My Community

Girls who perform in porn videos often find themselves joining a community. They tend to work with the same fifteen to twenty fellow performers and the same small group of directors through out their careers. They commonly share an apartment with another performer. They borrow money from each other to cover rent and turn to other members of the porn community in other emergencies.

Porn careers tend to last no more than two years. Girls who maintain ties with their families and previous community are able to move back to these communities without too much trouble. However, many girls no longer have ties with family or previous community, either because of ruptures that occurred prior to entering porn or because the move into porn itself caused a rupture. When they decide that they want to leave porn, they have no support group to replace their friends and support group in porn. This makes it difficult to leave, and girls who do leave often come back temporarily. The transition from porn to civilian life often involves moving back and forth more than once.

People in porn have noticed this pattern, and there's a group of people in porn who mock the girls who leave. This mockery can be summarized as "You're a whore. You'll be back." The reasoning behind the mockery is that as whores, the girls are incapable of financial management, or don't have and can't acquire the job skills necessary to support themselves, or they won't be able to earn enough to support their drug habits.

Porn justifies itself through free choice; the idea that individuals are capable of making choices that are in their own best interest, and should be allowed to do so, even when they choose to buy porn. Porn defends itself against accusations of abusing its female performers by recourse to the same concept of free choice; the girls are legal adults capable of making their own decisions.

However, the You're a whore; you'll be back message directly contradicts this. By denying the girls ability to choose to leave porn, they deny that the girls are capable of free choice. And that plays into the hands of porn's attackers, by acknowledging that the girls can't leave porn unless they are rescued. By infantilizing the performers, the people in porn who make fun of them are, in effect, admitting to exploiting the performers' supposed child-like state for their own profit. They're pleading guilty to the accusation that porn exploits its performers.

For performers who want to leave porn but don't have a community to return to, there is a group within porn's attackers who offer a new community; the community of Christian believers. Christian ideology explicitly involves redemption and acceptance of sinners, criminals, and deviants. However, just as the porn community's ideology of free choice is contradicted by some of its members, so the Christian ideology of redemption and forgiveness is contradicted by some of its members. Their attitude could be summed up as "Jesus died for my sins, but not yours", or more succinctly, "You're a whore. Go back."

It's one thing to recognize the hypocrisy in this. It's another thing to think that recognizing it makes me superior. That sense of superiority it the mark of Cain, something we share. Both whores and the people who mock and abuse whores hold up a mirror, and the reflection in the mirror is what I feel superior towards. They are my community. Their mistakes are my mistakes.