YNOT – Drawing on her experience with adult entertainment before and after she became the president of a leading adult entertainment company, Pink Visual President Allison Vivas has written a book of advice for women in relationships with porn fans: Making Peace with Porn: Adult Entertainment and Your Guy.
Vivas said she combined personal anecdotes and data-driven analysis to come up with the information and counsel contained between the covers. Making Peace with Porn is designed to provide women with a positive framework within which to start a discussion about porn with their boyfriends and husbands, she noted. The book is an attempt to combat what Vivas called “negative and fear-based” coverage of so-called porn addiction in mainstream media.
“Even though adult entertainment is more socially acceptable now than it has been in the past, most analyses of adult entertainment focus on things like exploitation and objectification of women, porn as a cause of tension in relationships and other negatives of that sort,” she said. “My goal was to look at the popularity of porn among men in a rational way, to remove some of the mystery, fear and anxiety from the discussion, and hopefully provide a more reasoned means for women to approach the subject with the men in their lives.”
Among the issues Vivas addresses is the stereotypical presentation of the adult entertainment business as “an industry filled with powerful men and victimized women.”
“It seems like it doesn’t matter what you do in the industry or how successful you are in doing it, the common assumption is that if you’re a woman working in porn, then there must be a man behind the scenes pulling your strings and exploiting you,” she said.
To counter that misconception, Vivas reveals the lives and careers of noteworthy and empowered performers, ex-performers, producers and businesswomen including Nina Hartley, Alana Evans, Stormy Daniels, Lexi Belle, Alexis Texas, Shy Love, T.J. Hart, Sasha Grey, Candida Royale, Jincey Lumpkin, Suze Randall, Tristin Taormino and Joy King.
Making Peace with Porn presents evidence, both scientific and anecdotal, to counter a host of other misperceptions about porn, as well, delivering Vivas’ perspective in a light and sometimes humorous tone.
“The book makes a lot of serious points, but I didn’t want it to read like a lecture or to bore readers by making things too dry,” she said. “My goal was to give readers — female readers, in particular — a new perspective on porn and the porn industry. As much as anything, the message here is ‘porn people are people, too.’
“The women in this industry are as varied and diverse as the women outside of this industry,” she added. “We’re just as smart, just as strong and just as in control of our own lives as anybody else.”
The book is due for release this spring.
