As you probably know, I've been an intrepid sex toy reviewer for the past several years (its a tough job but someone's got to do it). This means that lots of weird things show up on my doorstep, and while some get a permanent place in my toy box, many... don't. One of these weird things is The Love Machine, which I reviewed for Fleshbot's Marital Aid Test Kitchen two years ago. After it took up space in my Brooklyn apartment for a while I decided that I should try and sell the thing on Craigslist. And *then* it dawned on me that it would be even MORE fun to make a movie about selling it on Craigslist. And that's just what I've done.
Dacia's Love Machine is a 25 minute comedic short about what happens when you open your door to NYC Craigslisters who are interested in buying a lightly used fucking machine.
You can see a sneak peek of the film, with one of the more outrageous characters, right here:
And then you can come on over to my site and buy the 25 minute director's cut version as a download (.mp4, .wmv, or .flv file formats) for a mere $2.99. It's DRM free and you can only get it directly from me at http://wakingvixen.com/daciaslovemachine or http://wakingvixen.com/store.
As a bit of an added incentive, the first 25 people to buy the download will get a free sex toy, courtesy of EdenFantasys.com - at the moment, there are 15 sex toys left... so hop to it.
I hope you enjoy the movie - I had fun making it, and I'm glad its finally available to the viewing public.
Waking Vixen News: Fun Writing, NY Area Public Appearances, and Live Girl Review
So since Naked City was canceled, I've been drumming up some interesting work, though I'm still on the quest for mega-meaningful awesomeness. I've got a few columns I'm writing that you might find entertaining: *I have a monthly column at HotMoviesforHer.com - the most recent one was called "The Age of Porn: Performers, Attraction, and Age" and you can read it here: http://www.hotmoviesforher.com/2265/audacia-rays-guest-column/the-age-of-porn-performers-attraction-and-age/ *I've got a weekly featured column on Fleshbot called Stop or We'll Shoot: Fleshbot Fashion Police - it runs on Thursdays and has been a hit. You can check out the posts I've written so far here: http://fleshbot.com/tag/stop-or-we.ll-shoot%21/ *Starting this coming Monday I'll be writing an as-yet-unnamed weekly column for the Eden Fantasys blog -http://blog.edenfantasys.com/- about sex in history.
I've got two events coming up this week in the New York area: On Saturday, September 13th at 3.30 I'm teaching a workshop called Do It Yourself Sexy Media at eXXXotica NY, which is in New Jersey (silly, I know) at the NJ Convention Center in Edison: http://exxxoticany.com/. Here are the details: In this crash course, sex media professional Audacia Ray will guide you through the ins and outs of making sexy media, whether for yourself and your partners, or to show the whole world. Blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and homemade porn will be addressed. We will examine the how to's, including equipment selection, software and online platforms to promote your work, as well as privacy and anonymity issues for those who don't want to be totally revealed to the world.
On Monday, September 15th I'm giving a five minute talk at Ignite NYC - http://ignitenyc.org/ - an event for geek speakers. My talk is called "Porn as a front runner in technology innovations." Doors are at 7.15 and talks are at 8.45 at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street). There will also be cupcakes and free beer and the whole thing is free.
The third episode of Live Girl Review just went up today and it's jam packed with good stuff (if I do say so myself): a review of two books about non-monogamy: Opening Up by TristanTaormino and Open by Jenny Block, Fun Factory's Delight g spot vibe, Benny Profane's Hospital, Jamye Waxman's tip for a happy threesome, a little rant about vaginoplasty, and a fan girl moment with Marisa DiMattia of Needled.com Check it out at http://livegirlreview.com - and comment for a chance to win some sexy goodies!
I think that about covers it for now!
xo, Dacia
-- Audacia Ray Live Girl Review (video podcast): http://livegirlreview.com Waking Vixen (projects & personal blog): http://wakingvixen.com
Do It Yourself Sexy Media seminar at eXXXotica NY. 7:30 pm Saturday September 13 at Meadowlands
Do It Yourself Sexy Media at eXXXotica NY on Saturday, September 13th. At the Meadowlands Convention Center in Secaucus (I know I know, its in NJ). 7:30-8:30 pm. Day passes start at $35.00. In this crash course, sex media professional Audacia Ray will guide you through the ins and outs of making sexy media, whether for yourself and your partners, or to show the whole world. Blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and homemade porn will be addressed. We will examine the how to's, including equipment selection, software and online platforms to promote your work, as well as privacy and anonymity issues for those who don't want to be totally revealed to the world.
