Tristan Taormino's Blog, page 23
February 24, 2013
Feelmore Fresh Fridays: New Oakland Porn Event
Eastbay Express posted an article, When Porn Goes Public, about Nenna Joiner’s new ongoing series of film screenings at Feelmore in Oakland.
As such, Joiner said she’s planning on showing an impressively diverse number of movies at the monthly film night, including Buck Angel’s Sexing the Transman, a documentary about transmale sexuality; Japanese anime porn; the deep kink fantasy The Fashionistas; the sex worker documentaryWhore’s Glory; and even a pornographic claymation film from Amsterdam. It’s a totally mixed bag, to be sure, but “that’s Nenna’s strength,” said New Parkway owner J. Moses Ceaser: “making things that seem foreign more accessible, making the experience inclusive, welcoming Oaklanders to learn about things that they might otherwise shy away from.”
If you live or are visiting the Bay Area, be sure to check it out!
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This post, Feelmore Fresh Fridays: New Oakland Porn Event originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 24, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 21, 2013
50 Shades of Lingerie in the New York Times
In case you missed it, I was quoted in the New York Time on Valentine’s Day in their article “An Arresting Trend in Intimate Wear“, an article on new trends in lingerie because of the 50 Shades phenomenon.
“It’s just a matter of upping the luxury factor and packaging it in a way that really speaks to a different woman who might be intimidated by something more blatant or something with a harder edge, or who might not go into a store like The Leather Man on Christopher Street,” said Tristan Taormino, who has written many books on sexuality and is the editor of “The Ultimate Guide to Kink.”
Nashville Scene also wrote a Valentine’s Day post on Thirteen Alternatives to 50 Shades of Grey, and my erotica collections were one of them!
My work is also mentioned in this Huffington Post UK article, “Vive la Révolution! The Superheroines of Porn Domination.” Thanks to Liesbet of Dusk! TV for tipping me off to it.
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This post, 50 Shades of Lingerie in the New York Times originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 21, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 20, 2013
Anal Advisor: Anal + Ejaculation = Cancer?
It’s embarrassing for me to write this letter to you because this is the first time I will admit to anyone that my husband and I have anal sex. I actually am getting past the pain, and learning to enjoy it. A friend told me that you can eventually get colon cancer and other things from letting a man come inside your butt, is this true?
–A Little Scared
Please don’t be embarrassed by your admission and know that there are tons of other people having anal sex out there! Let’s talk about the risks of a man ejaculating inside your ass. The ass is made of delicate tissue that can have minute tears in it, allowing easy access to the bloodstream. If you are monogamous and he has tested negative for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), then he can come in your ass. If you are not monogamous or don’t know his STD status, then, by having unprotected anal sex and ejaculating in your ass, he can transmit gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis, herpes, human papilloma virus (HPV) also called anal warts, HIV, or hepatitis.
There isn’t any definitive link between semen in your butt and colon cancer. However, according to the National Cancer Institute, contracting HPV in the ass (anal warts) can increase your chances of colon cancer. Some studies suggest that other STDs and trauma to the anal canal and rectum — the kind that would result from not using lube or warming the ass up properly — can also lead to rectal or colon cancer.
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This post, Anal Advisor: Anal + Ejaculation = Cancer? originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 20, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 19, 2013
Feb 22: Christopher Ryan on the History of Human Sexuality and the Future of Ethical Non-Monogamy
This Friday on Sex Out Loud at 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT, I’m live with Christopher Ryan, the renegade researcher behind the New York Times bestseller, Sex At Dawn, a controversial, idea-driven book that challenges everything you know about sex, marriage, family, and society. We’ll discuss the ideas behind the book including monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics, as well as his latest project, KoTango.com. Kotango is an ethical non-monogamy site, a global community dedicated to modern relationships, and the culture that surrounds them.
Christopher Ryan received a BA in English and American literature in 1984 and an MA and Ph.D. in psychology from Saybrook University, in San Francisco, CA twenty years later. He spent the intervening decades traveling around the world, living in unexpected places working at very odd jobs (e.g., gutting salmon in Alaska, teaching English to prostitutes in Bangkok and self-defense to land-reform activists in Mexico, managing commercial real-estate in New York’s Diamond District, helping Spanish physicians publish their research, Ebonics to English translation for a Spanish film festival…). Along the way, he decided to pursue doctoral studies in psychology. Drawing upon his multi-cultural experience, Christopher’s research focused on trying to distinguish the human from the cultural. His doctoral dissertation analyzes the prehistoric roots of human sexuality, and was guided by the world-renowned psychologist, Stanley Krippner.
