Party with $pread in NYC!

November 28, 2006

Party with $pread in NYC - December 1
11pm - 4am @ The Delancey (downstairs), 168 Delancey Street
$7 ($5 for sex workers)
That’s right, we’re back! It’s been way too long since we partied in New York. So we’re re-launching our fall issue. Party with $pread and our friends and co-hosts, Hot Lunch NYC, (and if you haven’t yet) get your copy of ‘The Relationships Issue’!
Performances by Nicky Click, Rose Wood, Sir Loins & The Coxx. DJ sets by Sir Loins and David Dancer. Hosted by Topher.br>

Posted by Dacia at 11:52 PM | Comments (1)

The Bi Apple Trailer

I know, I know, lately its been all book book book around these parts. But remember the porno movie I wrote, produced and directed this summer? Well, its slated to hit the shelves in a mere two months, on February 6, 2007. “The Bi Apple” is 90 minutes of porn with some jazzy and sex nerdy dialogue thrown in for good measure, plus 40 minutes of behind the scenes footage, in which you’ll get to see the cast and crew eat cupcakes, tell shit stories, gossip about the history of alt porn, talk about where to hang Jesus (the Last Supper is present in the bisexual threesome, thanks to the set dressing genius of Bella Vendetta), and sweat and snack a lot.

The cast - who of course are credited in the film but not in the trailer - includes leading lady Simone Valentino, who plays an intrepid sex researcher who discovers that she’s really into her research if you get my drift, Tasty Trixie and Tucker as tantric sexplorers gone impatient, Mariah Ritani and Tyler Marciano as good clean kids from Jersey (and the gateway to the fuckhouse), ReVay as the resident lesbian superheroine, and newcomers Antonio Rodickuez and longtime blog reader Josh as naughty bi boys.

There’ll be a post up on Fleshbot about the movie soon, but seeing as you’re my number one buddies and all, I thought I’d spill the beans here first. A few folks got to see the trailer for “The Bi Apple” at CineKink in October, but now I’ve uploaded the fucker onto the internets (after a lot of frustration, but what else is new).

Yes, I know… the width of my blog doesn’t play nicely with the width of the video…. but tough titty, there isn’t a damn thing I can do about that right now. You can still enjoy the smutty smutty goodness.

ALSO - if you want to embed this video in your blog or you want to email it around, the URL for it on PornoTube is http://pornotube.com/media.php?m=80132 - once you sign up you can get the embed code for it and stick it anywhere.

Posted by Dacia at 08:53 PM | Comments (19)

Author photo vote

November 20, 2006

Ok, kids, I need your help, because I am indecisive and stuff, and my nearest and dearest all disagree about which picture is the best representation of me for my author photo in my book. I’m going to be using all three of these photos for various kinds of promo stuff, but I need to pick the specific one that goes on my book. So, these are your choices:

I can’t totally guarantee I’ll go with what the masses choose, but I’m definitely taking your vote into heavy consideration.

Posted by Dacia at 04:11 AM | Comments (27)

Online intimacies

My book is not about me (except for the introduction, those 5,000 words that will produce so many awkward conversations when the book comes out and it gets read by people who know me but didn’t know that stuff), but it is. It is about me because I wouldn’t be able to write Naked on the Internet (hahaha, check it out, I just totally linked to my book’s amazon page!) in the way I’m writing it, with the intimate knowledge of such things, had I not gotten naked on the internet myself. Ooooh, an insider’s guide!

I’m trying to at once be level headed about my observations and slinging of cultural criticisms, but also transparent about my personal involvement and commitment to these ideas. Its an interesting line to walk, especially since its not like I did the journalist/ethnographer thing of immersing myself in a culture and then removing myself from it in order to get perspective and write abut it - for better or worse, I’m still very much in the midst of living and being in my subject matter.

I think this is most striking when I’m tapping out my ideas about online intimacy - because there’s this weird way in which I’m writing about other people but also writing about myself, and sometimes perhaps not considering myself enough. My online and distance intimacies are what are sustaining me in many ways through this process. That and 10 phone daily exchanges with my boyfriend. And caffeine.

