I found the following link to a Salon.com interview of adult video performer Lorelei on Max Fisch under the heading "Interview with an articulate porn star." I was struck by the title of the thread, which implies a common bias that a woman who engages in work of a sexual nature must be an air-headed bimbo.
Here is another link on the San Francisco Chronicle's website which features an award-winning seven-minute documentary on Lorelei.
Lorelei met a friend of mine, who is also a local pro domme, during a sex workers art show tour. She ended up taking sessions out of my alma mater, The Gates, when she lived in the Bay Area. You can actually catch a glimpse of the inside of the new house in the video.
In one scene in the documentary, Lorelei speaks of her disappointment in one of her professors. After having told him of her work in the adult industry, he told her that he would prefer that she not reveal this to her fellow students, so that she "could stay the smart girl who sits in the front of the class." Once again, that sexy girl=dumb girl bias. As if the two things - being smart and being a sex worker - are mutually exclusive. What follows naturally from this argument is that such work is inherently harmful to women and therefore only stupid ones would engage in it.
Certainly, there are a fair share of individuals within the porn who substitute sex for thinking. Yet in my experience, there are also quite a few players who are highly articulate and critical thinkers. Now in graduate school in New York, Lorelei's Salon.com interview illustrates cogent arguments from a courageous and insightful mind. My favorite quotes from the interview follow:
The prevailing message women receive is that sexual aggression is unfeminine, that a woman's primary sexual role is as regulator of male desire — to say yes or no, but not to pursue desires of our own. Women are still often taught that sexy is the same as "pretty," that it means dressing a certain way and then waiting to be approached...
If we lived in a society in which women's sexuality was celebrated, and was seen as usually proactive rather than usually passive, I don't think people would jump so quickly to the concepts of exploitation and dehumanization when they thought of female performers.
