But I thought I’d give a preview of the good stuff. No reason to keep this to myself.

First, this:

The beautiful woman in this trailer is Murielle Scherre, the brains behind the Belgian lingerie company Le Fille d’O. Her first film, ‘J’fais dus porno et j’aime ça’ (info in Dutch) is being released tomorrow with a special issue of Belgian sex-positive mag Goedele. As she described it to me last month over late night mint tea on my last night in Amsterdam, the film is a series of sexy vignettes, all of which are from 1 to 10 minutes long. And there are more than 20 of them. This is not porn of the 5 scenes of 20 minutes each in 5 positions and a facial pop variety. Oh no. This is another beast entirely, featuring hot Europeans romping with friends and lovers. Deeper thoughts to come in my full Sex in Europe post. For now, know this: Murielle and her brain are very sexy.

And then, there is Emilie Jouvet’s One Night Stand. I spent some quality time with Emilie and the other Queer X tour ladies while I was in Berlin, and when I got back to Amsterdam, my lovely hostess Jen Lyon Bell pretty much forced me to take home a copy of Emilie’s movie. Having gotten rather massively burned out on porn from several years of working in the biz, not to mention scouring the internet for smut to write about on Fleshbot and Naked City, I have seriously burnt out on watching porn. With the exception of watching movies at film festivals, I haven’t been watching porn at all since I stopped doing Naked City a year ago. And this movie makes me really want to watch it. The last scene, which has screened at a few porn festivals as “Red Fetish Bathroom” is thoroughly impressive. Leave it to hot French lesbians to get me inspired.

Time Out New York has a list up of 10 Best New York City Porn Films – and The Bi Apple is on it. They’ve got this to say about my movie.

Those who “like to watch” will find a kindred spirit in Simone (Simone Valentino, see above), the sexual researcher sent to conduct fieldwork on bisexuality in the Big Apple. Her subject: “The Fuckhouse,” an apartment where self-described sluts love freely. Though Simone’s advised to “keep her pants on and hands visible,” she quickly goes native. We’re privy to girl-on-girl, guy-on-guy and girl-on-guy action, plus an impromptu ménage à trios in which the ass takes a leading role. Thanks to very real bodies, a racially diverse cast, loads of toys and a precoitus meditation scene (to align their chakras, naturally), watching the The Bi-Apple is like walking in on your cool, attractive neighbors, who would really like it if you’d come again.

I still can’t believe the legs this thing has – two and half years after its release, I still get fan mail about the film all the time. Which is just pretty damned awesome.

And there’s a contest! Enter here for the chance to win seven porno DVDs, including Michael Lucas’ Dangerous Liaisons and La Dolce Vita, Candice Royalle’s AfroDite Superstar, Dark Alley’s Gaytanamo and Crude, and autographed copies of Joanna’s Angels 2: Alt.Throttle and Audacia Ray’s The Bi Apple.

I took this pic of Zak and Mandy in July of 2007, when I was in Los Angeles on my book tour for Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration. They’d just moved to LA. This picture really cracks me up every time I look at it.

So, I’m involved.

All this means it’s hard to write about this book. But here goes:

We Did Porn is definitely a page-turner, and not just because I was nosy about how Zak would write me (I was pleased and amused by what he said about me), but because it was a genuinely enjoyable read. And the drawings served as great punctuation to the written bits.

One of the things that struck me upside the head as I read We Did Porn is that most of the books I read about the sex industry are written by women who at some point are or were activists. Women who write memoirs or other stuff about the sex industry frame their work in some way in relationship to feminism. If you’re a woman writing about the sex industry, you kind of can’t help it. And that’s a very different kind of read than this book. Zak just has a different perspective on the porn industry, which is not to say that he’s necessarily feminist or anti-feminist – the subject just doesn’t really come up (and I’ve never really hashed it out with him either, it’s never seemed like the most pertinent of conversations we could be having). He’s not apologetic about the fact that he signed on to make porn because he made a joke to Benny Profane about fucking girls on camera. And this simple fact – that Zak would like to fuck more girls – remains his reason for being in the business. The rationale being: if you were a dude, and you got offered the chance to fuck hot girls and get paid for it, you’d be insane not to go for it.

