LANSING, Mich. — Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon told reporters on Tuesday that, if elected, she would define “pornography” as “two naked people, and they are acting out a sexual act, and multiple different sexual acts.”

Dixon proffered her peculiar definition — which bears no resemblance to any legal precedent over the last several decades — during an event appearance, as she ramped up the culture war rhetoric by proposing a statewide ban on what she called “pornographic” books in Michigan schools.

When pressed for specifics, Dixon said that if elected governor she would personally “take a look” at such works to “make sure that we are not having children reading pornographic — or having a teacher read pornographic — material to a child in school.”

A reporter then asked Dixon, a right-wing commentator for a streaming news channel, how she would define “pornography.”

“Do you need me to define pornographic?” Dixon replied. “I mean, I can, if you want me to. So there’s two naked people and they are acting out a sexual act, multiple different sexual acts.”

Dixon then asked the reporter, “Do you want me to send you some so you can see them? That would be fine — I feel like it would be a little awkward.”

“I did not expect to have a gubernatorial nominee define ‘pornography’ at a press conference but nothing about this election cycle has made sense,” TV news reporter Eric Lloyd tweeted later.

During the same event, Dixon called for the resignation of Michigan’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Michael Rice, over LGBTQ+ training.

A Nationwide Culture War Strategy by GOP Leaders

Dixon’s attack on “pornography” is consistent with current efforts by Republicans nationwide to invoke a supposed crisis in public education over material dealing with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC issues.

Voters in Jamestown Township, news site Bridge Michigan reported, recently voted to defund their public library over concerns about Maia Kobabe’s graphic novel, “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” Dixon has also targeted “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a YA title by George M. Johnson, who is Black and identifies as queer.

“All told, local and state officials across the country have banned 1,648 individual book titles between July 2021 and June 2022,” Bridge Michigan reported, “including 41 percent with LGBTQ themes or characters, according to a tally from PEN America, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of expression.”

PEN America released a statement calling this recent book-banning movement “deeply undemocratic, in that it often seeks to impose restrictions on all students and families based on the preferences of those calling for the bans.”

Buddy BeBop vs. Michigan Pornography

Dixon’s holier-than-thou anti-porn tirades have been characterized as hypocritical by her Democratic opponents, who point out that, as an actress, Dixon has appeared in sexploitation titles like “Buddy BeBop vs. the Living Dead.”

The Detroit News reported that Dixon’s IMDB credits include “productions that featured gore and other actors in sexual scenes,” among them a movie described by its own trailer as “offensive” and “disgusting,” and in which Dixon’s character gets “eaten by two zombies.”

“News of Dixon’s involvement in these projects come as she remains fixated with distorting the realities of public schooling and healthcare providers in order to push her wrong-for-Michigan agenda,” a Democratic campaign site commented.

“Without providing any evidence,” the Michigan Democrats site continued, “Dixon recently stated that school staff provide ‘sexually explicit materials to children’ and likened them to ‘predator[s] sharing porn with children at the bus stop.’ But when confronted with her own acting background, Dixon argued that her roles were ‘different’ than what she’s targeting in schools because they aren’t accessible to children. As the reporting notes, her movie is ‘still available for viewing’ to anyone with Internet access.”

Political consultant Jeff Timmer opined that Dixon’s appearance in sex-and-gore splatterfests “could be a factor in the Republican primary because of the ‘sanctimonious message’ Dixon has been running on,” the Detroit News reported.

“In a normal time, this would just be weird,” Timmer told the newspaper. “It’s not necessarily a character disqualification. It’s just an indication of just how freaking weird the Republicans have become” under Trump.

The latest Detroit Free Press statewide survey shows Dixon trailing incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer by 16 points.

Sep 23, 2022 1:39 PM PDT

LOS ANGELES — Jessica Starling’s latest scenes mark her debut for Nympho.com as well as her return to MYLF.

For Nympho.com, Starling performs with Kat Chase and Scott Nails. It begins with two getting undressed and playing with each other before moving to Nails. After orally satisfying him, the three move through various positions until he climaxes.

The trailer for the scene can be found here.

Following this, Starling’s MYLF.com scene is her fourth with the studio and has her working with Ike Diesel. She is dressed in a pink sparkly dress and heels, but is stood up for a date. Diesel invites her over to hang out. What starts off with video games and pizza soon becomes sexual.

For further information about the release, visit MYLF.

“Both these scenes were so much fun to film. I’m glad I got work for Nympho.com and have wanted to for a while. There’s a reason that I’m smiling the entire time. Please let Nympho.com and MYLF.com know how much you enjoyed the scenes so you will see more of me on both,” Starling said.

