Blog Posts

Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley Podcast Now Available!

9/13/2014

Alert! Alert! My chat with Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley is now LIVE on KinkyCast.com!

Don't forget, KinkyCast is free, easy and fun. You can listen on your phone or computer, or just about any mobile device.

And you can always go to the archive page to pull past episodes if you missed them the first time around.

I'm really proud of this interview. Ernest and Nina are such professionals, they made me look good, lol!

0 Comments

Interviewing Nina Hartley and Ernest Greene, Porn's Power Couple

8/30/2014

4 Comments

I need to find a more articulate and grown-up means of expressing my awe, amazement and excitement than just “OMG.” But sometimes, when I’m in the grip of those emotions, my higher brain functions desert me and “OMG” is all that comes out.

So, I’ll call this an OMG2. Last night I interviewed Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley for KinkyCast.com. It was by phone, thank God, because I don’t think I’d have been able to look at Nina and speak coherently at the same time.

If you’re sex-aware enough to be reading my blog, you probably know who Nina Hartley is. Hell, unless you’re Amish and living in a cave, you probably know who Nina Hartley is. Look in the dictionary under “legendary porn stars,” and you’ll find her big blue eyes staring back at you.

But more than that, she’s a shining example of how women have evolved to take control of their lives and careers in the adult entertainment industry. She is living proof that a woman doesn’t have to be chewed up and spit out by a misogynistic sex industry. Was it merely luck that has kept her out of addiction, rehab and all the other pitfalls that some feminists are so fond of claiming are the inevitable fates of women who dare to make a living as unapologetically sexual beings, or is she just an extraordinary woman?

I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t, either. But just the fact that she exists spits in the eye of all those negative stereotypes and expectations about women who actually enjoy sex.

But maybe you don’t know that Nina Hartley is now a film director, sex educator, feminist, and author. She’s helped thousands of other people enjoy sex as a vital part of their life, and she does it with fun, with joy, with enthusiasm. With her husband Ernest Greene, she’s co-author of Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex (2006) and Nina Hartley’s Guide series of adult sex education videos, which now boasts forty titles.

People outside the adult entertainment industry may be less familiar with her husband, Ernest Greene. Before I began researching for the interview, I knew that he was the editor of Hustler’s Taboo magazine, and a successful BDSM and fetish filmmaker. I knew from reading his comments in various discussions on FetLife that he was an intelligent, articulate and dominant gentleman. From photographs, I knew he possessed an elegant sense of style. (God, I just love a man who wears a watch chain.)

I did not, however, realize how amazing his career has been, stretching from Denver to London to New York to San Francisco to LA as a syndicated newspaper columnist, talk radio host, reporter and journalist. He was first published in Esquire at the tender age of fifteen, and since then has been published in Rolling Stone, Details, and Harpers. As a screenwriter, he’s worked for Dino De Laurentiis, Interscope and Walt Disney.

Yes, I said Walt Disney. But if you want to hear that story, you'll have to listen to the podcast, which is scheduled to go live in about two weeks. (Don't worry, I'll remind you as soon as it is available!)

His first kink-porn job was as a rigger on a Marilyn Chambers film. Yes, he got paid $100 to tie up Marilyn Chambers. (Nice work if you can get it!) He’s gone on as a performer, writer, director, and producer of adult films and videos with more than 500 titles to his credit. He was a pioneer in making BDSM and fetish films that were, for the first time, neither brutishly ugly nor ridiculously inaccurate.

I am particularly thankful that he helped shatter the myth that “showing penetrative sex with bondage would result in certain prosecution.” I remember all too well being so excited to see my first actual bondage video. There was this beautiful woman trussed up in an enticingly helpless package, being whipped and caned and then….

Nothing. Breathless with frustrated arousal, I turned to my date and whispered, “Isn’t somebody going to fuck her?”

“No,” he said wistfully.

“Why not?” I asked in amazed disbelief.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “They just don’t. I think it’s against the law.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” I pouted. “Someone ties me up, they’d damn well better fuck me.”

As if his career wasn’t interesting enough on its own, Ernest has rubbed elbows with some fascinating people. He was a long-time friend of the (in)famous Hunter S. Thompson. (I think that means they got thrown out of places together.) He was living in Thompson’s basement while Thompson was writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and read the manuscript as it was being written, a page at a time.

And as the editor of Hustler’s Taboo magazine, he’s worked with/for Larry Flynt, who, for better or worse, has become an iconic figure not just in the history of porn, but of history, period.

