LOS ANGELES – If there’s one manner of feel-good porn story I’m getting mighty sick of reading, it’s the “I met a porn star and what do you know, she wasn’t a completely vacuous drug addict and victim of brutal sexual abuse” variety.
Take this piece on Bustle.com by Christine Schoenwald, for example.
“I never expected to meet a porn star, and I certainly never thought I’d like her,” Schoenwald wrote.
Why, exactly, did Schoenwald expect she wouldn’t like any porn star she happened to meet? Well, because she hadn’t liked the ones she’d seen on TV — always a reliable basis from which to individually judge anybody who hails from a diverse group of human beings.
“I’ve seen the AVN show on HBO, and the porn stars on that seem trashy, and kind of empty,” Shoenwald continued.
Reading this line, I immediately pictured the Academy Awards and wondered if Shoenwald simply prefers her empty people to be well-dressed at their award ceremonies.
Does Schoenwald also watch reality TV programs like My Big Redneck Wedding or Say Yes to the Dress or Who Wants to Marry a Self-Absorbed Asshole? and assume every married couple-to-be is a pairing of intolerably phony and attention-starved cretins?
To her credit, Schoenwald at least seems to understand how bone-stupid her preconceived notions were, following her fateful encounter with Keisha.
“I don’t like it when people pre-judge me because of the way I look,” Shoenwald confided. “Why did I think it was okay to assume things about someone who worked in the world of adult movies?”
Good question.
On the one hand, it can’t be a bad thing for someone to have an epiphany which disabuses them of false, useless, preconceived notions. On the other hand, in this context, it’s downright fucking sad Shoenwald thinks her epiphany is novel, something that needed to be shared so others might rethink their own assumptions about porn stars.
Nobody should be surprised to learn any individual porn star is nice, smart, honest or interesting, because on an individual basis, nice, smart and interesting people can be found just about anywhere (Congress notwithstanding).
What would be the reaction, for example, if I penned a similar column after meeting a NFL player? I can picture the intro now:
I never expected to meet an NFL star, and I certainly never thought he’d be someone who hadn’t beaten his wife or bred fighting dogs or who could speak in nearly complete sentences and never once refer to himself in the third person.
While it accurately references examples of actual misdeeds associated with a handful of infamous NFL players, the above sentence rightfully would be considered insanely unfair. What thinking person could possibly believe every member of the NFL can be fairly judged on the basis of the actions of their least respected and most contemptible peers?
For some reason though, when a column like Shoenwald’s piece about meeting Keisha comes around, many people will take the time to argue Shoenwald has been bamboozled by an exception to the general rule of porn stars (female porn stars, anyway, underlining the inherent double standard and glaring sexism involved in this whole discussion) being broken people, likely sexually abused in their youth and then steered into a life of porn by some nefarious Suitcase Pimp From Hell.
“Just because she met one porn star who isn’t a drug-addled victim of serial sexual abuse doesn’t mean it isn’t true of about 99 percent of porn stars,” some anti-porn critic inevitably will write on some blog or say to a media outlet in response to Shoenwald’s piece. “As you know, the porn industry just chews up these poor, misguided girls, then spits them out. The well-adjusted porn star is a myth promoted by the porn industry to throw people off the scent of the industry’s pure, exploitative evil.”
For Schoenwald, though, her chance encounter with Keisha was an overdue life lesson.
“I learned that you shouldn’t generalize about someone because of their job or the way they look,” Schoenwald wrote. “Everybody has a story to tell, and if you’re open enough to hear it, you’ll be surprised, delighted and entertained.”
Again, there’s nothing at all “wrong” with this sentiment. It’s just something, as an American, Schoenwald should have grasped fully by the time she completed her assigned reading list in middle school.
Then again, if Keisha’s persona is teaching people lessons they didn’t learn by reading the likes of Mark Twain and Martin Luther King Jr., maybe articles like Schoenwalds are more needed than I thought. Maybe people really do need to have the obvious explained to them.
Or maybe they should just stop watching so much TV.
Image: Keisha, from PlayWithKeisha.com
