Janet W. Hardy is an American sex educator and the founder of Greenery Press. She uses she/her, and she is public about being genderqueer, bisexual, and polyamorous. Those are not footnotes. She has put them in the record. Speaking to the International Online Sexology Supervisors, she described BDSM as a deliberate, conscious lowering of the boundaries people usually keep between themselves. For her, power exchange is a chosen structure for intimacy. It is not a psychiatric condition, and it is not a costume show. Across decades of Greenery Press, the catalog keeps the same claim: kink is ethics and technique you can learn. The people in the books are adults.
The Ethical Slut and the Easton books
Her long collaboration with Dossie Easton changed how English-speaking readers talked about non-monogamy. In 1997 Greenery Press issued the first edition of The Ethical Slut under the bylines Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (ISBN 1-890159-01-8). The “slut” in the title is reclaimed: someone who owns their desire, negotiates, and refuses the purity script. Celestial Arts brought it back in 2009 as The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures. Ten Speed Press issued the 2017 edition, The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Freedoms in Sex and Love.
The same pair wrote the basic SM teaching texts. The New Bottoming Book (2001) and The New Topping Book (2003) are practical guides for people learning to bottom and to top. When Someone You Love Is Kinky (2000) is the book ordinary partners get when a lover comes out as into leather or pain play. Radical Ecstasy (2004) puts intense sex and SM inside a frame of spirituality and trance.
Impact manuals and when play goes wrong
As Lady Green she wrote narrower skills books. The Sexually Dominant Woman: a Workbook for Nervous Beginners (1998) still circulates in workshops. The Compleat Spanker (2000) is a spanking guide. With Jaymes Easton she co-edited Kinky Crafts: 101 Do-It-Yourself S/M Toys (1998); later craft titles followed. The Toybag Guide to Canes and Caning (2004) is specifically about canes. With Charles Moser she wrote Sex Disasters… and How to Survive Them (2002), about what to do after sex or play goes wrong. That is cleanup after an accident, not a lesson in hurting someone.
Later memoirs and the leather awards
Later books turn from technique to a life. Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals (2012), Impervious: Confessions of a Semi-Retired Deviant (2019), and Notes of an Aging Pervert (2023) are Hardy as an older narrator inside kink, queer identity, and sex-positive publishing.
On screen she appears in BDSM: It’s Not What You Think (2008), Vice & Consent (2005), Beyond Vanilla (2001), and The Dr. Susan Block Show (1996). A 2002 Sex TV segment has her talking about The Ethical Slut. Like the books, those appearances translate dungeon culture and non-monogamy for a wider audience without sanding off the adult content. In 2019 the National Leather Association gave the Geoff Mains nonfiction book award to The Sexually Dominant Woman: An Illustrated Guide for Nervous Beginners, and in 2020 the same award went to Impervious. She is in the Society of Janus Hall of Fame. With the Greenery merger history that includes Jay Wiseman Books, her shelf sits in the middle of late-twentieth-century American kink literacy: the press, the topping and bottoming manuals, and the instruction to hit on purpose and stop on purpose, among adults, without drowning desire in shame.