NOTE: I'm no longer an editor at $pread, I'm just reposting this for them! Contact $pread directly, I won't be able to answer your questions or help you out!
email contribute@spreadmagazine.org if you're interested
Call for Submissions - Issue 4.3
We're looking for someone to write a feature length article on sex work and the economy, specifically how the economy's recent, dramatic downturn will lead/has already led to changes in the industry. Possible points of interest include a decrease in customer base, increase in the number of people turning to sex work for supplemental income, and increased financial pressure to participate in unsafe sex acts.
$pread wants to hear your client "thank you"s for our next issue's Hot Topic! Tell us about a client who made your day, did you a favor, or taught you a lesson you didn't want to learn. Submissions should be written as though you're addressing the person you're writing about.
As always, $pread is seeking additions to our blogging team. Blogging is quick, easy, and a great way to get writing experience on a regular basis. While we want our blog to be polished and informative, we welcome writers with a distinct voice and personality, who can write brief posts on current news and events. Contact us to express interest or to find out more.
Indecent Proposals: What's the funniest or weirdest thing a client's ever asked you to do? Send us your ideas for this popular, illustrated column. IPs are 500 words but please send an outline of your story before writing the whole thing.
Cunning Linguist: What are the terms of your trade? Send us a list of the terms you use in your profession with a one sentence definition for each term.
Consumer Report: Wanna review products for $pread? We're always looking for sex workers to be on our consumer panel. Previous products have included false eyelashes and flavored condoms.
Positions: Do you have a controversial opinion on a sex work-related issue? Do you want to argue with another sex worker about it? Send us your ideas for our regular point/counterpoint column.
Style: Stylish sex workers listen up! Do you make clothes, jewelry, or accessories? Send us photos of your products – we might just feature you in our Style section.
Creative Writing: Send us your stories, poems, and creative non-fiction.
Visual Art: Wanna see your photography, illustrations, or artwork in $pread? Please send all large file attachments to spreadmagazineart(at)gmail.com.
Naked City Contest: Write a Verse for the Wet Spots!
The Wet Spots are a fantastic duo from Canada. From their website:
Picture a husband and wife team from the golden age of comedy. Now picture them singing sweetly about threesomes and taking it in the ass.
Internationally acclaimed cabaret duo The Wet Spots (Cass King and John Woods) write the most elegant songs about sex that you will ever hear.
The duo will be doing their first full-length public performance in NYC at the Zipper Factory on Sunday, July 27th at 8 pm and they've joined forces with Naked City for a contest!
Starting today, creative types are invited to write a new verse to a Wet Spots song called Public Service Announcement, which is about things that you should not put in your ass - a YouTube video is below so you can study up on the rhyme pattern.
The winning verse and entertaining runners-up, as judged by me and the Wet Spots, will be published here on Naked City on July 24th, and the winning verse will be used in the song at the Zipper Factory show, plus immortalized in a Naked City TV video of the performance.
The winner also receives two tickets to the July 27th Wet Spots show plus a bag of swag - a copy of my book Naked on the Internet, a dvd of my porno directorial debut The Bi Apple, and a Sex Nerds Know How to Do It tee shirt, plus some other sexy goodies.
The deadline for all entries is 11.59 pm on Tuesday, July 22nd.
I am newly gainfully employed, and it’s pretty much my dream job: I’m editing a brand spanking new sexuality blog for Village Voice Media. It’s called Naked City, and it went live this morning.
I know it seems like I have a hundred million different projects - and I do. Naked City, however, takes top billing (though at the moment it’s part time so I have some room for other stuff). Because it’s a paid gig, it will give me the opportunity to cover sexuality in a much more in depth, consistent, and wide-ranging way than I do through my other outlets. It also means that my coverage in other places will be a little more sparse, but I’m excited to deliver cool stuff on Naked City that will complement the other sex media that is already online.
