Tag: porn

Everything from interviews with pornstars, to our “Ask a Pornstar” series, to the porn we love, to our attempts to get philisophical about porno

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Hanging with Kimberly Kane

OMG, Kimberly Kane in a Slutever T! Photo @ Driven By Boredom

I recently had the pleasure of hanging out with one of the hottest and coolest porn stars on the planet, Kimberly Kane. I’ve been a fan of Kimberly’s for a long time, but I really fell in love with her when I saw her on Chris Nieratko’s VICE series “Skinema”, because I realized that not only is she really good at sex, but she’s also extremely funny. Check it out:

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Fun fact about KK: that’s her crotch on the cover Taschen’s infamous Big Book of Pussy. Along with acting, Kimberly also directs porn, and she’s a photographer too. Actually, the reason she recently came over to my apartment was to take some sexy pics of me. Here’s a sneak peek…

…but you can see more on her photography Tumblr. During the shoot, KK and I had a casual girltalk about porn, cumming, and (of course) our moms. You can read some of our convo below. Enjoy!

Slutever: How long have you been working in the porn industry?
Kimberly Kane: This year marks a decade in the industry. It’s been a long time! I started when I was 19.

So I need your profesh advice. Should I act in porn, or no?
No, I don’t think so. Here’s the thing: it’s not a good time to start doing porn, because you’re not 18, so you know too much. I think you should keep practicing working as a Dominatrix. Also, you know people in the porn industry and have access to it, so you can make money just from being a porn insider. Also, there’s not a lot of good porn work in New York, and there’s not even a ton of work in LA anymore. It’s feast or famine. Although I might suggest doing clips-for-sale, because you can do that without even getting fully naked.

What’s clips-for-sale?
It’s basically Domming online, so you create 5 minute clips of different scenarios: cumming instruction, humiliation, foot fetish, etc., and then your slaves buy your clips. I do a lot of them on my website. It’s a good way to make money if you’re curious about doing porn, but you don’t want to go full gangbang :)

Thanks for the tip! So I know you are friends with Andrew Richardson, who publishes Richardson magazine. I love Richardson because it looks at sex and the porn industry in an analytical and academic way. Are you a fan?
Yeah, I really dig that dude, and he has a great vision for his magazine. Andrew is really into psychology, to the point where he’s constantly psychoanalyzing everyone around him, whether they want it or not. At first I was like, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?,” but when you spend more time with him you see that he’s really honest about his own problems, too. And what’s cool is that same energy comes across in his magazine–it’s like an investigation into the unconscious of the sex industry.

Totally.
Actually, in one issue of Richardson there was a photo spread by Leigh Ledare, whose photography I love. They printed a series he did of highly erotisized photographs of his mother.

Yeah, I love those. They’re so sexy, largely because they’re so “wrong.”
I met Leigh in real life, and he’s very soft spoken and adorable and shy. You just know that he’s a mama’s boy, ya know? I’m sure it might have been difficult watching his mom fuck his friends, but the result is incredible.

Yeah. And his mother is clearly very open-minded to want to be involved in creating those photographs.
My mom is very open minded and weird too, but I ended up hating her for it. I think at some point, despite how most children claim to want “cool” parents, what you really want is a parent. And if your parent is acting like your friend, or in his case, your fuck buddy, I think it can do weird things to you.

My mom is religious and (as far as I can tell) sexually conventional. She’s very loving and supportive, but also essentially pretends that my career as a “sex writer” doesn’t exist. What is your relationship with your parents like, in regard to your work?
With my dad it’s kind of a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ situation. And my mom, like I said, is open minded. She’s actually a stripper. But I found out through doing porn that my parents are pretty chill about a lot of things. Also, they’re not religious.

I had a similar convo with pornstar Bobbi Starr about parents recently, and she said that her parents are pretty OK with what she does too, even despite the fact that in the past random creeps from the internet have emailed her mother at work with photos of her being gangbanged.
Yeah, she has told me about that. But here’s the thing: Bobbi and I run our own shit, we direct, we’re in control of our careers, we don’t do drugs. If your daughter was in porn and was really messed-up, then you might have something to worry about. But I think our parents get it.

