Tag: S&M

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The World’s Sexiest Dungeons

NYC15511Photo by Susan Meiselas

Ever wondered what a real, professional BDSM dungeon looks like? Well, from personal experience, I can say that some are very elegant and ornate, while others are far trashier, and tend to be located in unassuming office buildings in gross areas of midtown, on a floor just above, like, a pottery class, and just below an insurance company. Random.

Generally, what most professional, “for-hire” dungeons offer is a selection of rooms, each decorated to create a different mood, and to cater to the differing tastes and fetishes of their Dommes and clients. Often, each room has a theme, for instance: medical room, boudoir, chamber, prison, “red room,” mortuary, classroom, or simply your classic bondage dungeon. Each room will generally have a variety of BDSM furniture to suit the theme, for instance: cages, spanking benches, morgue tables, bondage beds, thrones, isolation rooms, dentist chairs, mummification benches, suspension frames, etc. Dungeons will often have pro-Dommes working on site, and some allow independent Dommes to hire out rooms for sessions. I recently went into an internet black hole researching some of the world’s most glamorous dungeons. Below is a selection of images of some of my favorites. Enjoy!

1. A dungeon in Astoria, Queens (NYC), that shares a building with a dance academy for young girls–something that doesn’t make their parents very happy, weirdly.

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2. A dungeon-for-rent in Logan Square, Chicago:

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3. This is dungeon is of unknown location–it’s kind of sterile, but it’s funny that at first glance it sort of just looks like a gym:

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4. This uber chic dungeon is in LA, and owned by Mistress Justine Cross:

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5. This super cute dungeon was created by some freak on Second Life. Wish it was real!

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6. Be tortured in style in this fetish bed and breakfast in London:

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7. Below is a photo of a bondage room in the love hotel, Hotel Adonis, in Osaka, Japan. Sadly, it no longer exists.

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8. And I saved the best for last. Below are photos taken inside the original Pandora’s Box in NYC, one of the most infamous BDSM dungeons in the world. All photos are by Susan Meiselas, taken in the 90s. A couple weeks ago I posted the amazing documentary Fetishes, by Nick Broomfield, which was filmed inside this dungeon. If you like the below photos, and haven’t watched Fetishes yet, I highly recommend it!

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X-Mas Gifts for Nymphos

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Christmas colors are generally red and white. But why is that, when the combination of red and white creates an even better color–pink! This year, get your loved one of the gift of Pink Christmas, the scent! LOL. For some reason SSION (aka the incredible musician, artist and director) has made a holiday perfume. Below is the very creepy ad for it, which features me and Samantha Urbani. If you want to smell like a pink version of X-Mas, you can buy the scent at Vfiles. Oh, and the new band Slink (a combo of SSION, Samantha Urbani and Hunx and his Punx) just released a holiday song, also called Pink Christmas. You can listen to it HERE :)

Or, if you want to get your loved one a gift on the kinkier side, I have the perfect idea for you! Below, watch me unwrap the ultimate gift for the modern, bi-curious, sexually adventurous nymphomaniac <3 (p.s. watch more of Vogue‘s unboxing videos here! )

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Jamie Bell: Talking Sadism and Growing Up

Long time readers of this blog may remember my previous years of obsession with the actor Jamie Bell, which begun after I first saw Hallam Foe, in which he plays an emotionally unstable, cross-dressing late-teen who becomes sexually obsessed with a woman who looks like his mother (aka my ideal man). My obsession eventually faded (for the most part), but then peaked again after seeing him with a whip in his hand in Nymphomanic. As a result, I was definitely too excited when I recently got the chance to interview him IRL for the cover of Rollacoaster mag. You now can read the article below:

To say that British actor Jamie Bell has range would be an understatement. Since launching his career in 2000 with his Bafta-winning performance in Billy Elliot, Bell has had an incredibly dynamic career–he’s worked with big gun directors like Steven Spielberg (The Adventures of Tintin) and Peter Jackson (King Kong), while maintaining his indie cred with films like last year’s Filth (based on the Irvine Welsh novel), in which he played a cocaine-fuelled rookie cop. Earlier this year, he could be seen giving Charlotte Gainsbourg’s bottom 40 lashes (and then some) as a sadist-for-hire in Lars Von Trier’s sex epic Nymphomaniac. More recently, Bell made the jump to TV, playing the lead in Turn, a new American drama about a farmer leading a team of secret agents during the Revolutionary War. And he’ll soon add “superhero” to his diverse list of characters, with the forthcoming film The Fantastic Four. And to top if all off, Bell recently had his first child–a baby boy with his actress wife, Evan Rachel Wood. I recently met up with Bell in his home of Los Angeles to talk about S&M, the internet, and becoming a full-fledged adult. 