For more from Jessica Starling, follow her on Twitter.

Sep 23, 2022 12:44 PM PDT

MONTREAL — BranditScan has launced a ‘Back 2 School’ contest running from today until Sept. 26.

The contest will allow two creators to win months of premium protection as well as a BranditScan bag.

Creators interested in participating can do so by signing up to BranditScan, retweeting and following them on twitter, and tagging a friend in the comments.

Winners will be announced on Monday.

Additional information about the contest can be found here.

Visit BranditScan online and on Twitter.

LOS ANGELES — Lust Cinema will screen the first episode of director Casey Calvert’s six-part series, “Going Up,” Saturday at 8 p.m. PDT on Reddit.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Calvert and stars Maya Woulfe, Seth Gamble, Victoria Voxxx, Anna Claire Clouds and Charlotte Sartre.

“It’s the opening night of ‘The Voices Are Loud,’ the edgiest play the Curtis Theater Group has mounted in its 27-year history,” said a rep, describing the series. “The house is sold out. It’s a few hours until curtain. Everything is set… until it isn’t. Chaos reigns and the clock is ticking as the cast and crew do everything they can to keep the show from falling apart.”

Click here to register for the screening and Q&A; watch all six episodes at LustCinema.

Follow Calvert and Lust on Twitter.
 

Sep 23, 2022 12:11 PM PDT

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Zerella Skies made her AllBlackX debut opposite Isiah Maxwell.

The scene opens with her wearing a plaid bodysuit and Daisy Dukes. Skies undresses while showing off her body. Maxwell enters the room and begins to help her undress. From there, the two get physical.
 
“I love the way that AllBlackX shoots their scenes — they’re so romantic, and you can feel the tension build between the two stars. Isiah is always great to shoot with and such a gentleman. Plus, every orgasm was 100 percent real,” Skies said.

The trailer for the scene can be found at AllBlackX; follow the studio on Twitter.

Follow Zerella Skies on Twitter and find her premium social media links here.

LOS ANGELES — Adult Time’s multi-award-winning star director and chief creative officer, Bree Mills, has had a thing for biopics lately, especially if they also involve as a creative force the person being portrayed.

This mini trend started with the 2020 XBIZ Feature Movie of the Year “Teenage Lesbian,” based on Mills’ own coming-of-age story, and continued with 2021’s “Casey: A True Story,” starring Casey Kisses and based on her journey.

Next week, Adult Time will release “Stars,” based on Jane Wilde’s pre-fame experiences as a teenage cam model in Queens. The title stars and was co-directed by Wilde herself.

The three projects have more in common than merely a genre. They are all origin stories of a sort, built around traumatic events but ultimately uplifting since — spoiler alert — the protagonists all end up in the higher echelons of the mainstream porn industry.

This is a tricky undertaking, as overtly dealing with actual trauma — as opposed to just trauma-related fetishes and taboos — would seem likely to defeat the main purpose of pornography, which is by definition masturbation fodder. 

But Bree Mills likes nothing better than a cinematic challenge. After all, this is the director and producer who turned the script around on “taboo” genres by tackling them head-on and with unprecedented grittiness in the now-classic “Pure Taboo” series she masterminded years ago as a Gamma studio exec in Canada.

“Stars” looks and feels like a very extended episode of “Pure Taboo.” It has that series’ signature acting style, straddling minimal and eerie, plus the same awkwardness-inducing tempo. Nobody really speaks for the first four minutes of “Stars,” and Wilde doesn’t open her mouth until almost the seven-minute mark. That would be an eternity in either mainstream or indie film; in porn, it’s sheer deliberate perversity.

A Woman Finds Her Own Path

The official summary of “Stars,” a film that bears a collaborative co-directing credit for Mills and Wilde, describes it as the story of a woman who “finds her own path into professional sex work after being manipulated by an older man, told as a series of memories during her final months as a teenager.”

Wilde has attached a “Director’s Statement” to the film’s press material, acknowledging that she “was given the opportunity to turn what was a traumatic period of my life into art that can be consumed by so many people.”

Mills’ own statement reads, “With ‘Stars,’ we are reclaiming a narrative that is so often spoken for us and used against us,” an oblique reference to a core plot element: how main character Julia, played by Wilde as a transparent alter ego of herself, was groomed, manipulated and abused by a despicable human trafficker, played by a brooding, menacing Seth Gamble in low-life mode.

“Stars” falls somewhere in between those two statements. It is both biopic and a script-flipping PSA against human trafficking.

Trauma and the ‘Bad Situation’

When XBIZ published an exclusive, in-depth interview with Wilde in October 2020, she spoke about her pre-porn life in candid yet guarded terms.