A lot of it has to do with writing, and I wonder if I’d be as intimate with the ladies I share my thoughts and feelings with daily if it weren’t for writing, for that online space in which we interact and have time for each other. I’m terrible at making physical time and space for my friends who are here in New York - I think maybe that is true in general, but a million times more so during this intense book writing time. I need to share, to have this exchange, but on the internet it feels almost effortless, natural, part of my engagement with the internet itself, an engagement that I’m involved in anyway (though of course emailing friends is a little different then scouring the internet for Fleshbot-worthy smut). Offline, this kind of intimate freedom of words is a challenge for me (when we first started dating, my boyfriend would joke “do I have to read your blog to know how you feel about me?”), though I think I tap into that honest, emotional place a bit more often these days.

But maybe the essence of what allows me to be freer and more open online, in my writing and exchanges and increasingly often in my phone calls (or Skype!) is that its mediated by technology that I can control (read: turn off). Offline life is terribly inconvenient, with the scheduling, and the moving around and having to wear presentable clothes and shit. Online life is always there, waiting for me at the press of a button. Which, theoretically, I can turn off and on at will.

The point is, lofty theories and thinky brains or no, I’m not sitting high and mighty in my ivory tower peering down at this nudity and those internets. I’m tangled up in this web (har har), which is good and bad, and something I need to keep awareness on as I write these last few chapters and then take a spin back through and edit away.

Hey, remember when my blog was all about boinking for fun and profit, and it was hard to keep track of all my sex partners? Seems so far away these days. Not the boinking (for fun at least), but the writing about it all. But I guess that’s the thing about blogging - its a process that changes and maps that change over time. Ah jeez, there I go getting all heavy again. I’ll try to make it fun again come the new year, I promise - after all, I will be attending the Adult Entertainment Expo in Vegas shortly after my book manuscript is due, in the company of my dude friend, Jamye Waxman, Bella Vendetta, Zak Sabbath, Benny Profane, and assorted other wackadoos. That should produce some quality entertainment. Um, provided I can remember it. I’ll just have to take pictures.

Posted by Dacia at 01:31 AM | Comments (3)

On the upswing

November 17, 2006

At the end of September, I hit rock bottom with my doubts and my aspirations and, well, everything. I wasn’t getting paid for work I’d done (though I was supposed to), I was feeling like I’ve traded in everything for nothing, I was hungry, and I was wondering when exactly this shit would change. I was feeling like I should just give up this crazy life I’ve tried to build for something safer, like a full time job with benefits. Slowly but surely since then, things have started to shift, and that adage “Its always darkest before the dawn” is starting to prove itself true.

Really, hitting a low point was good for me, though it didn’t feel like it at the time and my close friends had to put up with some fucking serious moping and freak outs. When I got my book deal, I took a leave of absence from school for the semester, knowing that I should go back and finish (I “only” have to write my thesis, and then I’ll have a master’s degree), but also not really caring and feelig at odds with academia. Getting to that scary place in September was a real jolt to my system, and made me actually believe in finishing my degree and start to think about The Future and whether maybe perhaps I might continue on and do the PhD thing. That’s still a heavy question mark hanging in the air, but I turned in my signed and approved thesis proposal on Wednesday and goddamn it, within a month of my 27th birthday I will have the triple crown of movie, book, and master’s degree in my pocket. And then I fully expect to have another meltdown punctuated with the question of “what now?”

I’m still not at the “look back and laugh at my misfortune” phase, that’s for sure. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned this year (but really there are many), its that I can’t do everything myself and its stupid to try. As much as I want to have good knowledge about things, there’s just some stuff I don’t and can’t know, and that other people can do better than me (editing a movie and troubleshooting a computer, for example). Bigger, better and more interesting things are starting to roll my way, and with most things I feel like I just have to step up, own it, do it - though I also know that this is all starting to build to a point where I can’t go it alone. There’s a limit to my knowledge of the world, especially business, and what the hell I’m doing - and I’m hitting that wall. So I know I’m at a point where its time to assemble a team to back my shit up and allow me to do what I’m good at, but who those people are and what they do isn’t totally clear to me yet. I should probably spend the next few months enjoying relative calm and figuring out the answer to that problem, because once the movie and then the book get unleashed on the world, things are probably going to get a lot more hectic and strange, though I can’t entirely picture how just yet.

Its probably time to think fewer thinky thoughts that freak me out, tuck my head down and write the remaining 25,000 words of my book. But seriously kids, hang on. Its gonna get (more) interesting.

Posted by Dacia at 11:14 AM | Comments (6)

Missing you

November 09, 2006

Once upon a time I poured out my heart on these pages. I hunkered down in my room, and I felt the illusion of writing in privacy and silence, and I wrote. I wrote true dirty stories, I wrote my heart out, I wrestled with my brain, my life, my relationships and my sexuality.