A few years ago, would you have imagined yourself staring in a Revolutionary War TV drama?

JB: I probably wouldn’t have doubted it. I always find myself in period pieces, which is weird, because I don’t even particularly like period pieces. But when I look back at the stuff I’ve done, I’m usually in a different century.

KS: “Turn” shoots in Virginia, and you brought your family out to live with you during filming. How was that?

JB: I was very grateful that my family were with me, for sure, but it was also difficult at times–you know, you’re shooting like 17-hour days, almost every day, and then you go home and you’ve got the family to take care of. It’s a magical, incredible juggling act, the three roles: father, husband, actor. It was the first time I did it.

KS: So when you have a kid, do you suddenly start asking yourself questions like: Do I want to be “cool dad,” “strict dad,” or “artistic dad”? Do I give my kid a baseball bat or a guitar?

JB:  It’s strange–my son is only eight months old, but I’m already having thoughts like, ‘I want him to be like this,’ and ‘I don’t want him to be like that.’ But I think when you become a parent you suddenly realize that every parent did the best they could. You stop judging your own parents so harshly, and you accept that you’re going to make some mistakes–it’s inevitable–and you just hope the mistakes aren’t big ones. And beyond that, love is the most important thing. I would never tell my kid he couldn’t do something, or couldn’t act a certain way.

KS: Right, as a liberal person, it seems obvious that you would be accepting of whatever your child’s chosen lifestyle may be. Like I would never care if my kid was gay, or dressed weird or whatever. But then I’m like… wait, what if my kid is a homophobic jock? I would not be OK with that.

JB: Right, but I feel like if your kid is homophobic then there’s clearly something or someone influencing those feelings. Like if my son was homophobic I’d have to step back and evaluate myself, like ‘Fuck, when and where did something go wrong?’ Ya know? If he was a jock I guess that would just be his personality, and I’d accept that. Although I’d admittedly think it was kind of odd, having been raised by my wife and I. But that stuff happens–we rebel. You’re raised a certain way and you want to push back against it–sometimes the rebellion is just to piss your parents off, but sometimes it’s because you’re genuinely interested in something different, or because you see flaws in the values of the people who raised you. I think pushing against authority is a good thing. Although I personally never really had that whole ‘Fuck you, Dad’ mentality.

KS: Speaking of rebellious behaviour, you’re amazing in Nymphomaniac. You play K, a “Dom” who’s hired by masochistic women looking to be physically abused. There’s no backstory to your character, so part of the intrigue is wondering ‘Who is this person and how did he end up doing these deviant things?’ So in playing that character, did you create those answers in your head?

JB: Not particularly, actually. The idea was for my character to be a bit unexpected: I’m sort of the last person you’d imagine to be doing what K does. The only thing I was really thinking about during those scenes was, ‘What happens if I fell in love with one of these women?’ Like what happens if K starts to feel sympathy? But other than that, the abuse was just something he did–it was his version of playing squash on the weekend. And he was really good at doing it.

KS: But not everyone could do what K does–I think most people would have moral or philosophical issues with physically harming other people, even if they wanted it.

JB: Right, but I think there’s a disconnect. I don’t even think he gets sexual arousal or excitement from it. I think he maybe didn’t understand why these women wanted him to do it but he had the clientele, so he just did it. It’s like a performance almost–you’re being someone else for a while. You’re providing the fantasy.

KS: Before Nymphomaniac were you familiar with the S&M world at all, or did you do research?

JB: I did research which included watching a lot of pornography. Also, a friend of mine owns a sex shop and I just spent a lot of time there, but that was about it. I’m not incredibly well-versed in it, but of course I think it’s fascinating–anything to do with sexual expression, or sexual repression, is very fascinating. And I think Lars Von Trier is making a commentary on that.

KS: You explored somewhat similarly “deviant” ground in 2008’s Hallam Foe, about a teenage voyeur whose obsession with his dead mother verges on the sexual.

JB: Yeah, it’s about sex being incredibly ambiguous. Hallam Foe is like, “I don’t get it”–sex is connected to being born, it’s connected to your mum, and that’s not so sexy… but then it also kind of is, weirdly. It’s a Freudian problem. Sex is a very odd thing. It’s intriguing, and it’s something that everybody fucking does, but it also shuts a lot of people down. Sex is a scandal. 

KS: The fact that sex is still so scandalous is so strange. Like the huge media scandal now of the Duke University pornstar–she was outed for acting in porn and now she can’t be on campus, where she was studying law, because she’s getting so many death threats. Everyone watches porn, but being in porn is a crime worthy of death, or at least public disgrace.

