Ms Naughty Porn for Women Blog

Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category

So, since I’m being nostalgic, allow me to introduce you to this amazing timeline: the history of internet memes. It traces the rise and fall of the various web fads that have kept us amused over the years.

Remember Mr T Ate My Balls? Or Bert Is Evil? How about the Dancing Baby or the Hamster Dance or Numa Numa? Badger Badger Badger Badger! Bananaphone! Wharbargl!

And of course, anything is possible at Zombo.com (damn, that site still makes me giggle).

If I needed anything to prove that I’m getting on a bit, this site is probably it. There’s part of me thinking: how can you feel nostalgic about the internet? It’s this bright, shiny new thing where you can… oh… yeah. That’s right.

It’s now ten years since I bought my first domain name.

This means I’ve been creating erotica online for a whole decade – 2000 to 2010. When I started out I never imagined I’d be doing it for this long, nor that it would take me as far as it has.

In the last ten years I’ve seen the online adult industry evolve from single images on slow dial-up to a million free streaming movies. It’s gone from an initial startup phase, through a goldrush and into a major bust. It’s has moved from “tease” to full-on hardcore and seriously nasty stuff at every turn. It’s also seen numerous attempts to legislate it out of existence.

It all started for me in 1999 when I decided to write an article about online women’s porn. Conducting research, I went into the local library and started looking up porn sites on their internet terminal. You could get away with it back then. I found a whole bunch of gay sites and not much else – except for Purve.com, the first porn for women site.

I ended up chatting to the Australian woman who ran Purve and, after the article appeared in November 1999, she encouraged me to get into the business of adult webmastering. I set about learning the whole deal – what jpegs and gifs were, how to become an affiliate, how to make rudimentary websites. I went and bought Microsoft Front Page, despite howls of derision from my friends who all hand-coded. I didn’t care. It did the job.

The main aim was advertising. Put up a site with a few free photos, preferably small, under 20kb each and advertise paysites. Hopefully your average surfer would like what they saw and sign up for the good stuff. Back then, you could only get good quality pics and movies (occasionally) if you joined a paysite.

One of my first sites was Grandma Scrotum’s Sex Tips, originally hosted for free by a now defunct company (free hosting was the way to go in those days – bandwidth was really expensive. Unfortunately it made life difficult when the host went under and you had to keep moving your site all the time)

I also had a go at promoting mainstream porn for men but I wasn’t that interested. For me, porn for women was the main game. It presented a whole new “niche” that was being completely ignored by the “big guns” (still is).

I can still remember the day I got my first signup… and then my first cheque. The amount wasn’t huge but the thrill was substantial. I saw the potential to make some pocket money on the side while continuing to be a freelance journalist.

And then the signups kept rolling in, more each week. Suddenly it seemed I could make a living out of advertising porn. Which was cool. I tried selling books as well through Amazon but the commission of 5% could never match the 50-60% I could earn with smut. Especially since making sales was so easy.

I didn’t really tell many people what was going on. It was good for a laugh sometimes, seeing the surprised looks on their faces. Nobody expects me to be doing what I do, even today. They assume I’m some sort of serious, bookish type. Which I am, of course, with a mischievous, evil pornographer interior.

From 2000 to mid 2003 I continued to make sites advertising the five or six subscription sites that existed for straight women. (Playgirl wasn’t part of the equation; they were unable to use the Playgirl domain until 2006 thanks to a court ruling. Shady operators had used the domain for fraud. On top of that, the company seemed to dismiss the idea of the internet as a waste of time.)

I wasn’t alone in wanting to make porn for women. I was part of a small group of other female webmasters who wanted to market to females. Every day we’d chat about the subject on the Women’s Erotica Network message board, discussing what it was that women wanted to see and how best to appeal to chicks like us.

The rest of the adult webmastering sphere weren’t interested. We often had large online arguments where the guys happily pronounced: “women don’t buy porn, they’re not visual, selling to women is a waste of time.” Eventually we stopped arguing. Their loss.

