Although I'm not currently making spanking films, it seems that since I got back from my Australia trip I'm busier than ever. In the aftermath of ATVOD's activities last year I’ve been doing more and more public speaking - particularly on freedom of speech and censorship, pornography, sex work and feminism. If you’d like to come along to any future public events, I’ll be posting the details on my website as they’re confirmed, but here’s a quick roundup of what's happening next, and what I've been up to lately.

Tomorrow, on Thursday 24th March, is the UK screening of The Unslut Project at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. I’m really looking forward to this - the film itself looks at the damaging impact of ‘slut shaming’,  and we’ll be using the documentary as a starting point for discussion about sex negativity, sex work stigma and the adult industry.

I’ll be on the panel alongside some fantastic speakers: obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman, author and activist Jerry Barnett, sexual freedom campaigner Charlotte Rose, and Laura Renvoize from the Goldsmiths Sex Worker Solidarity Society. Tickets are under a tenner and available online -  there's still time to grab one if you want to join us.

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I recently had the pleasure of talking to the features editor of Marie Claire magazine Indonesia, who wanted to run an interview with a female pornographer. Somehow they stumbled across my name, and got in touch to ask if I'd like to take part. I was a bit surprised to be asked - with my niche spanking fixation and weird insistence on shooting non-consent fantasies, I'm hardly a straightforward representative of the feminist porn movement. But the questions were interesting, and I had fun answering them. I also enjoyed the challenge of finding a selection of pictures from Dreams of Spanking that were suitable for a mainstream women's magazine (ie. no nudity or spanked bums!)

I'm finding it a bit strange how many journalists are interested in talking to me about Dreams of Spanking now that the site is offline, when I struggled for ages to get publicity for the project while it was live. But I suppose if my experiences of government censorship help shed light on the conversation around porn, feminism and production ethics, it's no bad thing. I'm certainly pleased to see a feature like this in a mainstream magazine - it all helps to spread awareness of feminist porn. It's a bit surprising that this is still necessary after 40 years of pioneering work by female directors, but when prominent feminist celebrities are still unaware that any alternatives to heteronormative mainstream porn exist yet, I guess every little helps.

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This coming weekend I'll be running my first ever workshop, a full day event hosted by the amazing people at the School of Erotic Mysteries, who are passionate about helping people explore and express their sexual power. It's going to be the first event of its kind (that I know of) in the UK, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to share the knowledge I've accumulated during ten years working in porn. If more people made their own porn we could transform the industry for the better - make it more authentic, more diverse and more representative of the gorgeous variety of real people's sexuality. Plus it would give more people the chance to experience the many rewards of expressing your erotic self on camera - it's an incredible buzz and a journey towards greater self-love and creative satisfaction!

We've had lots of interest and many people asking questions about the event, so we have put together the following FAQ. If you have any other questions, ask away - and if you want to dip your toe into the waters of erotic performance in a supportive, accessible and non-judgemental environment, perhaps I'll see you on Sunday.

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Today thirty British fetish film-makers met to discuss UK porn censorship, particularly the news that at the start of 2016 video-on-demand regulator ATVOD was shut down and re-absorbed into its parent body, Ofcom. The occasion was the British Fetish Film Festival, a new event that aims to bring film-makers together and showcase the diversity and creativity of kinky erotica produced in the UK and abroad.

Led by femdom pornographer, artist and activist Itziar Bilbao Urrutia - who organises with Backlash, the UK non-profit organisation defending freedom of sexual expression - we shared knowledge around the changing landscape of porn censorship in the UK, and brainstormed strategies to resist attempts to close us down. As Itzi pointed out, “putting all of us out of business is not going to stop porn being available online.”

Under the ATVOD regime, many of us were targeted for censorship, and some of us have had our websites forced offline entirely. Some, such as myself, have appealed to Ofcom regarding ATVOD’s decision - as Itzi did, successfully, in the wake of ATVOD’s investigation into her site the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell. While many appeals to Ofcom are still pending, that organisation has become the sole regulator of video on demand, and none of us knows how we will fare under the new regime.

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A couple of years ago I wrote an article about why I think we need more DIY porn - to improve industry working conditions, increase diversity of representation, and empower more people to see and express themselves as the sexy creatures they are. Well, if you thought making porn might be something you might want to try but you don't know where to start, I'm now developing my DIY porn thoughts into a full day hands-on workshop, in collaboration with the School of Erotic Mysteries.

This event will take place in central London on Sunday 6th March - just two weeks away! It will run from approximately 10am-5pm with a break for lunch, and we’ll focus on building your confidence and capacity to the point where you have the skills and inspiration you need to go home and start shooting.