JB: But I wonder if it was a man who was doing porn and wanted to be a lawyer—I wonder if he would be kicked off campus. I feel like a big part of that scandal is the lingering double standard. For women it’s “If you’re a porno actress then you’re a whore, and if you’re a whore then you shouldn’t be a lawyer.” But if it was a guy it would be like, “You shouldn’t be doing that but… secret high five?” For women, sex usually has some moral consequence, but it’s different for men, which is wrong. My wife’s very uppity about it as well. And rightly so.

KS: A couple years ago I was in a serious relationship with a guy who was also a writer, and if felt impossible to avoid a competition between us. Do you and your wife ever feel that competition?

JB: Yeah, we do, honestly. Like, “Oh, you got that job?” But you’re supportive because of course you want the other person to do well. And I think a healthy measure of competition is a good thing, because it means you’re pushing the other person to achieve and do great work. It’s not so much competing as always  wanting to do better. I was raised with competition from a young age, because I begin dancing competitively when I was six–it was always win, win, win, win.

KS: So I know you’re 28, and so am I. I guess it’s slightly different because I’m not married and don’t have a kid yet, and that sort of fast-tracks you into adulthood, however these past couple years—27, 28— have felt very different for me. You can’t use the crutch of youth as an excuse for stuff anymore.

JB: Oh, so true. And especially when you have a kid you can’t. I used to manage to get away with so much shit, like not responding to emails, misbehaving, or not doing my job properly. And sometimes I still think I can get away with it, but then my manager will be like ‘What the fuck you doing? You’re not like 13 anymore.’ That behavior no longer seems “cute”–now it just looks bad. 

KS: Yeah. And also, when you accomplish something big at the age of 25–like writing a book or making a movie or whatever–it seems really impressive, like you’re special. But when you’re 28 it’s expected that you should be doing great things.

JB: Right, and then there’s people like Tavi Gevinson… fucking hell, what’s going on there? The younger generation is so much more entrepreneurial than we were. Like ‘I recorded an album; I have my own magazine.’ It’s like, you’re fucking 12! Whereas our generation—well, I can only really speak for myself, but I wasn’t like that. When I hear about these kids who achieve so much so quickly, it kind of blows my mind. 

KS: But what’s different is that teenagers now had the internet–like the full-fledged, information boom, social media version of the internet–from when they were in single digits, whereas we were already in college when that happened. When Tavi was 8 she had access to the history of everything that was ever cool or influential at her fingertips–the fashion of every subculture, the music of every underground band, every decade’s most important films..

JB: Yeah, technology is a huge part of it, but I also think we now live in a world where “dreams are possible.” Maybe it’s something to do with reality shows, or the phenomenon of internet celebrities, but today there’s just the sense that if you want to do or make something, you can do it by yourself. You don’t even need to go anywhere–you don’t need to move to LA and get an agent, or be signed by a record label, you can just put something on YouTube and if it’s good someone will find you.

KS: True… although I suddenly feel self-conscious that this conversation is making us seem really old. Like, ‘There’s this thing called the internet that makes dreams come true!”

JB: “All these kids out there… using YouTube!” It’s sad.

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An Intimidating Interior

Photo by Helmut Newton

I ask the dominatrix if she ever brings the men she dates back to her apartment. “Here? Oh god, no,” she says. “I mean, just look at the place. I couldn’t. Any man in his right mind would run screaming.”

The dominatrix, Mistress Dee, stands with her back arched in a pair of PVC heels, thigh high stockings and a black latex mini dress. Pretty standard attire. She’s petite with giant boobs (real), black curls and skin so white it looks painted on. Dee’s not even 30 but she’s been in the business for almost a decade. 
I’ve spent countless hours here in her apartment–a spacious one-bedroom in Manhattan’s financial district, the decor of which has been very carefully curated, to what some might consider an intimidating degree.

The first thing one notices when entering the Mistress’s apartment is that the walls of the main living area are lined with metal meat hooks, like the interior of an abattoir. The centerpiece of the room is a large black cabinet–about 7ft tall by 5ft wide–with a glass front, where Dee keeps most of her equipment and/or torture tools. There’s one shelf for dildos (there’s a good 30 or 40 of them in there, all shapes, sizes and colors, including one 16 inch black dildo that looks capable of damage I’m reluctant to even imagine), one shelf for gags, one for masks (my fave is the pink latex balaclava with matching nurse’s cap), one for whips, and so on. Opposite the cabinet, against the far wall, where most people would place a couch, or perhaps a TV, sits an authentic, stainless steel autopsy table. “A dominatrix friend of mine bought that at some sort of ‘morgue going out of business’ sale,” Dee explains, “but she ended up giving it to me because it was creeping out her roommates.” She pauses, thoughtful. “It really comes in handy… ya know, autopsy fetish, zombie roll play, and–my personal favorite–necrophilia fetish.” From the ceiling hangs a chandelier of illuminated glass butt plugs. It really is quite beautiful. In the summer, when the window’s open, a breeze causes the dangling butt plugs to clink together, making a really pleasant chiming sound.