Then, of course, there are all those sexy porn people he's worked with, directed and, in many cases… um, you know.

The icing on the cake, of course, is that this is the guy who has Nina Hartley not merely as his wife, but as his slave. I imagine men all over the world glare at Ernest and wonder how in the hell he got so lucky.

I don’t think luck had anything to do with it. What girl could say no to a smart, powerful, dominant man with style, the desires of a skillful sadist and the heart of a romantic?

Oh, I forgot to mention: he also writes some damned hot erotica. He’s just published his first novel, Master of O, a modern retelling of the classic Story of O with a twist: the story is told from the dominant’s point of view.

Together, Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley are the ultimate power couple of porn, sort of the Brad and Angelina of adult entertainment, if you will. I was star-struck and nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but they were both amazingly gracious and candid talking to me about their lives, their careers and their relationship.

Unfortunately for me, my co-host and master, Beast, was present when Ernest started explaining how he is somehow missing the “Jealously Gene.” Master was sitting there grinning widely at me, nodding vigorously as if to say, “Yeah, what he said!”

Well, that’s just great. That’s all I needed, someone else to reinforce Beast’s sense of superiority for his instinctual grasp of polyamory as a higher plane of existence. It’s not that I’m a boiling cauldron of jealous rage, mind you. I’ve had thirteen years with Beast and I’ve done a fair job battling the societal programming of a good Baptist girl who grew up expecting a monogamous picket fence. But sometimes his inability to fully empathize with my insecurities makes me want to slap him upside the head.

Not that I would ever do such a thing.

I started reading Master of O a week ago, confident that I could finish it before the interview. However, the book took much longer to read than I expected. I had to keep stopping to masturbate. I usually only have that problem when I’m writing erotica, so I was definitely impressed.

I read Story of O many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and I have a hard time separating the book from the movie (also seen a long time ago). Both book and movie fascinated and disturbed me in equal measure, I think because I had no understanding of real consensual BDSM to give me context.

I was confused as to why O would submit herself to such torture, and it made me uncomfortable with my own reactions to it all. I have to agree with Ernest, that the two dominants of the story hardly seemed capable of inspiring such a depth of devotion from any woman. Besides, I just can’t take a man named “Renee” seriously. My apologies to the French.

Now, knowing the author’s reasons for writing Story of O in the first place (to please a lover whose sadomasochistic interests she did not share, as well as to prove wrong his chauvinist assertion that no woman could possibly write erotica as well as his hero, the Marquis de Sade), I understand better the sense of chilly detachment that I found in it. There are occasional whiffs of the author’s disapproval of her characters’ actions, and a total lack of understanding for their motivations.

Master of O doesn’t suffer from any of those flaws. It is obvious in every line that Ernest Greene understands both the desires and the satisfactions of consensual BDSM. We get to see the wheels turning in the mind of the master as he plans out a scene and reads his submissive’s reactions. And oh, my, does Master Stephen have some fabulous toys!

I’d like to have all those toys, but I’d settle for his closet. When you read it, you’ll understand. Some women dream of sexual domination, but all women lust for that kind of closet space.

Ernest has had a lifelong fascination for Story of O, but has expressed his dismay at the ending.

He’s not the only one to feel that way. The ending of Story of O fucking sucked. It was as disappointing and frustrating as that first bondage video I ever saw, but Master of O has made it up to me.

Reactions to Master of O’s ending will probably be split. Ten years ago, at the beginning of my journey and at the height of my joyous emersion in slavery, I would probably have thrown something across the room, or at least pouted.

Today, with thirteen years of experience in the reality of BDSM, I think the ending of Master of O is perfect in its irony. Ernest Greene has given O the substance and understanding that her original creator did not. You cannot read this book and wonder what O wants and why.

Master of O is a well-written, stylish, sensual and utterly beautiful piece of erotic fiction that should be required as a companion to the original.

Or you could just forget the original and read Master of O. For my money, it’s a much better use of your time.

You can get a copy in digital or paperback at masterofo.com. I suggest the digital, because it's easier to hold a Kindle with one hand. You'll need the other for… well, you know.

4 Comments

The Last Four Hours of Shirley Beck's Life

7/9/2014

13 Comments

Something terrible has happened in Clarksville, TN, just up the road. When the threads online started, I was too sick to even comment. I didn’t want to write about it, because what the hell was the point?

