Bondage Radio

Love is a many-splendored thing, and lovers symbolize it with roses, candy and – in the case of those appearing in the work of New York art photographer Barbara Nitke – welts.
Read the rest of this entry →

AS if Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn’t enough, Republicans can now get steamed up by a four-minute video of a ruthless dominatrix whipping US President George W. Bush in the Oval Office.
Read the rest of this entry →

Pop hunk ROBBIE WILLIAMS’ male songwriter has accused the star of attempting a homosexual sex act on him.

RAY HEFFERNAN, who co-wrote William’s hit ANGELS, was furious the singer branded him a ‘quasi-stalker’ in his new autobiography FEEL, so has hit back by claiming the hit-maker consumed vast amounts of cocaine and whiskey at a New Year’s Eve party in 1996 and then begged Heffernan to sleep with him.
Read the rest of this entry →

WHEN I DECIDED to spend every day and night of the convention sneaking my tape recorder into strip clubs and talking with hookers, I was hardly the only one following the story. As far back as June 28, Daily News reporter Jose Martinez claimed that the sex industry would be to the RNC what Halliburton is to the war in Iraq. With a team of prurient pachyderms stampeding into the city, he wrote, agencies were flying in hookers and strippers “from around the globe.”

But a week and a half before the convention, Robert Polner of Newsday called that idea a fantasy. He cited increased police and media presence that would limit prostitutes’ ability to work freely, and suggested that most strip clubs would see a limited spike in business.
Read the rest of this entry →

[Are_PayPal_LoginPlease]SIMON GAGE

SEX is something Anna Span has had on the brain for a very long time. “When I was younger I used to have weird dreams about sailors and being tied to the mast,” she laughs, as she potters around her London flat, ordering police uniforms over the internet and searching out copies of hard-core porn videos. “I can remember seeing magazines on the top shelf in the newsagent’s when I was young, and having a real desire to look through them but not being allowed. It was like a secret garden. I wanted to know what it was all about.”

Span is Britain’s first female director of pornographic films, and one of the most respected, erudite and prolific figures in the industry. The 32-year-old already has her own company, Easy on the Eye, and has plans for shops and internet and mobile-phone projects all swinging into action.

But there is no trace of the predictable porn trappings about Span: with casual natural-brown hair, she’s wearing minimal make-up and her clothes are pure slouch; she looks the typical trendy Londoner, in jeans and trainers and the kind of singlet vest you can pick up in Topshop for £3.99.

And while her flat may be slap-bang in the middle of Soho, the traditional home of London’s sex industry, there’s not a scrap of leather or leopard-print, not a smoky mirror or a wicker Emmanuelle chair in sight. It looks like the home of a particularly tidy student, with a PJ Harvey poster on the wall, a copy of Ghostbusters in the video rack and rows of serious-looking books on the shelves.

“When I was growing up there was a lot of cheeky Carry On/Benny Hill kind of stuff in Britain,” she says of her middle-class childhood in Kent – her father was a reluctant accountant who always told her she had to find a job she really loved. “I think that’s got much more sexiness to it than a lot of porn films, and that’s the cheekiness that I try to get into my films. But my stuff is porn, it’s not a comedy show. With women you have to engage the brain enough to keep them watching the film, but not so much that it overtakes the groin.”

But despite Span’s films being directed at her own gender, the fact that most women still wouldn’t be caught dead walking through those grimy fly strips into the seedy environment of a traditional sex shop means that most of her fans are men. It’s a situation she hopes will change now that she has signed a contract with the Ann Summers chain – 75% of whose customers are women. (The company sells a million vibrators a year, and boasts an annual sales forecast of £110 million.) It is a very different world to the one the sex-obsessed, former anti-porn campaigner grew up in.

“I remember walking down Soho’s Old Compton Street when it was still the red-light district,” she says. “And I had a realisation: my anger was, in fact, envy. If I was a bloke, I could have walked into one of these peep shows. I tried going into one once, and they said that women on their own weren’t allowed. It is so sexist that women don’t have the same freedom as men. So, once I realised I was jealous, I thought, ‘What do I do now? Do I carry on getting embittered?’”

The answer – much to the disgruntlement of her tutors at London’s Central St Martin’s college, where Span was studying film and photographic arts – was that she should start making her own sexual material. “I come at it from quite a feminist perspective,” she says. “I feel that the way to empower women is to cater for their sexuality. I see it as a journey to finding yourself.”

