When Porn Stars

When Porn Stars
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Hong Kong's cheeky, lovable and best known film star, Jackie Chan endured many years of long, hard work and multiple injuries to establish international success after his start in Hong Kong's manic martial arts cinema industry. Jackie was born Kong-sang Chan on April 7, 1954, on Hong Kong's famous ...

A tall, strikingly attractive blue-eyed natural blonde, Cameron Diaz was born in 1972 in San Diego, the daughter of a Cuban-American father and a German mother. Self described as "adventurous, independent and a tough kid," Cameron left home at 16 and for the next 5 years lived in such varied ...

Sylvester Stallone is a athletically built, dark-haired American actor/screenwriter/director/producer, the movie fans worldwide have been flocking to see Stallone's films for over 40 years, making "Sly" one of Hollywood's biggest-ever box office draws. Sylvester Stallone was born on July 6, 1946, in...

Actor |
Terminator 2: Judgment Day

With an almost unpronounceable surname and a thick Austrian accent, who would have ever believed that a brash, quick talking bodybuilder from a small European village would become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, marry into the prestigious Kennedy family, amass a fortune via shrewd investments and...

David William Duchovny was born on August 7, 1960, in New York City, New York, USA. His father, Amram Ducovny , was a writer and publicist who was from a family of Jewish immigrants (from Ukraine and Poland), and worked for the American Jewish Committee. His mother, Margaret (Miller), was a ...

Matt LeBlanc was born on 25 July 1967 in Newton, Massachussetts. His mother, Patricia, is of Italian origin, and worked as an office manager, and his father, Paul LeBlanc, who was from a French-Canadian family, was a mechanic. After graduating from high school, he spent some time as a photo model ...

Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, comedienne, singer, and model. She became one of the world's most enduring iconic figures and is remembered both for her winsome embodiment of the Hollywood sex symbol and her tragic personal and professional struggles within the film industry. Her life and ...

Dame Helen Mirren was born in Queen Charlotte's Hospital in West London. Her mother, Kathleen Alexandrina Eva Matilda (Rogers), was from a working-class English family, and her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov, was a Russian-born civil servant, from Kuryanovo, whose own father was a diplomat. ...

A California native, Riley Steele started out working at Starbucks and at a golf course snack bar. As fate would have it, she found her big break in the form of meeting porn star Jesse Jane at a signing for the sex parody Pirates (2005). Jesse advised her to enter the business, and shortly ...

Actress |
Throat: A Cautionary Tale

Sasha Grey first made her name as one of the most notorious adult film stars in recent history; but with a no regrets attitude, she moved on from her former career, in 2009 at age 21. She has gone on to star in HBO's Entourage, published NEÜ SEX a book of photographs, and she DJ's internationally. ...

Jesse Capelli was born on May 21, 1979 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Of Italian descent, Capelli was a tomboy growing up who participated in such athletic activities as swimming and gymnastics. Jesse first started modeling at age twelve. In 1998 Capelli moved to Los Angeles, California in...

Jenna Jameson was born and raised in Las Vegas by her father, and by the time she was 18 the bright lights were already drawing her in. She studied ballet, but it was stripping that started her on her road to superstardom. Dancing led to nude modeling, and by her 20th birthday she had appeared in ...

The fourth child of her British and French parents, Aurora Snow was born Rebecca Claire Kensington on November 26, 1981, in Montpelier, Vermont. When Rebecca was a toddler her parents divorced. Her mother remarried and Rebecca's new stepfather, Raymond Nordell, relocated the family to Nottingham, ...

Stormy Daniels was born on March 17, 1979 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. She is an actress and writer, known for The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). She has been married to Brendon Miller since November 25, 2015. They have one child. She was previously married to Mike Moz and Pat Myne .

Actress |
An American Werewolf in London

Linzi Drew-Honey is a former British movie/television actress, glamour model, adult actress, movie producer/director and writer. Linzi was born Lindsey Jayne Drew on 11th May 1958 in Bristol, U.K. She moved to London in her early 20's to fulfill her dream of being a model. In the 1980's she appeared...

Although the ranks of Asian stars in the adult-film business has been growing, few have reached the status of Kobe Tai. She and Asia Carrera are probably the two most popular Asian women in western porn, and it's a toss-up as to which one would take the #1 spot. Of Chinese/Japanese extraction, she ...

Maria Ozawa is a Japanese adult video actress. In Japan, she is referred to as an AV Idol. Her father is French-Canadian and her mother is Japanese but she was raised in Japan and speaks both English and Japanese. She began her career in adult videos in 2005 at the age of 19 and her exotic beauty ...

Perrey Reeves was born in New York City and raised in the countryside of New Hampshire. Her parents, both academics, were from upper-class families. Her paternal grandfather, Hazard E. Reeves , was a sound pioneer who introduced magnetic stereophonic sound to films, and her maternal ...