When I arrived here earlier this afternoon, as I walked up the stairwell of the building, I was comforted by the familiar smell of freshly baked bread, drifting up from the bakery below. Dee opened her apartment door just slightly and peeked out, like she always does. I walked in to find a short Indian man crouched on all fours in the center of the living area, staring back at me.



“Don’t look at her,” Dee scolded him firmly. “Did I say you could look at her?” The man dropped his head down at the floor. “I just shit all over that guy,” she said, then began to giggle, flipped her hair and told him, “OK, you can leave now,” and the man obediently crawled out the door.



A few moments later Dee was in her bathroom, wiping the remnants of her session off the black and white tiled floor. “This,” she said, “is the not-so-glamorous part of the job.”



I ask her again why she doesn’t invite dates over. “Because they walk in and immediately think I’m going to rape and dismember them,” she says flatly. “It’s probably my apartment’s fault that I’m single. I love how all this stuff looks—fetish is clearly 80% aesthetics anyway—but it’s really threatening to guys who aren’t in the scene. And the only guys in the scene I meet are submissive guys. And I couldn’t date a sub. I mean… they’re fucked up, right? Not that I’m judgmental. I just mean that, let’s be honest, there is something slightly wrong with all of them.”



“But there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, unsure of whether I’m asking a question or making a statement.



“Us?… No,” she says with a confident shake of the head.

I originally wrote this for Apartamento Magazine
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Richardson Radio

Me and Andrew Richardson <3

Richardson mag, everyone’s favorite/the only academic sex magazine, now has its own radio show on know-wave radio, yay! As you can imagine, the show is very smart and sexy, with lots of dirty sex talking, paired with some intellectual rants, inspired ideas, and the occasional segment of great/dark/holy music. I was very honored to be asked as a guest on the show a couple of times over the past month, (as you may already know from my tweets about it). All of the Richardson radio segments are now available for streaming on the Richardson mag site. They’re each two hours long and hosted by the mag’s editor and publisher, the amazing Andrew Richardson. The two episodes that feature me are:

Richardson Radio episode 1: Where I interview Mr. Richardson about the genesis of his sex magazine, and we talk about a whole bunch of other wonderful things like death, porn and tantric sex. Other guests on this episode include Dev “Blood Orange” Hynes, Alexandra Marzella and Carly Mark. 

Richardson Radio episode 3: Featuring an interview with Cindy Gallop, the founder of Make Love Not Porn, as well as an interview with porn superstar Belladonna. Also, we all get into a pretty deep convo about feminism, porn and sex education. Other guests on this episode include Alexandra Marzella and Carly Mark. 

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Bad Girls Do It Well: A Chat With Porn Icon Tori Black

I recently interviewed pornstar Tori Black for the cover of Richardson magazine. I conducted the interview alongside another hero of mine, the cult artist and pornographer Bruce LaBruce. For the cover and accompanying spread, Tori was shot by the legendary Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki–all in all, a really good crowd! You can read the article below. I can honestly say, I think this is the most extreme interview I’ve done thus far. You will soon see why. (Also, you should check out Richardson’s newly launched clothing line. Photos on their site.)

Ladies and gentlemen, hailing from Seattle Washington, measuring five feet eight inches tall, weighing in at 125 pounds, two-time AVN Starlet of the year and mother of two, Richardson is proud to present the most beautiful girl in porn, Ms. Tori Black. Read about her emergence from the insanity of home life, her chaotic early days in the adult entertainment industry, and the true story of her coke-induced face-off with death at the hands of a human trafficker. And so, without further ado, here’s Tori…

Tori: I spent a lot of my youth fighting. When I was in high school I beat a girl with a baseball bat. She thought I fucked her boyfriend, but I didn’t even know who she was. I was like, “Who are you, who’s your boyfriend?” Then she stabbed me. So I put a baseball bat into her cheekbone and it imploded. Her eye almost popped out of her head. She went to the hospital and had to have plastic surgery. Afterwards she had scars all over her face; it was bad.

Karley: Did she stab you badly?

T: No, I didn’t even have stitches. But still, I’ve never forgiven myself for that; she was a kid, and she was stupid—you don’t go around stabbing people—but my part in it was totally unacceptable.

