The Masters Of O: Our Exclusive Interview With Porn Power Couple Nina Hartley & Ernest Greene

Hollywood is rife with so-called power couples, but this is curiously one area in which the adult industry seems to be sorely lacking in comparison to their mainstream counterparts. If there is one "typical" power couple in the industry, however, you'd have a hard time arguing that Nina Hartley and Ernest Greene aren't exactly that. With careers that span four decades, Nina and Ernest have managed to not only stay relevant over that span of time, but they continue to be at the cutting edge of progressive ideals. Not content to merely sit around and wait for offers to come their way, they're out in front of the industry, presenting themselves as ambassadors for a better and more enlightened industry.

Ernest's latest book, Master of O, is the talk of a BDSM community fed up with the terrible misconceptions perpetrated by mainstream imitators like Fifty Shades of Grey, and both he and Nina have been traveling to promote the book and the BDSM lifestyle. I recently chatted with them about their careers, the changes they've seen, the changes they'd like to see, and a little bit of everything in between. 

Tucker Bankshot: Can you walk us through the moment when you began to think about long term viability within the adult industry? Nowadays it seems that a lot of performers are more savvy and begin making plans for longevity a lot sooner, but when did you make a conscious effort to really make this a long term career? 

Nina Hartley: My first movie.

Ernest Greene: Yeah, and actually you’re asking two separate questions, so I’m going to give you two separate answers. I can tell you the exact moment, we were at the Adult Expo Convention in Las Vegas back in 2006 and we were in this nice hotel on a very high floor overlooking the strip. And it’s usually very busy with ordinary tourists, and this was right before the big economic implosion, and I looked out that window and I could see that there was almost no traffic on the strip, just taxi cabs. Now, I’d been watching the economic news with high anxiety, and I remember turning to Nina and saying, “I don’t think this can go on much longer.”

NH: Right.

EG: And actually that proved to be a little more prophetic and a little sooner than I thought. I’d always had my doubts about the long-term economic viability of some marketing aspects of porn as it exists. There’s always been porn and there will always be porn, there’s no question about it, but will it be consolidated in the form of big production companies doing big videos? I wouldn’t rule that out, but until there’s some protection against piracy, that could be, but the question of whether customers will return from the internet to buy conventional video products, they apparently do for some, but overall that remains to be seen. 

NH: He’s actually just asking about in terms of our careers.

EG: Yes, that was the second part…  

NH: The first time that I made a movie, I just went, I’m home. I’m never leaving. My reason for being in porn besides, well, naked ladies, was that I have a message about sex and an appetite for it, and porn is a wonderful subsidized way to get my message out there consistently. So I always knew that every time I made a movie, somebody was going to see me for the first time, and that was my one chance to grab them, to grab their interest. So I’ve been on message for pretty much my whole career, in terms of how I handle it. 

EG: That’s one of the things that brought us together. Unlike other people who get into porn for various other narrow reasons, both of us saw it as a vehicle for expression about certain ideas that we had. We saw it as a way for us to use the industry instead of it using us, to deliver our message instead of…

NH: Their message.

EG: Well, they don’t even have a message.

NH: No they don’t. Their message is “more tits!” 

EG: In my particular case it has to do with helping to bring porn’s portrayal of BDSM and DS and other kinds of kink related things into a more realistic focus because the material when I came into this in 1984 was (affects an accent) very bad.

NH: (Affecting same accent) Very bad, very bad.

EG: So we pursued these agendas with varying degrees of success. We’ve been able to make some pictures that we thought were helpful and meaningful. I think Nina’s “Sex Guide” series has been hugely successful and helpful, and for good reason because the information is presented in a very user friendly manner. And I’m proud of the large scale BDSM-oriented features that I’ve done, particularly the “O” series, and on other occasions it’s been a job. Some days you just go in there and it’s a job.

I’ve also been the executive editor of Hustler’s Taboo for 15 years, their BDSM/kink-oriented magazine, and that’s been a wonderful experience, I’ve had a lot of freedom, and I really think we helped to reshape the picture of what this particular kind of behavior looks like in that 15 years, and that’s been really good. So some of what we set out to do, we’ve been able to do, and in some cases this industry has done what it does best, which is thwart attempts to make it better. 

