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Mar 8: Nan Kinney on Real Lesbian Movies; Dr. Eli Sheff on Polyamory and Families

Mar 052013

N_KINNEY dr eli sheff

This week’s episode of Sex Out Loud has two guests talking about their groundbreaking work giving voices to those often marginalized. First I talk to Nan Kinney, who founded Fatale Media in 1985 when there was no porn made by and for women. Fatale produces authentic lesbian movies, including the famous Bend Over Boyfriend series and the classic (and personal favorite of Tristan’s), Suburban Dykes. Then, Dr. Eli Sheff will talk about her new book based on her groundbreaking work with Polyamorous Family Study, a 16 year project whose mission is to provide high-quality, research-based information about poly families with kids using sound research methods based in years of sociological study.

This week’s show is live, so find out all the ways to listen here and you can call in with questions at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter, or even e-mail me via tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air!

Nan Kinney is the president and producer of Fatale Media and one of the founding publishers of the highly acclaimed and notorious On Our Backs magazine. A native Austin, Minnesota, she began her foray into the world of lesbian pornography in the early 1980s when she moved to San Francisco to check out the S/M scene. When she realized that there was no venue for lesbian sexual imagery made by and for lesbians, she and two partners, Deborah Sundahl and Susie Bright, solicited material and published their first issue of On Our Backs in June, 1984. With the success and popularity of the magazine, Nan and Deborah jumped into videos. In January, 1985, they released Private Pleasures and Shadows, two videos that starred real-life lesbian lovers and presented for the first time sexually explicit footage made by and for lesbians. Later titles included Suburban Dykes starring Nina Hartley and Sharon Mitchell, Safe is Desire, How to Female Ejaculate, Hungry Hearts and Burlezk Live I & II starring Shelly Mars.

By 1994, with On Our Backs being published bimonthly and the circulation at an all-time high, Nan and Deb decided to sell the magazine and pursue their separate interests.

Nan runs Fatale Media full-time and in the late ’90s expanded the company’s mission to include adult educational and bisexual pornographic images. One such release, Bend Over Boyfriend, directed by Shar Rednour and starring sex educators Carol Queen and Robert Morgan, addresses women giving men anal pleasure. The DVD became Fatale’s
bestselling title and remains its bestseller today. Bend Over Boyfriend was reviewed and featured around the world in the mainstream and adult media, including Cosmopolitan, Playboy, FHM (U.K.), Adult Video News, Salon.com, and Dan Savage’s column in the Village Voice, launching it into infamy. Shar Rednour’s company S.I.R. Video shot Bend
Over Boyfriend 2, another bestseller.

Since then, Fatale Media produced and shot more critically acclaimed lesbian videos and began to carry independently produced lesbian, queer and other adult educational titles, including work by Courtney Trouble, Shine Louise Houston, Madison Young. Fatale also produced the U.S. edition of One Night Stand by Emilie Jouvet, introducing another fresh
lesbian voice to American audiences.

