HOLLYWOOD—Saturday night saw the debut of Taschen Publishing's latest sexual creation, The Big Book of Pussy, at the La Luz de Jesus Gallery, located inside Wacko at 4633 Hollywood Boulevard. The event was hosted by Taschen editor Dian Hanson, and among the guests present were veteran adult director David "Pussyman" Christopher and actress/director Nicki Hunter.
"It feels amazing to be in The Big Book of Pussy!" Hunter exclaimed. "I just had to be here to sign my pussy away to however many people wanted to come and buy the book. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. When you hear the title, Big Book of Pussy, you think it's just going to be close-ups of pussies, but when you actually read it, you realize it's an art book, and it shows pussies and women's bodies and the smiles on their faces, and it also takes you on a journey, from the 1900s all the way up to the present, of how we view pussy today. It's really incredible to read all the way through, and it's not just a pornographic book. I mean, yes, it shows nudity, but there's no pornography per se. I think it's truly artistic and is gorgeous. It's just about the female body, and if you want to go eating at the Y, it's a man's paradise."
But while both Hunter and Christopher both have sections of the book devoted to them, the cover went to another actress/director, Kimberly Kane.
"I chose Kimberly Kane for the cover after looking at many, many pussies, and finding the pussy that had the biggest, meatiest lips of all. They're fabulous," Hanson explained.
"Besides Nicki and Kimberly, I've got a lot of girls from the '80s: Vanessa Del Rio, Seka, Ginger Lynn, Amber Lynn, Christy Canyon, Rhonda Jo Petty, Candy Samples, Jacqueline Lorians and Shauna Grant," she continued. "We have Jenna Jameson's first photo set when she was completely natural; we've got Buck Angel—we shot him in drag. He said he would never do this for anyone else, that he was never putting on women's clothes again, but we have the surprise reveal at the end. I have an eclectic mix of interviews, because who do you get? Who's worthy of this? We got Steve Shubin, the ex-policeman who makes the Fleshlight, the world's best-selling sex toy, molded from celebrity sex star pussies. If you just read his quotes, they're great: 'It's the only thing you can fuck, shoot and throw out the window at high speech and not go to jail for.' That's a cop talking about his sex toys. He was fascinating. He's a great, great interview, as was Pussyman, that was a wonderful interview.
"Also, we've got this lady who, back in the '70s, would shoot ping-pong balls out of her pussy—there were several women who did that back then—Honeysuckle Divine and Monica Kennedy. Monica Kennedy was a performance artist, and the guy who found her and trained her is now a top scientist; he completely left the world of sex and went into science, and he claims he got all of his ideas for entropy theory—his specialty—by working in the porn industry. But these girls would do all manner of wild things with their pussies, and I knew there had to be somebody today, and I found this girl Mouse in England. She's a 'vaginal performance artist'; not only can she shoot ping-pong balls from her pussy and ass; she can take a giant funnel and pour like a quart of yogurt in—she can just suck it in; her pussy is like a mouth—and do all sorts of things with it."
Christopher, whose Pussyman series was a best-seller for many years, was particularly happy to be included in the book, seeing it as a homage not only to his favorite body part but also to the empowerment of women.
"I've known Dian for years, and I've always found her to be very positive toward the powerful aggressiveness of the sexuality of women," Christopher said. "She interviewed me for this book, and there's a whole chapter devoted to me, explaining how I started in the old days, and how I've always communicated the power of pussy to help women feel good about themselves, how me and George Payne were the guys that ate pussy better than anyone, and the whole big thing. The book is one of those coffee table books. There's like 100 pages of dialog in three different languages. There's a whole thing on Vanessa [Del Rio]—Vanessa has a big clit—and then there's a whole section on Flower Tucci because she was a squirting star. I gave Dian a lot of material and I was the one who told her about Flower. Dian doesn't just look for porno people; Dian looks for all kinds of performance artists, regular artists who do sexual stuff, fringe people who do different things, all of that."
Christopher current posts about his current fetish, extreme facesitting, at DeviantDavid.com.
"These pictures go back to the dawn of pussy time," Hanson explained. "We're going back to the dawn of photographic spread shots, back to about 1900,, and right up to the present day, so we have about 100 years of pussy in this book. And you know what hasn't changed a whole lot? The hair comes, the hair goes; we have early photos in here of women who were shaving. A lot of models in the early days shaved because they knew they were going to have to remove it anyway when they published the photo, so the less hair they had, the less work they had to do to get rid of it."
Hanson also called attention to how few countries were able to contribute photos to the book.
"You have England, you have France, you have Germany, but then you also have a guy from Romania—a lot of people assume that this kind of material is produced all over the world, but it isn't," she observed. "As I learned when I did my history of men's magazines, there are porn-producing countries, a very small number, and most of the rest of the world is not porn-producing. It was France and Germany, originally, and then spread to England, spread to the U.S. and Argentina in the Americas, and then to Japan. Turkey produced some very tame men's magazines in the '40s and '50s. Other than that, most countries do not produce it, and when people talk about how weird the Japanese are, and how weird Japanese porn is, you have to consider that the Japanese are the only people producing porn that do not come from a Judeo-Christian heritage, so what you see in their porn reflects their religious heritage, which views sex entirely differently. They take out the pubic hair, and yet they'll have a girl shooting enema fluid up into her own face but she's not going to have any pubic hair. Go figure!"
The evening saw a steady stream of interested adults speaking with Hanson and checking out the book during the three hours that Hanson and the others, including some who work behind the scenes in the adult industry, were there. Kimberly Kane was expected to join in after she'd finished shooting her current movie, but as of 9 pm, she had yet to make an appearance. Nonetheless, sales were brisk, and all were happy to have their copies autographed by some of their favorite "pussonalities."
(Pictured, l-r: Dian Hanson, David Christopher, Nicki Hunter.)