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While I was in Melbourne I thought it would be fun to shoot for some Australian porn sites. Thanks to my connections I already had some contacts, and before I left the UK Michelle Flynn had booked me to shoot for Yanks. Once I was there, I also sent off applications to Girls Out West and Feck. I didn’t end up fixing a date with Girls Out West, but Feck got back to me and booked me to shoot for two of their sites - Beautiful Agony and I Shot Myself.

I’ve been performing in porn for nearly ten years, but in all that time I’ve never worked for mainstream studios. All my experience has been in the UK spanking/fetish scene, where sites are mostly run by couples or individuals working from home, or for similarly small scale feminist porn outfits like Bright Desire. So going into the offices of Girls Out West and Feck offices for an interview was a weirdly new experience. It was surreal, as a relatively experienced performer, to be put in the role of a newbie, auditioning for production companies half a world away. The Feck offices in particular are dauntingly professional - I mean the idea of a porn company having offices in the first place is already a bit alien for me, used to the miniscule budgets of UK fetish porn - but Feck’s offices struck me as particularly snazzy; in the hipster bit of Melbourne, with a lobby and pot plants and a receptionist and lots of different people sitting behind desks in lots of different rooms. Porn on this scale is a totally different world.

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I was very lucky to be invited to attend a sexy film screening in Melbourne the weekend after I arrived, organised by Gala Vanting and others. I was impressed: it was a central, friendly setting with two screens, comfy seating, food and drink, and good vibes. No embarrassed jeers and nervous laughter from this audience; here was a collection of smut fans who were open to being stimulated and confronted by filth of all flavours.

By a happy coincidence, this event focussed on kink and fetish (my favourites!), although I can’t exactly imagine Gala curating a vanilla programme. Since I was going to be there, she included a film of mine and a Q&A, which was good fun - plus I got to raise awareness of porn censorship, which was very relevant since almost all the films screened that night would now be illegal to distribute in the UK.

It was an incredible programme. Some of the films I’d seen before; Action Painting and Expiatory were both in the short film competition in Berlin last year. They had struck me then - to the extent that I was enthusiastically describing the latter to some Melbourne friends a couple of nights before the screening, and then when we got there I was delighted to learn I'd be able to share it with them after all.

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I hadn't heard of this Channel 4 short web series until one of my friends showed me the episode on Sploshing, because she was in it. It's a fun, non-explicit 3 minute short film about the wet and messy fetish, with two kinky girls getting each other messy and talking about why they like it. I found the editing to be sympathetic and surprisingly non-sneery, showing genuine curiosity about why people enjoy the kink, rather than looking down their noses. I'd be interested to hear from WAM fans what you think of it!

There are a few other films in the series, including Pony Play, Shibari, BDSM Wrestling, Interrogation and Forniphilia. I don't recognise any of the other performers at first glance, but I wouldn't be surprised if I know one or two of them. The only remaining question is - when are they going to do one on spanking, and can I be in it?

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The British Fetish Film Festival is still brand new. The first event, in 2013, was a closed group of producers only, testing the format and giving kinky UK filmmakers the chance to screen their work in front of their peers. This was actually the first film festival I ever went to, and it was invaluable to see how fetish films play on the big screen.

I learned a lot about the different requirements of a festival compared to viewers watching films individually online: for instance, pacing needs to be much tighter in a festival edit; long kinky shots that would allow viewers the chance to climax at home are wasted on the big screen, because people probably aren't masturbating at a film festival; and funny films are almost universally better suited to festivals than unfunny ones. In fact, it was watching my online edit of Marital Discipline on the big screen at the zeroth British Fetish Film Festival that inspired me to start cutting festival versions of the films I wanted to submit to the Feminist Porn Awards that year, a process which eventually resulted in my shooting Houseboy for the Berlin Porn Film Festival, and winning the Short Film Competition last year. So I owe a lot to the British Fetish Film Festival, and I'm keen to help other UK filmmakers benefit from it too.

Lovely afternoon with other kinky pornographers at @britfetfilmfest. I think we really are all as shy, quiet and introverted as each other!

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Last November my friend Nimue Allen and I got together with our partners for a week to shoot some porn. We’ve both worked in the BDSM porn industry for years as performers and producers, and we were ready to delve deeper. We spent three days shooting a feature-length explicit documentary about our queer, kinky, polyamorous sex lives. We filmed interviews, video portraits, narrative sequences and hardcore sex scenes, capturing the intimacy and affection of BDSM play between people who love each other. The scenes were spontaneous and unscripted, a natural representation of the sex we have in private, and in the natural course of events they ended up including facesitting, fisting, squirting, caning, needles, breath play, dominance and submission and plenty of hardcore sex. It was authentic, caring and beautiful.

A week later, full of happy excitement about our new project, we learned that every scene we had filmed had just been criminalised under new UK porn laws. It would now be illegal for us to publish any of them. These honest depictions of our sex, pleasure and intimacy had been deemed so extreme that even informed, paying adults couldn’t legally watch them.

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