The technology progressed, as did marketing techniques. In the beginning were webrings and picture posts. You could create a seriously ugly page and fill it with ads and make sales. Then came linklists, consisting of large collections of adult links, supported by advertising. Ms Naughty is one of those. The linklist rules about the structure of free sites became rather rigid, requiring a minimum number of photos and a restricted number of ads. Then we saw the emergence of Thumbnail Gallery Posts (TGPs), comprising of single pages of thumbnails rather than full sites.

More and more webmaster message boards sprang up. These became the primary place to network with others and advertise. The first online industry conventions occurred.

The main aim at that point was to get listed in Alta Vista. Number 1 on that search engine was a licence to print money. You’d also submit to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and about 100 others. The results varied wildly from search engine to search engine. You’d also hope to get listed in the DMOZ Open Directory Project. I think it might have been 2002 when we started to prefer this “Google” thing that seemed to always give better results. I liked it straight away because my sites did better in Google than Alta Vista or Yahoo.

Then, in 2003, our little group of porn for women marketers began to go our own way. I had a disagreement with the owner of Purve, as did fellow webmistress Jane. In the aftermath we decided to set up our own adult site for women, modelling it on Australian Women’s Forum. In June 2003, For The Girls was launched.

Almost immediately we hit a snag: our credit card processor collapsed in the first month and made off with our initial profit. Thankfully we were better off than some who lost thousands. In 2003 American Express had decided to pull out of CC processing and Visa had introduced strict rules and a “danger fee” for adult sites. Not long after that Paypal announced it would not process for adult either and subsequently froze the accounts of many people, confiscating their “sinful” cash. We saved FTG by getting an account with CCBill and carrying on. Thankfully, CCBill is one of the few surviving third-party processors; at least 3 others went under in that year.

2004 saw blogs become popular in the mainstream. I launched the Ms Naughty blog that year in a very simple format; Wordpress wasn’t really an option at that time. I upgraded it to WP in 2006.

In 2004 the Bush administration, with the help of Attorney General John Ashcroft, introduced major changes to the 18 U.S.C. § 2257A law which ostensibly exists to prevent minors from appearing in porn (models must prove they are over 18). The new ruling changed the definition of “secondary producer” of adult content, making adult webmasters liable for any adult image that appeared on their site, even if they had nothing to do with originally creating that image.

The law imposed incredbily onerous compliance rules and allowed the government to essentially raid your house without notice or a warrant to “check your records.” I saw plenty of successful smaller webmasters driven out of the business by this new law, fearful of its implications. In 2005 it all went to court… and stayed there, it seems. A 2007 ruling said it was unconstitutional while another upheld it.

The 2257 thing was yet another attempt to restrict the spread of online porn. The 1998 Child Online Protection Act tried it and was struck down. The Communications Decency Act also had a go at it. There’s also been numerous prosecutions for obscenity, the most notable being John Stagliano in 2008. Nothing ever seems to stick.

Meanwhile, I just kept writing erotic fiction and searching out female-friendly pics and movies for For The Girls and my other sites. We held an annual fiction competition from 2005 to 2008 with much success.

Video On Demand sites had begun to be popular by about 2005, although AEBN had been offering their service since 2000. They began to challenge the old subscription-based paysite model in the second half of the decade.

In 2006 I remember going on to one of the adult webmaster boards and asking my peers: “What do you think of this Youtube thing? Should I embed this code on my page or will it break my site?” At the time I didn’t see that Youtube would become the future of porn. I don’t think many of us did. Yet it felt like only days before flash video was everywhere and porn tube sites sprung up like mushrooms, many offering full-length movies for free. Of course, it hasn’t ended well.

2007 and 2008 saw the Russians and the cheaters move into traditional webmastering in a big way, much to the frustration of the rest of us. A huge influx of new webmasters began catering to a dwindling number of surfers. Free porn was everywhere. The gold rush was over.

In the last two years I’ve seen an awful lot of old-timers sell up and leave the business, frustrated at constantly having to fight cheaters, liars, content thieves and scammers, seeing major companies beginning to rely on dodgy billing practices to keep themselves in profit. In the meantime the audience has come to expect that porn should always be free.

