Background and career
Marie Louise Hartman (born 1959), known professionally as Nina Hartley, is an American pornographic film actress and sex educator. By 2017 she had appeared in more than 1,000 adult films. She has been described by Las Vegas Weekly as an "outspoken feminist" and "advocate for sexual freedom", and by CNBC as "a legend in the adult world".
Hartley was born in Berkeley, California, in March 1959, the youngest of four children of a Lutheran father, Louis Hartman, and a Jewish mother, Blanche Hartman (née Gelders). Her grandfather, Joseph Gelders, was a University of Alabama physics professor, a prominent labor and civil rights activist, and a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member in the 1930s. Hartley's parents converted to Buddhism when she was young. Her mother supported the family as a biochemist after her father, San Francisco radio announcer Louis Hartman, was blacklisted in 1957 for his communist beliefs. As a teenager, Hartley self-identified as a feminist, influenced by the slogan "my body, my rules". After graduating from Berkeley High School in 1977, she attended San Francisco State University's undergraduate nursing school and graduated magna cum laude in 1985, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She was a registered nurse until her license expired in 1986.
Hartley has stated that pornography is one of the few places where women are allowed to initiate and take pleasure in sex in a society that restricts women's sexuality with expectations of virginity, monogamy, and childbearing. She deliberately sought a career in pornography as a way to make a living by having sex, later telling Las Vegas Weekly, "Porn gave me easy access to women without having to date them or have a relationship." She writes that part of her reason for choosing sex work was to be able to indulge her exhibitionistic and voyeuristic streak. She has said she chose her life's work when she saw the 1976 erotic film The Autobiography of a Flea alone at a theater in San Francisco. In 1982, during her sophomore year of nursing school, Hartley started working as a stripper at the Sutter Cinema and then the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre. She told an interviewer that she chose the name "Nina" because it was easy for Japanese tourists to say during the time she was a dancer in San Francisco, and "Hartley" because it was close to her own last name, and she "wanted a name that sounded like that of a real person." Her pornographic film debut was in Educating Nina (1984), where she was cast and directed by fellow performer Juliet Anderson. For many years, she toured the United States and Canada as a stripper and made personal appearances at sex shops. Hartley describes her father's reaction to her choice of occupation:
He asked, 'Why sex? Why not the violin?' I know now that I'm sexual the way that Mozart was musical [...] a life of public sexuality has, from my very first time on stage, been as natural to me as breathing." In the 1980s and early 1990s, Hartley starred in several of the Debbie Does Dallas film series spin-offs such as Debbie Duz Dishes (1986) and Debbie Does Wall Street (1991). In 1992, she directed her first movie, Nina Hartley's Book of Love. She also produced and starred in a series of sex education videos for Adam & Eve. In 1994, she began her line of instructional videos marketed under the Nina Hartley's Guide brand. She played the part of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 satirical pornographic film Who's Nailin' Paylin?, with Lisa Ann in the role of Sarah Palin. As of 2015, she was still actively performing, and by 2017 had appeared in more than one thousand pornographic films. She has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "one of the best-known actresses in the industry" and by CNBC as "a legend in the adult world".
Hartley acted in the 1996 Canadian film Bubbles Galore and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Phil Donahue Show to defend the pornographic film industry. In the 1997 film Boogie Nights, she played William H. Macy's character's serially unfaithful wife who is murdered. She later remarked, "The only movie I ever died in for having sex was a mainstream movie." Hartley appeared in the 1998 documentary Traci Lords: The E! True Hollywood Story and was interviewed in The Naked Feminist (2003). Hartley was featured in After Porn Ends (2012), and appears in Sticky: A (Self) Love Story (2016), in which she discusses masturbation with regards to education, the forced resignation of Joycelyn Elders, and her opinions on the blackballing of comedian Paul Reubens after his arrest for masturbating in a public theater.
Las Vegas Weekly has described Hartley as an "outspoken feminist, sex educator and advocate for sexual freedom" and "a guiding force for a generation of feminist porn stars". She has described herself both as a "classical liberal feminist" and a democratic socialist. Hartley began engaging in feminist activism in the 1980s. She has said:
