This may not be a good post to read if you are in the early stages of reboot and struggling. I don’t intend to post anything remotely erotic, but I am going to be talking about porn actors, etc. I will mention a name or two, but only because there’s no way to really express my thoughts completely without doing so.
A while back I watched a documentary called After Porn Ends which consisted of interviews with former porn actors. One of the reasons I chose to watch this video was to try to see porn actors in more human terms. I definitely did see the actors in more human terms after watching this, although those terms were not necessarily positive.
The biggest difference between a porn actor and me is that virtually all of the actors interviewed seemed to reflect the attitude that sex was basically meaningless and it really didn’t matter if you had one partner or many partners. One actor was married and his wife’s only objection to porn acting was the risk of disease. I don’t mean to come across as moralistic, but I’m not cut from that sort of fabric, I believe that sexual intercourse is, by its very nature, significant and never is it meaningless.
More than one of the actors/actresses interviewed came across as callous and cold. One male actor, relatively old, came across as arrogant and self-centered to an unusual degree. With few exceptions the people interviewed struck me as persons I wouldn’t care to befriend. I’m not judging them for their past acts, that can be overlooked; but the current attitudes displayed by many of these people seemed to be nothing I’d care to be around.
I think that is telling, because people of such a mindset, that sexual activity is of no consequence, have extinguished something essential to the human character. We are a bonding species and we can’t successfully change that about ourselves. Most of the people interviewed seemed to be fairly alone in life. A few of them were married successfully, but my impression is that most were flying solo.
One person that comes to mind is Linda Lovelace, a woman that claims to have been forced into prostitution and porn acting and has passed polygraph tests on the subject. Seventeen days of her life were spent acting in pornography but the rest of her life was spent paying a price. If she truly was forced into this, sometimes at gunpoint, according to her claims, this is an egregious example of literal slavery and I feel sick to think that porn merchants made fortunes from this movie (possibly the highest grossing ever) while she received no residuals and lived a lower middle class life, working at various jobs until her past caught up with her and she was fired. That makes me sick!
I wouldn’t recommend this video unless you are certain that you won’t be triggered. It doesn’t contain any porn, per se, but there are things that would’ve triggered me in the past. It certainly helped me to see that porn is not glamorous, fun or desirable in any way. I am missing out on nothing by not living that lifestyle.
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