This Just In: Stereotypes Largely Bogus, Even In the Context of Porn

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women and Couples

I can’t decide which irritates me more: The fact there’s a persistent stereotype out there which holds all women who perform in porn to be broken humans with “daddy issues,” or the related fact that now everybody who writes an honest profile of a porn star feels like they need to start out by emphasizing the subject of their profile doesn’t fit the aforementioned stereotype.

Take, for instance, a recent HuffPo piece about a photo series shot by Katia Repina, a photographer who works out of Barcelona. The subject of Repina’s photos in this case is a young woman named Marta, a performer who had just begun working in the adult industry shortly before meeting Repina.

Read on…

In the article’s opening paragraph, Marta is presented as something of an anomaly, because “she was not forced into the porn industry; she has no extenuating circumstances forcing the situation upon her. She chose a career in porn.

OH. MY. GOD.

Marta chose a career in porn of her own volition, without any nasty man lurking in the background forcing her into the job? Surely, you must be joking – or perhaps she’s mentally ill?

Why Does This Still Surprise People?

Over the years, I’ve attended a lot of adult industry trade shows. Most of the time, my duties at the shows have been pretty dull; get to the booth early, make sure all the printed materials have arrived, the podiums and furniture are where they’re supposed to be. Arguably most importantly, I need to make sure the teamsters who dragged in the various pieces of the booth didn’t leave any behind on the loading dock – or make off with too many of the company’s promotional DVDs.

At times, though, I’ve been given something far more fun and challenging to do, which was often referred to as “managing the talent.”

Roughly translated, this duty meant assuring all the performers who had agreed to do signings at the booth showed up somewhere in the vicinity of on-time, in appropriately inappropriate dress, makeup applied, reasonably ready to deal with members of the porn-appreciating public.

While there have been a few individual nightmares over the years, by and large what I’ve found is these women are professionals in every sense (except maybe the one which you’re snickering about as you read this sentence). I’ve rarely worked with a performer who hadn’t been to even more trade shows than I have, and even when they’ve arrived in a terrible mood, they’ve always managed to put on a smile for the fans when the doors opened and the lines started to queue up.

Truth be told, I’ve rarely had to do any real “managing” of the talent who showed up to work a booth, which is a good thing because there’s not one damn thing I could have told them about the task they didn’t already know (and know a hell of a lot better than me, for that matter).

As result of the lack of actual work involved in marshaling the booth talent, I’ve found myself having plenty of time to talk to them about the job of being a porn star, about their backgrounds, how they got into the industry – the whole nine inches, as it were.

Do you want to know what I have largely not heard in the literally hundreds of conversations like this? Stories about broken homes and nightmare childhoods, or any indication the person I’m talking to was cajoled, manipulated, mislead or otherwise coerced into working in porn.

Yes, it’s strange but true: As counterintuitive as it may seem to people whose information about the inner workings of the porn industry comes from an episode of Law & Order: SVU or two whole viewings of Boogie Nights, the vast, VAST majority of people who have ever worked in porn did so of their own choosing, generally with a pretty decent idea of what they were getting themselves into, as well.

Even Those With Open Minds Tend To Judge Porn Performers Mindlessly

While I applaud Repina’s approach to the photo series, which is offered in a sort of mise en scene fashion, “without judgment or agenda, neither a defense of the porn industry nor a takedown of it,” as HuffPo puts it, I can’t help but notice she did bring a hefty dose of preconceived notions into the project, by her own admission.

“When I first met her, I was so surprised by how open and sincere she was,” Repina said. “I felt that she was very different from other porn actresses. I remember thinking, probably, it’s because she is just two weeks in. All girls change when they enter the industry.”

There are so many sweeping and unchallenged assumptions in the above comments, it’s hard to know where to begin. It raises a ton of questions for me – chief among them being: “How many other porn performers has this Repina person met, anyway?”

If “all girls change when they enter the industry,” are we to assume they also all start out “open and sincere” but then become disingenuous and self-absorbed once they’ve had sex on camera a few times? I’m sure there are people out there who would believe such an assertion without hesitation, but my experience tells me it’s just another bogus stereotype.

Remember: The Porn Industry is a Big, Global Place Now

Here’s a wacky idea: Maybe the people who perform in porn seem, upon closer inspection, to be a varied population comprised of individuals who are different from one another because it IS a varied population comprised of individuals who are different from one another.

It’s a radical notion, I realize, almost like suggesting not every professional football player is a woman-beating, gun-hoarding lunatic who will assault an assistant coach on the sideline at the drop of a helmet.

I think people forget sometimes that the porn industry which has been lampooned and vilified in popular culture doesn’t really exist anymore, if indeed it ever did.

The porn industry is no longer a small lump of California-based studios who set the entire tone and market for porn, operating almost like a monopoly in which it’s their way or taking the I-10 East straight out of town. Those days are long gone – and good riddance to them, says I.

These days, the porn industry is truly global, because anybody with a decent smartphone can produce worthy amateur porn, if they have the inclination, the gumption and the (minimal) requisite technical wherewithal to upload their finished product to the web.

If you think about it (at all), the odds aren’t particularly good that people hailing from entirely different cultures, speaking entirely different languages, growing up in entirely different circumstances, would all wind up working in porn because of the same unfortunate soup of negatives lurking in their personal history.

In other words, Marta may or may not be an exceptional person – but what makes her exceptional is not the fact she’s something other than a miserable wretch forced to work in porn by some shadowy, monstrous pimp, because there’s just nothing rare about freely choosing to work in porn.

Maybe that’s what really bothers some people about women choosing to work in porn; not the stereotype of the broken porn-girl, but the fact it doesn’t hold water.

After all, if pornographers aren’t the sinister, hateful flesh-mongers we’ve been told they are, this means we might have to consider the possibility they’re people, too.

More Photos From Katia Repina…