The pieces of the book that really shine are the moments where he draws the parallels between the art and smut businesses. There’s a lot of depth there. Though his style throughout the book is somewhat disaffected (see above bit about the simplicity of his porn-doing motivation), there are great moments of intensity, when he gets fired up and not just in a cantankerous way (though that stuff is delightful too). For example, this moment (pg 391 for those playing along at home) in which he’s writing about a conversation between me, Bella Vendetta and Mandy Morbid that he listened to as we were doing late night food after the 2008 AVN Awards:

Their basic attitude -as they dissect the convention and the people in it- is that everything about sex and porn is really stupid, except the sex and porn that they like.
And this, again, is strikingly similar to the way I feel about art.

In writing about the sex industry, it seems that women have to more carefully negotiate the issues around exploitation, good and bad experiences of sex, all that touchy stuff that people get crazed about – but seem much less concerned about when it comes to thinking about men and the sex business. Zak runs with this, but also cracks open tough stuff around abuse, negative experiences of sex, and mental illness in porn business folks. Zak isn’t afraid of writing ugly things about the nature of the porn business and the sadness that touches the people who are in it – but he doesn’t get too heavy handed about it either. And actually, characterizing Zak and the writing as not being afraid is kind of silly and trite – that really sells it short, like it’s some other kind of book, like it’s a brave thing and there should be head patting and reverence. And that’s – just not really it either.

Let’s boil it down to this: I love how Zak mixes writing about porn and art without any of the tired old “is it porn or is it art?” garbage. It just is. These things are in parallel and also entangled universes. It’s a mess. There aren’t any stupid questions in this book and no overly simplistic answers, just tough, weird, messy stuff. Coiled together, this stuff isn’t nonsensical, but it doesn’t have a neat and tidy narrative either (and my use of the word “narrative” will be funnier to you once you read the book. Which you should).

Zak has a bunch of book events coming up in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle – you should see what he’s up to and go to one of his signings if you can. He’s here in NYC next week and has a number of events – which I’m missing because I’ll be in Europe. Otherwise, I would definitely be there.

Check out all of my reviews on Goodreads.

This past week it was revealed that there are some new cases of HIV within the adult industry in Los Angeles. The LA Times and LAist have both covered the story, as have adult industry media outlets AVN and Xbiz. A stunning majority of straight porn companies do not require condoms and actively discourage their use – in the business this is called “condom optional” which is euphemistic for “you either perform without a condom or you don’t perform for this company.” The gay porn industry has slightly different standards than the straight porn business. Gay porn companies do not require testing, with the idea that it is an invasion of privacy and HIV shouldn’t prevent people from working/having sex, but the more reputable companies require condom use. The Gay Video News Awards (GayVN) will not consider a film for an award if there is “barebacking” (sex without a condom) in it.

[snip]

The straight porn industry regards testing as prevention – and while testing and knowledge of your partners’ status is certainly part of a risk reduction strategy, testing is not prevention. Porn production companies argue that the appearance of condoms in porn reduces the fantasy for the viewer, and as a result condom mandatory videos sell fewer units. Yep: sales are more important than sexual health. Both male and female porn performers are disempowered to demand condom usage because most companies actively discourage condoms (even though the option to use condoms is often written into their model release or contract).

Directors who I’ve talked with about their reluctance to enforce a condom mandatory policy on their productions sometimes sheepishly say that the companies they work for won’t have it. Other times they tell me that the performers themselves feel safe enough with the testing policies and don’t want to use condoms for a variety of reasons. I believe that it is the producer and director’s responsibility to step up and advocate for their workers and protect their health. If this means enforcing a mandatory condom policy that the performers complain about – that’s part of being the boss. If a performer had become infected with a STI while on my set, I would have not forgiven myself for that kind of negligence. And that’s what the “condom optional” policy is – negligence, piled on top of blatant disregard for sexual health and a lack of respect for the performers as people.