NH: Absolutely, no question.  

TB: That’s actually a great segue into my next question, which is that you’ve been doing a lot of Q&As to promote Master of O, and I’m wondering what sorts of discoveries you’ve made through those regarding people’s perception of BDSM? Is there a sea change happening at least as far as people understanding that this isn’t some shady pastime practiced by people under dangerous conditions, or is there still a lot of work to be done to get people’s thinking to that place?

EG: The answer to that would be yes on both counts. I think that we’ve moved the line, and when I say we I mean the entire BDSM community has moved the line on public acceptance and consolidating around certain ideas of how this practice can be safe, consensual, and enjoyable. I think that within the community there’s been some progress, but there’s also been some grinding of gears in terms of having to absorb suddenly hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who have suddenly become interested in this. Even before Fifty Shades of Grey came out this was already happening.

NH: Right.

EG: FetLife, which is a big BDSM/kink social media site, already had a million and a half accounts before the book came out, and now they’ve got three and a half million accounts. We knew we were on the radar, there’s no question about that, but indeed as we’ve gone out and done these public appearances, the level of sophistication in the Q&As is very high. People are wanting to know about very specific aspects of the book and what they related to in the real world, as the book obviously is fictional and very deliberately over the top as a fantasy, so people are wondering, well what are you really saying about this and that? The questions have been, overall, very sophisticated and much different, much broader, much more philosophical, which I actually consider to be progress. 

TB: Right, not having to discuss logistics, I guess, is a nice change of pace. 

EG: The book itself is not really written for 101 people, it was intended for people who already brought some knowledge to it, but there’s a lot of that knowledge out there, there’s no doubt about it. There’s also a lot of misinformation out there as well, and we do occasionally have to clear some things up, and there are some ongoing controversies within the community, we didn’t used to have enough people to have that.  

TB: Nina, I would hate myself if I didn’t at least ask about how you became involved with Paul Thomas Anderson and his film Boogie Nights, which is one of my absolute favorite movies.

NH: I got a call, actually this is one of the things that I can thank Ron Jeremy for. I got a call from him saying that the casting director was trying to get a hold of me, that it was absolutely legit, and to give it a go. I auditioned, and it turned out that Paul Thomas Anderson had been a fan since an—ahem—early age, and he wanted to put me in his movie. I auditioned opposite William H. Macy who is the world’s nicest man, honestly, and I got the part. I shot six days out of a total shooting schedule of 56 days I think it was, and it’s been seventeen years now, which is hard to believe.

TB: You were obviously not active during the period depicted in your segments of the film, but how much verisimilitude was there in that film as it relates to the industry?

NH: Very little. Ask anybody in the industry that’s depicted on camera and you’ll hear how little realism there is. There’s one line when Nicole Ari Parker walks off the stage and says I’m gonna go douche or clean up or whatever, and I was asked, well what would she say? And in the 70s, shaving wasn’t a thing, so she wouldn’t be going off to shave, but douching was a thing back then, so that was one moment of verisimilitude, but everything else is completely movie-land ideas.

EG: There’s some fundamental flaws with that movie, and I don’t want to pick them apart here, especially since my beloved wife is in it, but my main problem was that the movie focused mostly around a guy, and in the porn business, no matter who you are as a guy, it’s still fundamentally about women. So I felt that women in porn were underserved in the movie. Now, I don’t mean to impose a political point on this, there doesn’t need to be affirmative action in the movies, I think you should make the movie you want to make, but if I were making it, I would’ve wanted to see more of the women and know more about them.

NH: Right, and P.T. Anderson wasn’t even born then, he’s only, like, 45.

EG: 45, huh? I hate him already! (All laugh)

NH: He’s young, he’s too old to be my son, but he’s still young.

EG: And I might add that he’s very talented. He’s an extremely good director.

NH: Yes, and I liked working with him as a director. He knew what he wanted, he never yelled, if he ever freaked out he kept it to himself, he was calm, cool, collected, gave very nice notes between takes, I was quite impressed. 

TB: Nina, you’ve shown on your blog a flair for prose and a quick turn of phrase…

NH: What? You are too funny, I think you’re adorable now!

