Nina Hartley – Actress, Biography, Onlyfans, Twitter, Instagram

Marie Louise Hartman (born March 11, 1959), known professionally as Nina Hartley, is an American pornographic film actress and sex educator. She has been described by CNBC as "a legend in the adult world".

Hartley was born on March 11, 1959 in Berkeley, California, to a Lutheran father, Louis Hartman, and a Jewish mother, Blanche Hartman (née Gelders), whose family was from Alabama. 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. 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. She was a registered nurse until her license expired in 1986.

As a young woman, Hartley sought out a career in pornography as a way to make a living by having sex. She writes that part of her reason for choosing sex work was to be able to meet other bisexual women and 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."

Las Vegas Weekly has described Hartley as "a guiding force for a generation of feminist porn stars". Describing herself as a "classical liberal feminist", Hartley has stated that "Pleasure is very, very powerful, very, very potent. You're no longer at the mercy of men when you understand that", and "Sex isn't something men do to you. It isn't something men get out of you. Sex is something you dive into with gusto and like it every bit as much as he does." In 2013 she described her father's reaction upon learning about her 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."