But days have passed and I can’t stop thinking about the last four hours of Shirley Beck’s life.

As I writer, I choose my words carefully, always looking for the best word to convey all the shadings and nuances of my meaning instead of one that is merely adequate.

But we throw around some words so casually that their edges have been blunted. Words like horrified. Disgusted. Disturbed. Sick. Incomprehensible.

Those words are pale and tepid, not nearly heavy enough, not strong enough. Using them to describe what I feel about Shirley Beck’s death is like trying to smash through a plate glass window with a pebble when what I need is a brick.

Shirley Beck, age 39, was a “house slave” to four roommates, one of whom she called “mistress.”

On June 26, three of the roommates beat her to death while the “mistress” watched.

Beck was hung up, gagged, choked and beaten continuously for four hours. Martial art kicks, a bamboo rod, oxygen tubing and a metal pole were among the weapons used on her.

The story only gets worse.

The beating started in the bedroom, but when Beck “leaned” into the television, they moved her to another room because they were worried about the safety of the electronics.

Beck passed out a couple of times, but they thought she was “faking it.”

One of the murderers paused long enough to take photos of Beck, her body battered and broken, hanging from the ceiling.

Why does this haunt me so much? Because I know that yearning to serve, to be willing to accept pain and even cruelty for the sake of another’s pleasure.

Understand, I’m not really much of a masochist. I suffer in order to please my master, and I know what it is to just keep breathing, trying to endure. To simply hang on through the next blow, and the next, in the knowledge that it will finally end and I will be rewarded with a kiss, a smile, a tender embrace from the master who has never, in all these years, violated my trust.

What keeps tearing at my heart is that Shirley Beck got none of that. She hung there for four hours, just trying to endure. Four hours. There would be no tender caresses or aftercare when it was done. No one would tend her injuries with smiles. No one would say, “I am proud of you.”

She gave her trust to the wrong people. Maybe she went looking for BDSM for all the wrong reasons. But that doesn’t make what happened her to any less tragic. She still wanted to be a good submissive. She wanted to offer her body, heart and mind up in service to someone that valued her.

It breaks my heart.

Her murderers have admitted she asked them to stop. Did they really mean she “asked,” or do they really mean she begged? She must have. What words did she manage between choking sobs and muffled screams of pain?

For Shirley Beck, the suffering just went on and on. I can’t even comprehend that level of pain, the rising panic when it occurred to her that this time they were not going to stop. In the last moments of consciousness, did she realize that, to these people, she was nothing? To die in that kind of anguish, with that sense of betrayal, might have been even worse than the pain.

When tragedy hits in our kinky community, it is almost always an accident born from ignorance, negligence or just blatant stupidity. People just didn’t think. Or maybe they were being as careful as they could be, and fate just fucked them over with some accident no one could have seen coming. It happens, and many of us hope that someone will not be crucified just because the justice system and the vanilla world don’t understand what it is we do.

But this was not negligence or ignorance; this was just brutality. This case is the very worst of what the world thinks we are, and what they believe we do. It doesn’t matter that these people, while known to some of us, were not really a part of our community, and that their behaviors have crossed so far beyond the bounds of decency that we would hardly call them human beings, let alone practitioners of sane, rational and consensual BDSM.

For every person out there who is still carrying the burden of a secret longing, still struggling to figure out what those desires say about them, and what to do about them, this case is a staggering blow.

Yet I am not hoping that this will be forgotten, or knocked out of the news cycle by some new atrocity. People should hear about this. They need to know about this. Will it frighten some people away? Probably.

Maybe some people need to be frightened. If you want to be a submissive, you need to make damned sure you have your head on tight, and that you understand your reasons for being here, and if you ever think for even one moment that you really deserve to be treated like shit, YOU SHOULD NOT PLAY THESE GAMES. When red flags start flying, so should you.

But this case is not really about BDSM or kink. It’s about criminal inhumanity trying to hide under the sheep’s leather clothing, about the bastards who dare to drape their sins in our kinky flag.

Do they lie to themselves, really believing they are one of us? Or do they know that they perpetrate the worst perversion of all? They take the things we have worked so hard to understand about ourselves, all the lessons we have learned and taught, all the trust we have earned and given, and they grind every bit of it into the dirt. And then they piss on it.

When I first heard about this, I was sick at heart. Today, I’m angry. I hope these people are nailed to the wall, that they are punished in every way and to every extent the law allows.

