From the Archive: Unbound
It’s always been ground glass, scraping against my insides. I imagine a light held to the place where I open would illuminate a mess of torn flesh, throbbing red-wet.
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Posts Tagged: porn
Agency Over Anything Else: Talking with Elle Nash
Elle Nash discusses her new short story collection, NUDES.
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My Blockbuster
Time has put those lovely nostalgia lenses in front of our eyes, and I am not immune.
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You Like That, Baby?: The Myth of Feminine Mystery
“It’s like a damn Rubik’s cube down there!”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #126: Christopher Zeischegg
“Being thrust into forced ritualistic closeness does break the ice, but doesn’t guarantee closeness.”
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ENOUGH: The Mark Thing
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #123: Erica Garza
“[T]here was something really empowering about being honest and open about this part of myself. Somehow, writing helped lessen the shame.”
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The Peep King’s Legacy: A Family Portrait
The day after Hugh Hefner died, I received a text from my sister that our grandfather was starring alongside James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal in HBO’s new series, The Deuce.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Kirsten Irving
The pressure to prove ourselves can have a distorting effect, causing us to doubt our instincts in favor of following others we perceive to be experts or “genuine.”
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Multitudes: (Re) Writing Mother
I like to listen to my mother’s voice; the sounds she makes in an English-Korean mashup; we are each the other’s dictionary.
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The Truth About Lying
My gut is a red, fiery drum, a beacon of rosy light. My instinct to run is a bright radioactive pink arrow, a bloody blade. I was correct.
...morePorn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her own piece on porn, writing a genre-bending essay that can best be described as a reported piece of first-person criticism. After positioning herself in the feminist […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Cristina García and Truong Tran
How do you work with a material that you don’t have trust in? I had to step away from it and find another way of articulating and I had to do it without words.
...moreNo Means No
Porn performers consent to have sex on-camera, but Stoya objects to the idea that she — or any other performer — is just a collection of orifices to which she’s signed away unrestricted penetration rights. The number of times you’ve said “yes” does not in any way disempower you to say “no” at any point, […]
...moreEmpowered and Powerless
Maddie Crum discusses Peggy Orenstein’s new book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, about female sexuality in our hook-up culture, the problems with school sex ed., and the role of porn in rape culture: Orenstein is clear about her opinion on porn, if only through the statistics she presents. She doesn’t touch on […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: As Soon as I Stop
I feel dizzy, but I’ve got the donkey’s tail in my hand and if I pin it just right, my whole life could change.
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Shark’s Teeth
My kink used to be my Deepest Darkest secret, and now it is an integrated part of my everyday life.
...moreWeekly Geekery
The crazy world of adult content. What poison teaches us about life. Why does hate live online? Medicine and art meet in Stendahl syndrome.
...moreCriminalizing Kink in the UK: The 50 Shades Effect
Last month I reached out to LA-based expat Anna Span, an English porn producer (and one-time Liberal Democrat candidate) who awhile back, fought the UK’s ban on showing female ejaculation in porn—and won! I was anxious to hear her take on the recent crackdown on sadomasochistic practices in adult films, specifically whether “BDSM-themed art porn” […]
...moreThought Crimes, Sexual Fantasies, and “The Cannibal Cop”
Years ago when I worked at a house of domination in NYC’s Chelsea district, there were a handful of clients who were memorable for breaking up the run-of-the-mill fetish (foot worship, spanking, bondage, role playing, repeat) monotony. One was a dude I never saw, but only heard about whenever one of the few Mistresses capable […]
...moreThe Last Pulp Star
Chris Offutt talks about the life and death his father, one of America’s last adult-pulp writers, for NY Times Magazine: In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a […]
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Beautiful Things That Happen in the Dark: A Conversation with Eon McKai
Antonia Crane talks to Vivid Alt’s Eon McKai about stigma, sex, and becoming a porn auteur.
...moreWho Are We Writing For?
Sandwiched between fictions on one side and instructions on the other, a woman is often denied the breathing room necessary to find her individual sexuality. In a conversation at the Nervous Breakdown, Rumpus contributor Ashley Perez and author Cris Mazza discuss sexual pain (both mental and physical) and the damaging standards fabricated by literature and […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
Cliches are something every writer has to deal with at some point. This weekend, Steve Edwards acknowledges the cliché and comes to something of a reckoning. Edwards declares: That’s how the heart works—it doesn’t give a shit about what it’s supposed to feel, it just feels. Using the context of a failed marriage, Edwards shows […]
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The Rumpus Discussion of Nymphomaniac
[Lars von Trier is] a black hole in the middle of his cinematic universe, and sooner or later he’s going to suck everything right into himself.
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The Rumpus Interview with Dylan Ryan
Porn star, writer, performance artist, social worker, and activist Dylan Ryan sheds light on her positive experiences as a sex worker and advocates for the empowerment of women in the porn industry.
...moreZoë’s Notes
As part of Welcome Kink Saturdays, The Weeklings published Notes From a Porn Set by managing editor Zoë Ruiz, edited by Rumpus contributor Antonia Crane. I realize he is apologizing because his hands are down his pants and he is masturbating. Also, Rumpus contributor Amy Fusselman debuted Zoë’s column From Her Notebooks on Ohio Edit. The column focuses on personal mini […]
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Public Sex, Private Lives: The Rumpus Interview with Simone Jude
I wanted to present three complicated portraits that raise important questions, not just about what it means to be a porn performer, but what it means to be a sexually open woman
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Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin
Porn was always stronger than me, and it still is.
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Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist.
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