EG: You’ve found the way to her heart. 

TB: You just made my day.

NH: Well, thank you. Thank you for thinking that my prose is good, I think it’s rather pedantic, but okay!

TB: Well, what I was going to ask is how much of this style of writing have you always done and how much has Ernest influenced your personal style?

NH: When I write for publication off of my blog, Ernest is my first and best editor. He edited, well and co-wrote, Guide to Total Sex, but on my blog he doesn’t… 

EG: You have your own voice, and I think it’s distinctive and I wouldn’t want to interfere with it. 

NH: No, and you’re very good, but my blog is just strictly, I mean I do spell-check it, but I don’t go back and rewrite or think, this is awfully disorganized, so I just report the facts as I see them, as I remember the incident in question. Luckily I have an interesting enough life that there’s enough to talk about (All laugh). Overall though, I think that living with a good writer for as long as I have, I will say that my basic writing style has improved, you know, short declarative sentences, no semi-colons (all laugh)…

TB: What was it that Kurt Vonnegut said about semi-colons? Don’t use them, it’ll only prove to people that you went to college (Full quote here)

EG: (As Nina laughs) Yeah, that’s so true. I think the semi-colon may be an endangered species. Hardly anyone knows what they’re used for and I rarely see them anymore. Only an editor or someone who really works with them actually has some idea of what they do and where they go. These days they don’t teach that in school, they just teach people how to tweet. 

NH: Yeah.

TB: From reading your blogs and interviews, etc. you make your lives seem like, for lack of a better term, an almost non-stop fuckfest. Is that the case, or does it just seem that way to someone like me that doesn’t lead a life of excitement?

EG: Okay, you want to give an honest answer and then I’ll give mine?

NH: It seems like a non-stop fuckfest because when I write about our lives, the only exciting part of it is the sex that we have.

EG: That’s not true of our lives, that’s true of the blog, let’s make that clear. Our lives are exciting otherwise.

NH: Oh no, for sure, but in terms of what’s exciting enough to write about, sexual play and practice is a large part of our social life. We have a regular circle of friends who like this kind of sex and like having it with us and, oh darn, they came over last Thursday, okay I have to write about it. One of the reasons that Ernest and I are married is that we both share the appreciation of sex as a loving activity between the two of us alone, but also as a fun, bonding, social activity. We don’t go out to the movies with people, we have them over for sex parties. That is our social life (all laugh). 

EG: (Laughing) You know, the last time this came up, we were walking up the red carpet for the AVN Awards and some fan shouted out something like, your lives must be one non-stop orgy. And Nina is very modest and realistic about things like this, so she started to say all of the things she just said here to you. So I stepped in front of her and I said, “Nina, quit lying to these people, you know the truth. It is a non-stop orgy, there are naked people running in and out of here all-day and all-night long, the party never ends, it’s unbelievable, it’s beyond your wildest imagination, eat your heart out!” And as we’re walking away I said, “see, there’s some PR for you.” (All laugh).

NH: It really is beyond most people’s wildest imaginations because a lot of people cannot imagine a life free of sexual jealousy and tension while being in a loving, committed, romantic relationship. For most people, the two are not synonymous. You’re either single and sleeping around or you’re making monogamy work, and many people do not get the opportunity to put the two together and see if it will work for them. 

EG: Non-monogamy was a given for us.

NH: Oh yeah, it was a requirement after my first marriage, I said that I will be single and have cats and lovers before I partner again with a possessive lover. Period, full-stop, end of sentence. So I thought I was gonna be single for years, this is never gonna happen. Finding a guy that I wanted to have sex with, and like, and had that attitude, it’s not gonna happen! And Ernest, of course, was under my nose the entire time, because he is that guy. 

TB: Hey, to meet all of those requirements in one person is probably more than you could’ve asked for.

NH: I know, right? And he’s smart, and he’s funny, and he’s age appropriate, and culturally… what’s the word?

EG: Compatible.

NH: That’s the word! 

EG: See, that’s an example of it right there (all laugh). 

TB: Nina, you’ve done several stints now as Hillary Clinton. Do you think those offers will ramp up with her eyeing the White House, and will you continue to do them?