“I started watching porn very young, as a lot of people in this day and age do, because it’s literally right there,” Wilde told XBIZ. “Nobody showed it to me. I found Pornhub when I was in school — that’s how people find it, it’s odd when you think how young these people are, but that’s the reality.”

After high school, Wilde said, she decided not to attend college and started camming. Fast-forward to September 2017 when, after a year as a cam girl, Wilde decided to “get out of a bad situation,” which she described as “traumatic.”

Two years ago, Wilde was not quite ready to unpack that “bad situation,” at least not on the record.

“I was trying to figure out what to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave the adult industry after webcamming, but it was a weird situation.” That’s when she slowly took her first steps in the mainstream porn industry.

A Fundamental Tonal Challenge

With “Stars,” shot by the Gamma production crew headed by Michael Vegas and Siouxsie Q, Wilde tries to make sense of those not-so-long-ago events of 2016-2017, cathartically reliving them but at the same time creating pornographic content.

The second scene of the movie, which extends for a tense half-hour, is perhaps the best example of the challenging balancing act Mills and Wilde are trying to pull off, interweaving and somehow reconciling very disparate themes and purposes.

After a lengthy, mostly silent intro in which Wilde responds to an online ad promising, “Make $1000 a week,” she goes over to recruiter Kevin’s house, where she is interviewed for the job of cam model.

What follows is a “Pure Taboo”-style twist on the lucrative genre of the “casting couch” porn video. Kevin, played by Gamble, douchily asks the standard questions: “How many people have you fucked?” “You ever get fucked in the ass?” Then, as in all those scenes, the predatory interrogation leads to Kevin pulling his hard dick out and instructing the model to fuck him.

The difference, however, is that “Stars” wants us to realize, from the get-go, what a nightmare manipulator the Kevin character is. He’s the crucial villain of the story — and of Wilde’s real life — which makes the lengthy sex scene that follows vexing to watch. It requires a strange suspension of disbelief, asking viewers watching the pair fuck for a full half-hour not to see 2022’s Gamble and Wilde — highly accomplished adult performers having highly professional pornographic sex — but two people with a much darker and rawer dynamic.

Some of the other scenes — featuring a solid cast of supporting players like Aiden Ashley, Oliver Flynn, Ryan Reid, Dale Savage, Cam Damage and Robbie Echo — fare better in terms of the fundamental tonal challenge, because of the context of the characters and their place in the script. At times, it almost feels as if the film is operating quite overtly in conversation with Sean Baker’s “Starlet” (2012) and Ninja Thyberg’s “Pleasure” (2021). But the film gutsily chooses to open with that initial, intensely and self-consciously controversial pairing of protagonist and antagonist, which necessarily colors the feel of the entire movie.

A One-of-a-Kind Project

Wilde has said that she does not intend this story to be more than her version of what happened to her. “I was manipulated, and I guess you could say abused by a man in his 30s and groomed to do sex work, being fed a bunch of lies and manipulative information,” she recently told the Daily Beast’s Aurora Snow. She added that she considers herself to be “a trafficking survivor.”

It becomes difficult to assess a project such as “Stars” in relation to anything but itself. It is as loaded an artifact as one can imagine, breaking the barrier between performer and character and weaving strands of self-exploration and brutal catharsis around the rules of an art form as complex as film, as well as the particular demands of commercial pornography as a genre.

It’s best to let the subject/artist have the last word.

“I could never have imagined I would be where I am now as a teenager living in Queens,” Wilde wrote in her Director’s Statement. “My circumstances have changed — but what I was able to take away from those experiences will stay with me forever, as well as the experience of creating this film.”

“Stars” will premiere Sept. 28 on Adult Time.

OWOSSO, Mich. — Wired magazine has published an in-depth report about the secretive world of surveillance apps marketed as “porn filters” to churchgoers across America by faith-based corporations.

Penned by Wired’s Security section reporter Dhruv Mehrotra, the piece focuses on Michigan-based niche market leader Covenant Eyes.

As XBIZ reported three years ago, Covenant Eyes is the brainchild of religious activist Ron DeHaas. The startup offers what it calls “accountability software” from a small office in Owosso, Michigan, somewhere in the economically ravaged expanse between Flint and Lansing.

Fast-forward to 2022 and, as Wired reported today, Covenant Eyes is now “part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic.”

These church-endorsed and -marketed apps, Mehrotra wrote, “then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone — an ‘accountability partner,’ in the apps’ parlance.”

After Wired presented its findings to Google, the article reports, the search giant “determined that two of the top accountability apps — Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You — violate its policies.”

