I didn’t spend Valentine's Day with my lover this year. I spent it supporting curious couples and individuals to express themselves sexually on camera. I’m not complaining. I saw Felix the following night - and I really love my job.

I was teaching an adult sex education class on DIY Porn: how to make it and feel good doing it. The event was produced by The Book Club in Shoreditch, the same people who hosted my talk a few months ago on feminist porn. This one was intended as a provocative evening out for couples who wanted to have a go at making their own sex tapes, but also open to anyone who wanted to try their hand at shooting porn. I was contacted on Twitter afterwards by an escort friend considering making the move into shooting clips, who said that the class inspired her, which delighted me; I’m pleased that the class wasn’t just useful to hetero couples, but to queer sex workers too!

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Happy new year! It's traditional to do an end of year review, and I've been chewing over my 2016 one. Damn, it was a hell of a year; comparable in craziness only to the year before it. Here are the headlines:

• I won my appeal to Ofcom against the ATVOD ruling that Dreams of Spanking was in breach of the 2014 porn regulations (the Audio Visual Media Services Regulations, or AVMS), and was able to reopen the site in June
• I researched and wrote over ten-thousand words in response to the government consultation on age verification for online porn
• I launched a Patreon campaign to crowd-fund my political activism, and did more campaigning than ever as a result
• I attended meetings in Parliament with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport discussing the age verification policy, and with the Liberal Democrat policy committee to consult about sex work and porn policy more generally. On request, I submitted my research into age verification to the Lib Dems to help inform their policy on online porn.
• Since the Digital Economy Bill was presented to Parliament in July, I've actively campaigned against it. I've written numerous blogposts, an article in the Guardian, given countless interviews to the media, organised a protest and a petition, sent int two responses to the MP Select Committee consultation, and supported the work of the Open Rights Group to challenge the Bill.
• Myles Jackman and I gathered protestors outside Parliament for fisting volleyball and a squirting waterfight in a pastiche of the UK's outdated obscenity laws
• I worked with Backlash UK, UK Adult Producers, and the Adult Provider Network
• I taught a workshop on how to get started making DIY porn for The School of Erotic Mysteries (I still owe the participants the promised showreel from the shooting we did at the end of the day; what with reopening Dreams of Spanking and campaigning against the Digital Economy Bill, I sadly haven't had time to edit anything extra)
• I went to Eroticon 2016, gave two talks, shot a documentary (see above; I'm hoping to finally find time to edit and publish it before Eroticon 2017, but we'll see), gave a spanking and caning demo, and shot a spontaneous porn film in a hotel room
• I edited and published a new spanking film, photogallery or audio story on Dreams of Spanking every week for the second half of the year - and the new content includes some of my favourite to date
• I produced and directed three shoots for Dreams of Spanking - with Zak Jane Keir and Charlie J Forrest at Eroticon in April, with Nimue Allen and Tai Crimson in London in July, and with Adele Haze, Molly Malone and Amelia Jane Rutherford for a super-exciting (and very nearly finished!) Victorian feature film, which was written and backed by a private sponsor and will be out on Dreams of Spanking soon...
• I worked as a wet and messy performer for Slymfords Sploshers, and as a spanking switch for Everyone Loves Spanking and The Havering Collection
• I went to Berlin, where I developed new porn crushes, watched a lot of amazing porn, and saw two films I was involved in being screened; Please May I Come, Mistress with Charlie and Zak, and Since You Asked So Nicely, my spanking, cunnilingus and pegging film with Parker Marx for Bright Desire
• I shot a new scene with Parker for Bright Desire which will be out in 2017, this time a slightly more traditional boy/girl scene which was super sweet, slow and sensual

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Because it was my second year and I knew what to expect, my time at the Berlin Porn Film Festival was more relaxed this year. I arrived in Berlin earlier, left later, and allowed myself more time between screenings to socialise, eat and rest. Still, it was a full week - not least because the morning after I arrived, I had a shoot booked with Bright Desire.

Bright Desire offers smart, sexy porn shot for the female gaze, and its owner Ms Naughty is one of my best friends in the feminist porn community - not least because we were (until Dreams of Spanking was closed down by ATVOD) two of the only people running membership sites with regular update schedules, which set our production process apart from others. We bonded at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2014 - which is also where we shot together for the first time, filming Instructed, a kinky solo scene that went on to win the award for Best BDSM Scene 2015.

This time we were planning a couple shoot, and my co-star was up-and-coming queer porn performer Parker Marx, a hot kinky switch with a killer jawline and cute bum. Parker and I met at a party in London a few weeks ago, we got chatting about working in porn, and hit it off. After some successful experimentation in private, a mutual decision was made that it would be fun to shoot together.

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Kink

• I loved this Sinful Sunday image by Sub Bee. Trick or treat!
• Erica Scott's wooden hairbrush spanking from Paul Kennedy is getting some positive attention. From my vantage point behind the camera, I thought it was super hot.
• How do you find a partner who shares your interest in spanking? Jillian Keenan is here to help.
• It turns out your sexual fantasies aren't all that strange - new research backing up Charlie Glickman's stance that when it comes to sexuality, no-one gets to be normal. Girl on the Net, as ever, has an excellent take on this study, emphasising that no sexual fantasy is wrong, even if it isn't common - and that not every kinky fantasy wants to be acted out.