At the same time, I’ve seen the rise and rise of alternative, sex positive and feminist porn. In 2006 Good For Her started the Feminist Porn Awards and they’re due to have their fourth event in April. Early dyke porn pioneers CyberDyke have been joined by Shine Louise Houston and her Crash Pad films and site. Courtney Trouble’s No Fauxxx continues to cut across genre boundaries by offering all kinds of different erotica, gay, lesbian, straight and genderqueer. The original alt porn site Suicide Girls has had its share of trouble but other alt sites have stepped in to fill the gap. Meanwhile, the lovely Tasty Trixie has built her own adult empire, being in this business longer than me.

I’ve seen at least six porn for women paysites go out of business… which is always a pain in the arse because I have to take down ads. In 2010 there aren’t many subscription sites actively targeting straight women as their main audience; I’m proud to say that For The Girls is still going strong after nearly 7 years in the game.

Way back at the start of 2000 , when the new Milennium and the Sydney Olympics made everyone feel shiny and peaceful, I had no idea that I’d be sitting here in 2010, getting wrinkly and hunched and thick around the middle, still making a living from online porn. The internet has been very good to me; it’s provided an opportunity to become my own boss and to create a virtual magazine that publishes the quality work of many excellent writers. It has let me carve out a space where I can promote a healthy and positive version of erotica and given me a small voice for women amid a rising tide of sometimes horrible male-oriented porn.

And it’s let me do all this while wearing pyjama bottoms and daggy old t-shirts.

Will I still be doing this ten years from now? I don’t know. I can’t even think ten weeks ahead at this stage. But I don’t feel the urge to give up any time soon. I’ve still got about 20 domains waiting for me to develop them. And a feature film to make. And an internet filter to fight.

And who knows what kind of technology we’ll have in 2020? Perhaps all those promises of “virtual reality sex” will actually come true. Either that or the internet will have become so controlled and censored by world governments that online porn has become a distant memory.

I do know that we’re going to have to start re-negotiating the concept of paying for porn. The expectation that everything will be free is creating problems. As I wrote in this post, the audience can’t expect producers to keep making porn if it results in a loss. Especially if those producers are trying to break the mould and offer something positive and different. It will all grind to a halt eventually, and I don’t want to see that. I want to see change; it’s what I wanted from the moment I started in 2000. We need better, more positive porn and the way to make it happen is for the audience to get behind those people who are trying to create change.

It’s gonna be an interesting decade, I suspect.

I’m finally back after another extended break away from the internet. It really is very good for me to go offline and experience the “real world” every now and again. I had a wonderful festive break with my family including much vicarious fun with my nephew and nieces. I’m not going to have kids of my own but I do love playing with my small relatives.

It’s midsummer here so my Christmas and New Year involved long days filled with heat, swimming, good food and white wine. The pic above is of the beach where we went fishing a few days ago.

And now I’m back at work, trying to unscramble my alcohol-addled brain and face the challenges of a new year. 2010 will see me doing even more travelling and I suspect I’ll be spending several months in the US making my planned film and building my small porn empire. And if the internet filter gets the go ahead, maybe I’ll have to stay there.

In any case, here’s to a happy and successful 2010.

Scanning in old photos a few weeks ago I came across the pics we took at the Sydney performance of Annie Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernist in 1996. Annie positively insisted that the audience took photos of the show so these blurry images are the result of our participation. I’ve also still got one of the rice-filled shakers we used to create a wall of sound during Annie’s orgasmic meditation.

This show was like a first step into a wider world for me. I’d had my interest in sex and sexuality stirred by the then-risque pages of Australian Women’s Forum mag but beyond a few furtive visits to a sex shop, I was still pretty naive.

And then Annie Sprinkle came to town amid much fanfare and negative press. I don’t think I paid much attention until the day the police paid her a visit. Suddenly it became imperative that uniformed officers determine if “obscene” acts were being performed in the Belvoir Theatre, something that couldn’t be allowed to go on if drinks were being served.

The libertine in me was galvanised. I booked two tickets to the show, partly to say “fuck you” to conservative censors who would tell me what I could and could not see.

Once I was in the theatre, I found myself feeling rather nervous. What was I in for? Was this really my kind of thing?

