SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – I’ll admit, given the headline and the outlet it appeared in, my initial reaction was a combination of head-shake and grumble. Here we go again, I thought.

The problem with a headline like “What It’s Really Like to Be an Indie Feminist Porn Star” is the implicit suggestion there’s only one possible type of experience such a person could have in the context of their professional career. In my experience, coworkers at the same company often don’t agree on “what it’s like” to work there, much less any two people who merely share the same general occupation.

Thankfully, the subject of the Cosmopolitan article in question, adult performer Andre Shakti, clearly isn’t prone to such narrow thinking. In a series of considered and candid responses, Shakti revealed herself as someone who has put a great deal of thought into her career, its impact on her personal life and the nature of sex work in general.

Of particular note is Shakti’s refusal to buy into a certain feminist porn = good / mainstream porn = bad narrative that has taken shape in some corners of the adult industry over the past several years. Crucially, she’s equally dismissive of an assertion often made by some in the “mainstream” adult sector holding there’s “no market” for feminist and/or indie porn.

Shakti’s thoughts on the false dichotomy are worth quoting at length, with emphasis added to the money line:

[QUOTE]There’s mainstream porn and then there’s the other, which is often called indie porn or feminist porn or queer porn. The implication is that mainstream porn is the big bad wolf and indie porn is the ethical, consent-based, authentic porn that we should be watching. The argument is that mainstream porn doesn’t offer a diverse representation of what people look like and what people having sex look like. And mainstream porn people will tell you that’s what people want. But when you put other porn out there, really empowering porn featuring two self-identified fat women in a non-objectifying way or you put people in wheelchairs making porn—you hear back just as strongly people saying, ‘Yeah, that’s totally what we want to see.’ The moral of the story is that there’s room for everyone.[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, it’s sometimes people who perceive themselves to be the most liberal or inclusive who have the most rigid standards for everyone else. We’ve all seen this in the context of political correctness: Freedom of speech is fine and dandy, as long as you use it to say what the bulk of people using Twitter want you to say.

Happily, Shakti isn’t one of those people. Quite the contrary: She’s a person who truly understands what it means to have an “open mind.”

“I think people on both sides of the coin try to make it a really black-and-white argument,” Shakti accurately observes. “They try and say that mainstream porn should be fully inclusive, which would completely eradicate an entire fantasy that many people have. Many people have fantasies about people who look very stereotypically attractive doing things that are very vanilla, and that’s their jam. I wouldn’t want to ever eradicate that.”

At the risk of indulging in overstatement, our entire country would be a whole lot better off if more people who make their living inside the Beltway shared Shakti’s ability to put herself in another person’s shoes.

I’ve become so accustomed to people finding a way to rationalize the desire to impose their personal values and perspectives on the rest of humanity, I’d almost forgotten the notion of “live and let live” still existed. In recent years, if there’s one endeavor that has been genuinely bipartisan, it has been the effort to paint the “other side” of any given issue as insane, dimwitted, evil or some combination of those adjectives.

While the porn industry’s internal division between “mainstream” and “other” is of far less consequence than the current policy rift in Congress over everything, it’s still nice to see someone do such a good job of expressing a reasonable middle ground. The fact the words came from a performer provides the added bonus of further undermining the absurd idea porn stars can’t be smart. In Shakti’s case, I’ll go one further and add wise to the mix of adjectives, as well.

“Porn really is a huge shade of gray,” Shakti noted, adding some very practical, straightforward advice for viewers in search of ethically-produced porn. Among other things, ethically-minded fans need to “do their research” and “purchase porn instead of getting it off of tube sites for free.”

Shakti closes with a nod to two of the more irksome marketplace hobgoblins facing the industry today: content piracy and moral hypocrisy.

“The truth is that most naysayers of porn rub one out to a five-minute clip they found on Xtube,” she said. “That’s unfortunately the reality of the situation.”

Well played, Andre Shakti, well played.