Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
One of the most serious issues a prospective porn performer has to consider is the impact on other aspects of her or his life, particularly when it comes to career options. The examples of people who have seen their post-porn careers derailed by the discovery of their porn past are legion, and include a great many would-be teachers.
While I suppose I can understand the gut reaction some people have to finding out any particular teacher of young children used to be (or still is) a porn performer, I have a harder time fathoming the distress over someone like Nicholas Goddard, AKA “Old Nick.”
He’s Teaching Chemistry, People, Not Sex Ed
One of the comments posted about Goddard in response to an article about him pretty well sums up the reflexive position a lot of people take in situations like this: “What a disgrace. What should we expect from those he teaches? What set of values? No thank you.”
First off, the assumption a porn performer would have bad “values” probably says a lot more about the presumptuous nature of the person who wrote the comment than it does about Goddard’s actual values.
How much does this person actually know about Goddard, anyway? Do they care at all about whether he’s qualified to teach the subject at hand (chemistry), or is the fact he’s appeared in porn videos effectively trump the fact he has 35 years of experience under his belt teaching it?
I took chemistry in college; you want to know what I don’t remember discussing in class, ever? Sex, or anything even vaguely related thereto.
Granted, maybe we would have had such discussions if we’d had a unit on the chemicals released by our bodies during sex we would have gone there, but despite their prefixes, I promise you discussions of the differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous mixtures don’t include any debates of sexual ethics which would upset my grandmother.
(I can’t guarantee these discussions wouldn’t upset your grandmother, naturally; I’ve never met the woman and for all I know, she gets terribly distraught over the notion of physically separating the various ingredients in a heterogeneous mixture.)
News Flash: College Students Are No Strangers to Porn
The other aspect of the overblown outrage which often comes up when teachers are outed as porn stars, past or present, is the concern over how their students will react to the news, once they find out. In the case of Old Nick, however, I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess it was a student aged 18 or older who first recognized him – and probably not because they had just spent a week doing “research” on porn tube sites in furtherance of writing a paper on sexual exploitation for a women’s studies course.
I know this will come as a shock to anyone who has never been, or met, a college student, but it’s really true: College students watch porn. A LOT of porn.
“There is such hypocrisy with people watching porn then complaining about those who act in it,” Goddard noted. “Why would students and staff be happy to watch it, but unhappy when they see who stars in them? Especially as I know that on evenings and weekends, 75% of web traffic on the university’s server is accessing porn.”
Goddard’s claim about the university’s server stats could be an exaggeration, but my sense is he’s pretty well on the money with that one. Hell, my college days came and went long before the internet made it a snap to watch basically any kind of porn you wish, but even back then porn consumption was not exactly rare among my male peers – and probably more common among the female students than people generally realized at the time, if my own clandestine viewing habits were any indication.
Look At It This Way: At Least He’s Not Harassing Sandy Hook Parents
When I think of college professors acting in ways which are unacceptable, I don’t think about guys like Goddard doing porn on their own time; I think about guys like James Tracy, the kook from Florida Atlantic University who was recently fired for harassing people who lost their children in the Sandy Hook mass shooting.
To be clear, I don’t think universities should fire people like Tracy if all they do is merely voice a conspiratorial opinion about an event like the Sandy Hook shootings, but when you do something like send a certified letter to the parents of a murdered six year-old demanding their son had ever lived….? Uh yeah; fuck that guy.
By contrast, Goddard has never pushed his side job in anybody’s face, or so far as I’ve been able to discern from reading accounts in the UK media, ever mentioned it at all until he was asked to comment on it.
I’m sure for some people, there’s concern over the fact the women Goddard performed with were around the same age as his students – but since there’s no indication he’s ever made advances toward, or any other way sexually harassed his students, I don’t much care about this fact, either.
Would it matter if he dated women much younger than himself, if he didn’t bring the desire to do so into his classroom? Heck, this practice probably wouldn’t be nearly as controversial as him doing porn, even if (to my eyes, at least) it would be a more relevant concern.
I have no idea how the “investigation” into Goddard on the part of University of Manchester will play out, but unless there’s something more to the controversy than what has already been reported, I hope they close the file without taking action of any kind.
After all, the sooner the investigation is put to bed, the less anybody is going to care about where Goddard makes his – or who he used to share it with on a semi-professional basis.
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
The post In Defense of “Old Nick” appeared first on Peeperz.