But I just keep thinking about those last four hours of Shirley Beck’s life.

http://www.theleafchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2014307030033&gcheck=1

13 Comments

A Girl Scout Cookie on a Plate of Chocolate Eclairs

7/6/2014

1 Comment

It's a nice picture, isn't it?

One of the things I love about going to events like SouthEast LeatherFest is being able to immerse myself in the kinky community. For that weekend, I am able to completely be myself, without censoring my words or wardrobe or whatever. I am among people who understand not just what makes me wet, but the innermost passion that drives the core of my life.

I can call my lover “Master,” without anyone giving me funny looks. I can nibble his ear, even as his other slave pats his butt, and the majority of the people surrounding us don’t see this as anything weird. They only see an affectionate poly triad.

If I show up at breakfast with bite marks on my neck, the waitress might blink, but if someone at a nearby table even notices it, they just know that I had a grand old time last night. All those people around us, most of them wearing black and looking a little hung-over, don’t mind if they overhear me saying, “I really would like to have the shit beat out of me tonight, Sir.”

I can wear clothes that I rarely get to wear, like my favorite t-shirt from Dark Entry in New Orleans that features a bare-breasted winged woman in fetish gear. I can wear the t-shirt that says, “I only hurt the ones I love, but only if they ask real nice.” I can wear my big silver chain collar with the big heart-shaped lock.

Now, I know I could wear my collar anywhere, really, and I could wear those t-shirts to the mall if I really wanted to, but the fact is, I’d feel weird doing it. I’d feel as if I were pulling up my skirt and showing my panties to the world, because the world just doesn’t get it. The kinky world gets it. They get me.

And yet…

At conventions, there is a part of me that feels just a teeny bit like a Girl Scout cookie on a plate of chocolate éclairs. Just a little outclassed, just a little bit out of place.

Why? Hell if I know, though I have some guesses.

Part of it is that I will always, always, always – deep down in the darkest recesses of my heart – be that painfully shy, chubby, four-eyed adolescent who never felt like she fit in. It doesn’t matter that I was never really the outsider I felt myself to be; that girl is lodged inside me like an ancient splinter. Put me in a large group of people I don't know, and I can feel her shuffling around nervously inside, whispering, “Can we go home now?”

People who know me now never believe this about me. All they see is a rather loud-mouthed attention-whore who is pretty entertaining when she’s not on the downswing of the bipolar rollercoaster.

Another part of it is really very superficial and, well, stupid. I worry about what to wear at these events.

Yeah, I have several corsets in leather and other assorted fabrics, but I can’t stand to wear them for more than an hour. There is a reason women stopped wearing those things, and a reason why only we masochists keep buying them. They are damned uncomfortable.

I have the four-inch stiletto heels and thigh-high boots, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to cripple myself hobbling around in misery until I lose all feeling in my toes. Yeah, fishnet stockings and garter belts are so sexy, but they get so easily twisted and you have to keep pulling them up and trying not to snag them on something….

I’m too old for this shit — not for the fashions, mind you, because I can still rock that look when I choose to — but too old to put up with that kind of discomfort without a vibrator between my legs. This is true of my wardrobe choices everywhere, all the time, now: fuck vanity, be comfortable. I’d wear pajamas to work if I could get away with it. I’ve thought about doing the whole Little thing just so I could wear flannel PJs and bunny slippers to a play party.

Maybe age is another reason I sometimes feel a little out of place. It doesn’t matter that part of my brain still thinks I’m thirty, the rest of me is fifty-one. I’m old enough to have given birth to many of the attendees. I no longer have the energy or desire to be beaten for hours while strung up like human macramé, and then fuck all night long doing alternate shots of Red Bull and Jagermeister.

While interviewing Laura Antoniou for KinkyCast, the issue of heterosexual insecurity came up. Maybe this is another possible explanation.

I’m straight, damn it. Mostly. I identify as heteroflexible, meaning I prefer dick but I’m not adverse to being fisted by a woman if the chemistry is right.

But I would be so much cooler if I were a lesbian, or at least enthusiastically and sincerely bisexual. At these conventions, what I really want to be is a gay leather man, because then I would truly be one of the cool kids.

Don’t think I don’t know how stupid and possibly offensive this sounds. I will never know the kind of hate, fear and ignorance that gays and lesbians have to fight through to find acceptance, sometimes even in their own hearts. And when they have to add kinky on top of that? That’s gotta be a hard road to walk.

