Nina Hartley And Ernest Greene: O (the power of submission) The Places They Go

Nina Hartley and Ernest Greene celebrated their fifth anniversary yesterday.

One of Hartley’s favorite questions is “What does your husband say about what you do?”

“Action.”

If there were a porn version of “Fiddler on the Roof” (and who says there won’t be – the title wouldn’t even have to change), the Yenta would determine that Nina Hartley and Ernest Greene are a good – and not so unlikely – match.

“We recognize that our relationship is a work in progress,” says Nina Hartley of her marriage to Ernest Greene. “But we love each other for our essential natures, which never change.”

Hartley, 49, is, of course, a major celebrity and sex educator famous to generations of fans, and Greene, 55, directs bondage-themed movies like “O: The Power of Submission.”

The couple met in 1989 and married in 2000. They live and work in a massive loft overlooking downtown Los Angeles.

Hartley and Greene are veterans of several long-term relationships and have deduced that maintaining a successful marriage requires hard work for its rewards.

“We maintain really rigorous relationship hygiene,” Hartley said. “No matter how frightened or upset, nobody gets to be mean. Nobody’s leaving. There’s no bringing up stuff from before.”

One of the defining traits of couplehood is that each member can feel at ease with the other. This has been true of Hartley and Greene since the day they met, albeit with a porn twist.

“It was 1989 and I was working as an assistant director to (porn performer/director/screenwriter) Sharon Kane,” Greene said. “And there was Nina…”

“There was a rape scene in the movie,” Hartley added. “And I balked. I didn’t want to do it. Ernest worked with me to recontextualize the scene for my character (those were the days in porn when you still talked about character). It was very helpful! Later that night, I was fooling around on the floor with Sharon and I asked Ernest if he wanted a blowjob.”

“What was I gonna do – say ‘No’?” Greene said.

“I pay attention to the way a guy receives a blowjob,” Hartley observed. “And he took it well.”

Hartley was in an unhappy triad marriage at the time. Although the couple she was married to approved of her working in porn (“and its paycheck,” she added), she was forbidden to get in an extracurricular relationship.

“So I was conflicted,” she said. “I was attracted to [Ernest] from the beginning. He had such a big personality, and we clicked, which is something I didn’t have at home in San Francisco.”

So Hartley would stay with Greene when she came to Los Angeles for work, but eventually felt so guilty that she called off their nascent relationship.

“I went back to my marriage,” she said, “until I just couldn’t take it anymore. And that took seven years.”

Greene, meanwhile, consoled himself by “being absolutely sure [Nina] had made a big mistake.” They would continue seeing each other professionally as they collaborated on a series of educational “Nina Hartley’s Guide To … ” videos for adult studio Adam & Eve.

To hear them tell it, Hartley suffered at their breakup but Greene soldiered on.

“I had relationships with several women in the business,” he said. “All of them great learning experiences. But all of them transitory from the beginning. I knew that.”

But then came the fateful day in 2000.

“She called and asked me to lunch … ” Greene said.

“I actually called him and said, ‘I’ve left my husband; are you free for lunch?'”

“Now and for the rest of my life,” Greene said at the time. “Now where were we?”

Greene said he would do anything to keep her. He told her that she was never leaving again.

“You won’t get out so easy this time,” he said.

And there, at ages 40 and 46, Hartley and Greene started their life together, which now reflects decades of their own sexual, artistic, and political exploration, and which allows each party room to have sex with other people as part of keeping their own special relationship strong.

“The more men I fuck,” Hartley said, “the more I love my husband. And if you want a perfect brute in the bedroom, go see Ernest. It’s like dancing with the Minotaur.”

“It’s more fun than it looks,” mused Greene. “I’m like an old Harley Davidson.”

But each also has a commitment to making good porn, which they think has something to do with their generation, and the age at which they started in the business.

“You had a lot of sex radicals back then [in the 70s and 80s],” Greene said.

“Because porn wasn’t everywhere, you had to go and find it,” Hartley added. “It seemed to attract the type of person who really believed in it.”

“And so we try to give people the best we can give them,” Greene said. “Consumers are not sheep to be fleeced. The people who are putting down their hard-earned money for a movie should get the best we can give them.”

The couple feels like they’ve hit on something, and want to get the word out.

“We like spreading the Good News about sex,” Greene said. “We want to let people know that ‘I’ve seen sex and I think it’s OK’”

One result of that philosophy was their well-received 2006 book, “Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex,” with Greene writing as Ira S. Levine, his non-porn name.
Greene is also happy to promote the product known as Nina Hartley: Porn Icon.

“She’s the star and I’m her biggest fan,” he said. The longtime executive editor of Hustler’s “Taboo” magazine, Greene acknowledges that even Larry Flynt seems smitten with Nina.

“After all this time, the invitations to Hustler’s Christmas party are still addressed to ‘Nina Hartley and Guest,’ even though I work there,” he said.

And Flynt isn’t the only one. The artist Robert Williams, founder of Juxtapoz magazine and whose painting “Appetite for Destruction” was featured on the cover of the Guns ‘n’ Roses album of the same name, greeted his old friend Greene at a gallery opening. Greene recalled the conversation:

“You’re with Nina Hartley?'” Williams said.

“I’m married to Nina Hartley,” Greene said.

“I’ve been jerking off to her ass for years,” Williams said.

Greene is not possessive of Hartley. The emotion is more like pride.

“How do I feel with other guys being attracted to my wife?” Greene asked. “Well, a little smirky, actually.”

Greene said that this is the result of a genetic deficiency uncommon to most men.

“I don’t get jealous,” he said. “I was born without that gene. We recognize that it is healthy for us to now and then get a dose of a different person.”

Hartley describes her own sexuality as “polymorphous/perverse.” Greene clarified, “I call her the Universal Adapter.”

“I’m dominant, I’m submissive, I like women, I like men,” Hartley said. “Most spots on the continuum.”

Hartley said that their style of open, non-possessive relationship encourages them to be better people for each other.

“Ernest says, ‘The stronger you get, the more secure I feel,'” she said. “How many men say that to their wives? ‘Be as big as you want.’ Oh, fuck, man! Now I have to own who I am!”

Hartley and Greene do not offer advice for other couples, but point to successful relationship protocols that they arrived at through trial and error.

“We’re very complementary to each other,” Hartley said, “but it was helpful to realize that the ways we are not compatible aren’t some plot by the other person to be offensive.”

Eight years into the second act of their relationship, Greene has only one misgiving.

“The regret I have is that we missed some fun by starting later,” he said. “What would this have been like in our 20s?”

If the relationship Greene and Hartley share seems alien to the average American couple, consider this final, universal tip.

“We have a maid come in and clean,” Hartley said. “You can really focus on loving your partner by outsourcing the drudgework.”

Previously: Sex on the nest with Nina Hartley; The Surrender of O first look
See also: Nina Hartley