Nina Hartley

That I’m not in touch with all of my emotions. Whereas the thing about Buddhism is that to feel any of your emotions you have to feel all of them. You can’t feel just the good ones.

Yeah. My parents live in a Zen temple in San Francisco.

The Zen background didn’t affect my career choice at all. When I was 10 they discovered Zazen. When I was 13 my mom retired from her job and they became full-time Zen students. My initial conditioning had already taken root; I had issues with codependence and having narcissistic parents who were very wrapped up in their own suffering. What I love about my parents is that they had no bad intentions.

But suffering makes you very short sighted and inner focused. Throughout the ‘60s they’d been doing other kinds of therapy — marriage counseling, biofeedback, body energetics. They got into mescaline, tai chi, naked tai chi… Then they discovered Zen because what they really wanted was to live a devotional life. There’s no Jewish or Protestant monasteries so there’s no place to retreat and study God.

Oh sure. In fact, I got to meet Suzuki Roshi a couple of times before he died so I’ve been around it for 40 years. But my career choice comes from the fact that I’m queer. After 25 years in the business, I’ve realized I’m a small “a” artist and sexuality is my subject matter. My parents offered the idea of finding your own way [and] living an authentic life. If I wasn’t so exhibitionistic or if I wasn’t deemed pretty enough to be paid to take my clothes of on camera, I’d have been a nurse and been freaky on weekends. As things transpired, I am both considered attractive enough and I’m exhibitionistic enough to like cameras.

But I have a message about sex. The Dalai Lama said there’s no greater wisdom than compassion. So I realize in my life that kindness is a choice you make.

I take compassionate awareness and acceptance as far as I can take it without being an actual temple living, Zazen-sitting, observant Buddhist. But it is a primary philosophy that I grew up with. Zen, in terms of my daily life, in terms of compassion, infuses all of my work especially my interaction with my fans because a lot of people look at people who consume pornography as losers, wankers, just completely pathetic.

[Laughs] I don’t see it that way. There are certainly many people in that world who could be considered pathetic losers but liking porn does not make you such a person. As a stripper I realized that men and women are equally fucked over about sex, but in such different areas we’re blind to the other’s pain. For certain kinds of guys, women are heartless bitches and cock teases and will bleed you dry before giving you a kiss. And for some women, men are asshole jerks and want one thing. Really, it’s the culture keeping them equally ignorant and then saying, “Go off and get married!” Watching the men, just showing them my vulva, I realized how sad it was. No woman in their life had ever said, “Here it is, here’s what I like, here’s what you can do with it, try it this way.” Poor guys are supposed to know what to do.

And we’re supposed to not know what to do until he awakens us with his kiss, touch…

My early attempts at communicating my needs were quite clumsy and resulted in the guy running from the room. I must have sounded like a drill sergeant, “OK, to the left!!” [Laughs] And porn, because you have to act a little bit, “Ooh, ooh, more to the left. Oh yeah, right there, oh yeah.” So talking dirty is just saying what you need using the vernacular.

Guys want to be good with a woman because it’s good for their ego and also because then she’ll have him back! They’re just clueless because our culture does not give us any good messages about sex. I love that about porn, besides the fact it’s where the naked women were because it’s hard to get naked chicks to go home with you.

I didn’t know how to get with chicks either. It’s hard. I wanted to be straight up. I was like a gay man, “So you wanna go home and have some fun?” Back! Then I tried saying, “Oh baby, baby, I love you, I love you.” And later on they’re like, “You lied to me!” Well, I tried to tell you the truth and you slapped me.

I love that. For me, sex has been my practice. I try to be as honest as possible, as present as possible, as centered as possible, as kind as possible, as generous as possible. I meet them on the set. It’s like, “Hey we’re working together later.” I have ten seconds from touching them for their body, for their hindbrain, to know it’s going to be OK. Adult entertainment stripped away everything that was difficult for me. Intimacy was difficult. But I don’t want to have sex meeting strangers in a bar and going home with them drunk. I don’t like having sex when I’m drunk. I don’t like having sex with people who are drunk, or high. Or desperately lonely. Or searching for the… Are you it?! Are you it?! Are you it?! Are you gonna be The One?