In my own relatively safe little life, it was difficult for me to stand up and say, to myself and my closest friends, “Why, yes, I do like to lick a man’s boots and be used brutally like a cheap whore for his pleasure!” While that may have, at some point, made me question my sanity, or cost me a relationship or two, my sexual orientation and fetishes have never made me fear being beat to death in some alley. I have never feared being openly discriminated against with the kind of malice so often aimed at the gay community in general, and the gay leather community even more so.

There are those among the gay fetish community who say they just don’t take heterosexual kinksters seriously. They say we’ve never had to fight the way they have, that we have not really earned the right to be kinky. Some point to how we can blend in and “pass” as “normal” so much more easily. Our closet is much nicer than theirs. We can marry and breed and adopt and hold hands with our partners in broad daylight without provoking physical violence. Our suicide rates are much lower, too.

I know that not all gay and lesbian kinky folk think this way. Or maybe they do, how the hell would I know? I’ve had a few say it to my face (or to my Fetlife and Facebook accounts), but maybe more have thought the same thing.

I don’t blame them if they do. And that’s the heterosexual insecurity talking, right up there with “white guilt.” I feel deeply and intensely sorrowful about outrages perpetrated on other people that I, purely by virtue of my skin tone and attraction to the opposite sex, have always been exempt from. I just thank God/Fate/the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I’m not a man, because then I’d have to feel like shit over centuries of patriarchal misogyny as well.

Why else are heterosexual kinksters so ridiculously enamored of the Old Guard myths, if not because we want to prove ourselves worthy in a lifestyle where the gay community blazed the trail? No, they didn’t invent BDSM, but they certainly got a jump on the branding.

I find myself thinking some of the same things about the youngsters coming along behind me now. I have been a sick, twisted bitch since about age five, but it took me until my late thirties to get up the courage to go looking for what I had always wanted.

Up until that point, I really thought BDSM was something the porn industry had made up, that real people didn’t actually do any of that stuff. I had more than one person who claimed to love me turn away in disgust when I told them what aroused me.

Being older, I’ve had a lifetime of friendships, family relationships, and a career fossilized in the vanilla world that I now have to balance very carefully with my “secret” life.

Then I look at the “Next Generation.” I look at how easily they can find the community in the first place; BDSM is on the checkout stands at the supermarket, for Christ’s sake, and all over the Internet. They are still at a point in their lives where exploring their sexuality isn’t going to tear a twenty-year marriage apart, or cause them to lose custody of their children. They mostly still work at jobs where tattoos and nose rings and big black leather collars are not necessarily the deal breakers they are for a bank manager in his forties.

Even more so, they simply don’t carry the same amount of Puritan baggage that we older folks do. People talk about sex more now, and there are so many outlets for information that they don’t dwell so long in darkness and self-loathing for being “weird.” They actually embrace weird!

I am so fucking jealous. Oh, if only I had found the community in my twenties. I would have been so awesome. You'd all be hearing the legends about me now.

Yet all this makes me question whether these youngsters value the community and these experiences as much as we old farts do. They haven’t had to carry that longing and uncertainty for so many years in secrecy. Many simply visit Kinky World as just one stop on their Grand Tour; it’s not even a destination for them.

So many of them don’t seem to grasp the concept of discretion, or the importance of privacy. Most of them don’t need it the way we did and many still do.

I know I’m wrong to judge them. What do I really know of what it’s like to come of age in this world, or of their personal journey? I really don’t want to be that old lady hollering, “You kids, get off my lawn!”

It would really be nice, however, if they didn’t look at me and see their mothers. I'm no soccer mom. I've done stuff. Some really nasty, edgy shit. So there.

Even with all this navel-gazing angst, I still enjoy the conventions enormously. It’s so nice to be the majority for a change.

Then you get in the car for the drive home, and you have to remember that fisting probably isn’t something you should discuss at a Gas-n-Go in Skunk Lick, Tennessee.

Oh, well. There’s always another convention right around the corner.

1 Comment

Sexual Frustration & Hopeless Crushes at SouthEast LeatherFest 2014

6/24/2014

0 Comments

Boy River, Flossie and Optimus

I love working with KinkyCast, but this past weekend at SELF, it really got in the way of my sexual satisfaction. We were so busy talking to people, I never got around to having any sex all weekend. It hardly seems fair. I hope you people appreciate my sacrifice.

