California- It’s not often that 150 students gather to hear adult film stars talk about sex, but the Stanford-hosted event “Backstage with the Porn Stars” did just that – brought X-rated movie actors Richard Pacheco and Nina Hartley to Cubberley Auditorium Saturday evening.

The event, co-sponsored by the Queer Straight Alliance, the LGBT-CRC and the ASSU Speakers Bureau, served as a fundraiser for the Tenderloin AIDS Foundation of San Francisco.

“The subject tonight is sex,” Pacheco declared bluntly at the beginning of the talk.

The speakers recalled their experiences in the industry with candor and, at times, self-deprecation. Their language was colorful and unapologetic. To kick off the event, Pacheco led the audience in a repetition of call-and-response, beginning with the words “zipper,” “bra” and “bosom,” and moving on to increasingly risque vocabulary.

“If you don’t like colored language, you should probably get the fuck out now,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Pacheco informed the audience that porn stars aren’t that different from everyone else. He told of his first audition and meeting with his potential co-stars.

“I wanted some of those bad girls I’d heard so much about,” he said. But after getting to know them, he said he realized “there are no X-rated people. It’s just us.”

Hartley gave advice to the girls seeking male attention.

“Men are visual,” she said. Joking that “the feminist police are going to shoot me,” she advised women in the audience to learn to walk in high heels and swing their hips.

“When it’s time for sex it’s okay to act sexist,” she continued.

But the stars primarily preached a message of acceptance and safe sex.

“It’s okay to like whatever it is you like,” Hartley said, cautioning: “Negotiate your behavior… You have to set limits and stick to them even when you feel aroused. You have to keep yourself safe.”

After speaking for more than an hour-and-a-half, Hartley and Pacheco took questions dealing with sex workers’ rights, pornography’s relation to violence against women and AIDS.

Asked about what should be done to combat the dangers prostitutes face in their line of work, Hartley argued, “The most important thing for sex worker rights is decriminalization,” and noted that prostitutes in dangerous situations currently cannot turn to the authorities for fear of being arrested.

Hartley also took issue with anti-porn feminists who seek to regulate adult entertainment and who argue that pornography causes misogyny, stating, “I don’t agree with their position that porn endangers women.”

“Sex begets sex, violence begets violence,” she said. “[Violence against women] is not the fault of porn; it is a reaction in the culture to repression.”

Hartley admitted, “There is plenty of distasteful stuff out there that I wouldn’t watch,” but both actors argued against federal content regulations.

The stars also described their respective responses to the first heterosexual transmission of AIDS in 1984.

Pacheco withdrew from the industry after hearing the news, while Hartley remained active, saying, “Risk reduction was fine with me.”

She explained that the modern porn industry requires monthly STD checks for its employees and that actors are actually safer than the general population despite the fact that only 20 percent of porn films feature condoms.

Event sponsors were pleased with the talk, which raised about $410 for the AIDS foundation, said Katy Yan, president of the QSA.

Megan Kelso, a senior whose friendship with Pacheco’s daughter prompted her to organize the event at Stanford, said she was pleased with the way the speakers handled the subject matter.

“I thought that the show was very uplifting, with little gems of wisdom that the speakers bestowed on us occasionally,” Kelso told the Daily. “I was happy that Richard and Nina didn’t dwell on serious issues and yet didn’t avoid them either.”

“The audience that was there seemed to have enjoyed themselves a great deal and got a lot out of the evening’s discussions,” Yan said. “People stayed to chat with the speakers and left talking about the topics raised, and that’s the best result that I could have expected.”

“We’re very happy to have sponsored this event,” agreed Adam Kahn, a master’s student in communication and director of the Speakers Bureau.

Asked why he attended, freshman Michael Hudson replied, “It was kind of a novelty thing to go to a talk by ex-porn stars, and also it was for a good cause.

“They were encouraging more sexual freedom, and as porn stars, of course they’d be saying that,” Hudson continued. “But there’s something to what they’re saying. How can sex be evil and why do we have to repress it, if without it we wouldn’t exist?”