Over on BroBible, there’s a post that relates how a few porn stars broke the news to their parents that they were working in porn. It brought back memories of a similar conversation I had with my parents, almost 20 years ago now, when I first informed them that I’d taken a job with a porn company.
Obviously, working in a porn company’s marketing department is a whole other kettle of fish than is performing in front of the camera – which, naturally, is what my parents were convinced I was going to be doing when I told them about my new job all those years ago, because they didn’t let me finish my sentence, or listen to a single word that came after “porn company,” for that matter. Even as non-performer however, as a young woman, telling your family that you have any kind of job working in the porn industry can be an adventure.
Once I managed to convince my parents that no, I really wasn’t going to be fucking anybody on film, posing nude, or providing on-set fluffer services, they calmed down… a bit, at least.
Mom sighed and said something to the effect of “Well, so long as it pays the bills, it’s OK if you spend a few months doing this while you figure out what you’re really going to do for a living.” For his part, Dad helpfully offered to volunteer his time to conduct “quality control” inspections of the content the company produced.
My sisters’ reactions were an interesting and very mixed bag. The youngest of them, who was at the time in the midst of some sort of staunch-feminist rebirth, acted as though I’d signed a pact with the Devil, and basically told me that I had just sold out the entire Global Sisterhood. My oldest sister confessed that she and her husband had been known to use porn to augment their sex life – something I really didn’t want to know, and especially didn’t want to picture in my mind, so I just pretended that she was joking and quickly changed the subject. My middle sister (a woman who is more than a bit nuts, quite frankly) immediately wrote a little song about the girl who went to work for a porn company marketing department, but ended up being the “bangee” in the world’s largest gangbang. Cute, right? Sure, it was highly annoying in that the ditty was set to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, but it was cute, nonetheless. (“Oh sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, the tale of a wanton slut, who went to work in marketing, but soon took it up the butt…”)
My male friends, predictably, had one question in response: Can you get me passwords? This was back when porn sites didn’t routinely give away the farm, and if you wanted to see the good stuff, you generally had to pull out your credit card in order to facilitate pulling on anything else, if you catch my drift.
I actually did issue some passwords to friends – mostly so I could egregiously violate their privacy by monitoring the use of their member name to see what kind of stuff turned them on, and ridicule them mercilessly if any of it was beyond the pale, or inconsistent with claims they had previously made about their sexual predilections. (Just kidding guys; I’d never do you like that!)
I sometimes wonder what a similar conversation would be like, were I to admit to my parents that I actually like porn (not all of it, naturally, but enough to keep me interested). I think mom would probably stick her fingers in her ears and leave the room, then rely on her potent sense of denial to rinse the conversation from her consciousness. Dad would probably just chuckle and say something like “like father, like daughter,” or make some completely inappropriate comment just to creep me right the fuck out.
The single strangest reaction I’ve received to telling someone I work in the porn industry came from my dentist, of all people – or my former dentist, I should say. A young and quite attractive woman, she also turns out to be a pretty serious Christian, and when I told her what I did for a living, she informed me that she could no longer be my dentist!
I tried telling her that if her concern was that there were massive amounts of porn-penis germs residing in my mouth, she could relax because I’d never blown a porn star, but that only seemed to increase her distress. For a lady who spends her day with both hands inside of other peoples’ orifices, this whole reaction struck me as a pretty squeamish response, but no worries – I have a male dentist now, and when I told him what I do for a living, all he wanted to know was whether I would back some autographed porn star headshots for him the next time I go to the Adult Entertainment Expo….