Born Karen Bach outside of Lyons, France, Karen Lancaume came from a wealthy family. The bi-racial beauty (French father, Moroccan mother) married at 17 while she was attending college. Even though her husband was a disc jockey and she worked weekends at a nightclub to make ends meet, the couple ...

Dany Verissimo-Petit is an edgy and talented young actress with an unusual background. Her recent runaway success in the play "D.A.F. Marquis de Sade" (2013), and a two-season run in the hit Canal Plus TV series Maison Close (currently being adapted by HBO), have led to her integration into a ...

Buxom and shapely 5'5" brunette knockout Summer Cummings was born Lisa L. McVay on March 4, 1968 in Reno, Nevada. Summer began her career in the adult entertainment industry as a topless dancer at a local bar in her native Reno. Cummings then moved to San Francisco, California, where she did live ...

Texas Presley was born on July 22, 1981 in Texas, USA. She is an actress.

Lexington Steele was born on November 28, 1969 in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He is an actor and director. He has been married to Savana Styles since February 2016.

April Flowers was born on March 28, 1978 in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. She is an actress, known for A Man Apart (2003). She has been married to ? since 2005. They have one child.

Jerry Jewell was born on July 30, 1976 in McAlester, Oklahoma. He is an American actor, singer, and voice actor working for Funimation and OkraTron 5000. He has provided voices for a number of English versions of anime. If you've ever watched an anime, it's very likely you've heard his voice.

Born in Taiwan, Qi Shu has won the prestigious Golden Horse Award in Taiwan (regarded as the East Asian Oscar) for Best Supporting Actress in 1998. She has also received a Golden Horse Award for Best Leading Actress in 2005. She appeared with Jackie Chan in the romantic comedy Gorgeous (1999) ("...

One of the most classically beautiful women ever to appear in adult films, Chasey Lain has a winning smile, long light brown hair and a trim, dance-sculpted figure. She was working as a stripper in Florida and took note of the kinds of money porn actresses made when they appeared for short dancing ...

Jill Kelly was born on February 1, 1971 in Pomona, California, USA. She is an actress and producer, known for He Got Game (1998), Orgazmo (1997) and The Roller Blade Seven (1991). She was previously married to Corey Jordan , Julian and Cal Jammer .

Actress |
Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy

Kristine was raised on a small self-sufficient farm in upstate New York. As a young girl, she took ballet and studied voice. At 14, she began modeling for Macy's. During her freshman year of high school, Kristine auditioned for and won the part of Marta in the musical The Sound Of Music. The ...