K: Maybe you’d like to tell us a little bit about you were like growing up.

T: Well, I think I must’ve been about twelve years old when I started experimenting with drugs. I was never addicted to any one drug or another, but I was addicted to getting high, to getting outside my body, outside my mind. Eventually my mom said, “Enough. I’m done with this.” My grandparents happen to be filthy rich, and so I got shipped off to boot camp. After boot camp, they recommended I go straight to boarding school, but my mom decided that I should be homeschooled instead, that way I could come home, but I wouldn’t have any contact with my old friends. So we moved about three-hours away from my old home. I was totally isolated. I was in the house by myself all day, everyday, while everybody else went to work and school.

K: So you weren’t actually being schooled at all?  

T: No, I had internet school. But unless you love to learn, at age sixteen you’re not going to sit by yourself and study. So I started sneaking out and getting into a lot of trouble because I was failing school again. I ended up moving in with my grandparents back near where I used to live. All my old friends were around, so it was back to getting high and everything else, until my grandparents kicked me out. I went to live with my dad for about a day and then he kicked me out too. So then I was homeless, living with friends, going from couch to couch. I was on top of the world. I was dropping acid, taking literally any pill I could get my hands on, crunching, snorting, having sex with people I would’ve never had sex with. Eventually my parents sent me away to boarding school.

Bruce: You mentioned that it wasn’t a typical boarding school…

T: It was called Mission Mountain. It’s shut down now. It was a school for gifted girls with behavior problems. I was stuck with twenty-five psycho girls in the middle-of-nowhere, Montana. The school was for the crazy of the crazy, but also the smart of the smart, and when you put crazy and smart together, it’s not a good combination: the things they come up with, to do to each other, to do to themselves. It was like living in some weird horror movie.

K: Sounds like a good movie.

T: It was like a cult. They trained you as if you were going to live in the middle of nowhere for the rest of your life, as if the only people you were ever going to be around would be soldiers hand-selected from their therapy game. I felt like I’d been brainwashed. When I finally got out and went to college—and when I say college, I mean a 12,000-student university—I felt like an alien.

B: It was during college that you got into porn?

T: In college I was partying a lot, and essentially I found myself right back where I started before I went to boarding school. I wasn’t going to any of my classes because I couldn’t pay attention to anything. My mind was reeling; I’d become an insomniac. The only thing I was doing was going to keggers. I’d never felt crazier in my life than in that moment—trying to assess myself, the world around me, trying to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to do, who I was, what I was doing, what was right, what was wrong. I immediately started looking for a way out. I said, “You know what? I love to dance. I’m going to be a go-go dancer.” Then I saw an ad for porn: “Do you want to make $20,000 a month?” A week later I flew to Florida. Talk about flying by the seat of your pants. My whole life has kind of been like that.

B: Could you tell us how you came up with your name, Tori Black?

T: Well, to be honest, I was wasted one night in college and still trying to figure out if porn was what I wanted to do. I asked my friends, “Ok, if I was a porn star, what would my name be?” Of course I’m hanging out with black guys, of course, of course… and they say, “Your name should be Tori.” And I’m like, “Tori? Why?” And they’re like, “Because Tori’s a hot white girl name.”

K: Like Tori Spelling?

T: So I’m laughing and drinking, and I asked, “What’s my last name going to be?” From out of the back room, somebody who must’ve been eavesdropping screamed, “Black!” I died laughing. Even though I hang out with a lot of black guys, I’m not a “hood,” as some people would say, you know what I mean? I don’t talk with that kind of vocabulary, I don’t dress the same way; I listen to similar music, but I’m not trying to be black. Of course I’m not. So it was a sort of a big inside joke to call me Tori Black.

B: You’re known for working with a lot of black performers. Was that a deliberate career decision, or something that just happened?

T: Well, when I first started in the industry, they had me fill out this checklist of what I would and wouldn’t do: Do you do boy/girl? Do you do girl/girl? Do you do solo? Do you do interracial? When I reached the interracial box, I thought, there are a lot of different races out there, so if I don’t check this, does that mean I’ll only work with white people? So of course I checked the box. Then my agent said, “You don’t want to do that so soon or you’ll ruin your career.” I was dumbfounded: “I’m going to ruin my career? What the hell do you mean?” It just made me laugh; you’re sitting there jerking off to porn, but at the same time, you’re going to tell me I’m somehow immoral or unacceptable because I’m fucking a black guy?

B: But do you think starting your career with interracial porn had an effect, one way or another?

