A Revamp of this Blog - Living in NYC

Hello Void,
I promise to actually make something of this blog now.
Living in Brooklyn, getting my MFA in writing, performing, filmmaking, teaching, loving, spanking, traveling, diving.
Thanks, that's all.
Dusty

In The Flesh Reading Series!

Why Porn?

When I want to be aroused, I want to use my imagination, not look at something pretty. I am also not tempted by sweets or moved to regressive states at the site of babies. I am no trying to prove anything or impress anyone. This is just the way I am. It's the opposite of what you would expect. It's harmonic dissonance.

It is the animation of porn, not the attractiveness of the people or settings, which arouses my interest, insofar as those movements suggests meaning.

The meaning doesn't have to be original, feminist, or romantic - it could most certainly be "because he came to fix the cable".

In queer porn, the reason for my interest is usually "because they're queer".

Now, the queerness of the performers does often manifest in their physical presentation, but it also very much has to do with what they do and how they do it.

Still, this preference reveals my identification with the performers and/or the role they're playing, which helps me relate to the desires of the Typical Porn Consumer ie the hetero male, for whom the genesis of arousal is generally "because she's pretty."

For me to Do Porn, I must now confess, has been an exercise in sexual self discovery and an inquiry into the general mysteries of sex itself.

Porn simply offered me an opportunity for exploration that is more my style and more in my nature than, it turns out, drunken one night stands, long term hetero monogamy, or even the overstimulation of San Francisco sex parties.

Because I trust my colleagues and community, I am able to put my body through extreme physical and emotional situations, acts of pain, contortion, abuse, exposure, torture, "forced" penetration. All of this empirical negativity occurs within a consensual context: fantasy, an honest day's work, the production of something designed solely for the pleasure of others. Within this context, this box, I confront all this horror and endure, survive, grow, and return to the rest of my life. I am able to experience what I and my body are capable of without fear and without the distraction of personal meaning.

In many cases it has only been through this contextualized, compartmentalized experience that I have been able to experience certain sexual excitements and satisfactions, and experience the raw state of my true sexual identity.

Having sex for money, on record, with someone who is not in the strictest sense of the word, my lover, is a method of publicly announcing:

This is really happening to me! Right?

Because I have never gotten over my incredulity about sex.

And of course, there is the fact that once you have sex for money on camera once, you're automatically a star!

my first book! a story in rkb's orgasmic!

i arrived home this week from my month-long european vacation to find a package from cleis press on my dining room table containing two comp copies of the first book containing something i wrote - orgasmic, an erotica anthology edited by rachel kramer bussel.

think about your favorite object in the entire realm of material, or indeed conceptual, existence. now imagine yourself INSIDE of one of those objects! this is the best moment since i released a 7" with my old band and got to hear my brutish beats and alto yelps rotating around on that other favorite object of mine; the difference here is that cleis published and distributes orgasmic and us punks paid out of pocket for mastering and production of 600 records, only managing to move a third of them before breaking up after a cataclysmic national diy tour in a rusted econoline. by the way, do you want a limited edition white vinyl copy of "minimum rnb"?

i met rkb at a litquake reading last year (where violet blue spanked me at the supper club!) and gave her my zine. she was kind enough to ask me to contribute to her seemingly endless procession of anthologies.

get it here directly from cleis, or find it at your local indie bookstore. ooh, the book has its own blog.

and here are some snippets from my story, "share."

My roommate works at the Farmer‘s Market, and our home is filled with stacks and stacks of long flat cardboard boxes packed with whatever is in season. We live in produce abundance. At stone fruit time, I walk the Earth with sticky syrup crystallizing on my chins. I can’t help but dream of pussy every time I bury my face in vibrant peach juice, but I may just be thinking of that LL Cool J video. Day in day out we slurp down so much pink and white and orange flesh bursting from taught furry skin that in a search for oral texture variety, my other roommate discovers and recommends pit sucking. Even I am amazed by what a hippie pervert I can be when the hard, porous ridges of the peach pit against my tongue reminds me of my own g spot.

...

In my mind’s eye my g spot resembles a walnut shell embedded in the upper wall, the ceiling, of my pussy. After fifteen some odd years of beating my clit like it owes me money, I have redirected my orgasmic attentions to that chandelier. If I could, I would tongue it like you tongue peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth.

...

You never know how much arousal has to do with power, and gender, and control, and debasement, as much or more as it does with connecting nerve endings, until a silicon phallus, jutting statuesque from your crotch, disappears into a pretty face. You feel a surge of what can only be testosterone because I swear to god it makes you feel like solving problems with violence and being incredibly insensitive. How else can I explain the need to FUCK THE FACE of someone I love, to behave in the most despicable porn fashion, grunting and grabbing and jack hammering, like a goddamn animal.

