Nina Hartley

Marie Louise Hartman (born March 11, 1959), known professionally as Nina Hartley, is an American pornographic film actress and sex educator. By 2017 she had appeared in more than one thousand 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". Early life and education Hartley was born on March 11, 1959, in Berkeley, California, to a Lutheran father, Louis Hartman, and a Jewish mother, Blanche Hartman (née Gelders), Her grandfather was a University of Alabama physics professor who was a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) party member in the 1930s. Hartley's parents were members of the CPUSA who converted to Buddhism when she was young. Her father was blacklisted in 1957 for his communist beliefs. Hartley grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as a teenager 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. Adult film career Hartley 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, she 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."