We'll be putting together a HUGE podcast episode with all the SELF interviews, but in the meantime, I'll tell you about the fun we had!

The KC crew arrived Thursday night and as soon as the luggage was dropped in the room, LD Beast strapped on the mobile recording gear and we were off hunting our prey: interesting kinky folk!

One of the complications of the weekend was that we didn’t actually know everybody we wanted to talk to by sight. Heck, in this Internet age, I’ve got friends I’ve known for years that I’ve never actually seen face to face. And in the kinky world where many of us don’t put our real faces out there, I’ve got friends that I wouldn’t recognize if they walked up to me on the street, unless they showed me their boobs, tattoos, last week’s bruises or penises.

It didn’t help that the badges, while being quite large, featured names printed in 10-point type. (Seriously?) In order to read someone’s name, I had to lean in three inches from their chest, or, in many cases, their bosom. While I don’t necessarily mind this intimate proximity to strange breasts and pecs, some of the people I approached drew back in alarm at this invasion of their personal space.

It was even more awkward when, after leaning close enough to read the name tag, I realized that the person was not who I’d thought they were. Some of them must have thought I was nuts when I just smiled and said, “Nice to see you!”

Not to mention the people I scared the crap out of by abruptly squealing, “Oh, Lord Such-and-Such, I’ve been looking all over for you!”

I am still appalled at the way my ADHD kicked in during an interview with SouthEast Bootblack 2013 Madeline Sparkles, when I suddenly cried out, “Ponies!” when I spied a lovely latex-clad pony girl behind her. Madeline, if you are reading this, I’ll say it again: I am so sorry if I damaged your hearing. My only excuse is that I am easily distracted by shiny, sexy things. And you, too, were a shiny, sexy thing! Madeline was so adorable I wanted to take her home with me.

We’ve been doing KinkCast podcasts in the studio every week since February, but this was our first venture out in the world with a mobile setup. We popped our cherry with none other than Flossie Nadon, Ms. SELF 2013. She’s got a sweetheart of a smile, but there’s a devil in those eyes!

Maybe it was the lack of sex that caused me to form a few hopeless crushes like the one I developed on Optimus, Mr. SouthEast LeatherFest 2013, aka Sir Raymond Onyx. He’s a total doll and he knows it, LOL. Throughout our interview, Optimus gazed sexily into my eyes with his own big brown orbs, and completely charmed me. Damn, sometimes I really wish I had a penis. It’s not fair that I have to be just one gender all my life. If I were God, we’d all get to switch back and forth.

Then there was the lovely Luna, who performed on both nights of the contest. I missed her first act, but the second striptease more than made up for it. She stripped down to a body stocking and then proceeded to slowly rip it from her body in the most alluring way. SQEEE! The sound of ripping fabric, ohmigod, how hot is that?

When she was finally, blessedly naked, she produced a can of whipped cream and sprayed it all over herself. Did I mention she has the most tantalizingly warm, brown skin? It was like hot chocolate and whipped cream. VERY hot chocolate. Then she rubbed herself. Can you picture that? She rubbed herself all over with the whipped cream until her skin shown like burnished copper, all slick and oiled up….

I’m predominantly heterosexual, but if I had any chance at all with this lady, I’d be on my knees faster than you can say heteroflexible. Just saying.

I dunno, maybe it was all the leather that had my panties wet all weekend. Male, female, trans, het, gay, lesbian, leather, kinky, little, pony, pup….so many wonderful kinky people…..

More to come!

0 Comments

Heading to Atlanta for SouthEast LeatherFest!

6/19/2014

0 Comments

Well, I'm about to depart for Atlanta for a weekend of perverted fun and education. One of the things I'm most looking forward to is finally getting to meet personal hero Laura Antoniou, author of the legendary Marketplace series of BDSM erotica, among dozens of other things. She's also one of the most honest and insightful people in the kinky world, and funny, too. She edited a wonderful book called "Some Women" many years ago, one of the first non-fiction BDSM books I read early in my journey. "Some Women" is a collection of short essays by women in the Lifestyle -- gay, straight, top, bottom, bi, mistress, slave -- that gives newbies a glimpse of all the paths by which women come to this community, and all the paths they choose to take. If you can find a copy, I highly recommend it.

If you at SELF… please look for the short busty redhead sticking a microphone in people's faces. I'll be with KinkyCast and we want to talk to you!

0 Comments

I'm back on KinkyCast… and it's crazy fun!