I wrote hard and I wrote beautifully, and I did it partly because I couldn’t speak, I was too shy and too embarrassed to wrangle up the words to say these things in person with my own lips to the people I needed to say them to. Better to type them into the ether. Maybe the people who should read these thoughts would - maybe they wouldn’t. Actually if they did - WHEN they did, too little too late - I was embarrassed and it didn’t make me better at talking.

Instead, I channeled my intensity about sex into having it (lots of it, in many configurations) and into becoming this kind of ubersexpert (how’s that for a bullshitty word?). And its not that I am not that woman or that I faked it til I made it (though maybe a little), but sometimes I left my inner self out of the picture a bit. Though I think I’ve created a new baby space for that in my life nowadays, but its still sparkly new and… weird.

I’m writing a chapter about blogging. It’s kind of emotional, more so than many of the other chapters in my book. As I talk to, IM and email with different women I realize how much I miss writing my heart out, and writing dirty stories, but the exposure would feel weird these days. And not just because my mom is reading, or my boyfriend’s mom might start reading at any moment.

The act of writing about my relationships and about sex I was having transformed not just my thoughts about those things, but also the things themselves, in a subtle but still seismic shift. I initially wrote that sentence in the second person: you you, pointing fingers. But I went back and changed it, owned it. Blogging did these things for me - I did them to myself.

My dad said to me just after I came out to my parents about all of this (I’m gesturing grandly) that, “You’re kind of like the female Henry Miller - only stupid.” By this he meant - Henry Miller waited many years to publish about his erotic life. I’ve done it instantaneously, as things were happening, hours after getting sticky and sweaty. This is the urgency of new media, reconfigurations of privacy and self portraiture.

And nowadays I’m very happy to write one step removed - I’ve learned that privacy and secrecy aren’t the same thing, and I love my private little world, my army of two, my quiet space. But I also feel compelled to tell - everything. In a post today Melissa Gira repeats the mantra Thisisnotapersonalblog. Thisisnotapersonalblog.

It is. It is not.

It’s hard to figure out where the boundaries are sometimes, and why I put them there or move them inches this way or that.

Posted by Dacia at 12:16 AM | Comments (2)

Indiscreet

November 07, 2006

I have a new roommate moving in tomorrow, and he knows What I Do, so whatever, I’m not totally scrambling to clean up my act, but the fact remains that my apartment is brimming over with sexual encoutrements.

Its a little ridiculous. Since I started reviewing sex toys for Fleshbot’s Marital Aid Test Kitchen every week, weird things have been arriving in the mail. Weird things in large boxes that I have to go stand in line at the post office for an hour or more to retrieve.

The week before Halloween my supplier of dirty fun, Eros Boutique, sent me a big motherfucking box of slutty Halloween costumes. Its a good thing that I have a lot of friends who are strippers and who were working on Halloween, so I was able to disperse these things easily enough. The rest won’t go to waste, though, I can always use a good slutty bunny outfit. Its amusing to me that when I was a goth teenager I looked forward to Halloween so I could stock up on a year’s worth of makeup. Now as a sex working adult, I look forward to the restocking my slutty attire. Because, as the Ministry song goes, every day is Halloween.

Anyway. I still have a large box of slutty costumes in my living room, not to mention my trunk full of lingerie, various ludicrous shoes, stacks of porno and storage containers full of sex toys. I suspect my new roomie (who I met last winter at Tristan’s party for House of Ass) will be down, but we’ll see. The problem, essentially, is that I couldn’t entirely clean up my act if I wanted to, because I am so used to living around this stuff that before my parents come to see me, they often remind me to put away my porn.

Anyway, back to writing. I have more intense things to say about my writing and researching processes, but right now I’m content to think about where the fuck I’m going to put all theses costumes and dildos.

Posted by Dacia at 03:55 PM | Comments (4)

My afternoon with Betty Dodson

November 03, 2006

Last week my friend Jamye Waxman passed along a casting call for a UK television show being made about Betty Dodson and her private sessions: Betty needed a few women to participate in a simulation of her BodySex group sessions - naked and such, talking about masturbation with other women. So of course, I was happy to sign up for an afternoon of nudity with Betty.