The documentary After Porn Ends is more about work than sex.
The most heartbreaking scene in the documentary After Porn Ends , about the post-porn lives of 12 adult stars, may be when Asia Carrera talks about her membership in the high-IQ society Mensa. She explains that Mensa links to all its members' websites, but that they wouldn't link to hers because... well, because it was a porn site. Eventually, though, the society did feature her in an issue of its magazine devoted to Mensa celebrities—a big moment for her, she says.
Which, to me, just seems incredibly sad. This after all, is Asia Carrera, a woman who ran away from home at 17 and pulled herself together to become a successful businesswoman and a world-famous name and face. Yet, despite all of that, what she wants is validation from some random group of self-declared smart people. For someone like her to need the approval of someone like them is an apocalyptic admission of neediness that's depressing to think about.
The natural conclusion to leap to, of course, is that the neediness and the porn career are inextricably intertwined: that Carrera entered porn because she needed to be loved, and/or is so unsure of herself because she's ashamed of her porn career.
There's certainly a fair bit of evidence in After Porn Ends , available on iTunes now and on DVD later this month , to support such suspicions. A number of the former performers link their entry into the industry to child sexual abuse and/or to drug addiction. And nearly all of them talk about the bitter stigma of being in the adult industry. Houston lost her job selling real estate when a client recognized her. Randy West—who otherwise seems fairly happy with his career—talks bitterly about the fact that most charities won't allow adult stars to donate to them. Even more poignantly, he suggests that his career in the adult industry made it hard for him to form normal relationships, and thus may be responsible for the fact that he never married and has no children.
One expert talking head argues overdramatically that being an adult star cuts you off from all personal ties. Given the way many of the ex-stars talk about their families and spouses and kids, he's obviously making a gross generalization. But at the same time, it's clear that if you're a former adult performer a lot of people are going to judge you—and you can see how, living with that, having Mensa declare you worthy might pack a certain punch.
So it is possible to watch After Porn Ends and come away with the impression that being in porn is a traumatic psychic and social wound that will never heal. But I don't think that that's exactly a fair conclusion. Carrera herself says she has no regrets about doing porn, and talks emotionally about the outpouring of donations and support she received from fans after her husband was killed in a car accident just before the birth of their second child. Porn in this case didn't isolate her; quite the contrary. And even the Mensa thing—yes it strikes me as pitiful, but is it really any more ridiculous than me looking at my blog's statcounter? Everybody needs reassurance, not just porn stars.
Which is not to deny the particular awfulness or difficulties of porn. Asia Carrera talks about enjoying the chance to have sex with some good-looking guy and get paid for it, but Shelley Luben (now an anti-porn crusader) clearly experienced many of her scenes as rapes. Even Tiffany Millions, who is not especially negative about her time in the industry, describes the work in unintentionally disturbing terms. She says that during sex she would often feel like she was outside of herself looking down: a textbook description of dissociation from trauma.
Millions originally got into the porn industry because of her daughter; as a single mom, she had a choice between spending all her time working a minimum-wage gig—or being a porn star for a few hours a week, making more money, and spending most of her days with her kid. She chose the obvious option, treated it like a day job—no parties, no drugs, no alcohol—and quit when she inherited some money and didn't have to do it anymore. These days she has a great relationship with her husband and daughter (whose almost tearful "you're my hero mom" would make a stone verklempt) and works, quite happily, as a bounty hunter.
I say she works "quite happily," and she does in fact seem to like her job. But there are some downsides. The one anecdote she relates is about repossessing some old lady's car because her son was a deadbeat. She's philosophical about it, but obviously found it quite unpleasant, and who wouldn't?
Most jobs have some unpleasantness of course—and blue collar jobs have more unpleasantness than most. Millions's experience does make you wonder whether porn is truly, exceptionally horrible, or whether it's just a particularly visible examplar. Minimum-wage service jobs, or factory work, or police work, or military service—those things don't involve having sex onscreen, obviously, but they're all arguably degrading, depressing, and potentially dangerous or traumatizing. For that matter, I have friends who are teachers in the public school system, and they are often treated terribly by administrators, parents, kids—everybody basically. Many of them have issues with depression and something that sounds a lot like post-traumatic stress.
Several of the commentators note that most people don't get into porn unless things in their lives have already gone awry. Not all, but most of the porn workers (and especially the women) interviewed here were sexually abused, or had run out of money, or were addicts, or had no support network—they were people who had been pushed into a corner. The film might have done better in illuminating this corner if it had had the elementary courage to interview black or Latino performers, and to think about race as well as class. Even as it is, though, the film makes it clear that porn for many performers was a way out of a dilemma—or, for some, a way to compound it.
Either way, it wasn't porn that created the marginalization or the desperation. And I wonder if the focus on porn as porn distracts from the real issues at stake for many of the folks who make it their livelihood. Porn is sensational, more or less by definition, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it's distinctive or central. Really, based on this documentary, the problems porn workers encounter seem like problems lots of workers encounter: abusive working conditions, inadequate (or more often non-existent) pensions, and lack of options. The stories here—the financial disaster Houston faces when she is first fired and then diagnosed with cancer, for example—are ones that could confront any non-former-porn-star in the swelling ranks of the lower middle-class. The antipathy and contempt porn workers face is perhaps more intense. But it's not necessarily different in kind from the antipathy and contempt that workers in general face. If anything, it's remarkable how many of those interviewed look back on their time in porn with satisfaction, and seem to have liked their jobs. Would that more of us could say the same.

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Tim Molloy | June 16, 2021 @ 11:30 AM
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Bryce Wagoner’s documentary ”After Porn Ends 2“ looks at the troubles and successes of people who have left the industry. (Yes, it’s safe to click through this at work)
What do porn stars do when their lives in the adult film industry end? That's the question at the heart of documentary filmmaker Bryce Wagoner's 2012 film "After Porn Ends," its two sequels. The film looks at the tragedies and successes of people who left an industry that famously uses up young talent. Some have no regrets about their years in the industry. For others, a career in the adult industry has proven to be a conduit to certain despair.
Here are their stories, as told to TheWrap by Wagoner.
He wasn't the first black adult performer, but he was the first black porn star. Coming from poverty, he enlisted in the Army and became a champion boxer, then used the G.I. Bill to get a drama degree and star in musicals. After a chance casting in the iconic 1972 adult film "Behind the Green Door," he found himself on the shores of Cannes and a cultural icon. Eventually retiring to raise his family, Johnnie is now an accomplished jazz singer and runs a youth outreach basketball camp with his son in Seattle.
Starting as a stripper in Pennsylvania, Lisa used porn to further her dancing career and was a well-known performer for 15 years before the opportunity of a lifetime: appearing in a parody of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin that catapulted her to porn superstardom. She parlayed her media appearances into hosting her own fantasy sports radio show on Sirius XM.
Her "girl next door" look made her the face of XXX films in the 80s and early 90s. Starting in bikini contests and taking the advice of famed photographer Suze Randall, she played the adult business by her rules, commanded the largest salary in porn, and got out exactly when she wanted to. After studying acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, she earned roles in "Wing Commander," "American Pie: Band Camp," "The Devil's Rejects," and "31." She has become as much an icon in the Comic-Con world as she is in the adult indus
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