T: Yes. I started advocating for it. When I talked to new girls entering the business I told them not to listen to their agents because the whole thing is just ridiculous. If you look at some of the greats in the industry—Belladonna, Jenna Haze, ummm… not Jenna Jameson, she’s not a good example for a million reasons—but if you look at a lot of the big names, they all started their careers doing anal, interracial, everything. Jenna Haze’s first scene was anal and they told her she was going to ruin her career. Obviously that didn’t happen. Jenna’s retired now and people are still demanding more. So I think the reason people say I’m known for interracial porn is not because I did it anymore than any one else, but because I’ve been so outspoken about the taboo—about how stupid it is.

K: You described to me some kind of abduction by a coke dealer. Would you talk a little about that? It sounded extraordinary.

T: Well, I started doing porn in Miami. And what do you find in Miami except cocaine? I was doing coke all the time. I felt just like Scarface—like I was impervious, just completely bulletproof. After a couple months, I moved to L.A. to do porn and live in a model house. One of the other girls and I went to a party, and I was introduced to this coke dealer, an older black guy. He was like, “I don’t want to talk about your work because I think you’re better than that.” And me being me, I’m like, “Oh! What a perfect gentleman!” So one night, my girlfriend and I went over to his house. We ended up staying until four or something in the morning. My girlfriend had to work the next day, so she said, “Hey let’s go home now, I gotta get some sleep.” And I said, “I don’t have to work for another five days, what are you talking about? I’m not ready to go.” And then she left. But I never left. Well I did, but not for a while.

B: Was there a moment, after your friend left, when you suddenly realized that this was no longer fun?

T: Yeah. At some point I think I said, “Okay, I’m ready to go back now, it’s eight o’clock in the morning and I’m tired.” And the guy said, “No, you’re going to stay here for a while longer.” At first I started laughing. I was like, “Yeah, okay, whatever. You want to keep me forever?” But he wasn’t laughing. And so I said, “No. I’m really ready to go home now; I need to relax and shower.” That’s when he said: “You can shower here.” As soon as he said that—“you can shower here”—I knew something was wrong.

K: What happened?

I was trapped in a basement for five days. They took away my phone and my shoes.

There was a lot of beating and a lot of raping. I wouldn’t say it was just about sex; it was more about domination. At one point they had to tie me down because I was fighting so hard. I don’t even know how many guys came and went. They watched me in shifts. Someone would go sleep, and then someone else would come and force me to do drugs. They kept me awake for days. They didn’t want me to sober up because then I might’ve figured out how to get out of there. When you’re high out of your mind, you’re not thinking very clearly.

K: Did you fear for you life?

Yeah. One time they took me to this one guy’s house, and this guy was a celebrity. He didn’t rape me or anything, but I was looking at him the whole time, thinking, Oh my god this is a celebrity. What if he’s involved? If he’s involved, then they must have a lot of power. Who else do they know? You know?

K: Didn’t your friend wonder where you were, since you didn’t come back for five days?

T: Well she did show up, along with my ex-boyfriend. But the guy holding me hostage pulled out guns—he had so many guns—and all of his friends were hiding in the trees. It was late at night and you couldn’t see where they were hiding, but they were all pointing guns at my ex’s car. So when I came out into the street, I said, “No, no, no. I’m good. I’m having a good time, guys. I don’t know why you’re here, everything’s fine.” I’ve got bruises all over my face, my lips are bleeding, and of course my ex is looking at me like, “I know you’re not okay.”

K: Did they call the police?

T: They did after they left. When the cops showed up at the house, they said they were looking for a Michelle—“Is there a Michelle here?” And I said, “No, I don’t know who Michelle is. My name is Tori.”

K: You didn’t take the chance to escape?

T: I was so high. And I was terrified. They warned me, “You’re high out of your mind. Do you think they’re going to believe anything you say right now?” I don’t know how many different kinds of drugs I had in my system—crank, meth, whatever they were making me snort. I’d been up for days. I had no concept of where I was or what was going on. All I knew was that if I told the police and it didn’t work out, I was probably going to get killed.

K: How did you finally escape?

T: Eventually they decided to take me to San Francisco and told me that I needed to go collect my shit. I told them that I didn’t know where my “shit” was, that I’d been staying in a model house and needed to call my agent to see what happened to it. They agreed to let me call him, but said that he had to be on speakerphone and that if I said anything they were going to fuck me up. So when I called my agent and told him I needed to pick up my stuff, he said, “It’s in garbage bags. We’ve given your room to somebody else. If this is the way you’re going to behave, we can’t represent you.” So the guy brought me to my agent’s office to get my stuff; he brought along his dog too. My agent is very anal, very British; he said, “What’s that dog doing in my office?” The guy said, “This is California. It’s a dog friendly state. I can bring my dog wherever I want.” Then they started bickering about stupid shit. Eventually my agent said, “If you don’t get your dog out my office, I’m going to call the cops.” The guy was a felon, and so as soon as my agent called the cops, the guy just bolted. He didn’t have enough time to grab me. He said he was going to go to the bathroom and then he snuck out the back.