NH: It might. I find it amusing, someone—a Democrat—got upset with me for ”dissing” Hillary in Who's Nailin’ Palin, and I said, “actually it’s a sign of advancement that we can ridicule women as easily as we ridicule men,” because what a lot of people don’t understand is that the male power figures in these movies are actually being made fun of. Either they play to cuckold or the doofus or…

EG: The rich guy who can’t get laid. 

NH: Right, so it’s sleazy or it’s whatever.

EG: You have to introduce some conflict into porn which is not that easy to do. 

TB: You jointly received the Free Speech Coalition Leadership award at this year’s XBIZ Awards. 

NH: I will let Ernest take that one…

EG: Well, let him finish the question because I want to know what you want to know about them.

TB: I was just going to ask if you could talk a bit about the work you’ve done with that organization, and the strides that you’ve seen them make both within the adult industry and outside of it. 

EG: Gee, I sure wish I could. (Nina laughs very loudly) I’ll tell you what I think. First of all, the Leadership Award was very nice, and I thank them for that. I think that it may have been something of a consolation prize because at the beginning, when all this stuff with Measure B came along, I had been the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation for six terms, I was one of the founders of it, and I kinda knew this was going to be serious. 

NH: And they kinda didn’t listen.

EG: Yeah, I had a little trouble at first getting the bigger powers in the industry to listen to me about it. Now, to their credit, the people that I was talking to at the time didn’t seem to be responding to it, so I think the forewarning that I gave them allowed them to get a pretty good system in place right away, so I want to give them kudos for that. 

Now, as far as the way they handled all the political strife around that, I am not quite so charitable. I think that a much more effective counter-campaign could have been waged against AHF, which was so over the top, and so completely ridiculous, and so groundless in every way it should never have gotten as far as it did.

I am a great believer in performer choice, and honestly we did not manufacture a strong anti-condom consensus among porn performers. They’d worked with condoms before but they are not useful in porn because of the way we shoot it. The performer community was overwhelmingly against this from the beginning, especially once you make it illegal not to use them

NH: That will get our goat up!

EG: It’s also unconstitutional, it was an attempt at censorship, and it’s one of those things where someone had a message to deliver and many times, people from AHF and other people that supported the condom mandate talked about how porn was “bad modeling.” The truth of the matter is, modeling ain’t our job. Do you take driving lessons from Vin Diesel? No, it’s an entertainment medium. Don’t try to do this at home, folks. 

And so unlike the folks at AHF and Cal-OSHA, and some others, I give the audiences a little bit of respect for being able to know that this is fantasy that we’re dealing with here, and they know that when they see people having sex in porn, and having the kind of sex that you see people having in porn, those are entertainers. This isn’t real life. So I felt that that was a thing that was not understood, and to make it understood, I felt that performers had to be the ones to make that case. It’s their health and their lives that are at stake, it ought to be their decision. 

They would have producers come out there and say, look we can’t do it because the consumers don’t like it and we’ll lose a lot of money, and we’ll have to leave California and California will lose a lot of tax revenue. That is a Republican argument, and one of the things that’s unfortunate about the porn business is that the leadership of it, by and large, are not politically savvy to where they live. California, especially Los Angeles, is very, very blue. It’s pro-labor, it does not have a problem with regulation. It’s not necessarily anti-porn, but if somebody succeeds in whipping up an alarm over workers’ safety, it’s hard to oppose that. 

Making pornography is legal in California thanks to the Freeman decision, and that has really only been tested in one other state which is New Hampshire, which is considered to be a long way away, and awfully cold for making porn. So I don’t see us decamping from California anytime soon. We needed better arguments and we needed to make them in the right places.  

Now, in the next round, in the legal round, we did well, and I do think that eventually all of these measures will be thrown out by various courts as unconstitutional. It’s very clear that the officials regard them as unenforceable and ridiculous. So I have to give the Free Speech Coalition credit for having learned from that bruising campaign that if, as AHF is threatening, they come back for another round, they’re going to find themselves in the ring with a much more capable opponent. 

TB: You have both seen a ton of change in the industry during your lives, but there are still some taboos left to be broken and changes that have yet to occur. What would you personally like to see change within the industry, whether or not you have any direct impact on it? 

