Porn star Johnny Anglais debates at Oxford Union

A former teacher turned porn star has spoken at an Oxford Union debate in favour of legalising prostitution.

Benedict Garrett from London performs under the alias of Johnny Anglais

Johnny Anglais, whose real name is Benedict Garrett, freely admits to being a prostitute.

In 2011 he was reprimanded by the General Teaching Council after his pupils spotted him in an adult film, but was not barred from teaching.

He left the profession and now campaigns for the liberalisation of attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

Mr Garrett said: "We all need to be far more open and honest... not just for our own sense of identity, but for the health and well-being of our young people."

His team included Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal. It also included brothel owner and founder of Nevada's Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Dennis Hof.

They were arguing against Julie Bindel, author and co-founder of Justice for Women, feminist activist Finn Mackay and campaigner Ellie Levenson.

The debate was on Thursday evening.

Source:  BBC Oxford

Ontario court legalises brothels

Toronto - A ban on brothels puts prostitutes at risk and is unconstitutional, Ontario's top court ruled on Monday, in a case that is expected to be appealed to Canada's top court and have ramifications for the country at large.

The Ontario Court of Appeal said sex workers should be allowed to work safely indoors.

"The world in which street prostitutes actually operate is a world of dark streets and barren, isolated, silent places," said the five-judge panel in their ruling. "It is a dangerous world, with always the risk of violence and even death."

The court in Canada's most populous province has given the government a year to rewrite the law if it chooses.

The panel also said that rules against profiting from prostitution should apply only to "circumstances of exploitation" to prevent pimps from exploiting prostitutes.

Criminal acts

The change will allow police to prosecute violent and manipulative pimps while at the same time permitting prostitutes to hire drivers or body guards to protect them, the court said.

At the same time, the court said concerns about the nuisance created by street prostitution are real, having a "profound impact on the members of the surrounding community". So it upheld the ban on soliciting for the purposes of selling sex.

Prostitution itself is not illegal in Canada, but pimping, operating a brothel and communicating for the purposes of selling sex were considered criminal acts. A lower court judge ruled in 2010 the prostitution-related laws were unconstitutional in that they contributed to the dangers faced by prostitutes.

Both sides have 60 days to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Julie Di Mambro, a spokesperson for Canada's Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, said the government is reviewing the ruling and its legal options.

"As the Prime Minister has said, prostitution is bad for society and harmful to communities, women and vulnerable persons," she said.

"We continue to see a social need for laws to control prostitution and its effects on society."

Violence

Ontario Attorney General John Gerretsen said the Ontario government is considering appealing the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Terri-Jean Bedford, a dominatrix, has argued that Canada's sex trade laws force workers from the safety of their homes to face violence on the streets. Bedford's "Bondage Bungalow" north of Toronto was raided by police in 1994.

Valerie Scott, a former prostitute who launched the challenge with Bedford, said prostitutes are safer when they don't have to patrol the streets. She said that sex workers can now call police and report a bad client.

"I'd like to thank the Ontario Court of Appeal justices for pretty much declaring sex workers persons today," Scott said. "I didn't think I'd see it in my lifetime, but here we are."

She noted that the vast majority of sex work has already been taking place inside bawdy houses, as they're called in Canada.

"I do worry about my street colleagues. We have to figure out something to make these women and men safe... when you have other people around, generally [in a bawdy house], you don't see as much violence."

"I feel like we're debutantes at a ball," said Scott. "We're almost real citizens so this is wonderful."

Win

Alan Young, the lawyer for the women, called the decision a win for sex trade workers and society.

"Canadian society will not collapse or even flinch under the weight of this decision," Young said. "Eighty percent have moved indoors. The movement has already occurred, and now the law is following afterward."

"It has not created a large infrastructure and business enterprise for the sex trade, but what it has done is that it's opened up the law enough so that people who choose to enter the sex trade, which is a legal choice, will now be able to avail themselves of certain types of safety measures that previously the law in a very callous way said, 'We don't care, suffer'. Now you don't have to suffer."

