Aug 282015
 
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Photo by: N. Maxwell Lander

I welcome back to the show Shine Louise Houston, the founding producer and director of Pink & White Productions, who is currently finishing her latest erotic thriller, SNAPSHOT. Written and directed by Houston, SNAPSHOT draws inspiration from film classics such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Antonioni’s Blow Up, featuring a diverse cast and intimate portrayals of queer sex in Houston’s signature cinematic style. We’ll also discuss how she’s telling a different kind of coming out story with her work and also share stories from working with the leads Beretta James, Chocolate Chip, & Lyric Seal.

Tune in to Sex Out Loud this Friday, August 28th at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET. This week’s show is LIVE so call in to Voice America with questions and comments at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Twitter @SexOutLoudRadio, or e-mail me via tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air. Tune in to Sex Out Loud every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com!

As the founding producer and director of Pink and White Productions, (CrashPadSeries.com, PinkLabel.tv), SHINE LOUISE HOUSTON has always had unique vision. Graduating from San Francisco Arts Institute with a Bachelors in Fine Art Film, her works have become the new gold standard of adult cinema. During a five year position at the women-owned, sex toy purveyor Good Vibrations, Shine recognized an underserved demand for an alternative to mainstream pornography, and began to create well-crafted queer made porn. Shine’s films have been recognized among the next big wave of women produced porn and have been internationally screened from Amsterdam to New Zealand. 2015 marks the 10th anniversary of Shine’s work. This year she was honored with the “Sylvester Pride in the Arts” Award by the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, receiving a Certificate of Recognition from the State of California Legislature Assembly. Shine’s upcoming film SNAPSHOT is an erotic thriller staring queer women of color.
Apr 032015
 

On Friday, April 3rd at 5 pm PT (8 pm ET), we welcome international porn superstar and writer Stoya to Sex Out Loud radio. Tristan interviews Stoya about her journey into the world of porn, writing for VICE, New York Times & Esquire, and her latest collaboration with Kayden Kross, the new site TRENCHCOATx.com, which focuses on high quality product, fair prices for the consumer, and fair pay for the people who work for them. Don’t miss this enchanting and provocative hour with the person the Village Voice called “America’s sweetheart of smut” and learn why Stoya believes there’s “a fun way to be called a dirty whore”.

tristan mic

This week’s show is LIVE so call in to Voice America with questions and comments at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter, or e-mail me via tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air. Tune in to Sex Out Loud every Friday, you can listen along on your computer, tablet, or phone, find all the ways at SexOutLoudRadio.com!

STOYA is the co-owner: http://TRENCHCOATx.com. Occasional Writer. Highly skilled at avoiding pants. Follow her on Twitter.

Nov 302014
 

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I See You, Seeing Me, See You, Seeing Me, See You: Surveillance, Pornography, Porn Studies
Journal: Porn Studies
Guest Editor: Evangelos Tziallas, Concordia University

Narrative film’s increasingly frequent emulation of CCTV and surveillance footage has engendered a dialogue about the intersections between cinema and surveillance, and their historical and theoretical antecedents. Most of the dialogue revolves around formal changes and the ontological and political ramifications of film’s and technologically mediated surveillance’s overlaps. Despite this growing exchange, work on how explicit sexual representation and pornography have been impacted by the rise of the surveillance society, and the overlaps between various personal and expressive apparatuses and surveillance technologies, if not the absorption of the former by the latter, are few and far between.

In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” ([1989]/1999) Linda Williams’ Foucauldian inspired analysis explored narrative heterosexual pornography as one of the latest sources of “knowledge-pleasure.” Accounts of pornography as forms of audio-visual knowledgepower have proliferated since Williams’ work, but recent technological, social, and cultural political changes require we think about the impact technologically mediated surveillance has had on pornographic representation, consumption, and production. Knowledge-power is “surveillance,” but the proliferation and ubiquity of various digital, computer, and recording technologies focus and transform the meaning and deployment of knowledge-power and knowledge-pleasure.