So getting my dick sucked inspires testosterone yes, but also an exultant Eureka! sensation - THIS is the real gender. I am exorcizing the demon gender by exercising its physical body. I am putting on the gender act and it’s hot! It’s hot to paint masculinity in broad strokes. You recognize my behavior as male and you recognize me as not male. A simple yet effective formula. Gender is phony. Gender is every bit this double-sized dildo. Gender is much less a functional anatomical reality attached to our bodies and brains but just another useful tool to get off.

Now, alone, on my back on the bed, I visualize you, my lady-love. I am putting on a show for myself, the jerk off show, my favorite program. And behind the scenes my little bulb is working away. A tug of war - I pull on the dick with my hand and counter clench around the bulb with my pussy wall. Where do you think you’re going?

Yeah, this is the perfect dick for you, isn’t it you little faggot. You can tell when it pounds into you it’s the physical manifestation of my lust, my pussy turned inside out. My pussy is the foundation of this tower, the conduit between your insides and mine. This is the right dick for the kinda faggot you are. Sure as shit is the right kinda dick for the kinda faggot I am.

I do everything I always dreamed of doing with a dick. I pistol whip your cheek. I straddle your chest and pull up the head of my cock. My hips pulse down so gravity combines with the whipping effect to slam your tits and sternum hard. And inside it springs up onto me and I damn near convulse. I flip you over and do the same smacking to your creamy ass. Thwack! Thwack! Taptaptaptap THWACK. I rub my cock lasciviously over your body, all your erogenous zones.

I get a good long look at that pussy. I could stare at pussy all day. Your pussy helps me to understand why men shell out all their money just so a girl will turn around and touch her toes. The vase-like symmetry of your inner thighs, fat folds tucked and huddled.

...

Hot Meat Injection to your Brain Zine Volume 1.1

collected dusty horn screen-printed covers by jen weisberg (only 30 copies exist!)

THIS MARKS the first blog installment of my five volume sex worker memoir/critical theory zine, initially nurtured in a slow-burn spontinaity-based analog medium, being now somewhat-defeatedly archived in digestible digital bites.

The Dusty Horn zine was originally self-released by Show Business Publications july 2008 and april 2009. An evacuation of my writing and self-publishing methods, and their connection to my experiences in sex work which are more or less the subject of this nominal show business, can be found in Issue Three of AORTA(previously known as ART XX), an exceptional radical women's art magazine. Excerpts from that meta-essay article are sure to appear in this digital-analog-cross-reference project.

Dusty Horn: A Hot Meat Injection to Your Brain!

An Introduction to this Collection of Issues 1-5:

"The boldness with which she went after them! The ardor and skill with which she aroused them! The delight she found in watching them jerk off! And the pleasure she then took in telling all she’d learned about lust and what it is for men . . . 'What I enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves.'” -Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

This zine was always intended as a outlet for me to express my observations, which are informed as much by my background in critical theory as my obscene exhibitionism and affinity for Jewish humor and 60’s rock criticism. In some ways my sex work career was always intended as a field study for this nebulous writing project. What came to pass was that I found my life’s great passion in BDSM and erotic performance. Bookstores are thankfully already stocked with sex workers’ tales of their clients’ weird perversions. It became clear pretty quickly that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell.

Welcome to my brand of DIY cerebral raunch, like a blowjob from a punk in the library.

DH - ISSUE ONE - July 2008

Galvanizing and

Naval-Gazing

IN THIS ISSUE:

Craiglist and The Perfect Scam ; not everyone is suited to this line of work ; Freak Flags ; What can BDSM do for me? ; What exactly does that mean, you’re a dominatrix?

"Not everyone is suited to this line of work. The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities . . .They pretend to themselves they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one’s stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attention of ones enemies. Or discourages it.
And you? What about your enemies?
I have no enemies. I don’t permit such a thing.
He looked around the room. Nice office, he said. Low key. He nodded to a painting on the wall. Is that original?
The man looked at the painting. No, he said. It’s not. But I own the original. I keep it in a vault.
Excellent, said Chigurh."
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

IT IS ABSURDLY SIMPLE.

I add to my little list of carefully strategized Craigslist search keywords - itself a collection of pipe dreams and reasonably sensible ambitions including - writer, copywriter, designer, editor, administrative assistant, production assistant, barista, nanny, publishing intern, etc etc etc
- the wonderfully specific multisyllabic word: Dominatrix.