• Nimue's World has re-launched! Nimue Allen is now the sole owner-director of her own indie BDSM porn site - and there's some amazing new content coming out of it. Check out these blogposts about what's changed - and why having control over her own content is so important to her.
• Charities wont take porn money unless they can keep it a dirty secret. "Its not that nonprofits wont take money from the adult entertainment industry. Oh no, they simply wish the whole affair to be discreet."
• Failsafe porn to watch with a new boyfriend, a fantastic article by Girl on the Net on how to introduce the porn you like to your new lover. Namechecks MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, Bright Desire, and Clips4Sale - it's good to see the truly democratic, grassroots world of DIY porn given some love. I would also add PinkLabel.tv to the list.

• What does an orgasm look like? Some truly awesome artworks submitted to Girl on the Net's competition (sorry, she just keeps on being interesting!)
• You've probably seen it already, but this drone-shot porn is beautiful. "The plan was to take beautiful landscapes and just put people fucking in them."
• Feminist porn director Jennifer Lyon Bell shares six practical tips for shooting porn. I found number five particularly interesting - and something I could do more of.
• Some responses to Zoe William's Guardian article on ethical porn (on which more later, but meanwhile you can read my first impressions here). Erotic Scribes: "Porn is here to say 'Your fantasies are OK' when nobody and nothing else is going to say it." Yes = even if those fantasies are totally pervy. And the Telegraph acknowledges that "times are changing" - the radical idea that porn might not all be universally misogynistic and unethical (even though Gail Dines is still claiming women don't watch it). Also, apparently I'm the future of capitalism. Hokay.
• I love this new sensual film by Ms Naughty, which screened for the first time in Berlin: Tactile. Watch the full film at Bright Desire.

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Since my last update from Berlin, Lucie Blush and Ms Naughty have both posted reports from the Porn Film Festival which are well worth reading.

On Friday I felt much better slept, and I had tickets for five screenings, but I'd already decided that only three of them were ones I really cared about: XConfessions by Erika Lust, LOVE HARD by Sensate Films, and the Female Porn Shorts screening in which Instructed was playing.

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Violet Blue was kind enough to link to my last post about the Porn Film Festival Berlin. I kept notes throughout the next four days of the festival, but didn't have time to post anything until I got back. The following was written last Thursday evening in Berlin, after midnight.

Oh my god, where to start? I can't believe I've only been here for a day. Including shorts I've seen fourteen films today - I've never consumed this much media in one go before. Every spare minute in between has been spent talking, processing, connecting with people. The scarcity of tickets not only makes the films seem more valuable, but having limited time to chat to people in between makes every conversation significant - and really forces you to be efficient. I didn't want to waste a single second in the film-makers lounge on small talk. Give me shop talk, gossip and analysis every time.

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For this week's Sinful Sunday I wanted to share a sexy moment from a very special film which I shot at the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto this April. I opened the video to capture a screengrab from one of my favourite bits - but I ended up with so many amazing captures I couldn't choose just one.

Zahra Stardust is one of the coolest porn stars on the planet - Australian pole dance champion, Penthouse Pet and political candidate for the Australian Sex Party - for House of Representatives, Senate, and for Lord Mayor of Sydney. She is a performer/producer of queer ethical porn, an activist, artist and she is studying for a PhD on pornography. An awesome woman and it was a huge pleasure to meet her.

In this collaborative film she expressed her curiosity about spanking... and confessed that she also loved to have her bottom punched and squeezed. Here I am after giving her a luxurious over the knee pleasure spanking and leather strapping, pummelling her perfect dancer's bottom while she brings herself to orgasm with the Hitachi.

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I made a film, and I'm pretty damn excited about it. 'Instructed' is a collaboration between me and Ms Naughty, which was filmed at the Feminist Porn Awards this year. The shoot was attended by a BBC journalist - and that wasn't the only way this was a new experience for me. This is my most explicit video to date, exploring themes of remote dominance, anal eroticism, solo spanking and female masturbation.

I've written before about how I came up with the idea of keeping D's instructions a secret, and reading - and obeying - them live on camera. If you haven't read them already, you can find out more about the shoot in my blogposts Submissive solo shoot with Bright Desire and What will I be told to do? I'm really glad that D got involved so closely with the shoot - both in writing orders for me to follow, and in recording himself reading his instructions for me to use as a voiceover. The result is an intimate, erotic film which is as fresh and exciting for me as it was on the day of the shoot.

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I enjoyed chatting to BBC journalist Daniel Nasaw at the Feminist Porn Awards, but I wasn't sure when his article would come out.

The first I knew of it was when I woke up on Friday to find dozens of tweets about it in my mentions feed. I looked and there it was, right on the BBC News homepage!

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