Christopher has lectured at the University of Barcelona Medical School, consulted at various hospitals, contributed to publications ranging from Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press) to a textbook used in medical schools and teaching hospitals throughout Spain and Latin America. He’s been featured in major national media, both conventional (e.g., MSNBC, Canada’s CBC-TV, Oprah Radio, CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Outside magazine) and Internet-based (e.g., Salon.com, Seed.com, Big Think, and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog over a dozen times). He and his work have also appeared in many international newspapers (e.g., The Times of London, Toronto Globe and Mail, Israel’s Ha’aretz, The Sydney Morning Herald, SonntagsBlick) and television (U.S., Spain, Russia, Canada, Australia).
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This post, Feb 22: Christopher Ryan on the History of Human Sexuality and the Future of Ethical Non-Monogamy originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 19, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 12, 2013
Feb 15: Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young on The Feminist Porn Book, plus Claire Potter on the Feminine Mystique Symposium
This week on Sex Out Loud I celebrate the release of The Feminist Porn Book, a new book I co-edited. The Feminist Porn Book brings together for the first time writings by feminists in the adult industry and research by feminist porn scholars, and this week on Sex Out Loud I’ll be talking to my co-editors – Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young – about our 5 year journey to get the collection published. This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world’s most lucrative and growing industries. Then I’ll talk to Claire Potter about REACT: THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AT 50, an upcoming two-day symposium and exhibition on Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu teachs film and performance theory and production as Professor of Asian American, Comparative Literature, Feminist Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is part of a decades long history of race and media production in the U.C. system. She is the author of the award-winning book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007) and Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her first feature documentary Birthright: Mothering across Difference (2009) won Best Feature Documentary at the Big Mini DV Festival in 2009. Her films The Fact of Asian Women (2004), Super Flip (1997), and Mahal Means Love and Expensive are distributed by Progressive Films and Her Uprooting Plants Her (1995) is distributed by Third World Newsreel. Her numerous articles are included in the journals Concentric, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Signs, The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Wide Angle and Theatre Journal.
Mireille Miller-Young, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture and the sex industries. Her forthcoming manuscript, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.
Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and studied at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Her major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, contemporary art, and science and technology studies. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies and editor or co-editor of the influential collections Feminism and Film Theory, Male Trouble, Technoculture, The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender, and The Feminist Porn Book. Her books include The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, and the forthcoming Teaching Pornography. Her collaborative art projects include MELROSE SPACE: Primetime Art by the GALA Committee and Biospheria: An Environmental Opera. Penley is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award and the Kenneth Burke Society Prize for Excellence in Rhetorical Studies.
Claire Bond Potter has been Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement since 2012. Prior to that I worked at Wesleyan University. I am currently writing a political history of anti-pornography campaigns, Sex in Public: Feminism, the Reagan Revolution and the Politics of Pornography, 1968-2000 (due to be completed in 2014.) I received my BA in English Literature from Yale University and my Ph.D. in History from New York University. I am the author of War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998) and an editor, with Renee Romano, of Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Since 2007 I have blogged at Tenured Radical, which moved to The Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2011.
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This post, Feb 15: Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young on The Feminist Porn Book, plus Claire Potter on the Feminine Mystique Symposium originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 12, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 5, 2013
Feb 8: Paul Joannides and the Guide to Getting It On
This Friday a 8 pm ET / 5 pm PT on Sex Out Loud, I interview author, speaker, and researcher Paul Joannides about the newest edition of his successful book, The Guide to Getting it On: A Book About the Wonders of Sex. The book has become wildly popular amongst students and college classes (and even Oprah Magazine) since first being published in 1996 and we’ll learn about Paul’s journey to get it published. We’ll also discuss what’s been added to the 7th edition and what he’s been learning from the anonymous sex surveys he currently collects through his website, GoofyFootPress.com.
Paul Joannides is a research psychoanalyst. In addition to being the author of the Guide To Getting It On, he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Sexual Medicine and he was formerly on the editorial board of the American Journal of Sexuality Education. He is an NCAA approved speaker for college athletes on sex. When he’s not writing, he’s a speaker on college campuses about sexuality. The Guide To Getting It On is now in its 7th edition and is used in more than 50 college sex-education courses and in medical schools. For the past year, he has done a daily broadcast for Playboy radio called “90 Seconds on Sex“.
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This post, Feb 8: Paul Joannides and the Guide to Getting It On originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 5, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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February 4, 2013
The Feminist Porn Book and Conference
The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
is co-edited by Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, and me
and is published by The Feminist Press
The Feminist Porn Book brings together for the first time writings by feminists in the adult industry and research by feminist porn scholars. This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world’s most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, Lynn Comella, Jane Ward, Ariane Cruz, Kevin Heffernan, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the arguments of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women’s movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and racial and sexual minorities produce power and pleasure. Check out the book’s official website to read the table of contents and see what people like Melissa Harris-Perry, Laura Kipnis, Jack Halberstam, Lisa Duggan, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, and other luminaries have said about it. I am so unbelievably excited that The Feminist Porn Book is here! This is a project that is five years in the making, and I cannot believe it’s in print.
