Porn Star Nina Hartley Is A Legend And A Trademark

If you look at porn stars who get out of the business, you’ll find all kinds of different people and reasons for exiting, says porn legend Nina Hartley.
“Porn is a huge community” Hartley, 49, told me at Las Vegas’ Adult Video News Awards. “There are people who use it strictly for commercial purposes. There are people who used in conjunction with being drug addicts, and when they got sober they realized, ‘Oh my God, gotta go.’
“A lot of people leave happy,” she said. “Other people are pushed out. Other people jump out. Other people go out for five, 10 years and come back.”
UNLV’s Lynn Comella — an assistant professor who studies women and the sex industry — said the stereotype is porn starlets were sexually abused. But Comella pushes back against that.
“One in four women are sexually abused. But one out of every four women do not become porn stars,” Comella said. “We tend to forget women have positive experiences and negative experiences in every industry.”
Comella knows women in porn and strip clubs and who work as prostitutes that don’t have abuse histories, and that find their work rewarding personally and financially, she said.
Hartley said more porn actors are in it for the money and career now, she said. Hartley said she snuck into an “X” movie when she was 17.
“Halfway through it, I knew it was what I wanted to do.”
Back then, people who got into porn were more like “freaks,” if only because “You had to be into sex” so much that you’d track down porn producers, who were much harder to find then.
“Now, you just go to L.A., or go online,” she said.
Hartley is a swinger who has been in porn since 1984. She’s been happy in the career about 85 percent of the time. The unhappy times had to do with her own poor money management and poor relationship skills, in her younger days.
“I am a sex creature. I’m a lifer,” Hartley said. “If a couple wires had crossed, I would have been in a laboratory my whole life studying a particular molecule.
“I’m lucky I found my life work early on. For some people, it’s music. For other people, it’s science,” she said. “But sex is it for me: thinking about it, talking about having it, helping other people have it better, educating people about it, advocating for it.
“I’m an exhibitionist. I’m as narcissistic as the next entertainer. Anybody who gets in front of people with a microphone is an exhibitionist in of one kind or another. I just recognize that aspect in myself. And I make sure — instead of being inappropriate on the street with strangers — I found a playpen to go play in. And I like the fact that porn has parameters. There are boundaries.”
Every job has its down side, she said.
“For me, the down side is sitting around waiting a lot; incompetent people around you; bad food, so you bring your own lunch; bring a book; bring some slippers and a robe. And be prepared to wait until it’s time for you to go do it. Don’t be in a rush to do anything else.”
Hartley said last week’s Consumer Electronics Show has an odd relation with its next-door neighbor, the Adult Entertainment Expo.
“They like our money, but they hold their noses at us, because we are a low-culture medium,” she said.
“Adult entertainment — it’s cartoonish. It’s silly. And it’s not ironic. For adult entertainment to work, there can be no separation between the viewer and the product. You can’t have hip detachment if it’s going to do you any good.”
Porn has seen innovations in technology, now available on Blu-ray disks. But there’s also not much innovation to be had in porn, creatively.
“In all of porn there is only: solo, boy-girl, girl-girl, girl-girl-boy, boy-boy-girl, groups. There are six basic configurations of activity. There’s stroking, hugging, kissing, manual sex and penetration. So there are six combinations and five basic things they do,” Hartley said.
“We can’t do animals. We can’t do kids. Don’t do blood. Can’t kill anybody. So we’re stuck with two humans trying to have a connection. How well can we communicate that energy?”
Porn being a product, Hartley has embraced such. At the end of the interview, she spelled her name Nina.com; last name “Hartley”:
“It’s a registered Trademark, so if you can remember to put the R circle, it’d be great.”