In “Surveillance is Sexy,” (2009) David Bell explores “sites where surveillance technologies and an emerging ‘surveillance aesthetic’ are being repurposed through their overt sexualisation,” pondering “whether the mobilization of voyeurism and exhibitionism can be read as ways of resisting surveillance” (203). But where does the line between surveillance and voyeurism exist in a hyper-visual and visible world? Voyeurism is predicated on the notion of privacy, but what is the meaning of voyeurism in an increasingly transparent world where privacy is not only being taken away but willfully given up? At what point does the same piece of technology go from being a tool for “voyeurism” to a tool for “surveillance”? How do the simulation of surveillance and the foregrounding of recording and simulation technologies alter pornographic texts and experiences, which are often understood as the epitomes of voyeurism?

In The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies (1996), William Bogard lucidly argues that “to understand what the technology of surveillance is and the effects it aims for today, increasingly we have to appreciate the fantasy that drives it, and that, in a word, is simulation” (9), going on to point out that “surveillance without limits is exactly what simulation is all about. Simulation, that is, is a way of satisfying a wish to see everything, and to see it in advance…” (15). How are simulation, surveillance, and voyeurism consonant with each other and how are their synchronicity expressed and experienced? Conversely, what discords, be they overt or underlying, does their convergence produce at a representational, legal, political, social, and theoretical level?

There is a tendency in surveillance studies to think of surveillance wholly within the realm of the technological, the social, and the geopolitical, as if these discursive spheres are not directly implicated in the observation, regulation, dissection, and control of the body through sex. There is, likewise, a tendency for researchers to be blind to how surveillance is both implicitly masculine and heterosexual, particularly when mediated through technology. Conversely, works on pornography tend to focus on discipline and ideology, rather than how these ideas are refashioned by technology, due in large part to the legacy and residue of the porn wars. This special issue is inspired by a proposed panel for the upcoming Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference (Seattle 2014), and seeks to bring together research from the growing fields of surveillance studies and porn studies into closer proximity. It seeks to fill in intellectual and scholarly gaps, and hopes to create a foundation upon which further research and engagement can be built.

Possible topics and avenues of inquiry include:
-Sexualizing authority, disciplinarity, and the police state (cops, the military, prisons, “torture,” superhero porn parodies)
-Amateur pornography and self-surveillance (XTube, Grindr/Blendr, Cam4)
-Sexualized representations of dystopia and the overly controlled society (Descent [1999])
-Surveillance and/or spying as thematic element or narrative device
-The use/representation of surveillance cameras/technologies, or the configuration of personal recording technologies as tools for surveillance in narrative pornography. (Focus/Refocus [2009])
-Politicized representation (“Gaytanamo,” “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” porn-mashups)
-Policing national borders and racial fetishization (“My Israeli Platoon”)
-The theoretical and formal overlaps between surveillance, voyeurism, and ethnography
-Sexualizing the violation of privacy (revenge porn, webcam spying/recordings)
-Biopower and policed bodies (barebacking, fetishizing and criminalizing HIV transmission, transgendered bodies)
-Censorship, bypassing censorship, copyright issues
-“Social sorting,” sexual taxonomies, and pornographic categorizations
-Risk, data mining, and the thrill of “getting caught” on the internet
-Ethnographic studies of particular websites, and online communities and cultures (4Chan, Reddit)
-Regional analysis of surveillance supra-structures and pornography (China, Iran, Turkey)
-Policing porn mobility (sexting, filming and watching porn in public, Google Glass porn)

Please send abstracts (300 words max), manuscripts (6000-8000 words) with a 200 word bio,
and direct all inquiries to Evangelos Tziallas at evangelostziallas@gmail.com

Abstracts due [rolling]
Manuscripts due [rolling]

Apr 252014
 

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Fresh off the success of The 2nd Annual Feminist Porn Conference at University of Toronto and her win at the 2014 Feminist Porn Awards, Tristan Taormino is set to lecture on feminist porn at Harvard University.

“I gave an anal sex workshop to a standing room only crowd at Harvard as part of Sex Week in 2012. I am thrilled to return to campus to talk about one of my passions: the radical potential of feminist porn to transform sexual representation,” says Taormino, who just won a 2014 Feminist Porn Award for her educational film Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Bondage for Couples, produced by Adam & Eve Pictures.