Are directors and producers going to step up and make condoms mandatory? Probably not. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes are all accepted as hazards of the trade, something that happens to everyone at some point. HIV is a big deal, but 22 performers infected over five years [EDIT: LA country health department has backtracked on the number of infections in the porn biz, and now says that possibly none of the positives were performers. she June 16 piece on LA Times blog here] is still a pretty small number – clearly not a big enough one for producers and directors to shift the way they run their productions. As a sexual health and rights advocate, I find this really appalling.

Click here to read (and comment on) the whole post.

In this post on Rollertrain, Libby explains why she wanted to paint a portrait of me for her Ghost-Painted Portraits of My Internet Heroes series (which so far also includes Dan Carlin (Common Sense, Hardcore History) and Jad Abumrad (Radiolab).

You can see Libby’s full set of painting process photos here.

In the Rollertain post I link above, Libby says some awfully nice things about me and catalogs why she wanted to paint my portrait. I want to turn things around on her a little bit, because Libby is awesome and inspiring, in a rage-filled, messy, complicated, interesting way.

Libby, like the vast majority of the people I know and hold dear today, is someone I never would’ve met without the internet. She is a blog reader from way back – she discovered me after the first time I was Fleshbotted in May 2005. I had been reading her blog Rollertrain (old blogspot bloggy) too, on which she ranted a lot about porno copywriting and the fucked up world of marketing smut in America.

We met in person in December 2005 at the Museum of Sex, where we were both on a panel for the anthology Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong, which has my first piece of booky type published writing. My piece in the book is an essay called My First Fetish, or, How I Fought Mediocrity; Libby has a piece in the book called The Daily Schedule of a Porno Copywriter. It was a weird night – only the second time I’d set foot in the Museum of Sex since getting canned in 2003; the first time I introduced my boyfriend to my dad; my dad was there to hear me talk about my sex life, a first since I’d come out to him and my mom as a sex worker in October 2005 (fresh wounds, yikes!). Those are the circumstances under which Libby and I met. I think we complimented each other’s glasses, but otherwise the meeting wasn’t anything special. She gave me her card and said we should talk about the possibility of me making porno.

Over the following weeks, Libby and I started talking on the phone about this theoretical porno project. I wrote up some blurbs about the porno I imagined I could make, I puffed up my sex realm resume to make it look like I could indeed be capable of directing and producing a porno movie. These conversations turned into The Bi Apple the following summer.

In February 2006 Libby was back in NYC on a business trip, during which we met to hash out porno particulars and strategize about how best to pitch her bosses. I also took her, as she notes in the afore-linked post, to see a solo show of Molly Crabapple‘s work. Possibly the first solo show Molly had had – at a little sliver of a gallery in the east village. We walked, we talked, we ate, we talked about porn and relationships and the kingdom of messiness in the midst of those things. This is pretty much how Libby and I have spent every subsequent meeting.

In May 2006 I flew to North Carolina for The Pitch. (A few days before I got on that plane, I had gotten approached by an editor from Seal Press about the possibility of writing a book. I told her that I was too busy with grad school and making a porno, but that I’d shoot her some ideas anyway. I signed the contract for Naked on the Internet a week or so before we shot The Bi Apple, and I was sitting and writing the intro to the book while my editor worked on The Bi Apple. Busy times.) The Pitch was bizarre and disorganized, and not what I expected. While I stayed calm and quiet and tried to organize my thoughts in an even-keeled way, Libby went berserk and yelled at her co-workers like the nut she is. They argued back. I watched the fireworks. I left not sure what had happened, only that I’d made friends with Libby for real.

Libby made an appearance at the release party for The Bi Apple in March 2007, which was rather epic, held at the Pussycat Lounge, and may or may not have involved me getting spontaneously naked on stage. Ahem. The next time I saw her after that was when Eliyanna and I did a week long road trip/book tour down the eastern seaboard, and when we got to Durham, Libby and her fabulous boyfriend Matt grilled meat for us, and we stayed up til the wee hours sitting in their backyard, playing with their dogs, and talking about politics, art, sex, and madness. Libby has become a pretty significant person in my life – we don’t see each other all that much, and when we do hang out its often the product of some kind of spontaneity or bad planning, but there’s always food and booze and intense conversation, just the way I like it. Hanging out with Libby recalibrates my brain every time, and I crack up when I think about her asking pointed questions, signing credit receipts with phrases like “faggot head,” and wandering off to go look at something that she’s identified as art.

