PORN VALLEY, Calif. – Over on BuzzFeed this week, there’s an interesting piece called “This Is What It’s Actually Like To Work As A Female Porn Star.” From an adult industry perspective, there’s a lot to like about this multi-person Q&A. For starters, the author chose to speak with (or was guided to) women who represent themselves, and our industry, quite well. Angela White, Tasha Reign, Jessica Drake, Kelly Madison and Little Red Bunny come off as precisely what they are: well-spoken, personable, professional women who appear to be in full control of their lives and careers.

From a public relations standpoint, it’s always nice to see the adult industry get something other than a vicious critique of its practices and its attitudes towards performers—female performers in particular.

I do have two issues with the BuzzFeed piece, though: the headline, and the underlying notion that by speaking to five people in an industry of thousands, we can determine “what it’s actually like” to work in any industry.

There’s a very simple reason why one can’t find out what it’s really like to work as a female porn star by speaking to five of them: The experiences of five people, any five people, cannot cover the full range of experiences encountered by the entire population of workers who work in the same position (no pun intended). I don’t care if it’s porn stars or stockbrokers, there’s no way to do a quickie Q&A with five of them and then feel confident you know what it’s like for all of them.

What is it like to work as a ditch digger, for instance? Well, it depends. Do you dig ditches for the state, get paid above the board and receive benefits, or are you employed illegally by some redneck asshole in rural Arizona who gives you a 36-inch shovel to dig a six-foot-deep ditch, pays $10 a day and doesn’t let you take water breaks in the middle of an 110-degree July day?

Potentially, at least, both of the hypothetical experiences outlined above are “what it’s actually like” for some ditch diggers, while neither one is what it’s like for every ditch digger.

News flash: It’s the same damn way in the porn industry.

Some people in this industry have lovely, life-enhancing careers in porn, from which they have no regrets when everything is said and done. Others look back on their time in the industry when it’s all over and say “What the fuck was I thinking?”

Sometimes, a porn star’s reaction to what he or she goes through in their porn career says more about them as an individual than it does about their experience. Other times, they either got lucky and spent their entire career working with only the decent people in the business, or they were unlucky and wandered onto a porn set with a “POV porn director” who was really just a sick asshole with a digital camera and a sincere desire to fuck women who would never have anything to do with him or his cock unless that “anything” were to happen in the context of a porn shoot.

Why does any of this matter, you ask?

Well, there are plenty of people working in the adult industry who believe the proper way to handle public relations is simply to deny the industry has any issues or problems.

What piracy? All those videos on the tubes were uploaded by their rights-holders, I’m sure. What do you mean performers are mistreated on sets? That’s all bullshit, rumor and innuendo, and any performer who says otherwise is just trying to set himself or herself up for a nice payday in a lawsuit. Right? Riiiight.

Every sector of every industry has its bad apples. The energy industry had Enron, cable television had Adelphia and the banking industry had… well, everyone. You get my point: Shitty people and shitty companies can be found everywhere, not just in the porn-nexus that runs from Canoga Park to Budapest and beyond.

At the end of the day, to pretend it’s all goodness and light out there in Porn World doesn’t do the industry any favors, even on the PR front. Why? Because the public already knows that’s bullshit.

This is the Social Networking Era, in which individual performers can and do speak out daily about their experiences, good and bad, to an audience that’s potentially much wider than the people who watch porn. There’s just no way you can closely “manage the image” of something as large and diverse as the adult entertainment industry in that sort of environment—and we shouldn’t try to, because we don’t need to.

It’s not incumbent upon on you or me to defend or extol the virtues of every company and person in the adult industry, just because we’re part of the industry. Does Peyton Manning have to answer for the actions of Ray Rice? Hell no he doesn’t. By the same token, I don’t have to answer for whatever horrible things might be done by some unethical cretin running his one-man porn shop out of Bumfuck, Wyo., either.

The porn industry is just like any other industry; there are some very good folks, some unmitigated pricks and a whole lot of Joe (and Jane) Schmoes who land somewhere in between those two poles. As Kurt Vonnegut might say, so it goes.

So, what’s it actually like to be a female porn star? Well, as the SEC requires them to say in the investing world: “Past performance does not necessarily predict future results.”