Tristan Taormino is the author of eight books on sexuality and relationships and editor of 25 anthologies. She is co-editor of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, the first collection that includes writings by scholars, academics, producers and performers about feminist porn, published by The Feminist Press; the book is a finalist for a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. As the head of adult film production company Smart Ass Productions, she has directed and produced twenty-four sex education and porn films including the groundbreaking series based on real female kink fantasies, Rough Sex,and the Expert Guide sex education series, which she created for Vivid-Ed. Her films have garnered 40 award nominations, 6 AVN Awards, and 9 Feminist Porn Awards. She was the first female director to win an AVN Award for Best Gonzo Movie for the debut film in her reality series Chemistry, and she received the Trailblazer Award at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2010. She is the host of Sex Out Loud®, a weekly radio show on the VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network.

Her lecture, “Feminist Porn: The Politics of Producing Pleasure,” will be on Wednesday, April 30 at 8:00 pm at the Fong Auditorium (Boylston Hall) on the Harvard campus. It is sponsored by Harvard University’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Her appearance is also sponsored in part by Good Vibrations and Sportsheets, the two companies for which Taormino serves as Brand Ambassador. Tristan will be raffling off prizes from Good Vibrations and Sportsheets at her talk.

Mar 122014
 

Allison Vivas making peace with porn

This Friday on Sex Out Loud, I interview Allison Vivas, President of Pink Visual, two-time winner of XBIZ Award for adult industry Woman of the Year and recent recipient of Free Speech Coalition’s Leadership Award. Under Allison’s guidance, Pink Visual has established a strong reputation within the adult
entertainment industry as an innovative, forward-thinking brand that focuses as much on developing excellent technology as it does on creating high quality adult entertainment. She recently published the book “Making Peace With Porn: Adult Entertainment and Your Guy“, which incorporates personal stories, clinical statistics, and the history of adult entertainment to explain why porn might not be such a bad thing after all.

After completing her degree at the University of Arizona in 2001, Allison Vivas joined a startup adult website affiliate program called TopBucks at the age of 21. Allison quickly rose to the position of Marketing Director, where she oversaw a wide range of the company’s activities in marketing, sales, event coordination, and project planning, across several product lines for both the adult entertainment and ‘mainstream’ markets. In 2004, the company launched
Pink Visual to bring together its Internet, broadcast and DVD distribution efforts under a single brand. Allison was named President of the company in 2006 and since then the company has played a major role with mobile distribution and anti-piracy efforts, most recently launching the Anti-Piracy Service: DMCA Force. She penned “Making Peace with Porn” in 2013 which combined research with her own personal growth around understanding porn as a woman.

Sex Out Loud airs every Friday at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET on the VoiceAmerica Variety channel. You can listen on your computer, phone, or tablet, find all the ways here!

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Jan 162014
 

A few months ago I was watching a cable station late at night and they had a segment on porn stars. In this program, they dealt with one girl’s preparations for filming. She discussed her tattoos, piercings, and laser removal of her pubic hair. She had her hair touched up, nails done, legs waxed, and did a stretch in the tanning bed. While she was having her makeup applied, she mentioned that she had her rectum bleached. I had never heard of that.

One night while preparing for anal sex, I noticed a dark discoloration around my anus. I told my husband about the show I watched and explained how this performer had her rectum bleached. He told me that I was crazy. Was I? Is there something out there that can bleach this discoloration away? If so, I would like to know more about it. Can this be done at home? What products can be used and where can I buy them?  I have a lot of adult movies and I have noticed that most of the female actors look like they may have bleached their butts.

–Want a White Eye

You were not imagining things, there are products on the market to bleach the skin, and a few are marketed specifically as anal bleaching creams. I’ll bet you saw the segment on Dr. 90210 on E! where adult film star Tabitha Stevens went to Pink Cheeks salon in Southern California and had her asshole bleached. The salon sells its own cream, Pink Cheeks Amazing Anal Bleaching Cream (and you can order it over the phone, 818-906-8225). According to its label, the cream’s active ingredient is 4% hydroquinone, a substance used to lighten dark skin. It comes with instructions that recommend you have your anus waxed prior to application, and that you use it every night until you achieve the shade you want (which typically is in a week or two). There is a less expensive alternative, simply called Anal Bleaching Cream.