K: Did you explain to your agent what had happened?

T: Yes. But I was still very high. My whole body was shaking, my eyes were bloodshot, and I had bruises and cuts all over me.  Of course he didn’t believe me. He was looking at me like, “You’re out of your mind, you’re a crack head. You would say anything at this moment because you have jack shit.” And I said, “You’re right. He stole my credit cards, he took my money; I don’t have anything.”  And he was like, “Well, that’s your fault. I didn’t tell you to go to this guy’s house.” My agent showed no mercy in that moment. He just told me, “The doors are closing—get out.” So there I was, standing on the street with my garbage bags and a broken-ass cellphone. I called my ex to come and pick me up. We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks by this point, but he let me move in with him.

B: Did they ever catch “the guy”?

T: Well, he started calling me and harassing me, and so I took all these voicemails to the police. They brought him in for questioning, but ended up having to release him because they didn’t have enough evidence. They found my blood in his apartment, but that wasn’t enough. “How do we know it wasn’t voluntary?” they asked. “How do we know it wasn’t just a nosebleed from all the cocaine you were doing?” The police told me that the only way to charge him with kidnapping and rape would be for me to get him to confess. There was no rape kit, and I’d admitted to having been high, so my testimony was already on shaky ground.

B: Did you think he was running a prostitution ring?

T: I think so. I found out later that he was wanted in New York for pimping and pandering. But at the time I was so naïve. I came from vanilla middle of nowhere where things like that don’t happen. I’d never seen things like that. Anyhow, he ended up getting arrested years later for something else. Now he’s in jail.

B: I’ve heard similar stories about the fashion industry. You have all these young girls, living in model houses; they’re cut off, they’re naïve, and some of them end up as prostitutes.

T: Now more than ever. And porn stars especially. I mean, if you look at the trend right now, Kevin Durant just mentioned me in his rap song. I don’t know if you know who he is—Kevin Durant’s a basketball player. The only reason I know who he is is because my fiancé loves basketball.

K: Kevin Durant from the Oklahoma Thunder…

T: Yes!

K: …is rapping?

T: Yes. About me!

B: Wow.

T: Lots of well-known people out there have propositioned me. I need to say that Kevin Durant has never approached me; the only reason I mention his name is because he put me out there in a song. Anyhow, I’m not going to say who’s out there looking for me, but there are people literally hunting me.

B: Athletes or…

T: Athletes, celebrities, entertainers…

B: They’re offering you money for sex?

T: Yes. I’ve been offered trips on private jets. I’ve been offered everything from $50,000 to $100,000.

B: You turned them all down?

T: Yup. Because I know that as soon as they can buy it, as soon as it’s for sale, then they own me, then I become obtainable, and that’s something I never want to be.

K: Do many porn stars make that transition to prostitution after their careers are finished?

T: No, no, no. Porn stars are prostitutes. I’d venture to say that eighty-five, ninety percent use porn as an advertisement for their hooking careers.

B: But it sounds like porn was never about that for you—never about the sex per se.

T: It had more to do with power. Like I could steal your soul out of your eyes. It was like: I want to be perfect in your eyes, to capture you, to control you, to make you do things you would never otherwise do. That was my high—my orgasm. I wanted to seduce everybody in the room. I wanted the sound guy, I wanted the lighting guy, I wanted the camera man, I wanted all my fans, even my agent, I even wanted my agent to wish he could goddamn experience me. I wanted that power, not to make them have sex with me, but I wanted everyone in the room to be in love with me, to become completely engulfed in this perfect creature I’d created called Tori Black.

B:  Looking back on it now, why do think you ended up in porn?

T: I think it must’ve come from a lot of different places. It’s not like one day something happens and then the next you decide to become a porn star. It takes a certain kind of person to enter this industry. Even being confident about my sexuality, I would say that for me, having been abused from a very young age, that it completely changed my view of my body. I remember when my dad got drunk he had this weird thing where he would tell all his friends how pretty I was, how I was single, and that they should hit on me. Of course, all his friends were his age, and I was thirteen or fourteen.