This scene - a middle class white girl with a Modern Literature BA and little to no experience with anything remotely kinky, broke-ass having quit her dead-end office job to go on West Coast tour, searching for work on her laptop in a Mission café - begs the question; what possesses me? Where do I get the nerve?

And all I got is -At this point, my post-collegiate growing pains stabbing, my delusions of rebellious grandeur throbbing, and my rock roll lifestyle needing the perfect scam to sustain it: anything, anything to avoid the rat race.

Illustration by Catherine Heckindorf

I HAVE BY NOW met a great many women who get into BDSM work because they hate men. For them, the scam is getting paid to inflict torment and revenge, and usually to get off on it themselves. While I cannot relate, I certainly can’t fault them either, especially since there are a great many men out there, pocketbook in one hand and dick in the other, just dying to be in the presence of powerful women who actively, passionately loath men.

Then there are the women who have explored kink in their personal lives, who identify with that sexual lifestyle to one degree or another. For them, the scam is getting paid to do the things that regularly get them off on their own time.

I’ve met women who get into BDSM work because they think it will make them cool, because controlling men comes easily to them, because it generally pays better and is perceived by many to be less demeaning than dancing.

For my part, I thrive in sex work because I am a ham with an iron constitution, because my sexuality is highly cerebral, and because I am endlessly fascinated by men.

I have clients who are hot, and clients who are not hot but turn me on, and disgusting clients who are very sweet. Those I do not love I have immense compassion for. The grossest, fattest, smelliest, creepiest, limp-dickinest clients are beautiful when they implore me to indulge and validate their freaky fantasies.

And nothing makes me feel more at home than freaks waving their flags.

FIRST OFF, LET’S DEFINE SOME TERMS, SHALL WE?

BDSM is a tricky little acronym which describes a very broad range of activities that are considered “kinky” by current culturally visible Western standards of erotic discourse.

It stands for: Bondage and Discipline / Domination and Submission / AND Sadism and Masochism.

The term usually also encompasses fetish. A fetishist is someone who has an erotic interest in something, like feet or leather, which is not associated with sexuality in those aforementioned standard terms.

Many people play with BDSM in their personal lives. If you have ever been turned on by having your hair pulled or your wrists held down then- whoops! - you’re into BDSM. Just a little bit.

Professional Dominants are persons who are commissioned to act out fantasies in which they are the top and their client is the bottom. Professional Submissive are the inverse. Professional Switches will either top or bottom, sometimes in the same session.

Professional BDSM as an institution, as far as I can tell, exists for a couple of reasons.

The first is that there is no small amount of shame and judgment placed on the proclivities encompassed by BDSM by those pesky Western conventions I keep being forced to mention. Many humans living today are too ashamed of their fantasies or interests to even share them with their sex partners or spouses let alone request that they participate or experiment together.

Secondly, many BDSM activities require a degree of finesse, training, and experience to do well or even at all. Safe, sane, and consensual is the mantra of responsible players, and it is generally the amateurs who give activities like bondage and impact play a bad or fatal name.

Thirdly, good ole fashioned fucking has gone stale or sour for many people of all ages. Games of control, fetish-wear, pain exploration, and the literally endless possibility of fantasy provide an intense and cathartic erotic experience that many people find are missing from their sex lives.

I also believe that there is a tremendous potential for joy and satisfaction that comes from simply communicating your fantasies and desires to another compassionate human, free of the implication of judgment.

It has also been suggested that erotic activities which don’t involve fluid exchange can play a crucial role in diffusing the sexual anxiety of the post-AIDS world.

My writing on the subject is meant to communicate my own experiences and insights doing BDSM work. I want to demystify some misconceptions, tell some stories, explore the development of my own sexuality, and, on a more selfish note, legitimize what I do as significant social and creative work.

My hope is that this zine will inspire readers to rethink their concepts of what constitutes a perverted fantasy or proclivity in their own sex lives and the lives of those they encounter.

“Dominatrix” is more than a little bit of a misnomer for what I do. I am a sex worker in that in exchange for cash money, I provide the service of arousal, which incidentally, is the legal definition of prostitution.

Even though I live for the moments where curiosity inspires a friend or acquaintance to inquire as to my mysterious and unconventional line of work, I have to cringe a little inside when I tell them, however proudly, that I am a Dominatrix.

It’s not judgment I worry about. I am quite shameless and also very privileged. I have a community of progressive, creative friends and a supporting family. The word Dominatrix communicates some things that are accurate, but entirely too many dimensions of my work are not invoked in the average mind by that word. What I do, and the way that I do it, doesn’t really have a name or identity yet.

