Janet W. Hardy is an American writer, sex educator, and founder of Greenery Press. She has also published as Catherine A. Liszt and Lady Green. Author or co-author of more than a dozen books, she is best known for long collaboration with Dossie Easton and for titles that taught English-speaking kinksters how to top, bottom, spank, cane, craft toys, and talk about non-monogamy without drowning in shame. Hardy is genderqueer (using she/her pronouns), bisexual, and polyamorous—identity facts she has kept part of the public record rather than footnotes.
How She Frames BDSM
Speaking to the International Online Sexology Supervisors, Hardy described BDSM as a deliberate, conscious lowering of the boundaries people usually keep between themselves and others. That definition is characteristic of her educational tone: power exchange as chosen intimacy architecture, not as pathology or pure costume. Greenery Press’s catalog has carried the same thesis for decades—kink as learnable ethics and technique.
The Ethical Slut and the Easton Partnership
With Dossie Easton she co-wrote the book that redefined public conversation about non-monogamy: The Ethical Slut. First issued by Greenery Press in 1997 under the Easton / Catherine A. Liszt bylines (ISBN 1-890159-01-8), it returned in a second edition as The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures (Celestial Arts, 2009) and a third as The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Freedoms in Sex and Love (Ten Speed Press, 2017). The “slut” in the title is reclaimed: a person who owns desire, practices consent, and refuses the purity script.
The same partnership produced cornerstone SM education texts: The New Topping Book (Greenery Press, 2003) and The New Bottoming Book (2001), plus When Someone You Love Is Kinky (2000, as Liszt with Easton)—the book many vanilla partners still get handed when a lover comes out as into leather or pain play. Radical Ecstasy (2004) pushes further into spiritual and ecstatic frames for intense sex and SM.
Lady Green: Dominance, Spanking, Craft
Under the Lady Green name Hardy wrote beginner-friendly dominance and impact manuals that still circulate in workshop tote bags: The Sexually Dominant Woman: a Workbook for Nervous Beginners (1998) and The Compleat Spanker (2000). She co-edited Kinky Crafts: 101 Do-It-Yourself S/M Toys (1998) with Jaymes Easton and later issued 21st Century Kinkycrafts (2005) and The Toybag Guide to Canes and Caning (2004). With Charles Moser she co-authored Sex Disasters… and How to Survive Them (2002)—practical damage control for when play or sex goes wrong.
Memoir and Later Work
Later books shift toward life writing: Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals (Beyond Binary Books, 2012), Impervious: Confessions of a Semi-Retired Deviant (Sincyr Publishing, 2019), and Notes of an Aging Pervert (Unbound Edition, 2023). Those titles extend her public role from how-to educator to elder narrator of a life spent inside kink, queer identity, and sex-positive publishing.
Screen Appearances
Hardy has appeared in documentary and television contexts including BDSM: It’s Not What You Think (2008), Vice & Consent (2005), a 2002 Sex TV segment covering The Ethical Slut, Beyond Vanilla (2001), and The Dr. Susan Block Show (1996). Those credits mirror the books: translating dungeon and poly language for broader audiences without sanding off adult content.
Awards and Institutional Recognition
The National Leather Association gave her the Geoff Mains Nonfiction Book Award in 2019 for The Sexually Dominant Woman: An Illustrated Guide for Nervous Beginners and again in 2020 for Impervious: Confessions of a Semi-Retired Deviant. She is an inductee of the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. Combined with Greenery’s merger history with Jay Wiseman Books, her résumé sits at the center of late-twentieth-century American kink literacy: the press, the topping and bottoming manuals, the slut ethics manifesto, and the spanking workbooks that taught people to hit on purpose and stop on purpose.
For readers of adult SM media, Hardy’s shelf is not optional background—it is infrastructure. If you learned negotiation language from a Greenery spine, thanked a workbook for your first flogging plan, or handed a partner When Someone You Love Is Kinky, you already live in the house she built.