NH: There’s starting to be change, we finally have a performer’s organization finally, but I’d like to see some kind of organized, consistent, formal training orientation for new performers. There is information out there and we did Porn 101 videos which are free for anyone that wants to watch them… I don’t even know where to start.

EG: Well, I think the idea that performers should have a representative group of their own which is not affiliated with anyone in the industry is good news, and we’d like to see it thrive.

NH: We’re trying to get performers together for so many different reasons, but more and more women are coming in with the idea that they’re going to stay for a while. Many of them are coming in older, after college, and they’re realizing that with camming and Skype sessions and movies and this and that, they can make a living and be their own bosses. There’s no longer at the mercy of trying to get a contract or waiting for the phone to ring. The different revenue streams for performers are definitely more than they used to be. I would also like to see the consciousness raised of some of the agents because, you know, they’re human…

EG: They’re human? I must’ve missed the memo (Nina & Tucker laugh) No, that’s not true, I have good relations with all the agents. If you’re out there listening agents, I’m just being snarky, as is my way. But I have a change I’d like to see. For a period, it was really during the 80s and 90s, and right up into the teens, there were some very ambitious efforts made to make bigger, better, story-driven, character-driven, better looking, better technically executed, major kinds of explicit pictures for adults and I would like to see that come back. I think we were on the right track with that because there is a growing audience of women and couples and generally sexually enlightened people out there who want to see explicit sexual material presented with some artfulness and some skill and something other than the same faded beige couch out in some living room in the valley.  

NH: Oh come on, couch porn is a thing!

EG: It’s a thing, but the reason it’s still a thing is because piracy has sapped most of the available funding for bigger productions and I think that’s a catastrophe for everyone. We built, over thirty years, a community of people here of actually skilled professionals who work behind the camera, good editors, good shooters, all kinds of people who actually managed to make some good pictures. I’ll agree that a lot of feature porn was pretty dreary, but it was getting better until the bottom dropped out of the market because people were stealing it. 

The last feature that I released, for example, was profitable amazingly. The Truth About O was my last big feature and it flew out the doors on DVD and paid for itself, it made a twenty percent profit in three weeks which nothing was doing at that point, but here’s the bad part. The week before it was released, I googled the title and the first thing that came up was seven torrent sites that already had it. A week before it came out. The pirates have a way of getting that stuff before we can even get it to distributors. We were making good things and we were going to make better things, and I think that has gone away to some extent because the profitability of large projects is just not there. 

Now, on the other side, I will say this: That does create a vacuum and the vacuum does fill itself. We are seeing a lot of interesting, independent, smaller pictures being made by people who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to gain entrée into this industry when it was a more professionalized kind of environment, where everything was done according to various formulae that these companies had. Now there are a lot of little startups of one kind or another that are doing kind of offbeat things that the bigger companies wouldn’t have thought to do, and some of that’s really great. The growth of, for instance, outfits like Girlfriends Films and Triangle Films, and other companies that do small pictures that are relationship and character driven have proven to be very successful. Their model seems to work in spite of the piracy problems. So that’s one good thing.

We have greater diversity in what we make. The days when there would be a feminist porn awards ceremony seemed remote at the beginning, but now there are enough women directors who identify as feminists, and wish to bring that consciousness into their work, that you can say that without laughing, and I think that’s a great thing. I think that’s terrific. There are all kinds of new gender approaches that we’re seeing in this indie porn with stuff that is much more queer friendly with a greater diversity of body types and much less aimed at what we see as the traditional porn demographic of guys in their 20s and 30s who didn’t have a date that night. I think we’re getting something more than that now, and I think that’s a good thing. 

It hasn’t been all bad and it’s created some openings for people, but we really cannot make these things for free. If I have a takeaway to give to people, if you want better porn, it’s like anything else, and producers don’t like it when I say this either, but the truth is…

Both: You get what you pay for!

To purchase a copy of Master of O, visit Ernest's site MasterofO.com

Nina's official site and home of her blog mentioned in this interview can be found at Nina.com

Follow Nina on Twitter @ninaland & Follow Ernest on Twitter @TheMasterofO