Naked City’s main beat is New York, as that’s the home of the Village Voice and I’m shamelessly New York-centric, but I’ll also be taking it with me when I travel to far away (and not so far away) lands. For instance, I’ll be reporting on Sex 2.0 in Atlanta this coming weekend.
So far I’ve got four posts up, and over the next week I’ll be adding a variety of columns and features to the blog. We figured that leaping in and sorting it out while the blog is live isn’t the worst thing in the world. Feedback is welcome.
One of the things I’m most excited about doing is Naked City TV, a weekly video show which will document and explore the personal and professional lives of people for whom sexuality is central. I’ve got some interesting stuff shot, some interesting stuff planned, and I’m also totally open to suggestions. I’m producing, shooting, and editing the show as well as doing the interviews, and I take issues around media representations of sexuality very seriously (as you probably know if you’ve read my blog for more than a day or two).
Waking Vixen News: Website facelift, tee-shirts, art, new projects, and mayhem!
Some recent news and awesomeness:
1. WakingVixen.com has a new look that I think is a little more user-friendly. Click on over and have a look: http://wakingvixen.com
2. Waking Vixen now also has t-shirts! They are red and say "Sex nerds know how to do it" on them, plus they’ve got an illustration of a curvy, nerdy pin up girl. They are designed by the lovely Joy Rumore [http://themilkmaid.com], and they are $15 each, in both men’s and girly tee styles. Buy yours at http://wakingvixen.com/store
3. Unless you live under a rock, this past month you’ve been assualted by the madness of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. My life got swallowed up by that insanity, and I did appearances on NPR/WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, FOX News Radio’s Tom Sullivan show, as well as CNN’s Headline News, plus I was interviewed for a bunch of print and online pieces. I wrote a few blog posts about the subject, and my fave is called "Why sex workers aren’t represented in the media," which you can read here: http://www.wakingvixen.com/blog/2008/03/11/why-sex-workers-arent-represented-in-the-media/
4. After a very successful run Demimonde: The Art of Molly Crabapple, which has been on view at Arena Studios in SoHo, New York City since February 8th, is coming down this weekend. There are only 2 pieces that remain unsold - if you’re interested drop me a line! There are also limited edition prints of several pieces available, which are 13x17 and sell for $70 each.
5. This past weekend I presented a talk called "Sex Workers and Media Representation" at the Women, Action and the Media conference in Cambridge, MA. Because of conversations at the conference, I was inspired to create a new website. It’s the first public education project of new non-profit Sex Work Awareness (of which I’m on the board): Sex Work 101 - http://sexwork101.com. It’s to address basic concerns and curiosities that the pubilc has about sex work. So if you’ve got questions, send em on over - and if you’re a sex worker who’d like to share stories or answer questions, let me know!
6. Speaking of conferences! Sex 2.0 is a conference examining the intersection of feminism, social media, and sexuality. It’s happening on April 12th in Atlanta, and I’ll be the keynote speaker. I’m looking forward to checking out Atlanta for the first time, plus fraternizing with my fellow internetty sex nerds, including both new and old friends. Learn more at http://sex20con.com
I’ve got a new job brewing that’s pretty much a dream come true, so expect another annoucement within the week. In the meantime I’ll give you a hint - it involves sex and the internet. That narrows it down a whole lot, right?
Speaking of sex and the internet, here are a few places to find me these days: As always, I’m blogging away at http://wakingvixen.com My video blog is moving along well at http://livegirlreview.com I’m obsessively twittering at http://twitter.com/audaciaray I’ve been using Tumblr too, for my informal musings and internet findings: http://dacia.tumblr.com
You need an official Waking Vixen sex nerd t-shirt
I’m very excited to announce that I know have official Waking Vixen tee shirts available, yay! I’m using AlertPay instead of PayPal - it’s a little clumsy but more adult-friendly than PayPal. If you prefer to pay by check, email store[at]wakingvixen[dot]com and I’ll let you know what to do.