The majority of people who watch porn are un-partnered. I’d say, completely unscientifically, 35 % of the porn market is never going to be partnered. It takes a certain skill set to be partnered. You have the biological knowledge of the machine. What are the parts, what do they do? Then there is your intellectual understanding about sex, what you believe about sex, what you were taught about sex. Then there’s your intra-personal skill.

Your relationship with yourself. These are skills that develop at completely different times. My father says there are feelings and then there are thoughts about feelings; our family had thoughts and theories and concepts about feelings. But feelings? Huh, fascinating. Like Mr. Spock. But your body cannot lie. It contains everything that ever happened to you. All of these feelings are here. And if you can learn to sit still and stay with them. Don’t run, don’t flee, don’t fall asleep, don’t eat. Just stay, stay, stay. Eventually all will be revealed. If you can just stay with it.

Sex works that way for me because I’m queer enough that I had to get settled with sex or I was never gonna be settled with anything else in life. If I was more conventionally sexed, I wouldn’t have had to put so much work into it because I would have been normal. I wouldn’t have had to delve deeply into it.

OK. For lack of a better word, a heterosexually oriented monogamous person, which is as close to normal as we’re going to get. But my orientation is multiple. I liked sex work because when you stay in the body, your truth shows up. Where are you scared? Where are you blocked? I got to my emotions through the body. I have a girlfriend who is very monogamous. I asked her a few years back, “How do you do that?” I’ve never had a monogamous thought in my life. She said, “Well, when I’m in love I don’t want anybody else.” How does that work? Fascinating! Because for me, being in love and wanting you are, experientially, completely different things. There’s my love for my husband; I love him and I want him all the time and I never get enough. But you’re someone different. I have people who are straight all the time ask me, “Doesn’t it get confusing? Aren’t you afraid that if you let him sleep with other people he’s going to fall in love?”

I never grew up with a Midwestern indoctrination; I grew up in a climate of anything goes, find your own way. You know, peace, love and flip-flops. I never had any guilt or shame about being a bisexual exhibitionistic person. I never ever felt shame about who I was sexually. Which is why I can be in this business 25 years and still be sober. The worst thing that religion does is instill shame and guilt about sex and the body.

It is my Buddha Nature to be omni-sexual. If you pluck one string on a well-tuned guitar the one next to it will vibrate because it’s the nature of sound waves. Well, my husband picks a certain chord. Then you, you hit this string and you over there, this string. You can’t hit her string. Your frequency is completely different. It’s not confusing to me. You can’t pluck my husband’s string and he can’t pluck yours.

Which is fine. People say, “Oh Nina, I could never be like you.” I don’t even know what like me means to them. But everyone can be like me -- meaning, finding your truth and living it. Your truth won’t look like mine. Your truth is going to be monogamous and heterosexual because that’s true for you. In that way you’re like me. My husband and I have a D/s relationship. That was a new kind of sex for me. I didn’t know anything about bondage or sadomasochism. I’d never done actual, official power exchange. But it’s his sexuality. He doesn’t have any vanilla. His sexual orientation is kink. I really loved him; I wanted him so I had to learn his language. So anybody can be like me, which is getting rid of guilt and shame about sex and your desires. You can have whatever desires you want once you stop repressing, being stressed over and suppressing and all the things we do when we don’t want to face the truth of our desires. They are what they are. With my other belief systems in place, are there any parts of these desires I can actually express? I know one person who would love to be a swinger and he loves his wife very much and she’s not a swinger. So they’re not swingers.

You have to make a choice. But it’s easier to make a choice when you’re not fleeing from shame, fear and guilt. I believe that what gets you off is what gets you off. That’s biological. On top of that is the cultural condemnation of what it is. You’re not supposed to want someone of your own gender, you’re not supposed to want someone out of your marriage, not supposed to want someone before marriage. We spend all this time going, “What’s wrong with me? Oh my God!” I beat myself up for years because I wasn’t multi-orgasmic. I read in a book women are multi-orgasmic and for years and years I tried. I did all the masturbation workshops and all of that and I discovered that I am not a multi-orgasmic woman. Once I realized that, a big load was taken off. Quite frankly, I only need to come a few times a month.