The staff at St Martin’s saw it somewhat differently. While posters advertising for models willing to masturbate in front of her camera were routinely taken down by the college technicians, one of the films she made for her final project was banned by the school for fear of upsetting the relatives of her classmates, who were coming to view the graduation show. “And they think they’re so cutting-edge,” she says, adding that she didn’t warn her own parents about the content of her exhibit until they were actually in the car on the way to the show.

Span’s parents never spoke to her about sex when she was growing up, and she admits to having had a very conventional early sex life, only becoming physically involved with boys once she was 16. Her family has now come to terms with her career choice, and her parents were typically proud, she says, when her photograph appeared in a broadsheet, in an article about the leading women in the sex industry.

“Even in supposedly open-minded areas, people are very set,” Span says. “It’s just the same in sex clubs. Most people weren’t even having sex in the sex clubs I went to when I left college. I just wanted to shag and experience what it was like to have people staring at you. That was the whole point of going there. But the only people shagging other than me were the gay men. So many people there were just poncing around in rubber outfits.”

But it wasn’t just the lack of action at London’s illegal sex clubs that disturbed Span; it was the fact that being there brought her face to face with the seamier side of the sex industry. “I met so many dodgy people in sex clubs that I’ve given it a rest,” she says with a shrug, disappointed that part of the secret garden she’d dreamed of as a teenager was actually overgrown with slime.

“You’d meet a lot of con men – horrible people trying to hook you into things. They were trying to get me involved in filming people without their consent, and it all got a bit Mafioso: I got offered £6 million to do something in America by Mafia people, but I knew I’d just be paying them back all my life.”

After a job editing erotic films at Television X, which is owned by the Daily Express newspaper tycoon Richard Desmond, Span was ready to branch out on her own. She reckoned she had seen so many sex scenes that she knew exactly what worked and what didn’t, and she started applying that knowledge to her own productions. She eventually set up her own company six years ago, and has now made hundreds of films. “I started out saying that I made porn for women, and then loads of guys came to me saying, ‘Thank God someone is making something a little bit more stimulating,’” she says. “Now I just say that I make stuff from a female point of view.”

But that doesn’t mean that the films are not hard-core. Unlike America’s main female porn director, Candida Royalle, whose films are soft-focus, strictly non-phallocentric and crowded with luxury fabrics and candlelight, Span firmly believes that women want to see penetration, just from a different perspective. This female point of view means that, apart from actual eye-contact between the leads, there is always some sort of story to her films.

After leaving St Martin’s, Span went on a script-writing course to learn how to write plots and create characters. “There is something that’s different for women: you need to feel like you’re going on a bit of a journey. I don’t just make the same film over and over again with a different girl,” she says. “That’s very much the male approach.”

Another aspect of the male approach that Span wanted to get away from was the body-fascism and the fixation on body parts that she feels men are obsessed by, born from years of watching pornography and pinning down exactly what they find erotic.

With women, many of whom are at an earlier stage in their development when it comes to watching sex scenes, Span pioneers the whole act: the chat, the foreplay and the post-coital cigarette, if you like.

She’s also very happy to use larger men and women – when she can find them – and has recently started making films with a woman who has had a mastectomy; her husband originally approached Span to commission a sex film of his wife, a former beauty queen, to prove to her that he was still attracted to her after her operation. Span saw that they were both so sexy – mastectomy or not – and decided that she wanted to use them in a commercial film. They have just finished their second film together.

“I used to watch 300 films a year at Television X,” she says. “A lot of it was amateur stuff, and I hated it. I do want the reality of amateur, so it seems authentic, but also the beauty and glamour of American stuff. They meet halfway in my films, so it’s almost like a soap opera: nice clothes, nice environments.”

Span felt so strongly about this that she wrote a book on how to make better home porn. So far it has sold 10,500 copies, and even the models in Span’s films are chosen on the basis of having nice faces rather than pneumatic bodies – although she points out that they are also expected to act a little.

“Nine times out of ten we get a really good atmosphere,” says Span, who employs female camera operators and make-up artists with this in mind. “It’s the way I treat people. I ask the actors to have fun and ad lib. You don’t start looking down on them because they’re doing sex. And you don’t try to shag them. That’s a professional boundary. A lot of male producers, even if they’re not trying to get off with the girls, try to belittle the men to make themselves look better in the girls’ eyes.”