I’d met Betty a few times over the years but not in a context in which she would remember who I am the next time our paths crossed, so I figured that showing her my boobs might be a good way to get her to remember me. I think it worked, and I never even ended up getting naked. I spent the morning at home writing, so I basically put on enough clothes to be decent in transit and ventured to her apartment - its funny when you have the kind of life where you really only need to put clothes on to get from one naked place to the next. As to be expected, the filming plans had changed, as the film crew thought that a naked circle of women was a little too much gratuitous nudity for Channel 4, so we’d keep our clothes on and do on camera interviews. I would’ve worn something different if I knew I’d be keeping it on.

Though I think and write about sex all day long, I don’t spend too much of my time blathering on about my own sexuality anymore. It was startling how difficult it was to talk about masturbation - or more precisely, how it felt to describe my orgasms. I don’t know if I ever have described an orgasm outside of the context of a dirty story. Definitley an interesting exercise.

I was really taken with how contagious Betty’s smiley and relaxed demeanor is and how thoroughly it affected the film crew, the women who were there for her help, and the three other women who were being interviewed, all of whom had had sessions with her before. One of the women being interviewed had been in one of Betty’s videos - and though typically I roll my eyes and mutter things about false consciousness when people who make movies with sex in them say “its not porn,” I actually totally buy that with Betty’s movies. Porno exists to get people off through visual stimulation - and Betty’s videos aim to get women off, but don’t rely on eye candy to make that happen.

And though in many respects the set for my porno was very much unlike a California porno set, it’s still porno. Betty’s work is so far away from porno that its incredible - as immersed as I am in commercial sex, I didn’t entirely think it was possible to work in sex and be that far removed from the ka-ching of the sex-saturated media (explicit and not). It is if you make your own little world of it, like Betty has. She’s built a brand - I’m not naive enough to think that she has nothing to do with the ka-ching of the industry - but it isn’t based on encouraging women to buy sex appeal or be insecure.

I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask the question, but meeting these women who were learning to masturbate on camera, as well as a woman who had masturbated on camera for a movie with decent distribution and a long shelf life, I really wanted to know: how can you think you aren’t participating in the sex industry? (see, not tactful). I felt really flabbergasted by this question and it made me wonder if I’m so immersed in the concept of sex/work and labor and exchange and making a living with sex (though not necessarily having sex to make a living) that I can’t see purchaseable representations of sexuality as anything but. Or is it that these women showing their bodies on camera have been pitched this idea in a way that makes it not seem like commerce? I just can’t figure it out.

Posted by Dacia at 03:15 PM | Comments (3)

Calling lady sex bloggers...

November 02, 2006

I’ve done a round of interviews on this topic already, but I thought an extra post on this wouldn’t hurt, since I know bloggers have lots to say… I’m currently working on the chapter of Naked on the Internet that is about sex and relationship blogs, and I’m interested in talking to women who are current or former bloggers who have written about sex and/or relationships. I’m especially interested in women who have quit blogging for one reason or another, women who have been outed via their blog, and women who are into kink/alternative sexualities, but really all are welcome. My turnaround time is pretty quick (this week!), and I’m happy to do interviews by email, IM, phone or Skype. Drop me an email if you’re interested.

Posted by Dacia at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)

Dr Sketchy's Official Rainy Day Colouring Book

November 01, 2006

Is it weird to get all fangirl on someone you’re friends with? Maybe, but whatever, I have no shame. Miss Molly Crabapple is one half of the dynamic duo that runs the Dr Sketchy’s Anti-Art School at the Lucky Cat in Williamsburg, wherein she encourages people to drink and draw. She is brilliant and charming and extremely talented, and I will gladly jabber on about her work to just about anyone who will listen.

She spent the summer bleary-eyed and cramped up in the hand, and now she’s got something to show for it: Dr Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book.

You can’t get your paws on the book for another month, but you can pre-order one to insure that you actually get a copy, because I’m pretty sure these babies are going to sell like hotcakes.

Maybe you need a picture, plus my blurby endorsement of the book, which appears on promo postcards:

Look, I’m even going to put quotes around it, to make it seem more authoritative. Is it weird to quote myself on my own blog?

“Like the perfect Mixed drink, Dr Sketchy’s Official Rainy Day Colouring Book combines one part smooth operation, one part sweetly amorous flirtation, and one part bitterness to make sure it does down smooth and leaves you swooning afterwards.”

Posted by Dacia at 09:28 PM | Comments (1)