Also, the world of porn seems to be different now than it was in the 70s and 80s–the perception of the intelligent, feminist porn star has crossed over into the mainstream. I’m sure the original porno starlet archetype still exists, but I think people now understand that there are alternatives to that.
I totally agree!

So I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but do you ever actually cum during scenes?
I have a couple times. I know that a lot of girls do cum, and that their main goal is to orgasm because it makes them feel like they are giving a good scene, but I don’t feel that way. I cum in my bedroom with the person I’m dating. I tend to really separate my personal life from my work. I can compartmentalize, as my therapist would say :) But also, I don’t cum during sex in general, I have to use a toy. I love my Hitachi Wand!

Yeah, cumming during sex is hard. Penetration can be so distracting!
Yeah, I can only cum from using my Hitachi. What I like–and I realize this sounds very vanilla–is to be with a guy, and either just kiss him, or have him fuck me, but really slowly, no pounding–because, like you said, penetration is distracting–and then I use my wand at the same time, and then I cum.

Are you the relationship type, and do you believe in monogamy?
Yes and yes. I’m not promiscuous outside of work. I’m actually a serial monogamist.

So how does porn work, money-wise? Is it like most other careers, where you make more money the longer you have been in the business?
No, it’s the opposite, because new girls are in very high demand, because everyone wants to shoot them first, or have them do a certain sexual thing for the first time in their movie. So when you’re new you tend to work more. But lately the business is not what it used to be; there aren’t actually that many people working in mainstream porn. There are lots of people who do porn–amateur and whatnot–but as far as mainstream porn goes, there’s only a couple thousand people working on a daily basis and making a living out of it. Or maybe even less.

And lastly, what do you love most about working in porn?
I really enjoy the performance aspect of porn. Some of the best sex scenes to me can be poetry, and I think sexuality can be an art form. Sasha Grey always used to say that she was a performer, and I feel that way too. When I first got into porn, I thought, “This is amazing!”–I loved the lights and the cameras, I loved putting on a show, I felt safe, I was being recognized and getting awards, and I really felt part of a community. But I’ve also tried to learn as many life skills as possible while in the business, alongside all the fucking. Porn is where I learned about photography, and it inspired me to start taking my own photographs. And I learned how to direct and edit too. Some people get into porn and just fuck and that’s fine, but I want a retirement plan, and one that doesn’t involve being a prostitute, which is why I think it’s important to learn as much as possible.

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Erika Lust and the World of Indie Porn

Dear Sluts, if you’re not familiar with Erika Lust, you should be, because she’s one of the pioneers of modern feminist porn, duh. Erika is an erotic filmmaker, writer and producer. While in college she noticed the lack of women’s voices in the male-driven, mainstream porn industry, and set out to change things. She eventually set up her own company, Lust Films, and has been making extremely sexy indie pornos ever since.

Erika (who was born in Sweden and now lives in Barcelona) also founded the online movie theater, Lust Cinema, where she curates a selection of her favorite indie adult films. So basically she gathers together all the best new, aesthetically appealing, innovative porn movies and makes them available to stream or download from her site. And it’s all (obviously) very sex positive, creative, and female friendly. So basc if you’re bored of Redtube and are looking for something a bit more… well, alt, you should def check it out!

I found out about Erika when I saw her incredibly sexy and sensual feature film Cabaret Desire. (I now own it on DVD–one of just three videos in my movie collection, which also includes The Dreamers and Mean Girls.) I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Erika about the world of porn, which you can read below.

P.S. Because Erika is awesome and loves the readers of Slutever, if you follow THIS LINK you can sign up as a member of Lust Cinema with a 50% discount :)


Slutever: What inspired you to make erotica aimed at women?
Erika Lust: You can find the answer to that in your video DON’T FEEL BAD, for Purple magazine. Basically, I’m tired of the guy behind the camera deciding what is sexy, how to behave, and how to fuck! I want to see women deciding how porn will represent us. I want to see women being women—women like you and me, women with feelings, jobs and educations, women who are mothers, married, divorced, single, young and old, thin and curvy–all enjoying their sexuality. Because the expression of female sexuality is powerful, and maybe that bothers some men.