A Faith-Based Product Unable to Catch a Religious Predator

As XBIZ reported, the Arkansas trial of ex-reality TV personality Josh Duggar, former director of the lobbying arm of the religiously motivated anti-porn Family Research Council, exposed the failure of for-profit, religiously inspired “porn filter” Covenant Eyes.

Duggar was sentenced in May to 12 years in prison for downloading child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The sentencing memo, by Assistant U.S. Atty. Dustin Roberts, described Duggar — who actively campaigned against legal, consensual, adult pornography for the well-funded Family Research Council lobby — as having “a deep-seated, pervasive and violent sexual interest in children.”

Last year, People magazine reported that federal investigators found that Covenant Eyes had been installed on Duggar’s computer so that it could monitor and report his internet use to his wife, Anna.

“According to Covenant Eyes’ website,” People noted, “the program is an ‘accountability software’ that is meant to protect users from objectionable content and help monitor the screen activity of those with porn addictions. The software ‘periodically captures screenshots,’ which are then analyzed by artificial intelligence and sent to a trusted ‘ally’ who can hold the user accountable for their internet usage.”

During a May 2021 detention hearing, however, an investigator reported that “Covenant Eyes was unable to detect Duggar’s internet usage after a password-protected network was installed on his computer.”

Spyware + Churches = ‘Shameware’

Today’s Wired article reported the story of Hao-Wei Lin, a former member of evangelical Southern Baptist church Gracepoint. “Within a month of installing the app,” Mehrotra wrote, “he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. ‘Anything you need to tell me?’ reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week.”

The Gracepoint church leader “zeroed in on a single piece of content that Covenant Eyes had flagged as ‘Mature’: Hao-Wei Lin had searched ‘#Gay’ on a website called Statigr.am, and the app had flagged it.”

“I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” another former member of Gracepoint told Wired. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”

To read “The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps,” visit Wired.com.

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Elevated X has signed on as the exclusive sponsor of the Talent Lounge for creator-first fan show X3 Expo, set for Jan. 13-14, 2023 at the world-famous Hollywood Palladium.

The company, which provides content management solutions for adult creators and websites, will also exhibit on the main show floor throughout the weekend.

Alena Croft, Alana Evans, Sofie Marie, Dee Siren and Meana Wolf, among others, are set to lend eye-popping glamour to the Elevated X booth as they mix and mingle with expo attendees.

Hailed by attendees and exhibitors alike, the inaugural edition of X3 drew thousands of fans, stars and exhibitors from around the world for a one-of-a-kind experience, garnering a tsunami of social media buzz.

Showcasing a wide variety of sizzling exhibits and solo booths for creators to connect with fans, promote merch and more, X3 promises once again to deliver the biggest lineup of stars in North America along with the latest advances in digital entertainment and pleasure tech.

“We will be hosting some fun events throughout X3 in the Talent Lounge,” teased Elevated X co-founder and CEO AJ Hall. “We’ll be releasing exclusive details as the show draws closer.”

Purchase tickets here and visit X3.show for the official event website; follow X3 on Twitter and Instagram.

For creator inquiries, contact creators@x3.show.

Find Elevated X online.

LOS ANGELES — Pristine Edge has been named MYLF.com’s “MYLF of the Month” for September, and stars in a new all-girl orgy scene to mark the occasion.

“The Draft: Game Day Orgy” starts with Edge and her friends “excited for draft day. When one of her friends brings his stripper girlfriend, Pristine and her friends get distracted. But this distraction proves to be just what Pristine needed, as she enjoys moving from partner to partner, soon forgetting about football,” said a rep.

“I am so grateful to MYLF for naming me ‘MYLF of the Month,'” Edge said. “I always enjoy working with them and to have them recognize me and my hard work means so much.”

Watch “Game Day Orgy” here.

Follow Edge and MYLF on Twitter.

Sep 22, 2022 2:01 PM PDT

LONDON — Atlantis Deep’s newest scene finds her starring for Brazzers opposite Danny D in “Everything Must Go.”
 
The scene begins with Deep wearing lingerie and putting dresses on her bed. She stars playing with herself only to be interrupted by the doorbell. Deep opens the door to her ex-girlfriend, Beth, and her new boyfriend, Danny D. Beth wants to buy Deep’s designer clothing. Deep offers to give away her clothing for free if she can hook up with Danny. Beth accepts the offer, so Deep and Danny immediately get physical.
 
“Working with Danny is always a lot of fun, and this scene is even better than our first. I have to admit I was so into it, which you can definitely see when watching the scene. I’d love to work with Danny again,” Deep said.
 
The trailer for the scene can be found at Brazzers; follow Brazzers and Atlantis Deep on Twitter.