The multi-billion dollar industry nobody talks about

A little over a month ago, a freshman student at Duke University discovered just how quickly a secret can spread. She admitted to a male friend that she works as an adult film star after he recognized her in a video he'd watched online. She explained that she was in the industry to pay for Duke's $60,000 per year tuition, which her family couldn't afford. Within a day, the internet transformed a word-of-mouth secret into a viral piece of gossip that the entire campus knew. The phrase "freshman pornstar" was trending on several social media sites during the weeks after her secret leaked, and she received hundreds of new Facebook and Twitter follower requests. The exposure has brought her an immense amount of scrutiny, attention and judgment. Duke's student newspaper, The Chronicle, published a long article a few weeks ago that tells her story based on a month of interviews with her. The article uses fake names to keep her real identity private.

I chose to write a post on this topic not to gossip about a juicy story coming out of our rival university, but because it's fostered a really interesting dialogue related to some of the issues we've discussed in class. I heard about the story on Facebook this weekend when several of my friends shared a link to an article in which she tells her story, in her own words, for the first time. It begins with "I am a freshman. I am a pornstar. You know nothing about me." Her story responds to the many comments that have been circulating about her choice to work in the porn industry. She vehemently defends her profession, calling it liberating and empowering. She points to a problematic culture at Duke that suppresses female sexuality and stigmatizes women who embrace it. But what I think what is most interesting is that she considers herself a feminist, but she works in an industry that many people find inherently anti-feminist.

Here is a brief excerpt from her statement:

I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.

Many of my classmates have written blog posts about the portrayal of women in the media. Some discuss the media's tendency to commodify and sexualize women, and others point out the problem with making women out to be victims. Either way, sex sells. And the billions of dollars of revenue generated each year by the porn industry prove that this is, quite literally, true. So my question to my classmates is, where does her story fit into our discussion of women in the media? Does she send a positive message by embracing autonomy and control over her own sexuality, or does her participation in an industry that helps her make a living off of her body only perpetuate the problems so many of us have discussed?

Or, is it really none of our business at all how she chooses to pay for college.