So despite the abundance of female porn stars, porn is still a very male dominated industry, right?
Totally. Our society has a tendency to dismiss porn as marginal and insignificant, and to believe that it doesn’t impinge on other areas of life. But it does. Porn isn’t just porn. It’s a discourse, a way of talking about sex. It’s a way of seeing and understanding masculinity and femininity. But this discourse and the theory behind it are almost 100% male, and often sexist as well. There are almost no women’s voices in the universe of porn, just as there were no women’s voices in the worlds of politics and big business until recently.

I believe that women have the right to enjoy adult films, and so I think we have to participate in the discourse. We have to be creators—screenwriters, producers and directors. The mainstream porn industry has its own fundamental, deeply rooted beliefs about female sexuality. Women have to step up and reevaluate those beliefs ourselves, because the industry certainly won’t do it for us.

What do you feel is lacking in mainstream adult entertainment?
Mainstream porn lacks class, passion, taste, humor, intelligence, beauty, sexual intelligence, and respect for women. As a matter of fact, I think that the right question would be, “What positive values does it provide for our society, if any?” They are just crappy filmmakers, and most of them have really poor sex lives.

screen grab taken from Lust Cinema

Two of my favorite porn sites at the moment are Kink.com and X-Art.com. Kink gets me off when I’m in a BDSM/bound gangbang mood, and I go to X-Art when I want to see people “making love” or whatever. Also, I know there are many sex-positive feminists working at Kink (including two of my faves, Bobbi Starr and Dylan Ryan, both of whom I interviewed on the VICE Slutever show). What are your thoughts on these sites?
They are both very different, but both have one thing in common: they are male oriented (made by men for men). Of course many women can enjoy them, I do not doubt that, but it’s just not my thing. But if I had to choose to go to a desert island with one, of course I would choose X-Art.

Are you familiar with Cindy Gallop, who I interviewed on Slutever last week? She started makelovenotporn.com and is now about to launch makelovenotporn.tv, which is a porn site which aims to depict real-world sex, so basically real couples having passionate, awkward, hot, funny sex. No professionals and no performances for the camera. The point is to teach the world that what happens in hardcore porn is not real life, and also to get people off in the process :)  What do you think of her, and do you think her porn site will be successful, or do you think people just want to see sensational, beautiful, “porno” sex when they masturbate?
Cindy and I are actually friends. When I went to New York last Spring, to show my movie Cabaret Desire in The Museum of Sex, she invited me to her crazy/amazing/sexy/all-black apartment–seriously, Google it! I love the woman and her ideas. Regarding the site, I hope people dare to make real sex videos and show them to the world, and if they achieve that objective, it will succeed.

What turns you on?
Many Tumblrs [for example: http://www.erikalust.com/tumblr-treats/ and   http://reveriesdenuit.tumblr.com and http://geekypornygirl.com/ ], my partner Pablo, red wine, champagne, my job! I’m a lucky girl!

Is there anyone working in the world of porn at the moment who you admire, or whose work you appreciate?
I admire certain performers like James Deen and Stoya, but not many directors. And I like what you are doing, I like fresh stuff like yours!

Thanks! What do your parents think about what you do, and how does it affect your work? I ask this because I’ve had issues with my parents, but they eventually agreed to stop reading Slutever, for the sake of our relationship (which was pretty cool of them, actually).
Well, my case is different than yours, in that I do not undress :) But yes, my parents were initially disappointed! They didn’t understand why, from all the professions in the world, I would choose to shoot explicit movies. They were expecting me to work for the UN, since I studied political science. But now they follow me on Twitter, FB and my blog, and all is OK. They are Swedish, which probably makes them more progressive than the average 65 year old American mom though…

Do you have a default thing that you think about when you masturbate?
When I find time, Alexander Skarsgård tends to be on my mind. And also some BDSM fantasies :)

What are your plans for the future?
I’m finishing an erotic novel that will be published in Spain in February 2013, and also preparing my new film, The Circle of Lust, to be released next September.