And then Annie appeared in all her positive, cheerful, bewigged glory and related the fascinating tale of a life lived to its fullest. She made us laugh and she made us share in the sad times. She also made us squirm. I can still remember my shock at hearing the story of a customer who enjoyed anal fisting: “I’d reach up and around and tickle his heart,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. I think that’s the first time I’d even heard of fisting, let alone the anal kind.

In the interval she invited audience members to come down and have a photo taken with her boobs on their head – for $15 of course. I was too shy and I still regret not doing it. The above photos show that we enjoyed it vicariously.

And then she performed her amazing breath orgasm which was just a stunning thing to watch (I actually tried it a year later with mixed success). It was a mind-expanding experience, to be in the same room as a woman who could achieve orgasm through breathing and mind power alone. I was just so impressed and Annie has been a heroine for me ever since.

Indeed, she showed me that sex can be a positive and feminist experience and that one can make a living out of prostitution or porn or sexually-based art without having to be all those negative things that society insists a woman should be. In a way, Annie’s Post Porn Modernist put me on the path that I’m still walking today: a feminist pornographer out to change the world.

I dug up my old Sydney Morning Herald and Age data CDs to see if I could find the news reports of Annie’s visit here. They’re so out of date they don’t work on Windows Vista but I did salvage some articles after much mucking around. Here’s a sample of some of the media from Annie’s 1996 visit.

Sprinkle’s tour into realm of the censors
By Mark Ray

IN a city accustomed to sordid revelations at the Wood Royal Commission on corruption within the New South Wales police force, New York-based performance artist Annie Sprinkle seemed an odd target for a burst of censorship fervor.

Sprinkle, a former US prostitute and star of 200 pornographic movies, has just finished a sell-out week-long season of her show ‘Post Porn Modernist’ at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, despite threatened police action against the theatre. The show opens at the Athenaeum in Melbourne on Tuesday for a two-week season.

During the week, the Belvoir Street Theatre was told its liquor licence might be revoked because of Sprinkle’s explicit one-woman show. There are no longer any censorship laws in NSW but police action against the show was threatened by recourse to provisions of the Liquor Licensing Act.

By Friday that threat had been abandoned – apparently after the Minister for Police suggested to his commissioner that the moves against Sprinkle were inappropriate.

‘Post Porn Modernist’ is certainly explicit, but the atmosphere at one performance here this week seemed unlike that of a sleazy porn show.

An audience of apparently unremarkable suburbanites, dedicated fans and the curious broad-minded staged no walkouts, made no complaints but responded with much laughter…

WHAT I LIKED ABOUT ANNIE.
SHANNON HALBERT, 26, high-voltage linesman.
“It was bizarre. Much more spiritual than I expected. I thought it’d be the life and times of a porno queen but it’s a decent show.”
AMANDA GARLAND, 29, film producer.
“I didn’t know what to expect but it was nice to see sexuality brought out so openly and presented so positively.”
ROBERT SKAPPEL, 50, interior decorator.
“I liked the fact that she included spirituality into her sexual experience. I’m all for that message.”
DIANA COXSHEAD, 35, naturopath and pharmacist.
“She seemed most comfortable in the last part of the program, going into the spiritual, tantric side.”

- The Age, 31st March 1996

Annie’s Happy Ritual
By Jim Schembri
…The reaction to the show has been strictly divided, Sprinkle says. “I’ve had the best audiences in Australia and the worst press. The audiences have been the most appreciative of anywhere I’ve been in the world and the press has been the most vicious.

“I’ve been misquoted here in Australia more than I’ve ever been. I wouldn’t say (the coverage has been) the most conservative, (but) I would say (it’s been) the most misinformed, the most taken out of context, the most uneducated. And very judgmental, extremely judgmental.”

Sprinkle says she’d never bring Post-Porn Modernist back to Australia because of the stress of bad press, but will bring her new show MetamorphoSex here. “I would have to think hard if I’d want to bring something back that has that potential to be controversial. The bad press inspires a lot of hatred.

I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
- The Age, 4th April 1996

In deep water with Annie
By Emma Tom

NOT LONG into the all-nude Annie Sprinkle bath-house interview, I wish to inform Houston that we have a problem.

