ve thought things through, and have spooked a few away from the industry in the process.

But with the men, I find myself immediately going on the defensive, and often just flat out assuming that they are idiots. Unfortunately, this assumption often seems to be true. And the thing is - I love men. Lots. But guys, help me keep the faith. For fuck’s sake.

The general trajectory of emails I get from guys interested in being cast in the movie seem to follow three different paths:

He: I saw your ad and checked out your website, I’m interested. Me: Great, are you bi? He: No, that’s some sick shit. (that’s the lite version – homophobic hate mail is not awesome)
He: I saw your ad and checked out your website, I’m interested. Can I wear a mask? Me: No, sorry, this is for a major company, you need to show your face. He: Oh. Can I hire you to make a private video with me?Me: No, sorry. He: You’re an ugly whore.
He: I saw your ad and checked out your website, this sounds really hot, its like my fantasy come true (sometimes these guys also say that they are bicurious and want to experience sex with a man for the first time) Me: Generally speaking, porn sets aren’t a great place to live out your fantasies or try to add a totally new thing to your sexual repertoire (like dudes). He: I didn’t think about it like that, but you’re definitely right. I don’t think this is right for me.

Many men seem to devour the lines that the sex industry provides them with, hook, line and sinker. They think that porno sets are big orgies, filled with slippery lube (and morals) and the joys of sex with easy and infinitely willing partners. There is some serious suspension of disbelief going on – or some very excellent sex-selling from the supply end, or a combination of both. Yes, porno can be fun, but it is really work, and work that most men are just not cut out for – the pressure on men is immense. Although the focus on exploitation in the adult industry is often all about women – partly because women get involved really young, burn out quickly and have weird shit happen along the way – in many ways it’s much tougher on dudes. This is why I’m very suspect of emails from random dudes, with their cocksure bravado and their cluelessness about how tough this shit is.

But eye-rolling and suspicion doesn’t quite cover it, because there’s got to be something in these responses, its got to mean something that so many men respond like this. I’m just not sure what that is. And though I do think sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a dumb dude is just a dumb dude, I think this is something else, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Posted by Dacia at 03:29 PM | Comments (7)