Shhhhhhh. I’m not lying to people. The way I come on camera is the way I come at home. More importantly, I don’t do on camera what I wouldn’t do at home for free anyway. There are no royalties or residuals. If you don’t like what you’re doing, the work’s gonna suck. When your body is your job, when sex is your job, you really cannot let work suck.

That’s different!

No. And for lots of reasons there never will be a union. Thirty-five years ago we tried to join SAG. That was just shot out of the water. It’s been illegitimate entertainment ever since.

It sounds great. But it’s a very transient population of rebellious young people who have no notion of solidarity. They’re usually out in two years. Without institutional memory there’s no way to build a union. Most women, when they quit the business, they go, they leave.

I love it!

But for me it’s not freaky dual. It’s very compatible. I’m glad that you’re here.

Did those guys want you out of the sangha?

Where is the compassion in that? You need to do a sesshinon that! A seven-day one. A one-day sitting’s not enough.

We got married at Zen Center and Sojun Mel Weitsman, the head of the Berkeley Zen Center, married us.

He was the first person who ever showed me compassion. At the time my parents were very pre-occupied with other stuff. Their marriage was in crisis, they had three other kids. I was young; they didn’t want to leave me all alone. By 12 I was interested in girls and boys. This being Berkley, I understood there was a word for that… Bisexual. The books at the time, 1971, said [adopts exaggerated scholarly voice], “Homosexual experimentation in adolescence is a normal part of growing up.” But at 14 I realized this wasn’t going away. I was a bisexual person. Mel was the first person who ever looked me in the eye. He was very direct, very there, relaxed, open, not expecting, not judging. I recognized it as something I’d never had before, something I wanted more of, but something I could barely stand. For 37 years I have been circling that moment, really trying to become centered in it.

For me, sex work has done that because I have to do that for other people. I can be centered because I’ve accepted all this about myself so I can be solid while they’re freaking out. Some of them clam down, but some of them flee because it’s just too much. When you see the truth or you see acceptance, it can either be a drink of water in the desert or a flash of fire that scalds you because of where you are in your development. Can you accept compassion or can you not? Mel was the first one to offer it to me. Ten seconds max. That was all I could take. I’m sure I blinked first. I had to have. We’ve never really spoken about it.

When I was a dancer, I realized right away the fundamental flaw in the objectification argument. Human females are ready to mate all the time. Most animals are receptive for about two weeks out of the year and that’s it. Humans are unusual creatures. So if I come up and talk to you because you look interesting, am I objectifying you? No. That’s how I make my choice. Most animal species, the males strut and the females choose. Why do some birds have big tails? Because chicks dig it. The feminists completely denounce the concept of female sexual agency, female self-awareness, female choice.

Actually the initial ‘70s feminism was very pro-porn. They were very pro-decriminalization of prostitution. The NOW conference of 1973 has an amazing poster by Betty Dodson of a nude woman sitting in lotus position with one hand on her vulva. That was when they were working for sex workers rights. Back when the mainstream feminist movement thought women could think for themselves. In the porn wars of the mid-80s created the current split in feminism between the pro and anti censorship forces. I’m a sex positive feminist. The so-called Left in this country has been completely hijacked by the anti-sex fanatics. There was a group trying to stop the war in Iraq. Larry Flynt offered them 30 thousand dollars and they took it. Then the anti-sex folks got so loud they ended up giving it back. That organization is, of course, now defunct.

These women question a woman’s ability — not right — a woman’s ability to do informed sex work of any kind. For them, dirty pictures is such an over-riding issue that the feminist left is completely silent on anything to do with women’s sexual freedom because women are such victims and men are such pigs. This group of people think that women are oppressed as a class. Women are a gender, not a class. It’s insulting. Sex workers have been willing to talk to people for 35 years. I used to go to NOW conferences and there’d be a dozen sex workers of different kinds and they regarded like we were goblins or trolls or hobbits. We’d be saying, “As a woman, here is my experience in pornography” and they didn’t want to know. If you say, “Dirty pictures skeeve me out and bug me,” then we can have a conversation. On most other issues we agree, I’m against the war in Iraq, I’d like to see national health care, etc. But I see men as human, I see men as equally victimized by the system. Men are also victims of the patriarchy. The anti-porn feminists are all about The Patriarchy. It’s like they think they get together every Tuesday to talk about how they can use porn to keep women down.