Note-taking in a ginseng bath is turning out to be almost as difficult as the well-documented “where the hell do I put my wallet?” nudist nightclub dilemma.

Plus, for some weird reason, the unclothed subject matter is not proving conducive to family newspaper photographs. No matter how low we sink in the spa or how strategically placed the sauna towels, there’s always a stray nipple or three vying for camera attention.

This is Annie Sprinkle, live performance sextress and former porn film starlet, after all. Asking her to keep her money- makers out of the camera would be like asking Eva Cox for a lap dance. Just wouldn’t seem right…

- The Age, 29 March 1996

Reading through some of the other pieces I’m somewhat depressed that Australian society hasn’t progressed in the 13 years since Annie’s visit. A 1996 article called “Have We No Shame?” used Annie’s public cervix announcement as an excuse to bewail the alleged decline of society’s morals. You could easily reproduce the piece in today’s papers and the conservatives would happily nod along. The visit by the police was reproduced during the Henson art gallery censorship incident in 2008. Seems that Australia’s attitude to sex is still very furtive and juvenile.

Annie hasn’t come back and I don’t blame her. Looks like I’ll have to make the effort to go to the US and seek her out. Maybe then I can finally get that photo of her boobs on my head.

I’ve long been musing about the whole issue of copyright, downloading and paying for entertainment/artistic content. It’s now the end of the Noughties and, as we speak, film studios, media companies and distributors are becoming increasingly hysterical about the effects of the internet, in particular the piracy that occurs through torrents and illegal downloads. The British government is mulling over a bill that would see people losing access to the internet if they are caught downloading copyrighted material, as are other Western governments.

Meanwhile plenty of people are advocating changes to copyright law that acknowledges the current situation: that millions of people download music, movies and TV shows every day without paying for them and that you can’t criminalise the whole world.

If everyone is downloading, does the law even apply anymore?

When it comes to porn, the internet is awash with free adult material. If you wish you can visit a torrent site and download any feature-length porn film you can name, helpfully uploaded by some unnamed masturbator. Or you can visit one of the plethora of free tube sites that feature porn video clips, many of them illegally ripped from membership sites. Beyond that there are millions of small galleries and free sites offering an abundance of porn, all for free.

Part of the reason for all this free porn is the promotional model that first emerged in the late 90s: give people some free photos and advertise at the same time. If the surfer is interested in the samples they will hopefully buy a membership to see more explicit pics.

Unfortunately the “sample” model turned into the “here’s the whole shebang” model and suddenly people didn’t need to pay money to see the hardcore stuff because it was absolutely everywhere and freely available.

The end result of all this free porn on the internet is the decline of the mainstream porn industry. As we speak some of the major adult companies are struggling to stay afloat. Porn stars are getting less work and they’re being paid less because the money is no longer there.

Too bad, I hear you say. It’s time the rich media companies stopped ripping us all off.

This is the usual thing I hear in defence of downloading, especially with regards to Hollywood movies and major record companies. The big wigs have had control of the business for too long, they’ve starved out competitors and encouraged crap product at the expense of good artists. The model is stale and cynical and is not giving us what we want. So who cares if they lose money, they’ve got heaps of it anyway. And it’s time things changed.

And I kind of agree, in a way. The distributors and the executives and the parasites need to be scraped away from the creation of good art. It’s time we cut out the middle man and found a better way for artists to get their product out there.

But here’s my problem. Amid all this “Robin Hood” downloading I’m also seeing plenty of theft that is hurting smaller producers. I’m talking about the filmmakers, actors, writers and artists who don’t have a big company behind them. They’re creating self-produced porn with their own money, putting a lot of time, effort and love into making something they think is worthwhile. It can take years for a single film to be made involving vast amounts of work, often without pay, to see a vision realised. And then there’s the endless wrangling with distributors and gatekeepers, trying to get the movie out to the audience.

And what happens then? Some asshole rips it and puts it on a torrent.

Too bad, goes the argument. They should just be happy that people are watching their film in the first place. Art shouldn’t come with a price tag, right?