Inspired by the book, I am producing The Feminist Porn Conference, a one-day event on April 6, 2013 at the University of Toronto during the Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards festivities. Speakers include Lynn Comella, Ariane Cruz, Loree Erickson, April Flores, Kevin Heffernan, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Shine Louise Houston, Jiz Lee, Nicholas Matte, Mireille Miller-Young, Ms. Naughty, Nenna, Bobby Noble, Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, Carol Queen, Dylan Ryan, Tristan Taormino, Courtney Trouble, Madison Young, and more to be confirmed soon. Registration is now open, and Early Bird Registration Rates are good through March 1, so register today! Our host hotel is the Holiday Inn; get our special discount code here. Special thanks to our sponsors Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, Good for Her, The Feminist Porn Awards, and The Feminist Press.
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This post, The Feminist Porn Book and Conference originally appeared on Pucker Up on February 4, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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January 28, 2013
Feb 1: Jennifer Pritchett and Clare Jacky of The Smitten Kitten Talk Sex Toys
This week on Sex Out Loud I talk to two of the leading experts in the sex toy industry from The Smitten Kitten: founder Jennifer Pritchett and general manager Clare Jacky. What is a toxic sex toy? What are phthalates and why are they bad? How do consumers find out what a sex toy is made of? What is The Smitten Kitten’s philosophy about safe sex toys? They discuss the organization Jennifer founded, the Coalition Against Toxic Toys, new products and trends in the sex toy industry, and Clare’s report from the Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo. Plus, Jennifer and Clare give their recommendations for some of their personal favorite toys and great Valentine’s Day gifts.
The Smitten Kitten is a hub of community activity. We consider ourselves sex-positive culture makers and community members. When we opened in 2003, there were only a handful of places like this in the country—in the world even. We were tired of scouring the internet for helpful and relevant information about sex, and we were totally exhausted by shopping online for toys and supplies that too often ended up being disappointing. So, for the better of our own sex lives, we opened our own sex toy store. What you’ll find at Smitten Kitten today is the place we wish we had when we were first adult retail consumers ourselves. Our store is welcoming. The folks who work here are friendly and honestly helpful. The products that we sell are well-researched, are good quality, and represent the best value in their class. Read some of our reviews online and you’ll see that it’s not only us who think we’re doing a pretty good job. What you will
find are wholesome, sexy Midwestern folks and visitors of all ages, races, abilities, sexual orientations, and genders shopping with common purpose: a happier, healthier, sexier and more inspiring love life.
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This post, Feb 1: Jennifer Pritchett and Clare Jacky of The Smitten Kitten Talk Sex Toys originally appeared on Pucker Up on January 28, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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January 24, 2013
50 Shades of Kink: An Intro to BDSM
Even with its flaws, Fifty Shades of Grey has become a worldwide phenomenon that simply cannot be ignored. It has sparked broad discussion and exploration of BDSM among mainstream media and everyday folks. My book, The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge came out at a perfect time last year just as the Fifty Shades craze was taking hold. But I realized that The Ultimate Guide to Kink is not necessarily geared for beginners, so I wanted to write a prequel to it. That book was just released by Cleis Press: 50 Shades of Kink: An Introduction to BDSM. It’s an e-book available for the Kindle and the Nook. It’s the perfect book for anyone who’s been inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey, is curious about kink, wants more information, or is just beginning to explore it. 50 Shades of Kink is a practical guide that moves beyond the fantasy and gives practical advice and techniques based on real world experience. You’ll learn techniques and creative ideas for bondage, spanking, flogging, sensation play, and rough sex and how to eroticize power, cultivate deeper connections and incorporate kink into your sex life.
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This post, 50 Shades of Kink: An Intro to BDSM originally appeared on Pucker Up on January 24, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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Radical Perspectives on Sex // CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
This call for submissions comes from @lastellanera at theyaretoremindme.tumblr.com so you can reblog from there, but I’ve also pasted all the information you need below:
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So I’m trying to put together a publication on radical perspectives on sex/porn/sex work/kink that goes beyond the basic sex-posi feel-goodness, isn’t just a glossary, examines things from a variety of radical angles.
E.g., i’m co-writing a piece on the place of porn & kink “before and after the rev”* – what is problematic about porn & kink, what is functional-in-current-social-conditions about porn & kink, and what aspects of porn & kink would survive if systems of power/oppression were minimal/nonexistent.
I’m really looking for whatever people have to say from a radical & feminist or womanist perspective. It doesn’t have to be from an explicitly sex-pos standpoint, and can range from personal narrative to art to analysis/critique.
All sorts of printable media welcome.
I’m especially interested in featuring work by queers, people of color, trans* folk, disabled folks, and women.
If you’re interested, please get at my inbox or email me at lastellanera [at] gmail [dot] com
*”before the rev”= current white-supremacist/classist/misogynist/etc. society
“after the rev” = systems of power/oppression are minimal/nonexistent/destroyed
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This post, Radical Perspectives on Sex // CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS originally appeared on Pucker Up on January 24, 2013. Tweet This Post!
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