[Laughs] Every country has its patriarchy. It’s the same 200 families who’ve run the country forever. So you’re no more a member of the patriarchy than I am. Most people do jobs they don’t like. Most people work too hard for not enough money. Most people are humiliated in their day-to-day work by their horrible bosses and, quite frankly, men have it worse than women.

Yes, because at least women have the comfort of having girlfriends. I can come to a girlfriend and unload my feelings and get some support and some fucking compassion. You, if you’re lucky, might have a partner you can talk to about things. But the average guy can’t go to his guy friends and say, “I’m hurt, I’m scared, I’m nervous, I’m worried, frightened.” You can be angry, pissed off…

Right!

It’s true! For sure! Of course there have to be rules about sexual behavior and expression. You have to have consent. That’s good. But what the West does is take up the Greek notion of the body being base and the spirit being pure and the monotheistic religions were built on that.

Right. I’m not like most Americans because I wasn’t raised with that notion of sex as sinful. It’s something I read in a book. What I don’t like is artificial limits. Like, you can only be married to one person at a time. You may only have sex with one person at a time. Which, if you’re monogamous, is fine. But what about the rest of us who might be other?

And this country does. Frankly I’d like to see less sex in advertising and more freedom in private. The idea that what you do over there harms me over here, I find very disturbing. How is my happy marriage the way we have with our sexuality hurting your traditional marriage? How does the existence of gay marriage harm your traditional marriage? It doesn’t make any sense. Of course gays should marry; they should be as unhappy as the rest of us, as one comedian put it. A good marriage takes work. This is what I don’t get about certain feminists. Actions hurt people. Thoughts don’t harm people. Whatever you’re thinking about me right now doesn’t harm me.

If I quit the business tomorrow and crawled over a football field of broken glass to kiss the foot of one of these anti-porn feminists, they might use me in one of their campaigns but I’d never be redeemed in their eyes. They have no compassion. They’re like Pol Pot or Stalin. I’m no fan of Andrea Dworkin, although I think she sometimes made some good points and address things that needed to be addressed. But it’s not right for a lesbian to be telling heterosexual women how they should approach sex. If you’re a heterosexual woman you need a man. Sixty-percent of women want to be married and have kids. I’m too bisexual to have been lesbian. I like men. I like fucking men. I like most things about men. They’re cool. I never could buy what she said. Early feminists went to Arabia and said how nice the burkha was ‘cause it took off the pressure of the male gaze. For them, male desire was also desire to harm. You’re conquesting us, penetrating us, conquering us! I thought we were having fun. It goes both ways. I like it. You like it. I objectify women and I look at them and I desire them without having any desire to harm so I knew from my own experience that I could objectify and not wish to harm.

I do! I’m not just bisexual. I’m very inter-gendered. I like being a girl. Yet I love women the way men love women. And I take pride in my ability to be a satisfying and a good lover to women. Besides, I liked having people look at me naked, even if they were guys. Guys are fun! And I found out that the more nudity there is, the better-behaved men are. Absent beer.

It’s like, if you do this, the naked tits will stay. OK. I can do that! Men are very rule oriented. What are the rules for naked boobs being in the room? I’ll follow those rules. Let me know what they are and don’t change in the middle. Women do that sometimes. That can be very annoying. I realized that part of my power over men is in not hating him for wanting to look. He’s a straight guy; of course he wants to look at naked women! Duh! So instead of shaming him and taking his money, I was like [smiles], “Hey look!” I like to show off. According to some feminists, I’m reducing myself to a masturbatory object.

I’m actually helping you with your next girlfriend. I’m showing you, here’s what works for me, try it on her. Men are hungry for information from an actual female who’ll actually say something to them about it. I had instant compassion for them right away as equal human beings, equally beaten down by the patriarchy and equally lost and wandering. Men are shit out of luck if they need comfort or compassion or care. That just pisses me off. I’m always very physical with my fans. I hug them. I touch them. I squeeze their shoulders. I have to let them know that I really do mean it.


Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff and a MySpace page too. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.

For more information on Nina Hartley go here.