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Cindy Gallop: The Santa Claus of Good Sex

I recently interviewed the amazing Cindy Gallop who founded Make Love Not Porn! This originally appeared in Dazed mag. <3

Cindy Gallop wants you to have good sex, like, for real. In 2009 the New York City-based advertising executive gave a four-minute talk at a TED conference that became one of the event’s most talked about presentations. “I date younger men, predominantly men in their 20s,” was her opening line, and she went on to discuss the obvious influence of hardcore porn on the sex techniques of her young lovers. According to Gallop, internet porn has created a generation of young people who think that “what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.” Basically, in the absence of proper sex-ed, porn has become the default sex-educator.

Gallop used her TED talk to unveil makelovenotporn.com, a witty, non-judgmental website that compares sex in the “porn world” to that in the “real world”. For example: “Porn World: Women come all the time in positions where nothing is going anywhere near the clit. Real World: There has to be some sort of rhythmic pressure on the clit in just the right way to make a woman come. Can be pubic bone, tongue, fingers, something else entirely. But it has to be there.” Oh, how true Cindy!

The site became a worldwide phenomenon, leading Gallop to publish the book Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. Four years later, she’s now preparing to launch makelovenotporn.tv, a video-based social-media site that aims to revolutionize sexual entertainment by offering videos of real people having real sex. Say goodbye to smoke and mirrors and anal bleaching –this is the real deal!

The best thing about makelovenotporn.com is that it’s funny. It’s so much less awkward to talk about sex when there’s humour involved.
Cindy Gallop: Exactly. I wrote all the copy myself, and I deliberately made it lighthearted to defuse the embarrassment that exists around talking about sex. Also, when I was creating the site I said to my designer, ‘I don’t want the slightest whiff of education or public service about it,’ because that’s the kiss of death where kids are concerned. I said, ‘I want you to take your design cues from the world of hardcore porn.’

And were you surprised by the response?
The response has been so extraordinary. I’ve been receiving emails about the site literally every day for the past four years. They tend to go something like this: ‘I came across your TED talk, I went to your website, I shared them both with my girlfriend/boyfriend/lover, and off the back of that we had a great conversation, and now our sex life is so much better.’ Essentially, the site is working as an objective, outside platform that helps people have the conversations they need to have.

You’re like the Santa Claus of good sex! So can you explain your new venture, makelovenotporn.tv?
Well, the sheer amount of emails I received made me feel that I had a personal responsibility to take Make Love Not Porn forward, in a way that would make it more far-reaching and effective. One of my philosophies – born of my advertising background – is ‘communication through demonstration’. So I decided to take every dynamic that currently exists in social media, and apply them to the one area no other social platform has gone or will ever dare to go: sex. I want to socialise sex, and to make real-world sex socially acceptable, and therefore just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. So makelovenotporn.tv is a user-generated, crowdsourced platform on which anybody from anywhere in the world can submit videos of themselves having real-world sex.

And how do you define real-world sex?
Real-world sex is not performing for the camera; it’s funny, messy, human, and ridiculous. It’s the shit that really happens. For example, the total nightmare of putting the condom on. Guys are supposed to be able to do this like magic, but as we all know it often doesn’t happen like that, and sometimes things go soft, juices go dry and libidos get derailed. Or fanny farts – everyone does it, nothing to be ashamed of. Also, I find it so amusing when people talk about porn being “dirty”, because porn actually sanitises sex. In porn nobody has hair, you never actually see anybody using lube, or having sex on their period, when actually that’s when girls are the horniest! So we want categories like ‘period sex’ – bring it on, blood everywhere – no big deal, take the tampon out with your teeth.

