When I heard about the anonymous Duke University porn star, the first thing I did was turn to Google.
As a journalist, I'm interested in the story behind the story; because I've been writing about the adult industry for years, this story was of particular interest to me.
What was I interested in discovering? Her real identity and her porn identity.
Within three minutes, I knew her porn star name. Within five minutes, I was watching a scene from a porn movie in which she had starred.
So much for anonymity when you're a porn star in 2014.
Once upon a time, porn stars changed their names and compartmentalized their lives. You were one person in the real world -- with a birth name, a mortgage, a family -- and you were another person in Pornlandia -- with a stage name, a box cover, a fan base. Decades ago, it was a way of protecting yourself, your family, and your future from the near unilateral disdain the culture had for your occupation. In recent years, porn stars' personal information has been disseminated online, making it increasingly difficult to be a porn star with a private life.
The internet turned anonymity into an antiquated notion, and doxxing became a sport. Nowadays, privacy is a thing everyone claims to want but no one truly has. We surrender our most personal information to Facebook and pretend the government isn't snooping on our secrets.
Last month, "Lauren," a freshman at Duke, found herself the focus of campus attention after a male student spotted her at her part-time job -- performing in adult movies -- and revealed her alter ego, "Aurora," to the student body by way of a fraternity rush event. The way she had chosen to help pay her $60,000-a-year tuition exposed, the young woman allowed herself to be anonymously profiled by the Chronicle. In the article, her real name and her stage name were changed, her face concealed by a back-lit photo.
In a subsequent personal essay for xoJane, she outlined with confident clarity why she had picked porn -- and not, say, waitressing -- and posited her role in the adult industry as an act of self-empowerment.
But in an interview with the Cut, she confessed she hadn't expected her sex worker identity and her true identity to collide so dramatically:
"I thought I could keep Lauren and Aurora separate, compartmentalize parts of myself, and have two alter egos. Perhaps in hindsight that’s not healthy for me. I’m still getting used to the integration of the two, but, that being said, I do not want my identity to be porn star. I want my identity to be Lauren: activist, kind, sweet girl. I don’t want be defined by my work."
Her mistake wasn't making porn to pay her tuition; it was imagining she could do so without becoming a viral sensation.
Meanwhile, liberals are defending her decision, conservatives are slamming her choice, and sex workers say no one but sex workers should get a say about sex work. It's all so polarizing, and, frankly, entirely misses the point.
At this point in her career, the Duke porn star speaks with as much authority about working in porn as a Nordstrom employee speaks with authority about what it's like to work at McDonald's.
Porn is no more inherently empowering than it is inherently degrading, and the way its industry conducts its business ranges from the professional to the godawful.
The adult industry is all blurred lines, irreducible complexities, and gray fog. There is no black and white, no good or bad, just people trying to make money.
We deny them their right to privacy because we want to understand, we want to enter their world, we want to be in that impenetrable fantasy.
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