Designed by the lovely and amazing Joy Rumore, my totally awesome tattoo artist - have a look at her portfolio: The Milkmaid, her shop in Williamsburg: 1228 Tattoo, and her blog (with examples of recent work).
Girl shirts come in medium and large Bella girly tees, dude shirts come in large and XL Galdin tees - both are printed by my friends at High Voltage Customs here in the fine city of New York.
I seem to get the itch to redesign my site about every year and a half, for better or worse.
This week I'm introducing version 3.0 - yay! My main goal with this version was to make better and more thorough use of WordPress, to make things bigger and more readable, and to make it easier for people to find out about the many and various projects I work on. I think it's succeeded in all of those goals, which is awesome. I've also got a rudimentary store set up, using AlertPay for the credit card stuff instead of PayPal - if anyone has opinions on this, let em fly. I'd like to avoid PayPal because of their treatment of adult businesses, though I know it's the standard for those who don't want to get extra-fancy with programming a store. But any opinions will be considered. I'm concerned about it because.... drumroll... by the end of next week I'll have t-shirts! Yes indeedy. They're designed by my friend and tattoo artist Joy Rumore - check out her site, her blog, and her shop in Williamsburg (where the renowned Brian Decker is now doing body modification). I am not going to reveal the design just yet because I'm a jerk like that, but I'll put up pictures as soon as I get the shirts. Suffice to say: they are fucking cool, and I think you will like them a lot.
Ok, now for a little trip down memory lane, with the ghosts of Waking Vixens past!
In December 2004, after I'd been blogging away on blogger for about five months, a reader emailed me and asked if I would be interested in a real website. It was run with Movable Type and launched on my 25th birthday, April 25, 2005. This site also had a splash page warning people against adult content, which I then abandoned in version 2.0.
Version 2.0 was conceived as I began to want something with a more professional look. I wanted to take the emphasis slightly away from the blog and make the site more about showcasing me and my awesomeness. It was launched on January 1, 2007, with the unfortunate side effect of my RSS feed going poof as I made the transition from MovableType to WordPress.
Now that I have a better understanding of WordPress, I wanted the site to be a bit more dynamic, with a smoother back end (heh heh) for me to tinker with more easily. Now it's simpler for me to add pages, and the URLs are SO much better. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I do!
If you see things that need fixing, please let me know via email: dacia[at]wakingvixen[dot]com. And if you've got any suggestions for pages that need to be added or better fleshed out, by all means get in touch. Sometimes I think I'm just so immersed in all this that it's hard for me to see some of the more obvious things that are missing.
P.S. Yes, I know I took away the photos of me that were taken by professional photographers. That work doesn't really represent the work I'm doing these days, so I've folded those pictures into the blog archives. But so you don't have to make yourself crazy looking for them, I've also made a set on Flickr devoted to my modeling career (2004-2006). You can find it here (though you need a Flickr login, cuz my account is naughty): Once upon a time I was a model
Here I am, all decked out in my dress by Bella Vendetta, standing by the pool at our hotel, pre-GayVN Awards show.
It's safe to say that the weekend overall was excellent, but the awards were a major clusterfuck.
I am 90% sure that The Bi Apple did NOT win Best Bisexual Release. According to AVN.com, I didn't win, "Bi Accident" did. But there have been other reports that The Bi Apple won, and I've been getting congrats emails all day.
Various porn performers presented all the different awards, and it was damn clear that there had not been a dress rehearsal, and also most of the presenters weren't all that sharp and/or didn't know how to enunciate or use a microphone. When the Best Bisexual Release was announced, it came out as "The Bi Apppcccident," a weird bastardization of two different film names, The Bi Apple and Bi Accident. No one went up on stage to retrieve the trophy and the presenters didn't repeat the name of the winning movie. Most of my pals in the room thought I didn't win, but on the way out of the awards (a little before intermission) I ran into another friend who thought I had won and asked why I hadn't gone up on stage. Gotta love it!
The Bi Apple is a winner in my heart, and it was worth going to San Francisco to hang out with friends and eat delicious foods regardless of the win/no win situation. Cheers to the bizarro world of porno!