K. Did you parents abuse you?

T: No. I was sexually abused by people outside my family. It started at age four actually, I think. What happens is that the abuse makes you look at yourself as a vehicle for someone else’s pleasure. Literally just that—a car. If you use that as a metaphor, somebody will go, “Look at that car in the window. I want that car.” They might spend a lot of money to get that car, but they’re going to take care of it the way they want to take care of it, not necessarily the way you need to be taken care of. In order to cope, I think I just decided that I was here for somebody else’s pleasure, that I existed to be whatever they wanted, to become their fantasy—the car they saw in the window.

B: Did porn allow you to regain some control over that?

T: That was part of it. It was more like: Fuck that. This is your life. You’re going to do what you want. You’re going to fuck how you want to fuck, and you’re going to do it in front of the whole world. I don’t give a shit how much you hate me. I don’t give a shit how low you think I am. This is me. This is my life.

B: I’m sure that there are a lot of women in porn who were abused as children. What’s interesting is how you manage that, how someone responds to that history of abuse.

T: Well, I think there are three ways that people go. Either they become asexual, completely cutting off their sexuality, or they go the opposite direction, becoming hypersexual, which is what happened to me, especially during my high school years. Other people find some sort of inner peace with the matter. But you’re always going to be affected; there’s no way getting around that. You know, when I was in boot camp, there was a fifteen-year-old boy who’d been involved with a gang. As part of the initiation, he’d raped a girl. At the time he’d thought it was okay; but, as the weeks went by, he’d see her around school and it ate him alive. Just talking about it, he could barely get the words out; his whole body shook, tears started streaming down his face. I was thirteen-years old, and I’d just been raped by somebody at my school, somebody who I knew and saw all the time, and sitting there with this guy who’d been through something similar, I had this moment, this epiphany: Oh my god, you’re a person too. It took some of my anger away. But I wanted to be angry; I wanted to hate him. I wanted to hate all of them so much for what they did to me. Even to this day, there are moments when I’m making love to my fiancé, and I’ll have a flashback, and there’s nothing I can do except to say, “Ummm, can you hang on for just a minute.” And then I just have to burst into tears. The only thing you can do is take care of that hurt inside of you. When I have these feelings, these flashbacks, I can’t hold them in. If I try to hold them in, that’s when I know I’m starting to abuse myself all over again, that’s when I’m thinking: he doesn’t want to see me cry; he’s enjoying himself right now and I don’t want to ruin this for him.

K: You’re pregnant with your second child now. How has having had children affected your career?

T: It’s really hard. For example, when I went to the AVN [Adult Video News] awards, I’d just found out that I was pregnant. I was sitting there signing autographs, listening to my fans say, “Oh my God Tori! I love the way you sucked this dick,” or, “Oh my God, you take cock in the ass so great,” and all the while I was saying to myself, “These Spanx are really tight; I really just want to let my belly out.” If I’m feeling pregnant, it’s hard to get myself into Tori Black mode.

K: You’re about to turn your back on hardcore porn. What’s next?

Well, being pregnant and doing porn—I won’t do that. But I can do solo work for the next four or five years and make triple the money I made taking two cocks at the same time. It’s a matter of being smart about it—smarter instead of harder. I’ve reached a point in my career where people in mainstream entertainment are approaching me and saying, “I want to do a reality show, I want to do this, I want to do that.” Of course there are still options for me in the adult industry, but I’m not going back to hardcore. If I want to do hardcore again in the future, that door is always going to be open. But am I ready to do that right now? Obviously not—I’m having a baby. It’s family time right now.

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Cum Tomorrow: Gyno Landscape!

If you’re in New York, you should come to this exhibition opening in tomorrow eve! It’s an all-female show, curated by the amazing Petra Collins and featuring artists like Sandy Kim, Coco Young, Jeanette Hayes Alice Lancaster, Jaimie Warren and more! Also I’m doing a live performance! (LOL) I don’t want to give too much about it away, but I’ll say that someone is def going to be getting whipped. Also, Petra and I are (or at least I think we are, anyway…) premiering a new short film we made for Purple mag. Cum one, cum all! <3

 

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Talking Domination on Gunwash

A few days ago, I was a guest on Gunwash, a trippy radio show that records from the radio station in Roberta’s restaurant in Brooklyn. (I didn’t even know there was a radio station inside Roberta’s??? Fascinating.) The topic of conversation was “Dominatrixes”–what a Domme does, what subs want, etc.–and there was also a lot of talk about the host Aaron’s own personal relationship problems. Lol. It wasn’t the most erudite conversation of all time, given that everyone in the room except me was high on weed brownies, but there were definitely some interesting moments, specifically when Aaron was being spanked by the riding crop of dominatrix Mona St. Claire.

You can download or stream the radio show HERE. Fyi, I join about 20 minutes in.