This seems a delightfully lofty ideal and it’s one that we all might aspire to. Unfortunately, here in the real world, things don’t work that way. We live in a capitalist society where people need to work to make money to live. If you choose to pursue filmmaking rather than, say, an office job, you choose to live on the breadline. Sure, you could try and do both but it’s a great deal harder to come up with good art.

So firstly, if we accept that people deserve money for effort then demanding that they offer that effort for free is not fair.

Secondly, if someone puts time and money into a film and it doesn’t pay the bills (or the loan) because people refuse to buy then they are highly unlikely to make a second film. And if their first film is really good then there’s no chance to further enjoy that person’s unique perspective.

Making good porn requires money. Sure, anyone can grab their camcorder and film themselves fucking in a dimly lit room. That’s amateur porn and yes, it has plenty of fans. But if you want porn that has decent lighting, sound, sets, camerawork, costumes and actors, you need to start forking out the cash to make that happen. Even simple low-budget stuff can’t be done properly unless you have money. I know this, I’ve done it.

And if you want to go a step further and create porn that breaks the mould, that tries new ideas, that explores weird fantasies or breaks taboos AND is ethically made, you definitely need money. That’s just how it works. The simple ethical idea of treating performers with respect means you have to pay them properly. And that takes money.

Someone asked where they could find feminist porn for free. The answer is, you won’t find a lot of the new wave of independent feminist porn without paying for it. And nor should you. The people who are forging a new path in the porn industry, creating female-friendly erotica with feminist/humanist ethics and high aesthetic value are all doing it without the support of any major players. We’re all small-time in the broad scheme of things.

So many of the filmmakers I met in Berlin are struggling, trying to get their work out there while being ignored by the mainstream porn industry that refuses to believe that women even like porn. They’re self-publishing and distributing, working their butts off trying to get their product out into the marketplace. They may be offering samples of their work, but nobody can afford to just give the whole thing away.

I’m speaking here as a porn producer and artist but I should point out that I’m also a consumer. A few years ago I did my share of downloading on a file sharing site – and I will still do it occasionally when it’s apparent I can’t find and pay for what I want through standard channels (and this I understand is one of the reason many people do download – so many media companies still haven’t “got it” with regards to the internet). But I did make an ethical choice to stop downloading indiscriminately because I felt that what I was doing was ultimately not fair to the artists.

And this is what I want to advocate in this long and rather painful post. We as surfers need to put the brakes on and start to adopt some ethics when it comes to downloading. If we want to see copyright laws loosened then we damn well need to take some responsibility on our end.

Here are my suggestions for the ethical consumption of online media:

If a movie or song is by an independent artist, make an effort to find their website and buy it directly off them. You will undoubtedly get it cheaper, possibly personalised and you know they’re getting compensation for their hard work that made you happy.

If you’ve already downloaded something and you really like it, make an effort to buy the official version. Or if it’s not in buyable form, make a donation.

If you like something, recommend it to your friends.

If a movie/song/website is making an effort to cater to you and is offering high quality stuff that you can’t normally get elsewhere, pay for it. You are paying for ethics and quality, in much the same way you pay more for free range eggs.

Don’t assume that everything should be free or begrudge having to pay. It’s not fair to the artist and will ultimately result in less content being created.

Things are still a jumbled mess when it comes to copyright and the world of entertainment feels like it’s on the cusp of a huge change. Everything is going to be delivered digitally in the future and the big media companies can see themselves being squeezed out. I’m not going to mourn them. It’s going to be great when every individual artist is able to make a living by communicating directly with their audience.

BUT

The online audience has to come to the party. If we want the brave new world that is the internet then it can’t all be free.

* The above pic is a screenshot from Grahame Linehan’s hilarious spoof of that annoying anti-piracy ad in the IT Crowd. Mr Linehan is a vocal advocate for loosening copyright laws and not prosecuting people for file sharing. He’s also hilarious.

I’ve just come back from my 2 yearly pap smear appointment and thought I’d make a too-much-information post about it. I’m feeling like someone’s attacked my insides with a blender – and this despite the fact that the doctor is a really good and caring GP. Why is this procedure so horribly awful? Surely there’s some other way we can test for cervical cancer other than spreading your legs for a stranger and letting them scrape away at your bits with a miniature toilet brush?