Brenda Cossman, a University of Toronto law professor, said the ruling is not going to lead to an explosion of brothels in the province.

"There are thousands of workers who practice sex work out of their homes, out of establishments that they've rented where they work with one or two other women, are we going to now see brothels springing up in everyone's neighbourhood? No, because frankly they're already there and you just didn't know about it. All this law does is make what those women do legal now and allow them to practice in an environment that will be safer."

Cossman noted that the province grants 25 "body rub" licenses a year.

Julie Grant, the executive at large of the Sex Professionals of Canada, agreed that the ruling will not be a huge change for the industry.

"Bawdy houses have been operational for as long as the industry has existed, they've just been somewhat invisible, existing as adult massage parlours and with women operating out of their homes or in hotels as escorts. We're not all of a sudden going to become the Wild West with brothels filled with women and beer bottles in saloons popping up everywhere," said Grant. 

"Canadians have always been discreet with the way the sex industry operates and this will continue."

Shawn Loftis, Globe-Trotting Gay Porn Star, Rehired As Miami-Dade Public School Teacher

Shawn Loftis was a popular sub at Miami Beach High and a handful of other Miami-Dade schools until he was abruptly canned in January 2011. His crime? A past lifeas a gay porn performer under the screen name Collin O'Neal, including his own erotic series -- "World of Men" -- featuring Loftis cavorting with hunks around the globe. Loftis challenged the termination, and surprisingly, the Florida Department of Education has agreed to let him return to teaching.

"I'm proud of my state. I was really shocked that the state of Florida was going to do this. I'm happy," Loftis says.

By the time Loftis decided to pursue his long-time dream of becoming a teacher, he was famous to web viewers for two different reasons.

First, under his porn name, Loftis was the star of such classics as Mo' Bubble Butt and Pumping Iron, plus his more innovative travel porn that featured him filming sex scenes in locales as far flung as Lebanon and Cuba.

But Loftis -- who has an international relations degree from FIU and a master's in public administration from UM -- also made his name on CNN, where his self-produced iReporter pieces earned tens of thousands of viewers.

When he quit both jobs in spring 2010 to take sub jobs at Miami-Dade schools, he was chasing a lifelong dream to teach, he says. But someone ratted on his past career to Nautilus Middle principal Allyn Bernstein, who canned Loftis under the school system's ambiguous "good conduct" clause.

Loftis went back to his globe-circling porn ways while his challenge worked its way through the school system (and earned a starring role in Miami New Times' Sex Issue last year to boot).

He plead his case to the Florida Education Practices Committee in Orlando, and on Friday they ruled in his favor.

"I can use my experiences in life to teach kids," he tells our sister paper L.A. Weekly. "The key point is that they said when you go back to the classroom and a student brings this up to you, you will be able to handle that. I thought that was highly progressive of them."

Loftis plans to again quit porn and return to the classroom, and after two years on probation, he can apply for a full-time teaching gig.

Source:  Miami New Times

Kevin Hogan, High School English Teacher And Alleged Gay Porn Star, Scandal Sparks Mixed Reactions

Controversy over the alleged gay porn past of a Massachusetts-based high school English teachercontinues to swirl, with support split between the employee and the reporter who broke the story.

As The Boston Globe is reporting, Kevin Hogan, who was hired in August to head the English department at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden, was placed on administrative leave after Fox News broke the news yesterday that he had acted under the pseudonym "Hytch Cawke" in X-rated movies like "Fetish World" and "Just Gone Gay 8," which were released in 2010.

When confronted with the accusations by Fox Undercover reporter Mike Beaudet, Hogan -- who also served as the school's crew coach -- only responded, “I don’t know what you’re talking about."

The school's business manager responded quickly to the reports with a swift e-mail to students' parents saying Hogan's references had been "superlative" at the time of his hiring, yet opinions on the controversy have been surprisingly mixed. A poll on the Fox News site finds a staggering majority (81 percent) of readers believe Hogan should be allowed to keep his job, compared with a mere 18 percent who feel he should be fired.

