Articles
On the Camino Trail at 75
Next Avenue June 30, 2023
“If you are going to doubt something, doubt your limits.” A card on my desk reminds me of that every day. In April, I walked a section of the Camino de Santiago celebrating my 75th birthday after having spent my actual birthday in bed with COVID. Read more.
Pop-Ins & Floggings: Inside the Senior Porn Revolution
Evergreen Review 2023
Marlene, a sixtyish divorcée without prior porn-star creds, arrives on the set with an array of hard-earned skills, though one of them isn’t finagling a condom over the soft…Read more.
The Future of Sex Ed Is the Internet
Wired November 28, 2022
Compared to a few decades ago, young people have surprisingly less access to high-quality, informative sex education. Typically, human sexuality programs have been the responsibility of middle or high schools, but like many things, sex is political, and sex education has been prey to the influences of religious dicta, fundamentalist morals, and a family values agenda. Read more.
Commentary: Sometimes, NIMBY can also be for the greater good
Times Union November 9, 2022
More than 25 years have passed since I moved to the Hudson Valley, a move that was done in stages, but I always knew this would be home. I settled on a pretty unexceptional house. Read more.
What I Learned From Doing Amateur Porn in My 20s
Oldster September 20, 2022
Nancy Jainchill recalls a ’70s sexcapade that helped her make (one month’s) rent, and began her exploration into women’s pleasure and sexual parity. Read more.
Originally published in Longreads April 29, 2019
Continue to Demand Abortion Rights Law
Times Union October 10, 2021
On April 9, 1965, between 6 and 7 p.m., I had sex for the first time. Having heterosexual sex with someone before marriage was still outside the norm, and I was stepping across the threshold from good girl to bad girl when I engaged in what was then considered illicit behavior. Those years the fear of pregnancy was inescapable. Read more.
Listen to Transgender Youth | Opinion
Newsweek August 20, 2021
The American Medical Association (AMA) is now recommending the removal of sex labels from birth certificates. Sexual identification, according to the AMA, is often arbitrarily assigned based on external genitalia, may have little to do with how someone feels about themselves and can lead to problems including stigmatization and discrimination. Read more.
LGBTQ rights: My grandnephew’s transition made me do my homework on transgender issues
USA Today June 5, 2021
I saw my grandnephew Sam for his COVID-era Zoom bar mitzvah in October, along with family and friends who’d signed on to watch him perform the ritual acknowledging the coming of age of a Jewish boy. Wearing a suit and tie, a blue and white tallis wrapped around his shoulders, black fuzz sprouted above his lip, noticeable even on the screen. Read more.
I’m vaccinated — ring the bell!
Hudson Valley 1 February 19, 2021
The bell rang but I didn’t hear it. I’d been vaccinated — the first shot — and I was verklempt. Maybe I’d survive.
Living in Woodstock, where there’s less snow than when I first moved here, but more than in the city during the winter, the big chain pharmacy was boycotted for two years but survived. Read more.
Goodbye Diane di Prima, Feminist Beat Poet and My Role Model
Next Tribe December 28, 2020
More than twenty years before Jennifer Worley takes us behind the scenes of the Lusty Lady club, in Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power, I was slinking across the stage of one of the many strip joints in San Francisco’s North Beach. Read more.
Backstage and Under the Lights: A Review of Jennifer Worley’s Neon Girls
A book review for Brevity Blog December 22, 2020
More than twenty years before Jennifer Worley takes us behind the scenes of the Lusty Lady club, in Neon Girls: A Stripper’s Education in Protest and Power, I was slinking across the stage of one of the many strip joints in San Francisco’s North Beach. Read more.
How A Porn Star Became My Muse
Brevity Blog April 29, 2019
“You’re not too old,” Nina Hartley, one of the most successful adult entertainment performers and a pioneer of feminist porn, whose career spans more than thirty years, told me over lunch. Really? She was reassuring me that I could make up for my only foray as a porn star in the early 70s, which found me squirming unhappily beneath the sheets for rent money. She smiled. I would do better this time. Read more.
Skinny Dipping for the Environment
Advantages of Age March 19, 2019
Annie Sprinkle, a golden era porn star cum environmental activist, and her partner, Beth Stephens, a queer artist/activist, and professor, have always been all about sex, sharing their enthusiasm publically. Now, as ecosexuals, they’re skinny dipping for the environment.
Read more.
Pornography as a Model for Consensual Sex and Feminism
The Fanzine February 2019
Feminists in search of a model for sexual consent should look to the porn industry. For real.
My own exploration into pornography began, not with my sorry experience in the 1970s — my star turn as it were — which was a single and singular experience motivated by a shortage of rent money. Those days, and for years, I saw no relationship between feminism, sexual equity, and pornography. Read more.
Violence Against Sex Workers is Not OK
Medium February 2019
In 2003, the Seattle Green River Killer confessed that he’d strangled ninety women and had “sex” with their dead bodies, picking prostitutes, he said, because their absence would go unnoticed. He copped a plea to 49 of the murders, almost all involving sex workers and other vulnerable women. Read more.
Reversing Elephant ‘Trophy’ Ban Further Violates Nature
Times Union November 27, 2017
In late February, I spent a week volunteering at the Wildlife Friends Foundation of Thailand Elephant Refuge and Rescue Center. Every morning I’d awaken and outside my window I’d see Boon See, which means “Good Spirit” or “Virtue,” in her enclosure. Read more.
Woodstockers Journey to Selma
Hudson Valley 1 April 24, 2017
Selma, Alabama,1965, now made famous not only by an historic victory, but by a movie that brought that victory to the big screen, just happened to be a small southern town, where one end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge stood. Read more.
In the Streets of Old New York
Hudson Valley 1 January 26, 2017
New York City — it was perfect marching weather, 50 degrees with a slight grey overcast. Among the approximately 400-500,000 people who took over the streets from 42nd Street from one end of Manhattan to the other… Read more.
A Review of Amy Ferris’s Shades of Blue
Brevity January 21, 2016
New York City — it was perfect marching weather, 50 degrees with a slight grey overcast. Among the approximately 400-500,000 people who took over the streets from 42nd Street from one end of Manhattan to the other… Read more.
Bringing Candida Home
Originally published in entropymag.org January 2016
“Wear red,” we were told. The occasion was the memorial and celebration of Candida Royalle, the “Grace Kelly of porn,” who not only was an iconic sex goddess—beginning her career in such films as “Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me—but also, in her later years, was an invited speaker at the American Psychiatric Association and the Smithsonian Institute. Read more.
Violence and the Question of Right Action – A book review
Originally published in entropymag.org 2016
For at least ten of the most exciting and dangerous years of my life, I believed certain murders were defensible. I had faced down bayonets and been arrested. Police had shot my classmates on campus and someone had been blinded. Read more.
Kids Today – Book review
Women’s Review of Books, November-December issue 2016
Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein and
American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales
Reviewed by Nancy Jainchill
The FDA approval of the birth control pill in 1960 marked the beginning of the sexual revolution, a milestone quickly followed by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and a decade later, Roe vs. Wade, which guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion. These events were part of a seismic change in American attitudes toward sexual activity, as sex became untethered from reproduction, and its association with marriage became increasingly equivocal. Read more.
Knockers
Eckleburg August 19, 2014
The sun melted into my arms and back as I walked into the darkness of The Rose. I sensed the place never closed and the stink of liquor and cigarettes hit me as soon as I entered. My eyes screwed up in a squint. There was another smell too, which I imagined was the afterlife of sticky sex. Read more.