These products have not exactly registered on the Food and Drug Administration’s radar, so the safety of them has not been researched. The fact is everyone’s skin around their anus is a darker shade than their regular skin tone; in other words, it’s natural and I’m inclined not to fuck with it. Plus, your perception that “most of the female actors look like they may have bleached their butts” is not accurate; some have, but the majority of brown eyes you see on screen are as nature made them.

Jan 022014
 

saint croix

This Friday, January 3rd at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET, Sex Out Loud welcomes to the show one of the most prolific male stars in the adult industry, Steven St. Croix, who will pull back the curtain on his 20+ years in the business as both a performer and a director. We’ll hear how he got his start as a entertainer, stories from his favorite and most outrageous scenes, and what inspired him to write them all down for his new book “Porn Star.” Plus, we’re live and we’ll be taking calls and questions.
steven st croixThis week’s show is LIVE, which means we’ll be giving away a Sportsheets prize to a lucky fan. Find out all the ways to listen here so you can call in with questions and comments at 1-866-472-5788, join the discussion on Facebook or Twitter, or e-mail me via tristan(at)puckerup.com and I’ll read them live on the air – you could be chosen to win!

Steven St. Croix has performed in over 1200 full length feature movies with over 1600 woman on camera. He received 55 nominations for AVN, XRCO and XBIZ Awards (and 19 wins), won 2 Nightmoves Awards, and is a member of both the AVN and XRCO Halls of Fame. He’s the triple crown winner for Best Actor 2013 for XBIZ, AVN and XRCO for his role in “Torn”. St. Croix is the first male star to be signed to an exclusive contract with a video company, the first male contract star for Vivid Video, and had his penis insured for $1 million dollars through Lloyd’s of London. In addition to starring in films for Vivid, Adam & Eve, Penthouse, Wicked, Cinemax, and Hustler, he’s also written and directed 20 adult films. He’s widely known for comedic and dramatic roles, including parts in Baywatch, Babylon 5, Diagnosis Murder, Six Feet Under, The Client List and Castle. His latest book is “Porn Star: Everything You Want to Know and Are Embarrassed to Ask.”

Sex Out Loud airs every Friday at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET on the VoiceAmerica Variety channel. You can listen on your computer, phone, or tablet, find all the ways here!

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Dec 052013
 

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Both AVN and XBIZ have announced their 2014 Award nominees. Tristan Taormino’s Smart Ass Productions has garnered seven adult film award nominations. The Expert Guide to Female Ejaculation, her final film as a contract director for Vivid, has been nominated for two AVN Awards: Best Squirting Release and Best Educational Release. It stars Jada Fire, Christian, Kaci Starr, Anthony Rosano, Dylan Ryan, Derrick Pierce, Kylie Worthy, and Mr. Marcus. The two films she directed for Adam & Eve — Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Kinky Sex for Couples and Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Bondage for Couples —  are nominated for the XBIZ Award for Best Educational Release. Plus, both those films were also nominated in a new category this year: the XBIZ Award for Feminist Porn Release of the Year. Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Kinky Sex for Couples features Asa Akira, Derrick Pierce, Adrianna Nicole, Evan Stone, Aiden Starr, Christian, Lyla Storm, and Danny Wylde. Adrianna Luna, James Deen, Skin Diamond, Derrick Pierce, Samantha Ryan, Michael Vegas, India Summer, and Danny Wylde star in Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Bondage for Couples. Tristan Taormino’s Guide to Bondage for Couples was also nominated for the AVN Award for Best Educational Release.

 

Oct 212013
 

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The fabulous students who work at the Pollock Theater at University of California-Santa Barbara created this video of the Feminist Porn Mini Con, which happened in May at UCSB. It features many contributors to The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, including UCSB professors Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young, Professor Kevin Heffernan of Southern Methodist University, directors Tristan Taormino and Carlos Batts, and performers Jiz Lee, Dylan Ryan, Sinnamon Love, and April Flores. Watch it now: Feminist Porn Mini Con on UCTV.

Sep 202013
 

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Tristan Taormino talks to Senior Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen about the recent HIV scare in the adult industry and her decision to go condom only. Check out the video piece here and the longer written article here.