The Sexis Interview: Tristan Taormino, Part 1

The first woman I ever saw with a cock was Tristan Taormino. In 2000, on HBO’s Real Sex 25, I watched a gorgeous brunette with cute glasses stand on a bar in a room full of lesbians and tease them with her bright red strap-on. Eventually, another girl also climbed up on the bar, and got down on her knees to worship the candy-colored cock. When the brunette finally allowed the girl to suck it, I was shocked—not at the graphic sexuality on television, but at the fact that the focus was on the pleasure the girl was experiencing in doing it. Tristan Taormino, the brunette, had shifted the focus of the classic blowjob to the pleasure women can experience while sucking cock. This love and respect for women’s sexuality would later earn her the title of “The Feminist Pornographer”.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan University, advice from a professor and a lack of interest from law schools caused Tristan to change her plans of becoming a lawyer to becoming a sex writer. Since then she has published four books, including the groundbreaking books Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. She has served as an editor for various erotica series, as well as On Our Backs, and appeared in numerous magazines and TV shows as an expert on women’s sexuality.

In 1999, Tristan convinced John “Buttman” Stagliano to turn The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women into a film, which eventually won two AVN Awards. She then made The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women 2, House of Ass, the reality show porn Chemistry Volumes 1-4, and a series of Expert films for Vivid-Ed on a variety of subjects including anal sex, oral sex, and threesomes. Her most recent film, Rough Sex, has been nominated for the 2010 Best Specialty Film of the Year at the AVN Awards, and more importantly, has become my favorite heterosexual porn movie of all time.

I sat down with Tristan in the outdoor courtyard of the beautiful adobe bed and breakfast I was staying at in Albuquerque for the Pornotopia Erotic Film Festival. Although originally scheduled for a half-hour interview, we ended up talking for almost two hours. I tried to remain objective and professional, all the while reminding myself that I was having a discussion on feminism, pornography, and women’s sexuality with one of the true game changers of the adult industry.


Have you always been this curious and interested in sex?

People often ask, “Where did you grow up?”—like on some lesbian, feminist commune. I didn’t. I was raised by a single mom, and there was no open discussion about sex [or] sexuality at all. Her way of educating me was that she had really good explicit sex education books on the shelf, out in plain sight. And if they disappeared for weeks at a time, nothing would be said.


Which books?

Oh, for sure the Joy of Sex. For all its faults, it had the sense that everyone liked each other, and everyone was enjoying themselves. Those are really the first explicit images of sexuality I saw—not Hustler or Penthouse.


My first porn was Sisters, by David Hamilton, and it was not a scary experience at all.

There used to be a whole ritual associated with your first porn: His dad went out of town, and we call our friends, and the babysitter was coming over, but we had half an hour and we dug under the bed and found the stash. It had this charge to it, this taboo—and that made it twice as hot, the fact that it was forbidden. And there were all these ways you had to find it in this tiny little sliver of time that you could get your hands on it. Whereas now, it’s one search on Google, and you have hardcore free porn at your fingertips.


We are coming out of eight years of Bush and abstinence-only education, while at the same time Internet pornography is ramping up. How do you feel the Internet is changing the way society looks at sex?

I think that it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there is such a diversity of sexuality represented on the Internet that people have a tendency to be able to find what they are into faster than they could five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, so it’s like, Oh my god, I thought I was the only one into that, and no, here are 20 sites, and an organization, and here is a conference next week. We don’t have just Playboy and Penthouse and this sort of dominant machine putting out this imagery. We’ve got amateur sites, we’ve got swingers, we’ve got alt people, we’ve got queer people—all over the board. So you can find your sexuality or a piece of you somewhere.

The flip side of that is that all this talk about what is sexy with no education. We still will not talk to kids in explicit terms about sex education. There’s the sense that that’s what fucking looks like or should look like, and women still don’t know how their clitoris works. Or women are 22 years old, and have gotten to college and never had an orgasm. There is all this: image, image, image, and no information, no education. So, in some ways, it’s like we still need to sit everyone down and show them naked people and actually how their bodies work.