Got this great email from my best pal Thomas:
"You are programming an AI sex educator? That fascinates and terrifies me. You are one weird kitten, Violet Blue.
Panama sucks. I can’t wait to go home, even if it’s to Detroit. I’m sure even Detroit will feel like home. At least there the cab drivers won’t try to hook me up with Colombian prostitutes. Very much."
Ah, what weird problems we all have. Case in point is my much-dreaded upcoming business trip to the AVN awards and convention. I really don’t want to go. But I have to for two really good (well, now several) reasons, the most important being my friend Carly who was absolutely the deciding persuading factor, and the other being all the business I need to do there. Namely, I’m being flown there by a very large and powerful company whose name I cannot disclose, and when I asked about a place to stay put me up in my own suite (!) in the Venetian. Oddly, they are not the only company that has arranged a suite for me at the Venetian and now I need to make a choice between the two. What’s more is that this is an all-expenses paid trip, if I get to pay for anything, as dinner offers are already lining up, yikes. And on top of all that, I’ve been given full press access — and to say the least, I am absolutely humbled by every single development. Good Vibes is not sending me to AVN, and I know others from the company are going, which is odd and confusing, but I have to say that I no longer worry about it.
It’s a long way since my first (and last visit) to this particular self-congratulatory spectacle. I vowed I would not return unless there were very strong animal tranquilizers involved. I guess friendship and money are two powerful drugs. My term for the experience is "boot camp for the female ego," and that isn’t necessarily good, though I guess it could be. I plan on being an observant ghost, if that means anything. Last time I went, I floated around and watched the spectacle — though I was interviewing and researching my video book, few people from "the industry" would talk to me, though I spoke with many outsiders and my friends, differently minded people like Nina Hartley, Veronica Hart, Joe Gallant and Sean Michaels. The general vibe was that you were either industry or a shill, or a possible threat, and sexually inappropriate behavior from the thousands and thousands of men streaming in to shove their cameras up a girls ass every time she bends over, or thinking they could possibly "bang a porn star" — was encouraged. Which may be normal for strip clubs and porn parties, but is truly a psychological car wreck if you’re mentally unprepared for it at a "convention." Wandering around it’s hard not to soak up that naked male aggression that feels like a strip club full of soldiers at closing time. Plus, there are so many bad boob jobs that it’s like a haunted house full of pods that you know are just going to burst open with alien face-huggers. It makes me want to grab my own boobs when I see them, like when guys see another man on TV get kicked in the balls. After the convention I sent my book to one of the female editors for a read before it went to print and she told me the whole book was a huge mistake and marketing porn to women was doomed to fail. Years later the book has not sold like hotcakes, true, but has landed me in interviews with major news networks, print magazines and college lectures, and admiration from people like Hartley, Hart, Greene and many more. Now I’m the moderator and founder of an online porn club for women that’s up to 257 members.
Just taking a look at what’s changed gives me perspective. Not just for me, but the porn world in general. When I attended, I told big-name female porn stars that I was a big fan of their work and got a lot of freaked-out looks and uncomfortable moments. In a different venue two years later, telling Belladonna I love her work got me a warm hug. But then again, she’s cool.
Last week I had a great phone conversation. A man representing a porn company called my office at Good Vibes wanting me to pick up titles from his company, and while on the phone he directed me to his website. Talking to him, I looked over titles like "Hot Twats in Uniform" and "Spicy Kung Pao Pussy" (names only slightly changed) and said, "You know, the titles really won’t work for us." I explained further telling him that our porn-buying customers are slightly over half male, the rest female and couples. "Oh," he said, "so you need softer stuff for the ladies." I said, no, we didn’t want softer porn at all. I explained that John Leslie’s all-sex series like Voyeur do really well for us. There was confused silence at the other end. I said, "Women want porn. They just don’t want to be demeaned by it." Same goes for many men, I think, but that would’ve been information overload and I just wanted to get off the phone.
I was at a dinner on Sunday night with a very wealthy adult entrepreneur and his wife and a few other people. His wife really loves the work I’m doing with women viewership and porn, but asked me, "Don’t you think that certain hardcore magazines exploit the women in them?" I told her that’s the question I usually get asked on the air, live, and everyone laughed. But I continued, because it’s true — what I answer never gets aired or used. I never have a soundbite on this topic, because the answer isn’t neat and clean, like, "are barns usually red?" It’s absolutely subjective, I told the table, in both the eye of the beholder and the performer. Nina Hartley isn’t exploited and lectures around the country from a pro-porn feminist (and very personal sex-positive) perspective. But I’ve also seen tapes where the female performers ask repeatedly to stop and then have to physically move the dick out of their ass, or wherever. And there are far worse, and far more positive stories, too. The truth is, yes it does, and no it doesn’t. The problem is that the media, government and religious agenda organizations want to paint the female porn experience as black, while the porn industry wants to paint it as all white. And the reality is that it’s gray, and that’s what makes it interesting.