Despite her strict ‘no fraternising with the talent’ rules, Span does explore the early fantasies she had when she was, as she says, “a frustrated sexy beast”. But how does having such a career affect her personal life? Like the proverbial child in the candy store, Span (who is currently single) has been left feeling a little sick: no longer so keen on casual sex, and craving instead the emotional side of relationships. “I suppose I’m more adventurous,” she admits when asked if it’s all about hanging from the chandeliers when she gets a man home.

“The line between what’s normal and what’s not normal gets so blurred – which is good, because I see what’s moral and what’s immoral rather than what’s normal and not normal. I wouldn’t think anything of having sex in public, but I’m a bit more needy on the emotional side. I get my fix of sex for sex’s sake through shooting, so I want a proper relationship. My life is one constant one-night stand, so I want a proper boyfriend. It’s not a massive problem or anything, but I’ve never been great at relationships. I don’t know if there’s a connection.”

It isn’t hard to imagine how difficult your average man must find it to have a partner who works in the sex industry. It’s the classic scenario: Span finds it easy to get men, as they are fascinated by the highly sexed life she leads. But when it comes to commitment, “The girls working in the sex industry are not the ones they want to marry.”

This kind of problem with “civilian life” helps create a strong feeling of solidarity among the women working in the sex industry, and saw Span advocating the introduction of condoms following the bombshell in the Valley (the porn industry’s Hollywood) when actor Darren James was found to be HIV positive in March this year. “I was saying that this is a chance for us to start using condoms, that the customers will understand,” she explains. “But none of the producers wanted it. And male performers really don’t like using them. They lose wood [their erections] all the time, so it’s much more hassle.” She shrugs, exasperated. “And those are the lives you’re supposed to be saving.”

But despite these wranglings and a general discontentment with the lack of professionalism in the British porn industry, things are looking good for Span, especially since Ann Summers offered to start promoting her films to the people they were intended for – women.

Span is certainly in step with a growing movement for women-friendly porn. Playgirl TV founder Mark Graff, (who claims Nancy Friday’s 1973 collection of sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, is his bible) decided there was a gap in the market where porn for women was concerned. Having decided that “gynacological shots” are of little interest to the “fairer sex”, Graff focuses on the art direction: apparently women want to know whether the film’s star has had her nails done or not, and they like pretty bedspreads and top-end lingerie – preferably Prada, but Victoria’s Secret at the very least. “From the headboards to the shoes to his haircut, her haircut, everything in the room was pretty closely examined [by his focus groups],” he explains. And his female film fans seem particularly concerned with an actress’s choice of shoes.

And Graff isn’t the only one to see financial gain in a female-focused sex industry. There is a wave of sisters-doing-it-for-themselves, as women openly embrace upscale sex. Thank Sex and the City if you like, but there is a proliferation of sex aids available to anyone with cash. The movement includes the London branch of Cake, a New York sex club for women; Anita Roddick’s daughter Sam’s erotic emporium Coco de Mer, which launched with a Saatchi ad campaign; sex shop Sh!; Myla, a website and Notting Hill boutique that sells real pearl G-strings, £200 sex aids designed by Habitat’s Tom Dixon and a lubricant infused with ylang-ylang and ginko biloba. Span’s offerings may be a little more hard-core and less ‘naughty-ladies-who-lunch’, but the men-only barriers are definitely being dissolved.

You get the feeling, however , that Span would be as forthright if she were a lone voice in the porn industry. Although she hasn’t yet made her fortune (rather than live in Hugh Heffner splendour, she reckons she earns only an average wage for someone her age), she is incredibly comfortable in her own skin and with her personal choices.

And, luckily for any future partners, her fondness for sex remains undiminished by the fact that it is now her nine-to-five occupation. “You have to get over the sex in porn,” says Anna, cryptically, pushing a brown lock behind her ear. “It’s like a surgeon has to get over the sight of blood.”[/Are_PayPal_LoginPlease]

Louisiana voters will cast ballots on a proposed ban on gay marriage after the Louisiana Supreme Court Thursday refused to consider three lawsuits designed to block the September 18th vote.

Supporters of the amendment praised the court for allowing the measure to go to the voters.
Read the rest of this entry →