I found myself doing the “keep yourself nice” routine – having a thorough shower and shaving my legs, putting on some makeup. This from a furry princess who is often found wearing pyjamas all day. Why do we do this? Perhaps it’s to feel a little bit more comfortable and in control during what is, essentially, an unpleasant experience when we often feel exposed and helpless.

And then I had a smile about the old urban myth of a woman turning up for her pap smear with glittery nether regions.

Apparently Joan Rivers’ method for making pap smears better was to “learn to throw your voice.”

I did laugh at the little sign in the surgery: “I won’t panic, cry or scream. I’m the doctor.”

I also had to resist becoming a geek and talking about this shot film on Youtube when one of the interns knocked on the door as I’m lying there behind the curtain with legs akimbo.

Yes folks, it’s my birthday. I’m another year older and there’s a few more wrinkles. This year I found a great list of reasons to feel good about getting older:

1. It sure as hell beats the alternative.
2. I can still touch my toes.
3. Any occasion that encourages cake and gifts is a good occasion.
4. When I see a light at the end of a tunnel, I don’t automatically assume it’s a train.
5. Getting to bed by 10 p.m. is a blessing – not an embarassment.
6. To steal from a great country song…I’m old enough to know better, but still too young to care.
7. From here on out, I won’t care when people forget my birthday.
8. I’m not wearing reading glasses yet.
9. I’ve learned that No is not a four-letter word.
10. The longer you live, the smarter you get.
11. Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional.
12. If you keep your heart unwrinkled, you won’t need a wrinkle-free face to make a great impression.

I’m not 36. I’m 21 with 15 years of experience and I’m now fully twice as good as I was at 18!

More on this site.

20 years ago today, I first kissed my husband. Yes, it’s kind of obsessive that I remember the date, but it’s one occasion I’ve always thought worth remembering. I was 15 at the time… and pretty new to kissing too. And damn, if it wasn’t a lovely bit of smooching.

It wasn’t love at first kiss, though. The whole thing was a false start. It took us six months to get together, during which time we actually got to know each other well as friends rather than as a potential couple. Turned out for the best in the end.

But damn… there’s a milestone in my life. And 20 years ago. Phew! Hand me my wrinkle cream.

I’ve had bad food poisoning for a couple of days thanks to a dodgy batch of salmon. Hence the lack of blogging lately.

Naturally this leads me to quote this scene from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

“But I didn’t even eat the mousse!”

Oooh, I’m excited At last, Alabama 3 are in Australia and I’m off to see them tonight. You might only know them from the Sopranos theme but these guys are one of my all time favourite bands. We went to see them live in Wales in 2005 and they rocked.

I don’t usually do music recommendations, but once you hear Exhile on Coldharbour Lane you’ll be hooked too. Sweet pretty mutherfuckin country acid house music, all night long.

It’s nearly here. My cousin’s lesbian wedding (ooh, sorry, commitment ceremony) is this Saturday. Which means I’m going to be off with the bridesmaid fairies for a little over a week. I’m going to organise some advance blog posts to keep you entertained, but don’t expect anything pithy.

And thus, these shoes. My god. Aren’t they beautiful and terrible? These are the shoes I am wearing as a bridesmaid at the lesbian wedding. Remember that thing about how lesbians were supposed to wear sensible shoes? Forget it.

I’m very, very worried about these shoes. I really like the look of them, but if you read this blog regularly you know that me and high heels get along about as well President Obama and Ann Coulter. And in this metaphor, I get to be Obama and the shoes are Coulter: kind of svelte but also tight, pinchy and seriously unstable.

And this is an outdoor wedding. Beside a lake. I, with my big, square hobbit feet, am being asked to somehow balance myself on 4 inch heels across grass and mud, and look fabulous at the same time.

I will do it of course. This wedding is just so important. It’s a statement of love and acceptance. And it’s an occasion when my extended family will get together and party and prove that all our differences can be overcome through shared experience and ongoing affection.

Wish me luck.