I forgot to tell you about a couple of fun things that happened to me at the GV party. One is that I had the sexy Michael Soldier hug and hang out with his arm around me, which led me to find out that a certain group of sex educators have a betting pool going on him — if, when and who will be the female he has sex with. He’s as gay as an Easter basket, so hell might freeze over in the meantime, but it’s pretty exciting to know that I’m in the betting zone. The other great thing was that at the end of the night a cute young motorcycle boy, all geared up in his leathers and glasses, came over to me before he left. He told me he really wanted to compliment me on my boots. I thanked him and told him they were my favorite pair. He said that sometimes with people he knows, he asks if he can kiss their boots. I knew where this was leading, and it was awfully adorable, and he was actually blushing. I told him he could kiss my boots if he wanted to. And he reverently kneeled and politely kissed and nuzzled my right boot, for just a minute. Not sloppy, or for too long. He stood and thanked me, and gave me a sticker of a boot he made (which looked quite a lot like the boots I was wearing), and told me it was a very special sticker. I thanked him for the sticker and he left — and when I told Hornboy, he was bummed he didn’t get to see the whole thing, especially because the boots were my birthday present from last September.
Okay, I’m in a café and I really have to pee. But I posted more pictures from the crazy weekend, where you’ll see I kept with the "doll" theme in my holiday outfits and was a candy cane dolly Saturday night, complete with sexy sock garters. Nothing beats getting ready for parties with a bunch of burlesque dancers hanging out and drinking in your kitchen; I had the biggest lashes and felt like a million bucks. Also on Saturday we made our last party stop with Miss Satanica in tow to a late-night sex party, where the main attraction was the rumor of a bicycle-powered sex machine. It was quite large, perhaps 10-15 feet long, with a low seat at one end equipped with bicycle pedals and handgrips (facing forward), and an elevated seat at the other end (facing left) with stirrups and a hole in the seat where a dildo when up and down when you pedaled. I was in quite a mood, and wanted to make the night a memorable one. I got in the pedaling seat and started pedaling, making an enticing seat for any guy or gal who wanted to go for a ride. "I’m in training," I announced to the room. "I need to get ready for the big ride. Can anyone help me get my heart rate up?" One of the party hosts told me not to pedal too fast or I might break the machine. I took it under advisement. A creepy guy in a white suit came and stood too close to me. "Hey," he said, "why don’t you get on it?" He started stroking my arm. I smacked his hand away, "No, and *no*. Why don’t *you* go get on it?" He moved away — just in time for a sexy, voluptuous vixen to walk up with blue glitter Hebrew letters painted on her naked body. She asked if I would stay while she got a condom, and I did, and she came back. Then she got on, and with her direction, I pedaled in exactly the ways she needed to have a loud, thundering orgasm. Wow, it was intense! There was a large mirror behind the machine, so while I couldn’t see the front of the woman (major bummer) I still had a great view. The machine really wasn’t built for speed, though, and every time it met resistance (insertion) it made a stressful squeak. This clearly was not a load-bearing machine. It was put to the test moments later as another incredibly sexy young girl climbed on, and with assistance of her boyfriend’s roaming hands, directed me to pedal her to a squirting orgasm! It took a lot of pedaling really fast for a very long time, and people were cheering us on, and saying, "Look at Violet glow!" (I got my heart rate up.) She looked like an R. Crumb or Buttman model, and turned to straddle the seat facing me, so I could watch — it wasn’t only my collar that was getting hot and wet watching her. After, she thanked me and dropped a chocolate coin down my top and said, "Thanks for just getting me warmed up, darling!" Her boyfriend said as he passed, "Welcome to *my* life!"
Okay, really must pee now. I may not blog for a day or two as I get my podcasting going and see Hornboy off for the holidays — he’s off to see family. I’m going to hang out in cyberspace and spend my holidays with *you* dear readers, and there’s nowhere I’d rather be. I’m stoked about my podcasting setup — I think I might dump my efforts with Type Pad, as I don’t want to do a potentially Google-fatal redirect to the Type Pad blog, and I found an all-in-one podcasting service that’ll do my broadcasting and bandwidth *and* comes with a free phone podcasting account so I can call in podcasts from AVN (and interviews!).
