This is the closest I’ll get to posting anything NSFW on here.

I couldn’t think of a good opening for this post, so I just used the headline from an article by Stoya, posted on Jezebel on Monday. Not everyone knows who Stoya is, and many people pretend they do not know who she is, so let’s get this out of the way. Stoya makes her living as an adult film actress, a/k/a a porn star. If you can handle reading about concepts of opposing the harassment of women in public, and you can handle it in the context of pondering a person who makes a living doing sex stuff in front of a camera, read on. Otherwise, Disney still has a website.

Stoya provides a direct attack on the idiotic notion that, if a woman has sex on film or video, she must like having sex with everyone, and therefore she’ll have sex with me. A South Park episode once featured Kurt Russell being forced to go through a Stargate-like device, because he once did it in a movie. The point of the joke was that it is absurd to expect a person to do something in real life just because they did it in a movie. Porn actresses do not get that sort of deference, though. When you stop to think about it for more than one second, it makes sense that she ought to be able to have a normal life, free from excess groping, the same as anybody else. And yet:

I can actually remember every time a person at a convention or trade show has touched me inappropriately. My first year at the Venus Fair in Berlin there was a man who shoved two of his fingers into my panty-covered vagina. It was really fast, like he was standing there one second and the next I was trying to figure out how the gusset of my underwear had ended up in my vulva. There was a man in Texas who rather violently squeezed my ass while we were taking a picture and then laughed at how I’d “squealed like a piglet.” Seriously. I’m kind of disappointed by how much of a stereotype he was. At AVN this year, a guy grabbed my forearm while I was walking from the elevators to Digital Playground’s booth. He let go when I punched him in the testicle area. There’s an average of three people per convention who try the more subtle approach of sliding their hand a bit too far down my back when I stand next to them for a photo. Every single one of them apologizes when I gently put their hand back where it belongs and ask them to remember that I am not a blow up doll.

(Bolded for emphasis)

Seriously, guys? I mean, seriously? You are embarrassing my gender.

Stoya must be pretty terrifying to people who want to keep women’s sexuality marginalized. Her Tumblr blog (where the Jezebel post first appeared in two parts) features commentary on all manner of topics, and the simple fact that I have started typing a sentence in which I am saying something to the effect of “no, really, the porn star is smart and stuff” should speak volumes about how we view sexuality. She tends to defy many societal perceptions of women in adult entertainment, though. The assumption tends to be that women go into porn and other forms of sex work because they are broken in some way. The ones who say that they aren’t, and who say they go into it for other, generally non-traumatic reasons, tend not to be believed. Also, the men in porn don’t seem to get this kind of scrutiny, even though they do the same work (often for less money.)

So of course, like clockwork, some commenters on Jezebel feel the need to question Stoya’s bona fides to comment on the harassment of women, when her profession feeds much of the objectification of women in the first place.

The basic argument is (i think), that Stoya plays an instrumental role in fostering the belief among some that women are objects to be leered at or grabbed, and therefore she is in no position to complain or something. For any variety of reasons, this is a load of bollocks.

In the Academy Award-nominated film The Town, the protagonist makes his living robbing banks. The main antagonist is a cop who badly wants to bust him. We, as the audience, root for the bank robber as he goes through a long series of improbable trials to escape from the law. Does this mean that bank robbers are good guys, or that we should do our part to foil law enforcement? I’m pretty sure it was a movie, and while it may have more than a few messages about social inequalities, loyalty, and other themes, it is not saying anything so blatant as “Bank robbers good. FBI bad.” Most moviegoers are both smart and wise enough to know this. The Town may not be fantasy fulfillment, per se, but it is clearly a story set in a fictional world, with only a cursory thematic relationship to real life.

(You probably know where I’m going with this.) Let’s compare that to Stoya’s film career. I think it is safe to say that porn operates much more on the level of fantasy fulfillment than movies like The Town. Some porn is, to me at least, disgusting, degrading, and utterly impossible to watch. Other porn is, uh, interesting. A quick Google Image search (with SafeSearch off, so it’s waaaay NSFW) of Stoya’s name suggests a not-terribly-edgy career in adult entertainment, in the sense that the leading images probably won’t get anyone arrested (at least in the U.S.)

That some porn turns people way the hell off should hardly be surprising. Sturgeon’s Law holds that ninety percent of any genre of entertainment is bad. Her movies are no more an indictment of women’s sexuality, or even her own authority to speak on such issues, than is The Town’s effect on efforts to fight bank robberies. If you don’t like her movies, don’t watch them. The same goes for Ben Affleck-directed films. To challenge her perspective based on the way that other people react to her films is a crass cop-out. I’ll close with Stoya’s own words on the subject:

Pornography is entertainment. The final product is a fantasy. Most companies don’t discuss the testing protocols we use. They don’t explain that actually the guy playing the pizza delivery man (Mike Blue in one case and James Deen in another) is someone that I at least casually know. They don’t show the viewer the parts of our day where we discuss limits and specific preferences before we start a scene. I would draw a parallel to the way that romance novels don’t have an epilogue reminding you that relationships don’t actually work like a fairytale. They don’t point out that two people can be head over heels for each other but both parties have to put in serious work or have a likelihood of breaking apart the first time they have trouble resolving a major conflict. Alternately: the same way that action movies don’t have pop-ups saying “This daring maneuver would never have worked in real life because of physics.” This is because we expect the viewer, as an adult, to know the difference between entertainment and reality.

One other thing: if you really want examples of her work, here’s an extremely-NSFW link. You’ve been warned.

Photo credit: “Stoya at AVN Awards Expo 2012” by Michael Dorausch from Venice (Stoya at AVN Awards Expo 2012Uploaded by Tm) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.