Beaudet has taken to his Twitter account in response:

@Channel_Mike 
Mike Beaudet

Lots of reaction to our story. Don't agree with all of it, but appreciate the feedback. Working on update for tonight. See you at 6. #fox25

November 30, 2011 5:34 pm via web Reply Retweet Favorite

Meanwhile, a Facebook page, "Support Kevin Hogan, FIRE Mike Beaudet," already had just over 250 users at the time of this report. "There is no allegation that Kevin Hogan's conduct in his job was other than exemplary," wrote one user. "In fact, this is thinly-disguised sexual orientation discrimination."

It's been a tough year for gay porn stars overall. In August, Florida’s Miami-Dade school district fired substitute teacher Shawn Loftis when it was revealed he act acted in gay porn under the name Collin O'Neal. Earlier today, it was reported that the Executive Director of the Southern CaliforniaScholarship Association -- a nonprofit that produces the Miss Hollywood pageant, an official preliminary to Miss California and Miss America -- resigned after it was revealed his partner, Ric Alonso, was a porn star and producer who operated three X-rated websites for gay men.

Source:  Huffington Post

Porn made for women, by women

Independent female directors are making pornographic films aimed at women. Catalina May finds out what makes them so different

Anna Arrowsmith (aka Anna Span) has been a porn director for 12 years. This made her recent campaign as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Gravesham rather controversial. "Not my cup of tea", said Nick Clegg about her occupation. But what she has been doing is not mainstream pornography, but independent porn made for women.

"I have fought long and hard for women's right to sexual expression and consumption, as well as for freedom of speech," she wrote in the Observer. But Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, challenged her in the Guardian: "What are you doing that is different from what every other pornographer is doing?"

The best way to answer that question is probably by watching Arrowsmith's films. And not just hers. Because a number of women, tired of mainstream porn and tired of criticising it without offering an alternative, are making the porn films they want to watch.

These films don't include horny schoolgirls, naughty nurses, nymphomaniac nannies or desperate housewives. Nor do they include Mafiosi, multimillionaires drinking cognac, pimps, drug dealers or super-sized sex machines. Because these women, as filmmakers and consumers, place themselves far away from mainstream porn.

"It is a prejudice to say that women don't like porn," says Erika Lust, another fem porn director. "Sex images make you hot, but pornography has been made by and for men. In mainstream porn everything is about male pleasure and women are objects. Oral sex for men can last forever, but when women's turn comes it lasts 10 seconds. Female orgasms are not an issue in most of the films. And women are shown mostly as prostitutes, which is sad."

Lust has directed three porn films and written three sex books. Her website explains: "We produce adult movies. We publish erotic books and magazines. Our works speak about sex, lust and passion. We enjoy exciting you and exciting your mind. We make love, not porn. And we do all this with a feminine, aesthetic and innovative approach."

After working for 10 years as a TV producer and director, Petra Joy has moved on to directing "art-core" films. She says: "Women have a lot of catching up to do. We had the sex toy revolution first - no more giant cucumbers but a gold-plated mini vibrator perfect for clit stimulation - and now the second wave is the porn revolution: porn that is made by and for women, that focuses on female pleasure and features male sex objects."

These directors are just three among many. Their films have different styles: Lust's are urban and modern, Joy's are visual and sensory and Arrowsmith's are a bit more hardcore. But there are similarities that show how this new branch of the porn industry works.

First of all, they are educated. Lust read political sciences at Lund University, Joy has a master's degree in film history at the University of Köln and Arrowsmith studied fine art at Central Saint Martins. They do this because they chose it, and not because they don't have other options. They are all independent producers and distribute their films mostly over the internet. They pay particular attention to aesthetics, music, locations, actors and stories. And most importantly, they think about what women need to enjoy porn.

