Nina Hartley Podcast (2019)
Sex educator, author, trained nurse, and yes, pornstar, Nina Hartley gets down and dirty with us in this interview from 2019.
Nina has a wealth of knowledge that comes with being not only a renaissance woman but a true legend and icon. Of course, that also comes with having the longest on-camera adult career out of any woman in history.
“I started in ’84, this is my 35th anniversary year…I have no intentions of quitting.”
That’s the epitome of dedication if you ask me. Few people, if any, are as passionate about anything as Nina is about sex and sexuality. My favorite thing I’ve ever done is play the guitar and I quit that after two weeks.
“Sex, sexuality, and sexual expression is my deepest fascination sociologically, politically, personally, artistically, metaphysically, and public health-wise.”
She also makes a simple yet compelling point, about the root of her dedication and our shared human experience.
“It’s a very important part of our human experience, of course. We relegate it to the sewers of entertainment. The basements of our lives. To the detriment of everybody.”
Nina’s ability to swiftly and precisely cut through these convoluted barriers and shine a light on the obvious truth is no doubt what has made her a unique and unstoppable force.
“As soon as I saw my first porno movie when I was 17, I realized that’s for me.”
Nina described her first porno-watching, career-inspiring experience, in vivid detail, down to her somehow on-brand outfit.
“It was mid-afternoon on a weekday. I had been walking back and forth in front of this movie for probably a year. I read the book (The Autobiography of a Flea) when I was in my middle-teens as a babysitter. Finally I decided to go on in. I was the only woman. I was 17, but they didn’t card me because Berkeley, and I looked like a hippie. I was wearing overalls. I had my hair in a single braid down my left shoulder. I was wearing granny glasses, no makeup. Some kind of ugly shoe. But unbeknownst to anybody else, I was wearing beautiful matching fashionable lingerie. These were Glossies by Lily of France. They were sheer, sparkly, stretchy material with an underwire front closed bra and matching bikini panties.”
Not only does that sound like every woman who’s ever broken my heart, it’s undoubtedly the perfect outfit to wear to a porno on a Thursday afternoon.
“I sat in the middle of the theater. I always say that a lone female in a movie theater in those days is like a drop of dish soap in greasy water. I was all alone, I had at least 10 feet in every direction. I was just transfixed. I knew it was for me.”
She didn’t make a movie until eight years later, but that fateful day guided the fabled trajectory our industry’s eternal star.
Hear all about Nina’s journey in the podcast below, where she also discusses the new relationship in her personal life, artificiality in porn, anti-porn feminists, being sexual from the “brain down,” the most difficult surfaces to have sex on, the controversial law that could threaten porn’s existence, and more.
