Why I Do Porn Even Though I'm Very Bright And Could Have Done Anything I Wanted.
August 3, 2000 9:27 PM   Subscribe

Why I Do Porn Even Though I'm Very Bright And Could Have Done Anything I Wanted. Apropos the earlier thread on women and promiscuity, here's an essay by Asia Carrera, Unreal skin maker, webmaster, and porn star, explaining why she chose to make adult films as a career.
posted by wiremommy (8 comments total)


 
So if we agree that in this society, women who have sex with a lot of men are seen as being degraded, then what to make of pragmatic people like Ms. Carrera? What about sex-positive women in the porn industry like Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley? Are they bucking the odds? striving for revolution? or just fooling themselves?
posted by wiremommy at 9:30 PM on August 3, 2000


I adore Asia Carrera - she has a fabulous sense of humour on her site - and have you seen her computer desk pics? I have some serious computer envy, looking at her set up.


posted by kristin at 9:54 PM on August 3, 2000


Asia Carrera is an extremely unusual case. Women in the Porn industry vary all over the map; many are drug addicts and there have been suicides. Marilyn Chambers is HIV-positive and may have advanced to AIDS by now. (She stopped performing quite a while ago because she's getting pretty old.)

But Asia's got her act together, and as she says she's investing her money intelligently so that she'll never be poor again. It isn't going up her nose, it's going into mutual funds.

She also happens to be hooked on Unreal Tournament and is apparently very good at it.

By the way, if you want a different take on her, see this.

More power to her. Another one who's got her act together is Danni Ashe. She was working as a stripper in Florida, and asked the club owner about the local laws, and the owner lied to her and she was arrested (and released after paying a fine). So she decided she'd had enough of travelling around working as a stripper, bought a book on HTML, and sat on the beach and read it cover to cover. Then she went home and opened up a web page selling pictures of herself and others. Over time her site has evolved. She's got 12 employees now and is doing great.

One of the more interesting things she has done for the last two years was to broadcast a half-time show during the SuperBowl from her website, called something strange like "BreastBowl" and it has indeed been very popular, consisting of Danni and a number of other 'well endowed' women pretending to be in the locker room at half time. But Danni Ashe doesn't take herself too seriously, which is one of the attractions of the site. (I was a member for a while.)

Finally, you might find this interesting. She's got a day job working as a Novell network admin, but she works as a stripper one night a week simply because she loves it. This page describes how she got into it. She happens to be intelligent and articulate and well educated and not at all the stereotype of what you'd expect a stripper to be -- all the more so because her boyfriend encouraged her and helped her get into it. (Her choice, not his, but he supported her all the way. He loves her very much; you can tell.) Here's the base homepage for her site.

posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:41 PM on August 3, 2000


You can't paint all porn stars with a broad stroke (like anything else). For every woman that's a coked up sex toy, there's another who's a smart businesswoman making cash hand over fist over the very same guys accused of "exploiting" her.
posted by owillis at 6:36 AM on August 4, 2000


From ZDNET regarding Danni Ashe:

Ashe heads a Web-porn empire with more than 100 million customers. Her website, Danni's Hard Drive, is the most popular destination of any genre that is owned by, or features, a woman.

posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:07 AM on August 4, 2000


Damn, but it's nice not only to see self-confidently sexual women, but to see approving commentary thereon -- and even from women.

For some reason, that last is the most uncommon... probably because those women (who don't comment) are themselves unconfident.
posted by baylink at 10:24 AM on August 4, 2000


You know what I don't like about Asia's story? To her, it sounds like:

increasing Money = increased Stability = increased Happiness

and in my life it's more like:

Interesting work + interesting people = happiness

and additionally:

increasing Money = increasing problems.

She talks about how much money she made, and how she gained her independence through it, and how she continues to amass a fortune and how happy that makes her.

I never had a lot of money growing up, and getting more of it as an adult never helped any. It didn't make my relationships better, it didn't make my friends like me more, it didn't make me a more interesting person. It just gave me more things to worry about paying and insuring and so on...
posted by mathowie at 11:27 AM on August 4, 2000


Mathowie, everyone has a different relationship with money. It's not hard to see how Asia has come to associate money with stability and happiness; in her story, she talks about being a runaway, having no money, always moving around and trying to get by. She mentions that she slept with people just to have a place to stay, and from there it's only a matter of degree and compensation-- from sleeping with people for shelter, to sleeping and getting filmed for it in order to make so much money you never have to sleep with someone for shelter again.

In other parts of her site, she talks about how she loves playing with her computers, doing her website, playing Unreal, making skins, etc. I think her money fixation is more a focus on having enough money to make the fun things possible (and retire from adult with a nest egg), rather than a desire for money for its own sake.
posted by wiremommy at 11:57 AM on August 4, 2000


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