To avoid graduating from the pricy Duke University with debt, a freshman has taken to staring in adult films. To no one’s surprised, she’s experienced a fair share of slut shaming since a student revealed her identity.
- Duke University Archives (flickr)
I’m not going to look for her true identity – that’s neither here nor there. But I will share her blog post and a few hopefully thought-provoking questions:
Would this be as big a deal if she went to, oh, I dunno, NYU?
If a male freshman at Duke was doing porn, would he turn into frat bait, too?
She says she wants her privacy protected, but she performs in public in the most revealing way. Is she really, as she says, “not ashamed of porn”?
An Internet troll argued she was too young to know what she was getting into. If the girl is smart enough to get into Duke, is it safe to assume she’s capable enough of navigating her formative years?
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2014.
Sex work is still work. She is in a legitimate business and should not be shamed for her choice. Even if she is putting her body out there for people to see, that does not mean that she deserves to be gawked at and scrutinized in her everyday life. She is still deserving of privacy. This falls to the basis of do girls that wear skimpy clothes deserve to be raped or sexually harassed? No. This girl does not deserve to be shamed and sexually harassed because of her choice in line of work…which is a really good way to quite quickly pay for that education, and without her having to worry about debt. It all boils down to it is her choice and it shouldn’t matter to anyone but her.
Why should a woman who chooses to willfully perform as a porn actress be vilified and accorded slut status, never mind the double standard of men who agree to watch porn or simply fornicate with as many women as humanly possible to a hero’s clap….that said in congratulating the woman in her ability to own her sexuality and feel liberated one also has to ask how liberated is she really when at the end of the day, she’s not getting to choose her partners but rather her partners are being chosen for her for a fee? How sexually emancipated is the freshman then and will she bear a burden for that in the future….? Or to be blunt, is Lauren the progressive female role model she proposes that she is ?
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2014/02/outed-duke-college-freshman-insists-shes-proud-porn-star/
Considering a 4 yr degree at Duke is going to run her around $200,000.00, she will certainly need to earn more money than the typical coed would earn working as a waitress at Chi-Chi’s or Hooters.
The farther up the food chain life takes you, the more you will be associating with people who believe themselves to be better than everyone else. People like that get a sense of self satisfaction denigrating others. It helps them reinforce their own self image.