Joy says: "Women enjoy seeing a curve of arousal and like to understand why these people are having sex and how they got turned on. Women want to see credible female performers, women of all sizes and looks who genuinely enjoy themselves rather than porn clones with fake nails, hairs and boobs faking it for the camera."

Lust adds: "To get excited women want to see something that looks like us. We want to see independent women exploring their sexuality, who are not afraid, but are not sex heroines either. We want to see attractive men who share our lifestyles, our ideas."

These directors make sure they only work with people who want to perform in erotic films, and that what you see is real pleasure. Lust says: "I want people with an open sexuality who want to work here. I don't want anybody doing this because they don't have another choice. During the shooting I want them to have good sex and it's my job to find the images. For me it is a tense moment, because things happen only once and it's a moment of hard work. Is not a party behind the camera."

In 2006, Alison Lee created the Feminist Porn Awards, which this year takes place on 13-15 April in Toronto. She says: "We wanted to celebrate people who were making porn in a feminist way and help to expose them to a greater audience. For our sixth anniversary we are expecting lots of stars and a super-fun event. We are also hoping to have a stronger focus on websites and online porn than we have in the past."

Lust, Joy and Span have previously won awards in different categories. This year Lust is nominated for her last film, Life, Love, Lust, and Span for Sex Experiments: Bisexual Scenes and Sex Interviews.

These director's films are also featured on Dusk!, the Dutch porn channel that since 2007 has broadcast fem porn 24/7 and is available to 1.2m viewers. Martijn Broersma says he started the channel with the aim of providing a service that nobody else was offering.

"Nowadays women talk more about their own [sexual] likes and dislikes," he said. "With this revolution in mind, it was logical that women needed their own erotic TV channel."

And while independent fem porn keeps growing, mainstream porn is in crisis. Patrick Kwasniewski specialised in gender and queer studies at the University of Klagenfurt and is currently researching his thesis on feminist porn. He says: "The development of this branch of the industry is profiting from the internet: the more direct ways to reach consumers, easier ways of self-distribution, having a more focused target and producing highly profiled films. Whilst the mainstream industry faces loss of profits through not changing their traditional ways of production or distribution and producing very repetitive films that have more and more troubles on the market, especially when there's so much for free on the internet."

Joy adds: "The industry is slowly waking up to the fact that it is not just VOD [Video on Demand] that caused the drop in porn DVD sales, but that even males are bored of films that always show the same performers in the same studios going through the same sexual positions in the same running order and looking bored whilst faking it. People are hungry for more authenticity, variety and joy."

Being part of this industry that refuses to change hasn't always been easy for female porn directors. Male members of the porn industry don't necessarily like their presence. Lust says: "Pornographers are usually middle-aged straight guys, with a similar cultural background. They don't like it when I say that I make porn for women. They say their porn is for everybody and I am the 'tight' one. But I just can't have an intellectual discussion with them, because they don't measure up. What I'm doing is criticising the kind of porn they have been making for years and offering an alternative."

There are no reliable figures on female porn audiences, but there are some academic studies that provide some information. Verena Chiara Kuckenberger is responsible for gender at the University of Graz, and she did a study on women's porn that included audience research.

She says: "Research suggests that women are not as interested in pornography as men are. But this assumption has to be seen in a broader context – there are certain scripts for male and female sexuality and one of these says that women don't find pleasure in looking as man do. But who looks and who gets looked at is a question of power as well. Historically the gaze is male, while women are objects that are being looked at.

"For women to admit to experiencing pleasure in watching pornography means overcoming stereotypes about female sexuality. There are women who do not want to consume pornography, but at the same time there is a potential female audience for porn and I would say it is bigger than it has been assumed so far and it is increasing as our society overcomes gendered stereotypes in general."

Keeping all this in mind, I asked Arrowsmith how she feels about the controversy about her work. She said: "I have received very good responses from the press, the readers and the general public. Now, I want to join together my political work and the work I do in the porn industry. I'm going to start campaigning for sex workers' rights and encouraging women to fight for what they deserve."

Source: The Guardian