Porn
Essays
Natassia Dreams is an iconic adult performer and high fashion model. Here, she speaks with The Sex Ed about succeeding professionally as a trans woman of color in both the fashion and adult worlds; her recent gender confirmation surgery; directing porn; advice for those who may be struggling with their identity; and much more.
Erika Lust is the founder of the groundbreaking ethical porn company Erika Lust films. Erika and her husband Pablo, are founders of The Porn Conversation, a company that provides guides for educators and parents to discuss and teach porn literacy to kids, speak here about how they discuss their work with their children; what ethical porn is; and how porn viewers can make better choices about what porn they consume.
How can we celebrate sex in ways that emancipate our desire from feelings of shame? Can pleasure, power and porn be redefined as a means to teach us about sex and connection?
Watch filmmaker and founder of The Sex Ed, Liz Goldwyn, in conversation with award-winning, international indie adult filmmaker, Erika Lust, moderated by journalist and editor Danielle Kwateng-Clark.
The trio address the responsibility of representing female sexuality across creative mediums, while reframing the dialogue around pornography and gender equality.
For the second part of our series on Cybersecurity, we are going to hear more from ethical hacker and cyber defense expert Thèo Anastos, as well as victim’s rights attorney and founder of cutting edge law firm C.A. Goldberg & Associates, Carrie Goldberg.
It’s long been a priority of The Sex Ed to provide our community with Cybersecurity tips—practical information on how to keep yourselves safe online. Here are some tips to protect your digital privacy from passwords to protecting your location settings.
Well, I’m 56 [years old]. I was born in Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley. Yeah, I’m 56 and I got into the adult industry 19 years ago. I created the genre of Trans-Male porn. It didn’t exist before I created it in the industry. I grew up a total little “Tomboy”. My parents raised me as a boy. Back in the 60’s, tomboys weren’t a problem.
Podcast
What does sex, love, intimacy and consciousness look like in the digital age? For the Season 2 finale, Liz talks to three experts about where sex and artificial intelligence intersect, and where we’re going: Gray Scott, a techno-philosopher; Stephanie Dinkins, a visual artist interacting with AI as part of a revolutionary ongoing project; and Bruce Duncan, the managing director of the innovative and mysterious Terasem Movement Foundation.
This week’s podcast guest is Carrie Goldberg— victim’s rights attorney and founder of C.A. Goldberg; a cutting edge law firm that helps victims fight pervs, assholes, psychos and trolls. Carrie details how her own experience with a vengeful ex changed the course of her career; why the internet is outpacing law enforcement; what to do if you are being harassed online and her new book, Nobody’s Victim, which is out now!
This week’s podcast features Asa Akira—legendary porn star, podcaster, author, PornHub ambassador—and a new mom. Asa and Liz talk about her pregnancy and postpartum experiences and how they affected her sex drive; what it means to be a MILF; and how she’s navigating and winning the shifting landscape of the adult biz.
Paul Fishbein founded AVN Media Network, the adult film industry’s leading trade publication, and the annual AVN Convention and Awards Show in Las Vegas, otherwise known as the “Oscars of Porn.” Now Paul is producer of the Showtime Series “Submission” and “Sex With Sunny Megatron,” amongst others. In this episode Liz and Paul discuss how a college kid with no knowledge of porn ending up founding the industry giant, how he’s transitioned to making Hollywood product and why he considers himself a feminist.
Lexington Steele is one of the most well-known male adult film stars in the world. Lex is a hall of fame porn-star with three AVN Performer of the Year Awards—basically the Best Actor Oscar for porn—and he’s still going strong today, two decades into his career.
Nina Hartley is a world-famous adult film actress, director, author, and educator. She first achieved mainstream recognition in the 80s and 90s for promoting sex-positive feminism. In this interview, we discuss Nina’s early training as a Registered Nurse, feminism in the 1970s, and sex as an artistic medium. You can find Nina at her website, nina.live and follow her on Twitter where she’s @ninaland. Watch a video here of a talk we had at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Ramy Youssef is the Golden Globe-winning creator and star of Ramy on Hulu, which debuts its second season on May 29th. Liz spoke with Ramy about faith and sex; observing Ramadan during quarantine; the differences between his fictional and real self; filling the void with emotional eating and porn; and how to find the middle ground between earthly desires and the divine.
Riley Reid is an adult award-winning superstar whose videos have been viewed over a billion times on PornHub. In this week’s episode, Riley and Liz talk about being the CEO of a porn brand with major millennial appeal; how YouTube is giving her a crossover fan base; porn and safe sex in the time of COVID-19; why she likes “vanilla” sex off camera and what she is learning about intimacy.