“My goal has always been to present alternative images of sexuality,” Nan says. “Sex is an important part of people’s lives, and women, and lesbians in particular, have always been portrayed in a very limited way in traditional pornography. I want people to have other images of themselves, a way to bust out of the ingrained images in mainstream porn. We’re offering another view.”

~~~

With a Ph.D. in Sociology,[1] 15 years of teaching[2] and research experience,[3] and certifications as a Guardian Ad Litem/Court Appointed Special Advocate[4] and a sexuality educator,[5] Dr. Elisabeth Sheff has the education, experience, and credentials to provide flawless legal and educational consultation. Dr. Sheff is the foremost academic and legal expert on polyamory in the United States, and the worldwide expert on polyamorous families. Her academic research has focused on sexual minorities and their families. Dr. Sheff’s Polyamorous Families study followed poly families with children for 15 years, tracing the evolution of the families and the progress of the children. This unparalleled study has resulted in numerous professional and academic publications. In her Overlapping Identities and Are You Kinky? studies, Dr. Sheff examined the intersections between and among unconventional sexual identities, including swingers, kinksters (people who practice BDSM or sadomasochism), and polyamorists.

Dr. Sheff is widely recognized by her peers and the media as an international expert in polyamory and BDSM. She served as the chair of the Sexual, Behavior, Politics, and Communities Division for the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) from In addition to serving as the polyamory expert and IRB compliance specialist for the Community Academic Alliance for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS), Dr. Sheff founded the online research community PolyResearchers that has grown to include 327 members in 17 different countries and 16 different fields.

Her extensive media interviews include national outlets like Newsweek, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio, and international sources such as Semana magazine in Columbia, Mente e Cervello (the Italian edition of Scientific American), Elle magazine in Quebec, and the Sunday London Times. In addition to appearing in the National Geographic television series Taboo episode entitled “Odd Couples” and the documentary BDSM: Education and Experience, Dr. Sheff has provided background information for several television shows including the Discovery Channel’s I’m Pregnant And…, and the Canadian National Television series The Bigger Picture as well as numerous interviews with online magazines like Momlogic.com and Seattle Met, and podcasts like Polyamory Weekly and How Stuff Works.

Dr. Sheff has the expertise, training, experience, credentials and education to provide effective testimony regarding gender, families, sexuality, communities, and especially on the families of sexual minorities and unconventional relationships. She also possesses rare knowledge useful to counselors, therapists, nurses, and lawyers, as well as the teaching experience necessary to present the information in an interesting and accessible format.

[1] Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, 2005

[2] Teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Montana, Missoula; and Georgia State University, Atlanta

[3] The Polyamorous Families Study (1997 – 2012); The Overlapping Sexual Identities Study (2005 – 2006); The Are you Kinky? Study (2006 – 2011)

[4] State of Georgia, Bar Association

[5] American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT)

Tristan Taormino Talks Open Relationships on NPR

Mar 012013

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Tristan Taormino will be on “To The Best of Our Knowledge,” as part of a show called ‘After the Romance‘, which airs this weekend on NPR stations. Tristan talks with host Steve Paulson about her book Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships, open relationships, swinging, polyamory, and more. You can hear it during the following times on local NPR stations:

Atlanta, GA: Monday and Tuesday 11:00 am on 91.7 WUGA-FM

Columbus, OH: Sunday 3:00 pm on 89.7 WOSU-FM

Eugene, OR: Sunday 8:00 am on 1280 KRVM-AM

Los Angeles, CA: Sunday 9:00 pm on 88.3 KCLU-FM

Milwaukee, WI: Sunday 12:00 pm on 90.7 WHAD-FM

San Francisco, CA: Sunday, 8:00 am on 91.7 KALW-FM and
Sunday, 7:00 pm on 88.5 KQED-FM

Seattle, WA: Friday (3/8) 8:00 pm on 94.9 KUOW-FM

Springfield, MA: Sunday, 8:00 am on 640 WNNZ-AM

For other local areas, click here to search by state.

You can also stream or download the mp3 of the entire show featuring Tristan Taormino, Esther Perel, Kate Bolick, Brian Kaufman and Martin Swinger, and more or listen to and download Tristan’s segment here.

Anal Advisor: Help Me Help Her

Feb 282013

My girlfriend loves anal pleasure, but she just cannot handle it. When I finger her asshole, and or touch her pussy at all, she says “it’s too much pleasure to handle.” She has to stop me because she says it feels too good, and that she can’t take it. Because of this, we have never gotten past the two finger mark. But she wants to have my cock in her ass, and of course so do I! How can I get my girlfriend to relax? We think we have tried everything short of drugs, which we don’t want to try. How can I get my girlfriend to give in to the pleasure and loosen up? We both really want to get my cock into her ass without hurting her!

–Help Me Help Her

A woman’s vulva, clitoris, and ass are extremely sensitive and sometimes, if the clitoris in particular is not fully engorged, it can feel overwhelming to have it stimulated. However, it’s rare that women complain that touching or fingering is too pleasurable. It sounds to me like there may be some emotional/psychological issues at work in your girlfriend’s assertion that stimulation feels too good. Perhaps she has some reservations about anal play that are causing her reaction; many people think it’s dirty, unnatural, and taboo, for example.

Your description also makes it sounds as if your girlfriend is tense in general about sex. (Of course drugs are not the answer, so don’t even go there!) I think she needs to explore her feelings about her body, sex, and pleasure and get to the bottom of what may be making her feel tense, overwhelmed, or overstimulated. Be supportive of this process and don’t put pressure on her to figure it out quickly so you can get your dick in her ass. I suspect that once she gets in touch with her inner feelings about these issues, your communication and sex life on the whole will improve, and then you can start to explore anal play together when you’re both in a better frame of mind.

Mar 1: Joan Price Gives Straight Talk on Senior Sex and Ageless Erotica

Feb 262013

Joan_Price headshot high res

This Friday on Sex Out Loud I talk with Joan Price, author, editor, and ageless sexuality advocate. Joan will discuss her book Better Than I Ever Expected which first got her named “the senior sexpert” and her latest book, Naked At Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex. We’ll get a sneak preview of her presentation at Catalyst Con in Washington DC in a couple weeks, as well the scoop on the latest anthology she edited, Ageless Erotica, a collection of hot stories where age is no limitation to getting busy.

Joan Price (www.joanprice.com) calls herself an advocate for ageless sexuality, though she has also been dubbed “senior sexpert,” “the beautiful face of senior sex,” and “wrinkly sex kitten” by the media. Joan, age 69, has been writing, speaking, and blogging about senior sex since 2005. Formerly a health & fitness writer, she switched topics to senior sex when she wrote her spicy memoir, Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk about Sex After Sixty, to celebrate the joys of older-age sexuality. Her blog (www.NakedAtOurAge.com) attracted a growing community of sex-positive (and sex-inquisitive) seniors who sent Joan their stories and questions. This led to her next book in 2011: Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud about Senior Sex, a compilation of 130 reader stories, advice from 45 experts, and Joan’s candid commentary. Naked at Our Age won Outstanding Self-Help Book 2012 from the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) and 2012 Book Award from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, and the audiobook was nominated for an Audie in 2013. She recently edited a steamy senior sex anthology titled Ageless Erotica. Visit Joan’s zesty, award-winning blog about sex and aging at http://www.NakedAtOurAge.com, where Joan continues to talk out loud about Boomer/senior sex, partnered or solo.

Feelmore Fresh Fridays: New Oakland Porn Event

Feb 242013

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!

50 Shades of Lingerie in the New York Times

Feb 212013

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.

Anal Advisor: Anal + Ejaculation = Cancer?

Feb 202013

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.

Feb 22: Christopher Ryan on the History of Human Sexuality and the Future of Ethical Non-Monogamy

Feb 192013

christopher ryan

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).

Feb 15: Celine Parreñas-Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young on The Feminist Porn Book, plus Claire Potter on the Feminine Mystique Symposium

Feb 122013

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 photo 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.

Penley-Constance-low-res_0002 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 potter 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.

Feb 8: Paul Joannides and the Guide to Getting It On

Feb 052013

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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