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a cute, young Ron Jeremy as a neurotic Jewish guy with an over-protective mother, who acquires a bachelor pad to attract girls. The film featured an amazing cast of talented and funny actresses including Samantha Fox, Merle Michaels, and Marlene Willoughby. I also loved Blue Magic, a beautiful period piece that I wrote and starred in, which was produced by my then-new husband, Per Sjöstedt. This was also my swan song to porn . . . that is, porn in front of the camera. I hadn’t known then that my expanded role as scriptwriter anticipated things to come.
    It was 1980, and after about twenty-five movies in five years, I was ready to abandon porn stardom. Monogamous by nature, I was in love with my new husband and didn’t want to be sexual with other men. I also felt the easy money was keeping me from pursuing other personal career goals that had more long-term potential. Taking time to consider what I’d like to do next, I kept busy earning a living writing for a number of men’s magazines like High Society, Swank, and Cheri. During this time, I began to feel a growing uneasiness about my time spent in porn films. I felt it was perfectly fine to perform sexually for others to view and enjoy, but I often felt awkward and uncertain about admitting to my unusual vocation to anyone outside my artists, freaks, and merrymaking crowd. Looking to resolve this and other issues in my life, I found an amazing woman, a social worker, who at one time had been a sex worker. She was someone I felt wouldn’t judge me.
    In order to understand and come to terms with the choices I hadmade, I had to try to separate my own feelings about pornography from what society says about it. I had been brought up to think for myself, but societal and religious influences have a way of permeating our thoughts so that it becomes difficult to decipher what we think as opposed to what we’ve been told to think. As part of this reflective process I explored everything from early erotic art, from the sexually explicit frescoes of ancient Pompeii and the exquisite Japanese erotic art known as shunga, to twentieth-century smokers, blue movies, peep shows, amateur porn, and the big-budget, star-studded features of the “golden age” of porn. When I also examined all the erotic fiction and manuals for newlyweds, from early Japanese Pillow Books and the still popular Kama Sutra to the works of Anaïs Nin and the Marquis de Sade, it became clear that people have always been curious about what sex looks like and how to do it, from those who created it to those who consumed it. I concluded that there was nothing wrong with erotica or adult entertainment; we have a natural curiosity shared by our earliest ancestors. But one thing was glaringly absent from contemporary pornography: a female vision or point of view. Porn images and movies have changed remarkably little from the formulas of the early stag films to the films of the “golden age” and still today. Though 1970s culture had changed enough to allow women to pursue active sex lives without the sanction of marriage, porn films still focused mainly on male pleasure, with its laughable depiction of a woman in the throes of ecstasy as her male partner cums on her face, the de rigueur money shot.
    Even if there was a lot of porn that I didn’t much like, I felt it was basically benign. But I still had to confront my feelings of having betrayed my sisters in the movement. On numerous occasions I’d been challenged about the contradiction of being an active feminist who also performed in porn movies, as if one naturally precluded the other. I could never come up with a satisfactory answer, other than to say it was my body to do with what I wanted. But most people still disapproved of porn and I had to admit that, despite my years spent giddily flying in the face of convention, I did care about what others thought of me. I wished I didn’t, but there was no use in lying to myself. So why, with all the training