Perhaps because of its somewhat baffling lack of visibility as an actual occupation that people choose for themselves, there are no shorthand terms for a BDSM worker. I long to level with people, to treat the cartoonish severity of my stereotype with casual vulgarity. In short I wish I had a word like hooker, or even whore.

The laundry list of colloquialisms for that oldest of professions is and should be reserved for people who, by choice or by coercion, cross that line into full service. Now, the definition of a sexual experience as the vaginal penetration of one human by a penis attached to another is hideously outmoded. But the fact remains that allowing strangers into your body through your mouth, pussy, ass, or whatever else is available, has more emotional implications than the acts and games that I play for money. And for the folks who do it I pledge my undying respect and I do not pretend to know what that is like.

Ergo I cannot in good faith refer to myself as a hooker, even in flippant irony, lest I undermine the integrity of the good men and women who earn that moniker by occupationally allowing people into their bodies.

Thus I am left with this hopelessly inadequate and overdramatic word “Dominatrix.”

And as anyone who knows me will tell you, if a word is too dramatic for me, we are talkin’ some very serious shit indeed.

WHEN I TELL MY MOM what I do, I say;
“Mom, I’m a dominatrix.”
And thank goodness for small favors, her reply is;
“What’s a dominatrix?”

So what, given this opportunity to spare her the gory details, do I tell dear old understanding mamam?

I tell her I am living my dream, the one that started with me performing for the video camera, tape recorder, or whoever would pay attention from the second I could walk and talk.

I’m a professional actress. But that is of course only part of the picture.

So, Mom, Dad, sister, friends, exes, future employers, countrymen, I am going to attempt to dispel some stereotypes. Potential lovers, run not screaming at the implication that I am too high maintenance for a good ole-fashioned fuck. Grandparents, roll ye not over in your graves. Here is my work as clearly as I can demystify it:

I’m a professional improviser, a professional ham, a professional thinker on my feet, a professional flirt, a professional at making you feel good about yourself, a professional dirty mouth, a professional wit, a professional mind-fucker, a professional photographic memory, a professional hustler, a professional persuader, a professional knowing what you want to hear, a professional diva, professionally larger than life, the professional center of attention, a professional imagination, a professional bull-shitter.

Operating, as I do, in a grey area of the law, I am literally a criminal. Like many laws, whose openness to interpretation is directly proportional to socially conventional opinions on what constitutes a clear and present threat to the well-being of a community, I will most likely only be prosecuted if I am indiscrete.

Providing, as I do, by the pleasure of my company and the acts in which I engage no small amount of relief for my clients, I am a therapist. I am not professionally qualified to consult on emotional stress, physiological guilt, physical tension, and the abuse of our sexually negative society but at the very least I can claim to be a specialist in human needs.

Offering, as I do, the promise of creative energy, positivity, stimulating conversation, laughter, and a great deal of pleasure, I am an entertainer.

Devoting, as I have, my life and intellectual energy to research, to offering in addition to my not-inconsiderable physical assets a very well-read, educated, versatile, quick, hilarious, wise, caring, filthy, filthy mind capable of being commissioned at any moments to produce a sophisticated product out of a set of specific requests, I am an artist.

Where can I get copies of this incredible zine I hear so much about?

Great question!

I endeavor, as part of my dissemination of sexual positivity through community and physical media, to ensure that local independent bookstores are kept stuffed full of Dusty Horns. So I bike around town dropping off copies of my zine, sometimes consigning, sometimes donating. And in my travels domestic and international I have also left my mark. I love knowing that strangers are picking up the fruits of my labor and it heartens me to think that I might stimulate conversation and eradicate shame among the uninitiated.

So support your local bookstore/zine library/info shop/all-ages community center/craftstore; pick up DH and check out something on bike maintenance or fermentation while you're at it! If the smell of used paperbacks in non-corporate bookstores disappears off the Earth, I may never be horny again...

San Francisco

Needles and Pens

Thrillhouse

Center for Sex and Culture

Oakland

Rock Paper Scissors Art Collective

Berkeley

Longhaul Infoshop

Pegasus Books

New York City

Bluestocking Books

ABC NoRio

Toronto

Good For Her

Carnal Nation!

I've got a great gig at Carnal Nation. The personal political perverted powers that be over at CN know my taste in smut, especially comics smut real well. When they get some fancy new pornography collection from Taschen or Eurotica, they send it my way. All I gotta do is tell em what I think.

Head on over to CN to read my reviews, and features on events like the Feminist Porn Awards, and interviews with the likes of faggot comic porn writer Dale Lazarov.

While you're there, poke around. Pretty much all of my sex work sex positive sex nerd heroes and colleagues are regular contributors or have been featured. It's funny, enlightening, engaging, socially relevant and hot!