A Woman in the Porn Industry, Then and Now

A Woman in the Porn Industry, Then and Now

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com. 

When I first got started working in the adult industry in the 1990s, you didn’t hear too much about women like me – namely, women who worked in the adult entertainment industry as something other than performing talent. Plenty of us existed, mind you, including some who occupied some pretty important executive positions at major adult companies, but so far as the media and public were concerned, we were definitely not on the radar.

Read on…

That point was driven home for me at the very first Consumer Electronics Show I attended, back in the late 90s. At the time, I was doing HTML coding, SEO and copywriting for a fledgling Internet porn outfit that just happened to employ more women than men. Most of the girls from the office didn’t go to the show, but I was there, along with a woman named Julie who owned a 20% share of the company. Julie also happened to be a knockout, a slender, leggy blonde who looked so good in tights that I didn’t like to stand next to her wearing anything tighter than industrial-size garbage bags.

I learned very quickly that as a young woman sitting behind the countertop at our booth, I was presumed to be talent by the fans who dropped by. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t signing anything, wasn’t wearing makeup, and was wearing an outfit that was carefully engineered to reveal nothing of the shape of my body – the guys in that room were operating on the assumption that I was porn star who was playing it incognito.

At first I was embarrassed by the attention, then briefly flattered by it before settling into a simmering annoyance. “If one more of these guys asks me which of the DVDs on the table I’m in, I’m going to stab him with this spork,” I thought to myself as I sat there eating some overpriced conference hall vendor’s idea of a chef’s salad.

It was then that I noticed Julie out among the guys at the booth…. posing for pictures with them. My initial reaction was disbelief; Julie was a businesswoman who kicked ass and took names, and she took shit from nobody; ‘how the hell could she lower herself to this,’ I thought, posing like some vacuous ditz for a bunch of amateur paparazzo?

Then I overheard an exchange between Julie and one of the picture-snapping porn fans that changed my whole perspective on what I was seeing. “Which movie are you in?” the man asked Julie hopefully, pointing over at the lineup of box covers on the table. Julie gave him a wicked grin back and said: “None of them. I own the company, actually.”

For a second, the guy looked like he wanted to drop his camera, sprint back to his hotel room and hide behind the minibar – but Julie revealed another aspect of her personality in that moment; a mixture of confidence, self-assurance and empathy that gave me a whole new level of respect for her.
“It’s OK,” she said. “I’m not insulted by you thinking I’m hot enough to be a porn star, and I don’t mind having my picture taken…. so what the hell, right?”

When I talked to Julie about it later, she made a good point: why wouldn’t that man assume that every woman in the room (especially those with shapely butts who were wearing sheer black tights) was a performer? That was the image people had of the industry – a Man’s World, where women are to be obscene and not heard.

That is the most obvious, visibly noticeable change in the adult industry over the time I’ve been working in it. These days, when I go to trade shows, women are everywhere, not just signing pictures or toiling in the booth on behalf of their employers, but as fans walking the floor. Women are among those seeking autographs – from both male and female performers.

These days, nobody asks me to pose for pictures, or asks which DVDs I’m in – and I’d really like to think that’s because the industry and people’s perception of it has changed, and not just because I’m 17 years older and substantially less cute than I was back in the day.