So your site will show actual orgasms, not the fake, overdramatic screamed orgasms common in mainstream porn?
Totally. For example, our very first submission was from a young straight couple, and as I was watching it, no matter how hot what they were doing to each other was, I just could not stop looking at the girl’s face. And the reason was because she was loving it. She was so aroused that it became adorable. You never see faces like that in porn.

Will there be a fee for users?
We charge $5 per video for a three-week streaming rental. We also charge $5 to submit a video to the site, which is a curation fee, as my team and I will review all submissions. But then we revenue share – we give you, the contributor, 50% of the revenue that your makelovenotporn.TV video generates.

Whoa, so one can potentially make a lot of money.
Absolutely! In theory, your video could hit the YouTube holy grail of a million rentals, and at $5 a rental, the revenue is a nice amount of cash. That’s why we like to call ourselves ‘the Etsy of Sexy’.

Does makelovenotporn.tv have a primary ambition?
The message is pure and simple: talk about it. The issue I’m tackling is not porn, I’m tackling our society’s lack of an open, healthy dialogue around sex and porn. Because people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re actually having it with, because they’re terrified of hurting the other person’s feelings, or putting them off, or derailing the entire relationship. But at the same time, people really want to please their partners and make them happy, so they take cues on how to please from anywhere they can, and if the only cues people have are from porn, then those are the ones they take, to not very good effect.

And is it only men who are being misled by this sex-ed-through-porn trend?
Not at all. I talk to young men who say, ‘My girlfriend is putting on a performance in bed and it’s getting in the way of a real connection.’ One guy said, ‘I’ve been getting a lot of pornified blowjobs lately. I don’t know whether she’s really into me or if it’s what she thinks she should be doing.’ So it cuts both ways.

That makes sense.
And porn does a massive disservice for men, because it makes them think that sex is entirely dick-centric – it’s all about how big it is and how hard it is. For example, the other night I was with a 25-year-old, and for whatever reason he was having some trouble getting it up. I didn’t mind, but obviously he cared massively, and so as unfortunately often happens in these situations, the entire session became about his need to get it up and cum. And I was thinking, well, there’s actually a whole different way to approach us being in bed together, and it doesn’t have to be all about addressing your penis. Great sex is about the whole body. I deliberately spend time telling the men I sleep with how beautiful they are, and praising various parts of their bodies that aren’t their dick, and they’re stunned when I do this, because that’s not something they’ve even conceptualised. So for a lot of men, porn is causing unnecessary neuroses and insecurity.

Do you think people truly have difficulty understanding that porn is not an accurate representation of real sex? That it’s sensationalised for entertainment, just like regular films?
I had this conversation with some students in Oxford recently, because they were saying, ‘Come on, how could anybody think that porn is real? It’s like disaster movies or police chases.’ But here’s the difference: you can watch The Fast and the Furious, but everybody knows and talks about how to drive in real life. But with sex there’s no counterpoint, because we don’t talk about how sex operates in the real world. That’s why our tagline is ‘Pro-Sex, Pro-Porn, and Pro-Knowing-the-Difference’.

You have said you think makelovenotporn.tv could actually benefit the mainstream porn industry. How so?
Porn is a male-dominated industry. Now, the best of all possible worlds, in every sector, is one that is designed by men and women equally. I explain to guys that us girls like porn too – who doesn’t like to watch other people fucking?! – but often we have to watch porn that’s made for men. So I’m watching porn and trying to get off, but I can’t avoid processing it through the lens of female experience. I can’t help but think, ‘I know that hurts – if she keeps her leg up one more moment she’s going to get a cramp, I know she’s not actually coming,’ etc. But I want to see real-life sex, because I’m much more in tune emotionally with something I can relate to. The world of porn hasn’t even begun to experience what women can bring to the table. Make Love Not Porn is a venture founded by a woman, conceived by a woman, and built by a tech team that is more female than male. So that’s part of how we want to help the porn industry – by demonstrating that it’s possible to create a disruptive, innovative new business model, and to leverage human sexuality entertainment in a whole different way.