The tale of the Duke porn star

Elaine McCahill

Editor

By now I’m sure most of you will have heard of the Duke porn star. ‘Belle Knox’ is a freshman student of the prestigious American

university and has garnered international fame or infamy, depending on your view, by starring in adult films in order to pay her $60,000 per annum tuition. But is this a case of an enlightened and empowered young woman embracing her female agency and making informed choices about her body or is she a ingenue who has been taken advantage of by the porn industry and doesn’t

realise the ramifications of her life choices?

Her classmates, the media and the general public in the guise of internet forums, naturally have plenty to say on the matter. Many insist that we should respect her choices and that she free to do with her body what she sees fit. Others, such as Time magazine, claim her choice to work in the porn industry will be one that will affect her for the rest of her life and not in a good way.

It all began with a $20,000 bill for a semester’s tuition. Belle told Duke University’s daily student newspaper, The Chronicle that she googled ‘how to become a porn star’ and quickly began working in the industry, using her spare time during college holidays to film in Los Angeles. However, the unthinkable or not so unthinkable if the current data relating to porn use is to be believed, happened when a fellow student was watching a porn  movie and recognised her in it. The figures relating to the porn industry online are incredible with sites receiving approximately 450 million visitors per month and the industry being worth over $13.3 billion in the US alone. Thomas Bagley, Belle’s fellow freshman who happened to recognise her and later revealed her secret, asked if it was her and she confessed and swore him to secrecy. Unfortunately, he later got drunk at a Frat House and spilled the beans to to those present. Word quickly spread and by the next morning, Belle had received 230 Facebook friend requests and her alter-ego, Aurora’s Twitter account was overloaded with new followers. However, with the new followers also came a tirade of online abuse. Tweets such as “I found out a girl in our freshman class is a pornstar. I’ve now made it my goal to fuck her before I graduate”, quickly appeared alongside comments decrying her behaviour such as: “So being choked, spit on and degraded is now empowering? Feminist logic…I’d rather have my dignity and loans than work as a prostitute. I’m sure Daddy’s proud”.

The Chronicle quickly sought an anonymous interview with her, which she immediately agreed to and in which she spoke about a variety of issues varying from tuition fees to feminism to female agency and her sexuality. In relation to Duke’s $60,000 per year tuition fees, she claimed that “she turns to to the adult film industry to help supplement her financial aid.” In her interview with Playboy, the question of whether her choice to work in the porn industry was really because of the cost of education, she remained adamant that it was declaring that her  “story is a testament to how fucking expensive school is. The fact that the only viable options to pay for college are to take out gigantic student loans, to not go to college at all or to join the sex industry really says something…We also need to stop looking at loans as a solution to fix our education system, because they’re crippling our economy.”

She also spoke about her sexuality, admitting she’s bisexual and feels stifled at Duke: “I feel like girls at Duke have to hide their sexuality. We’re caught in this virgin-whore dichotomy,” she said. “Gender norms are very intense here and I feel like that’s particularly carried out by frats. I think that being a woman at Duke is extremely difficult. I think that being a sexual woman at Duke is extremely difficult.”

When asked why she didn’t work as a researcher or at a store, she claimed that she felt more empowered working in porn than she previously had while working as a waitress: “I worked as a waitress as a job for a year… but I was making $400 a month after taxes. I felt like I was being degraded and treated like s—t. My boss was horrible to me…To be perfectly honest, I felt more degraded in a minimum wage, blue-collar, low paying, service job than I ever did doing porn.”

Following her interview with The Chronicle, she wrote a personal essay on the popular feminist site xojane.com. She claims that she wanted to take control of the conversation as she felt she had been misrepresented by the student newspaper, who portrayed in part as caring as much about ipads and designer handbags as her college tuition: “…if people are going to talk about you, you might as well control the conversation and use it to start a dialogue, which in this case is about the abuses we inflict on sex workers.”

While Belle has claimed that she “vehemently” wanted to have her privacy respected, she has gone on to do interviews with Playboy and Piers Morgan and has adopted the name Belle Knox to protect her identity. However, many are still questioning whether her choice is an inherently feminist one or a regressive one. Some commentators have noted that her case is a tough one for feminists, do they support her autonomy and female agency to do as she pleases or do they detract her for working in what is an inherently sexist industry that is know for degrading women. Ultimately though we can discuss her choices as much as we like and how they relate to feminism but the fact is that there has been a distinct inequality in all of this. Bagley, the boy who outed her secret profession, is lauded and has reportedly been offered $10,000 to appear in his own x-rated movie.

No one has brought up the fact that he was watching and presumably enjoying the very porn that Knox has been demonised for appearing in. Yes she does things as part of her job that may not to be everyone’s taste, including rough sex and choking, but while she is on the end of a barrage of abuse because of it, the greater issue of the madonna-whore dichotomy is being lost. Many would argue that people enjoy this type of porn but they don’t like being confronted with the reality of female sexuality and individual female agency.

The women in these movies are to remain objects of desire, unrealistic versions of the real thing but when the previously objectified women manifests herself in real life, she is suddenly the she-devil or a naive girl who has been taken advantage of. One thing that must take precedence in this discussion though is that she is still a young woman and deserves respect, not to be abused and torn apart by online commentators. As a later statement released by The Chronicle states: “Porn actress or not, Lauren should never have experienced vicious name-calling, strangers’ sexual claims to her body or the threat of sexual violence. No woman deserves such treatment, and yet too many Duke women experience it every day.” Lets remember that the next time we debate or denigrate someone else’s choice.