Although like lots of people I don’t know what the fuck Libby will do at the end of her art skool adventure and I know it was sort of insane for her to drop out of a successful and secure career in porno marketing to pursue art, I am of the opinion that more people should take the chance to drastically reroute their lives. This boldness is surely a sign of some insanity, but fuck it. Libby is doing what lots of people wish they were doing: fucking shit up, learning, making art. You should read her blog and visit her Flickr photostream to get a fuller picture of the madness she’s doing.

Her responses are awesome and spot on:

Now Meatholes.com is about obviously about pushing their stars limits. This video has made the rounds of course and enforced the idea that the site is abusive to it’s stars to the point of making them snap. I don’t really know Meatholes or the people behind so I can’t say if it’s awful. It does seem degrading in the viral video but on the first video of the site is a girl talking about how hard she can take things and what she will take. I can not really speak on this site.

(emphasis mine)

She’s talking about labor, not images. And that’s hugely important – and it’s the future of discussions about porn and exploitation, even if there’s still a lot of obsessing about the sex acts happening on screen.

It’s often hard to tell just from looking at a visual representation whether or not the performers are being placed under duress or if their working conditions are bad. Can you tell by looking at a tee shirt whether it was made by workers in ethical working conditions? Nope. Not unless you look at the label and then do your homework on the company.

Sometimes when I present the idea that its not the aggressive anal/choking/cum splattering that makes porn unethical or unfeminist, but the conditions under which the performers are doing said acts, people say things like, “its impossible to know what the working conditions are.” It isn’t impossible – it just requires some research. Just as people research textile factory conditions and then put pressure on corporations to have better practices – the same could happen with porn.

At 28, I’m not “old” by any standards – except the standards set by the porn industry. Twenty eight is full on MILF territory, even though I don’t have any children. I started working in sex when I was 21 and all the models were essentially my peers, but as I’ve hung around the biz over the years and gotten older, porn performers suddenly seem freakishly young to me.

It’s possible that I’m getting conservative in my old age, but these days I find myself attracted to women and men who are in my peer age group or older. I mean, it’s true that I’m also something of a chubby chaser but I like the fuller shapes that come with age, and while I’m not lusty over granny porn (yet?), I appreciate the mature look. Maybe I was naive when I was younger, but despite knowing that sexuality is fluid and can change over time blah blah blah, I didn’t necessarily think about how age factors into that equation.

I go on to write about my personal feelings of squickness about young women in porn, contextualized with some words from porn legend Seka, who like other porn stars of the 1970s and 1980s was in her late twenties when she entered the industry. Barely Legal has not always been the reigning norm of hotness in porn. I also have an interesting quote from the always smart, always dirty minded Tasty Trixie, who feels totally different about the subject.

Read the whole piece here.

Download audio file (WakingVixenCitibankMessage2.mp3)

To paraphrase, the voicemail informs me that they cannot open the account for me because of “the line of business [I am] in.” Because I work in the adult industry, Citibank will not take my money.

When I did the account set up stuff with the guy at Citibank, he asked a lot of questions about my business, and I was straightforward about it. When asked what my business does at the beginning of our conversation, I told him that I do adult new media production and consulting (then of course I had to explain what new media is). I explained that I don’t have an office, work at home, its mostly web based, gave him my web address (this one, wakingvixen.com) and told him that Village Voice Media/New Times is my major client. All true stuff that didn’t seem to raise any red flags for him as we talked.

But later when the bank manager reviewed my application and they, as the voicemail says, had a look at my website they decided that “it’s obvious” that my work is adult and not a business they want to work with. As soon as I heard the message, I decided to close all my accounts with Citibank, and that’s what I did yesterday afternoon. When I marched in and told them my intentions, I explained, “Since you’ve told me in no uncertain terms that you don’t want money from the adult industry, I don’t want you to have any of my money. I would like to close my accounts.” They didn’t really argue much at first, though as we worked our way through the paperwork they explained that it wasn’t my personal accounts that were the problem, just the business. As you know, there isn’t a lot of separation in my mind between who I am as a business and who I am as a person, so this argument just isn’t going to fly with me. Also, my business is a DBA, which means it isn’t a separate legal entity (like a LLC or other corporation would be), it’s intimately tied to my personal finances in the legal sense. Who’s to say that at some point in the future, they wouldn’t get a hair across their asses and decide to close down all my accounts with them? That notion aside, no one who objects to how I make my money is going to get their hands on it. That is fundamental.

