Unlike what you might expect from a blond porn star turned author, Nina's
book is not the literary equivalent of a bag of Doritos (tasty, mildly spicy,
no nutritional value). Rather, it's honest, thoughtful, direct, and jam-packed
with useful tips. She articulately describes her life as a porn star in an
unlikely way: as a personal journey of sexual experimentation, self-discovery,
and acceptance. She refers to it as fieldwork, and one gets the sense that it's
just that: she doesn't just fuck, she pays attention when she fucks, she's 100
percent there—and she's taking notes. She has translated those notes from her
remarkable career into a handbook for sexual empowerment. One could assume that
so much fucking has made her bored and tired of all things erotic, but it's
quite the opposite. She's perpetually enthusiastic to talk about her vocation:
ask her a question, and she'll give you more than a mouthful of an answer:
"I want people to understand the importance of developing sexual agency.
To understand our own sexual nature and to accept it wholly so that we can
express it in a healthy manner. To learn that any one of us can, at any time,
choose to become sexually sane, and that it's incumbent upon us, as adults, to
do so."
Nina wrote the book with her husband, I.S. Levine, known in the adult
industry as Ernest Greene, executive editor of
Taboo magazine and a porn veteran himself. He's directed as many
movies as Nina has performed in, and they have collaborated on 17 of her how-to
videos. Ernest has been in the BDSM community for 30 years, and Nina publicly
came out about her kinkiness when she began dating him more than six years ago.
As she embraced a new identity, her sex-ed series reflected the change and she
began covering BDSM topics like spanking, bondage, and dominance and
submission.
With no sign of retiring, the couple recently worked together on O: The
Power of Submission (othepowerofsubmission.com),
a retelling of the BDSM classic novel The Story of O; Ernest wrote and
directed, Nina performed and narrated. It made its big-screen debut in New York
in October as part of CineKink (cinekink.com),
the BDSM film festival, where it won the Best Narrative Feature Award; it was
also recently nominated for several Adult Video News Awards.
They are both incredibly passionate about O, a slick and sexy film
set in contemporary Los Angeles that features lavish production values, intense
power dynamics, and real female orgasms. Ask them about the casting process,
and the concept of authenticity—a major theme in Nina's book—takes center
stage. "I deliberately chose performers with some BDSM exposure in their
personal lives," says Ernest. "That helped me create the kind of
realistic, behind-the-scenes view of the BDSM world that I had wanted to see in
the original work and found missing. In my movie, kinky people have highly
individual characters as I find them to in real life."
In their real life, the duo is slated to produce at least six new
instructional videos (two confirmed topics: how to strip for your lover and
tips for bi-curious women), and they welcome the challenge to add to the
library. When asked about what their favorites are, they both rave about Nina
Hartley's Guide to Female Ejaculation: "We got a performer who had
never [ejaculated] before to take a book and a toy home and practice. She
actually had her first ejaculation on-screen," gushes Nina. Adds Ernest,
"It's sensational because it's so real." In the masturbation video, a
couple of experienced performers were told that they could do anything but have
intercourse to get themselves and each other off. "It was a moment of
authentic discovery," says Ernest. "They realized how much fun that
could really be, and it was pretty terrific."
In between shooting the new videos, there are book-tour stops and university
lectures around the country for Nina. With a degree in nursing, she hints that
soon she may be spending a lot more time in academia—this time, as a student
pursuing an advanced degree. "I want to take my educational aspirations to
the next level," she says. For her, as life continues, so does the
learning. Nina and Ernest acknowledge that sex ed has changed a lot since Nina
first starting producing her instructional videos. "I think younger
audiences in particular bring a much more sophisticated background to their
self-education through video and are interested in a much wider variety of
options," says Ernest. "[Sex ed] is getting more press as people
realize that sexual health connects to all other aspects of health," says
Nina. "We can never know too much about sex and especially about our own
individual sexuality."
Deliberate
Orgasm Duet