Books
Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality; how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory.
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Mistress of sexual storytelling Carol Queen offers a fresh look at sexual lifestyles and choices that are misinterpreted and repudiated by the mainstream. Her perceptive and knowledgeable treatment inserts a new viewpoint into the carefully developed relationships of power play, destroying stereotypes and modeling open communication.
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A Curious History of Sex covers topics ranging from twentieth-century testicle thefts to Victorian doctors massaging the pelvises of their female patients, from smutty bread innuendos dating back to AD 79, to the new and controversial sex doll brothels. Podcast guest Kate Lister deftly debunks myths and stereotypes and gives unusual sexual practices a historical framework, as she provides valuable context for issues facing people today.
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After earning a good living by stripping and working as a dominatrix at a sex dungeon, Asa Akira built up a reputation for being one of the most popular, hardworking, and extreme actors in the porn business, winning dozens of awards for her 330+ movies. In a wry, conversational tone, she talks about her experiences shoplifting and doing drugs while in school, her relationship with other porn stars (she is married to one) and with the industry at large, and her beliefs about women and sexuality.
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The sequel to Insatiable is a new book about turning thirty in the adult film trade. Internationally known as a porn star, Asa Akira's perceptive, funny, and straightforward writings on love, sex, death, marriage and celebrity come together in a surprising book of essays. Personally revealing as well as universal, Dirty Thirty marks the coming of age of a new literary star.
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Victim’s rights attorney Carrie Goldberg shares the diabolical ways her clients are attacked and how she, through her unique combination of advocacy, badass relentlessness, risk-taking, and client-empowerment, pursues justice for them all. With breathtaking honesty, Carrie also shares her own shattering story about why she began her work and the uphill battle of building a business.
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In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein dives back into the lives of young people to once again give voice to the unspoken, revealing how young men understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy. By surfacing young men’s experience in all its complexity, Orenstein is able to unravel the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important realities of young male sexuality in today’s world.
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Batts adoringly and erotically lenses his wife, subject, and collaborator, adult performer April Flores throughout this visual exploration of the "thick" side of sexy. Boldy iconoclastic in its contemporary celebration of a naturally voluptuous figure, this collection of images works to dismantle the “(only) thin is pretty” paradigm.
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While for some, feminist porn sounds like an oxymoron, for others it reclaims the notion of erotic media, freeing it from its misogynist conventions and centering the pleasure of female subjects no longer bottled and battered within the confines of objectification. This survey considers their many stakes in this complex dialogue.
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Not content to swim ambivalently within default currents of the mainstream feminist movement, Betty Dodson architected and shared a personal philosophy built upon a sex-positive liberation ethic. Her story affirms both the personal and political presences within "pleasure".
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Authored entirely while Genet was imprisoned, this largely autobiographical account details the then-illicit encounters of Paris' homosexual underground. A breathtaking snapshot of love and life within the margins.
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A sexuality explorative of the "sinister side" is cataloged in Bataille's seminal work of literature. The lines between mortality and sensuality are both disturbingly and stimulatingly blurred.
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Ecstatic pleasure, consensual pain, and awe-inducing precision: traditional Japanese rope bondage is not for the faint of heart or short on time. That said, those up for the challenge will find Midori's tour of this storied tradition as mesmerizing as it is thoroughly informative.
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This mythic sexual catalog of positions, techniques, and traditions offers a glimpse of an India in which sexuality —in its myriad identities—walked hand-in-hand with both spirituality and culture.
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Valerie Steele irons out the complex connections between the cultures of fetish and the cliques of couture in this masterful articulation of how we dress desire. From lingerie to lederhosen, no seam is left unsurveyed.
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Temperatures rise and complexions grow flushed within these bawdy, Victorian tales of the erotic. Potentially hyperbolic flourishes hint at tinges of satire, but only for the purpose of spicing pleasure with giggles.
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Wanna play in the big leagues? Ya gotta learn from a "Pro". Nina Hartley has "been there and done that" (both figuratively and literally) and in the process has compiled this encyclopedia of so-good-ya-gotta-try-it sex. Let no stone be left unturned (on).
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From 1946 to 1959, the periodical, Bizarre offered up a glimpse into S&M's wickedly glamorous, burgeoning subculture. Via photos, illustrations, and prose you are taken on tour of a bygone era's most pleasurable pains.
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Witnessing modern life's detonation of the nuclear family (and along with it the promise of monogamy as an indefinitely satisfactory finish line), Witt sets forth entertaining the alternatives (sexual, romantic, digital, and otherwise) offered to her in a rapidly evolving techno-mantic ecosystem.