Wasting time on Youtube the other day I encountered an old episode of Batman – the 1960s camp version starring Adam West. Before long I was gleefully surfing through various snippets from the old series and feeling like a kid again.

In the same way that Star Wars was really about Princess Leia, Batman was really a series about Catwoman. And later, Batgirl. Preferably both. I used to hungrily watch each episode hoping to see Julie Newmar in that incredibly sexy black outfit. I wanted to be Catwoman. It didn’t matter that she was the bad guy. She was hot and she kicked butt.

Better than that, she and Batman had that sexual tension thing going on. They were desperate to get into each other’s spandex. One was always tying the other to a chair. Thus, my childhood memories of Batman are tinged with a hint of awakening sexual fantasy. And oh, if only Batman and Catwoman could kiss!

Holy sexual frustration Batman!

I liked Eartha Kitt’s version of Catwoman, but I think I’ll always prefer Julie Newmar.

I have yet to see a single modern Batman movie. Not even the Dark Knight. No yellow utility belts? No sparkly purple costumes? Meh.

The pics are from these Youtube clips that I couldn’t embed:
Catwoman and Batman love affair
Batgirl bound and gagged by Catwoman

The Sun is practically exploding with excited bold print in this article (and I use the term loosely) about a survey into porn viewing habits.

They’ve found that 66% of women watch porn. Well, duh. This is compared to 88% of men, out of a survey of 1000 Sun readers. I must admit, the 66% figure is a lot higher than all the other surveys I’ve seen on this topic, but maybe it makes a difference that readers chose to fill in the survey and that they are in the demographic of “people who actually read The Sun newspaper.”

The age demographics suggest that younger women are more likely to enjoy porn, but not that much more than women aged 26 and older.

65% of women said they’d watched porn with their partner or husband with a third of those saying they used it for foreplay.

I’ve just had a mad 5 days attending a film festival, learning a whole lot, making new friends and watching some seriously inspiring movies. It’s also got my creative juices working again.

And this film about Procrastination was one of my favourites, because it sums up what I’ve been doing lately. NOT ENOUGH.

Procrastination is messing about on Facebook.
Procrastination is reading everyone’s posts on Twitter
Procrastination is buggerising about on Youtube
Procrastination is aimlessly wandering around the web with Stumbleupon
Procrastination is reading the Sydney Morning Herald
Procrastination is playing spider, endlessly
Procrastination is watching Oprah
Procrastination is looking for Asterix books on eBay
Procrastination is writing to-do lists without actually doing anything on the list
Procrastination is drinking wine on weeknights
Procrastination is joining Script Frenzy and then not coming up with a single idea
It’s having dozens of ideas and not following through on any of them
Procrastination is owning a bunch of domain names and not getting around to using them
It’s owning Celtx and YWriter and still not really knowing how to start (or how to use the software)

Procrastination is watching videos about procrastination
It’s blogging about the video, and making my own list of individual distractions
It’s putting off changing my life til tomorrow because I’m too tired today

Procrastination is putting off the inevitable.

Procrastination is making a cup of tea.

Procrastination is stopping me from writing a novel. From writing a screenplay. From making a film. From creating more websites. Procrastination is sucking my creativity, wasting my time, slowly eking away the precious seconds of my life.

The procrastination has to stop. Now.

So it’s Monday, the start of a new week and the rest of my life.

Thought I’d better put up a sexy photo post, it’s been a long time between sexiness on this blog, what with all the depression and censorship and stuff. This photo set can be found at For The Girls, of course.

Amid all this frustration and doom and gloom, this photo reminds me why I make porn – I want to see pleasure, joy, intimacy, playfulness and love in the world! I want couples to enjoy sex together, I want women to embrace their sexuality, to explore their sexual possibilities and enhance their relationships. I want chicks to love their bodies and to get off!

I’m not about corrupting anybody, or spreading hatred, or exploiting anybody. I want to make porn better, more ethical and inclusive and realistic and wonderful. I want to make sex better through the use of good, positive porn.

And I want adults to be able to access that porn as they see fit, without interference from anybody else. Personal responsibility, private decisions, individual morality.

Wake up! Porn can and should be wonderful!