In a situation like this, I essentially have no legal recourse – the Citibank policy doesn’t go against any protected rights. Businesses are totally within their rights to discriminate against people who work in any sector of the adult industry, regardless of the legality of that work. But I can (and did) take my money elsewhere, and I told them exactly why.

This is something that people who work in all adult-related businesses should think about, and if you feel comfortable, ask companies that you do big business with if they have a policy on adult entertainment. Some will look at you like you’re crazy – money is money, who cares where it comes from? – and others will say that of course they don’t do business with people in adult. I’ve had this experience at post production houses too, when trying to get screening copies made of The Bi Apple.

I took my business to Washington Mutual immediately after receiving my official checks from Citibank, and before I even sat down, I asked if they have a policy against opening accounts for adult businesses. They didn’t think so, but reviewed their policies anyway and there was nothing against my work. Upon explaining what I do, I was also told that it didn’t seem all that adult, because I don’t own or operate a strip club and my primary business isn’t porn production. It’s so fascinating to see what different people’s takes on “adult” are.

So the moral of the story is: if you work in the adult industry or are an ally of people who do, don’t do business with Citibank, even if you can conceal where your money comes from. Money is power. Bestow that power on companies that don’t judge you (and this goes for hairdressers, CPAs, etc as well).

I’ve posted my Twitter stream and replies from my Tweeple below so you can see some reactions to what was happening as it was going on, with the most recent entries at the top.

A photoblog I am absolutely loving: Ashley Blue. Ashley is a porn performer, a vegan, and married to photographer Dave Naz. Her photoblog is awesomely mundane and intimate, with lots of pictures of what she’s eating, her pets, art excursions with Dave, plus cock sucking, naughtiness and piss.

I’ve also been checking out a few foreign language sex blogs like Erotica Curiosa and @mateurdart, which are typically a hodge podge of links and images, stuff that toes the line between art and porn – it stirs up both the brains and loins, why bother figure out which side of the divide it falls on.

There’s also a recent addition to the world of sex worker multimedia that I’m really excited about – Red Light District Chicago. So far there are two audio podcasts and two videos produced by kittenINFINITE (who is doing the interviewing in the videos) and SerpentLibertine. The videos are man-on-the-street interviews with Chicagoans about the Spitzer scandal, and the audio podcast is a conversation between the two producers, who are both sex workers. I’m really excited about this project and I’m looking forward to what they do next!

As I write in the column, I’m a little bit on the fence about Sharing is Sexy. On one hand, it’s a cool thing and I like to see queers experimenting with and being empowered by sex media. On the other hand, I am suspicious of people who are anti-capitalist and make porn purely for empowerment and as a way to challenge the dominant paradigm.

Today I read an interview with the collective at .dpi called On How Porn Can Teach Us All to Share. In response to the question … what is porn? And what would you qualify as “good porn”? Also, you make it clear that one of your aims is to inspire positive attitudes and actions. Could you detail how this can be achieved via SiS? … collective member Scruffy Eudora (link is to nudity, because the goodness of this response made me immediately look for the noodz) replies in part

I don’t think the categories of good and bad can be applied to porn because in so doing, you silence certain stories, you exclude certain perspectives. I think you can ask how porn functions in society and you can ask if it is ethical. The things that come up for me in terms of it being ethical deal with the way it was produced. To me, something done ethically has to be done with justice and oppression in mind.

Though I do think that the categories of good and bad can be applied to porn, I definitely agree that this can create a value judgment – similar to the erotica vs porn thing – at least when it comes to the content or aesthetic of the porn. When it comes to production, however, the good/bad is a little bit clearer – decent pay, good working conditions, the ability of a performer to say no once on set, etc, make for good porn.