CNN recommended The Ultimate Guide Kink to folks who are fans of Fifty Shades of Grey that are looking for authentic instruction on the matter. (They also recommended Clarisse Thorn, one of my guests on Sex Out Loud!)
I also did a two-part interview with Cunning Minx for her fabulous podcast, Poly Weekly. The first half of the interview is HERE and then part two is HERE.
The Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health featured me as one of their Hump Day Heros! Thank you so much, CSPH. Go read the interview here
Sassafras Lowery wrote a great review of The Ultimate Guide to Kink for Lambda Literary Review. Here’s a snippet:
In a world increasingly dominated (pun intended) by 50 Shades of Grey and other arguably unrealistic representations of BDSM, Tristan Taormino’s The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM Role Play and the Erotic Edge is exactly what we need. This primer takes the biggest names in the kink world and binds them together (the puns here are endless) into the kind of how-to guide our community has desperately needed for a long time
And finally, Get Lusty has a list of 20 sex educators to follow on Twitter – including yours truly! Check out the whole list here.
I recently appeared on the podcast Afroerotik, along with Dr. Cherie Ann Turpin, to have an in-depth conversation about race and sexuality. We talked about the implications and effects of continued stereotypes and racism in the adult industry and the how it affects perceptions in society. If you missed it, go listen to it now!
Take it slow. Talk to your partner. And don’t forget, just because you start off with strap-on play, doesn’t mean you have to end there, also, just because you start with anything else, doesn’t mean you can’t end with strap-on play.
As you may recall, I was on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show on MSNBC a couple weeks ago, which prompted anti-pornography crusader Gail Dines to complain that she was bumped from the show. Marisa Black wrote a piece for Betty Dodson’s site called “Feminism and Pornography Can Coexist” which I highly recommend reading.
Glorified Love Letters wrote a review (aka a love letter) to Ultimate Guide for Kink and Sinclair Sexsmith featured the book in Lambda Literary’s Cliterotica 2012, a quarterly lesbian erotica review roundup.
“If you’ve been reading (or have heard about) Fifty Shades of Grey and you’re curious about how those kinky games are actually played, this book’s for you. Even if you don’t want to tie up your partner, you’ll learn how to do it right and why it appeals to the folks who play that game.”
My head is still spinning from my first appearance on Melissa Harris-Perry on Saturday. Watch it below or at these links—Segment 1: Porn in America and Segment 2: The Business of Pornography. I’ve done a fair amount of television appearances, and I have mixed feelings about them. In the past, I feel like many TV producers shy away from difficult topics, don’t allow for complex, nuanced analysis, and often want me to “dumb it down.” This time, none of that happened. I was excited when a producer for the Melissa Harris-Perry show on MSNBC contacted me last week about a show about female sexuality and porn. We had a spirited conversation where I feel like she really listened to me, rather than attempted to fit me into a quasi-script she had already written. When I found out that one of my co-panelists was author and activist Jaclyn Friedman, I felt relieved to have a sex-positive feminist sister there.
Fun fact: Jaclyn Friedman and I were both in the class of ’93 at Wesleyan University, and we were fellow activists and friends during college. Although we’ve followed and supported each other’s careers since then (I blurbed her newest book What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame Free Guide to Sex and Safety and she appeared on my radio show Sex Out Loud), we hadn’t been in the same room since the late 90s. We had dinner the night before, and Jaclyn reminded me we wouldn’t talk about the show, so that everything would stay fresh for the next day. We had plenty of catching up to do, so it didn’t matter!
At every stage of the booking process, the folks behind the scenes at MHP were competent, respectful, and, well, have their shit together. In the green room before the show, Jaclyn and I met Zephyr Lookout (author of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics) who sat on the panel for an earlier segment and would be joining ours. She is a law professor at Fordham. I liked her immediately, and we bonded over our love of the children’s book Tuck Everlasting. She admitted she was “probably the most anti-porn of everyone on the panel,” which I appreciated her saying up front. It’s actually refreshing to engage with someone who really wants to dig into the topic and isn’t just ready to shut you down (like Gail Dines and crew are). After being fitted with our mics and mic packs (during which Jaclyn had her hands all the way up my dress to assist the sound guy), the three of us sat down at the table. That’s when I met the fourth panelist, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson (author of Holler If You Hear Me), and I truly had no idea what he was going to say about porn. I was pleasantly surprised to discover he knows quite a bit about it (he name checked Lexington Steele and Mr. Marcus!) and had smart things to say.
MHP introduced me as a feminist pornographer and showed the cover of my new book The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, co-edited with Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young and forthcoming from The Feminist Press at CUNY in 2013. The two segments just flew by so fast, and suddenly, she was doing the closing of the show (naming activist teen Julia Bluhm the Foot Soldier of the Week for petitioning Seventeen magazine).
Afterward, we all stood in the hallway, continuing the conversation, and I got to meet several more of the show’s producers including Jamil Smith and Executive Producer Shirley Zilberstein. Melissa Harris-Perry is so smart, it’s actually intimidating. But in a good way. Obviously, we barely scratched the surface on some pretty important topics. I have a whole lot more to say about race politics in the porn industry, shifting representations of sexuality in porn, today’s porn economy, queer porn, and on and on. But this was definitely a start, and great one.
Jaclyn Friedman, me, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson backstage at MHP
Very few mainstream media outlets, and even fewer, if any, television news shows are willing to look at porn in an intelligent or balanced way. I am so impressed that Melissa Harris-Perry and her producers took a risk and really broke down a barrier. I know they have already gotten flack about it from conservatives and anti-porn feminists. So, if you want to show your support for the topic of this show, applaud Melissa Harris-Perry and MSNBC for making space for this conversation, you can do so in a number of ways:
Astrologist Eric Francis of Planet Waves wrote a post called “Beyond Astrology” that includes a recommendation of my work as a sex educator. Thanks, Eric!
IWAdult Reviews writes up The Ultimate Guide to Kink for their toybox reviews, saying it “will become your bible when it comes to sex.” Thanks for the recommendation and I do think the book would look great in every bedside drawer….