6/14/2014

0 Comments

You simply gotta check out the newest episode of KinkyCast. It's so much fun and so fabulous we had to split it into two parts.

The extended KinkyCast crew and assorted friends -- tops, bottoms, middles, doms, slaves, subs and switches -- get together in the dungeon to discuss questions from listeners.

Episode 20 A starts off talking about collars and what they mean, and then moved on to discussing when, if and how a kinky person comes out to their family and friends. It's very interesting to hear how different people from different backgrounds tackle the same questions.

It really was a lot of fun to do this episode, and you can tell it in the podcast, LOL. At one point, Woody asks the Beast, "How exactly did we lose control of this?"

"When you let a bunch of sassy subs into the studio, that's how!"

Somewhere along the line we got off on the tangent of munches and what is acceptable munch behavior, which is a very important subject for a lot of newbies who are still trying to figure out what a munch is in the first place!

We finish up with a debate on the meaning of community in BDSM.

In the second half, Episode 20 B, we move on to a discussion of how the internet has changed the kinky lifestyle. We discuss rituals and their meanings, as well as personal play styles.

It's like sitting in on an evening with friends, just talking about all the stuff that needs thinking about.

I hope you'll go to www.kinkycast.com and take a listen. It's free, it's easy and it's available now.

0 Comments

Chatting with Dr. Gloria Brame… Wow!

6/4/2014

0 Comments

Dr. Gloria Brame

I still can't believe i got to spend an entire hour chatting with Dr. Gloria Brame, author of the definitive scholarly work on BDSM, Different Loving. She's a bona-fide pioneer of the kinky community, but she is just as down to earth and easy going as anybody could wish for! She also has a great sense of humor, and talking to her was a real treat.

Dr. Brame is a bona-fide pioneer of the kinky community, but she is just as down-to-earth and easy going as anybody could wish for! She also has a great sense of humor, and talking to her was a real treat.

Maybe you are new to kink, and don't recognize the name of this writer, board-certified sexologist and sex therapist with a Ph.D. in human sexuality. This is one of the downsides to the explosive growth in the kink community in this Internet age: we move so fast, we are losing our history. Most of us don't even know where we came from, or that we owe Dr. Brame a debt for helping to get us here.

So, no, Fifty Shades of Grey did not invent BDSM. Neither did Gloria Brame, but she was among the first to campaign against the stigma attached to BDSM and fetish sex. Different Loving rocked the world, and today it is used in classrooms to teach about human sexuality.

Today, so many of us just jump on the computer and in a few clicks, we can find just about any fetish or kink you can possibly imagine -- and some that you never dreamed of.

But for those of us who began in the dark ages, back when you started out all alone, thinking you were the only person in the world who ever got excited by a swat on your ass, the world was a much colder and scarier place. Nobody ever talked about this stuff, and your only hope of hooking up with a like-minded pervert was posting personal ads in swingers' magazines and sneaking around adult bookshops. If you had the courage, that is. A lot of us didn't. When I first became aware of what was then called "S&M," I honestly thought it was something the porn industry made up. Surely, I thought, real people didn't do this stuff… did they?

Then Dr. Brame came along and told us, yes, real people did this and it was okay. Having real research on who we are and what we do helped so many of us take those first steps in fulfilling our fantasies and feeling okay about it.

As I told Dr. Brame on the podcast, Different Loving was the first non-fiction book on BDSM I ever read, so she's at least partly responsible for the happy, well-adjusted pervert I am today. (There are a lot of men — and a few women — out there who owe her a thank-you!)

Since Different Loving, Dr. Brame has written several other books, including Come Hither, A Common-Sense Guide to Kinky Sex, The Truth about Sex, and Sex for Grown-ups. Her newest book, Naked Memory: Confessions of a Sexual Revolutionary, is just out and I can't wait to read her very personal story. Check out her website, www.gloriabrame.com, to find out more about her work.

Seriously, check out our conversation on www.kinkycast.com. It's a very enjoyable episode. I even got to ask her about the Swiss Cheese Pervert.

No, I'm not gonna explain that. You'll have to listen to the podcast!

Listening is easy and free…. you can listen anytime you want, while driving, folding the laundry, grocery shopping…. on your computer, or your phone or laptop or whatever mobile device you might be carrying around these days.

0 Comments

This post has been deleted....

4/26/2014

1 Comment

This post has been deleted

4/22/2014

0 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

Archives