The Porn Star Speaks: The Representation of Adult Actresses on Television more

The Porn Star Speaks: The Representation of Adult Film Actresses on Television In 2004, pornstar Jenna Jameson released her autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale and became an instant sensation on the New York Times Best Selling list. NYTimes.com’s Sunday Book Review describes Jameson’s autobiography as a “gold mine” for aspiring performers, emphasizing her improbable tips and advice to readers – “Jameson debunks the myth of the casting couch: ‘You don't have to have sex with anyone in order to get a job having sex with people’ and she offers tips like ‘Girls who scream and flop all over the place into new positions don't get many jobs.’”1 Her autobiography was awarded XRated Critics Organization’s 2004 “Mainstream’s Adult Media Favorite” and Jameson remains one of the most successful ‘cross-over’ porn stars in recent American cultural memory. With the accessibility of sexual interests, bodies, and fantasies taking prominence through easier avenues of reception (the internet and social media, for example), the mainstreaming of the female porn star becomes an interesting yet complicated site of representation throughout this decade. Because of technologies like the Internet and social media, it allows anyone with an Internet connection to endlessly explore or even participate in pornography. The narrative cycle of the porn actress, moreover, becomes even more nuanced and forces a re-imagining of what it means to be a porn star in this technologically modern world. Even though there are now tremendous amounts of techniques in which famous celebrities, like porn stars, may reach their fans and the digital world, why is the porn actress constantly and perpetually in need to be seen as juvenile and foolish? Many feminists and media scholars have passionately argued on both negative and positive perspectives of pornography and sex workers, primarily seen as a distinctly woman’s 1 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/books/review/05STERNL.html 1 issue, and peaked in academic discourse and debate in the 1980s within feminism. On one hand, the anti-pornography movement feminists and scholars like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Robin Morgan maintained that the intense and over-satiated patriarchy that is at the root of pornography displaced and exploited the female body and further desensitized, dehumanized, and promoted violence to the woman’s body and subjectivity within society. The movement composed of an immense amount of ex-porn stars, psychologists, feminists, ex-sex workers, scholars, and religious groups that collectively opposed and defined pornography as, what Dworkin critically argues in her renowned 1981 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, “the orchestrated destruction of women’s bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanizing and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny” (Dworkin xxvii)2. On the other hand, sex-positive (or pro-sex) feminists and scholars like Camille Paglia, Betty Dodson, Naomi Wolf, and Gayle Rubin have asserted that sexual freedom is a right and a crucial element in the liberation of women and men in general. Essential to the movement is this embracing of the human sexual desire and activity, emphasizing that sexual expression is restricted by patriarchy. Connecting to other sex positive groups and even movements about gender issues – like LGBT minority groups, various sex-positive authors, scholars, and pornographers – the pro-sex feminists were adamant about seeing sex as a woman’s political issue and not a woman-as-victim social issue. Writes Rubin in her pivotal 1984 essay Thinking Sex, about the hierarchal dynamic of sexual and erotic acts, “marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid…but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid…the most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, 2 See also: Gail Dines, Robert Jensen, and Ann Russo’s Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (1998); Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (2007) 2 transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models” (Rubin 14).3 Since the feminist sex wars of the 1980s, many media scholars have taken pornography out of the realm of this specific, feminist body politic and have explored and extended the discussion in a myriad of issues like semiotics, film theory and production, as well as seeing how pornography has changed the face of American pop culture. For instance, film and media studies scholar Linda Williams’ 1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” asks “how…should [we] regard the specific ‘implantation of perversions’ that this massively popular cinematic hard-core pornography represents? [my emphasis]” (Williams 272). Williams is strategic and swift about subduing politics with pornography and comments directly on the feminist sex wars by stating: “To come to terms with pornography in the late 1980s, we need not only to acknowledge the force of but also to get beyond merely reacting to these gut responses” (Williams 5). Contending that these ‘gut responses’ are culturally mediated and learned, Williams thesis’ is very simple – “I wish to ask just what the genre is and why is has been so popular” (Williams 5). This interpellation and introduction of viewing pornography in the modern landscape of technology nods to the ways in which sex and porn studies is ever-changing and still in its early stages of recognizing how influential to American mainstream culture it is. Another example, Laura Kipnis’ 1996 Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America explores issues of fantasy and pornography and the ways in which it operates within legal questions of rape, pedophilia and violence in the broader issue of roleplaying. Kipnis takes the inner dialogue of a sexual body politic in relation to how we feel about pornography and asks, “what impedes us from considering pornography as a mode of expressive 3 See also: Dossie Eason and Catherine A. Liszt’s The Ethical Slut (1998); Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (1998). 3 culture?” and inquires about what the base of our desires are and what they mean (Kipnis 64). She delves into the spectacle of the sexualized Other with her chapters “Clothes Make The Man” and “Disgust and Desire: Hustler Magazine.” In the former chapter, she explains the highly complex and intertextuality of transvestite pornography and denounces how pornography is seen as unintelligent: “What disastrous thing would happen if we were to…approach pornography as we would any other cultural form, applying to it the same modes of respectful analysis, the kind of critical attention received not infrequently by even the dumbest forms of mass culture? (Even boxing gets serious intellectual consideration)” [my emphasis] (Kipnis 64). In the latter chapter, she investigates a cultural moment in which Hustler magazine founder Larry Flynt was shot outside a Georgia courtroom and the media’s response to the incident. Kipnis explains how this particular shooting left Flynt paralyzed from the waist down and how “the nation hardly mourned” – “there were no candlelight vigils outside his hospital room or impassioned calls for the nation’s prayers, even though when a similar fate befell Alabama governor George Wallace six years earlier, Wallace was instantly converted from a southern racist to elder statesman in the national consciousness” (Kipnis 122). This precise moment Kipnis outlines and, more significantly, this idea of the ‘national consciousness’ is specifically where I hope this paper will venture. This paper will focus on female porn stars – specifically how they have been portrayed on television in the 2000 decade. I am primarily interested in the cultural work of their pattern of representation as well as how technology has played a role in re-imagining what it means to be a porn star. I argue that the representation of female porn stars as undereducated, undignified, and unintelligent reinforce the distancing and spectacle of the sexual Other that furthermore reveal anxieties of the sexual body politic and desire in America. I chose the television interview 4 process as my primary site of analysis because of the reception levels these programs reach (Dateline NBC, The Tyra Banks Show, Good Morning America) and how it targeted mainstream audiences. The television medium provides a crucial insight in how the porn star is visually portrayed to these mainstream audiences – including (but not limited to) body language, style of dress, make-up, hair, posture and composure, and so forth – and additionally provide an avenue for them to speak up and back to an enormous public. I selected the 2000-decade because of the technological advancements in social communication that changed the face of media. Within this decade you see a rise in celebrity sex scandals beginning with the notorious Paris Hilton sex tape. Other celebrities during this decade that have gone through sex tape situations include: lead singer of Limp Bizkit Fred Durst, Pamela Anderson, Gene Simmons, and former U.S. Senator John Edwards. With the introduction of social networking websites like MySpace.com4 and the intensification of mobile devices (advanced and sophisticated cellular phones and music players that enable Wi-Fi connections like the iPod), these trends commenced a trailblazing and rapid refashioning of social relations, communication, and connectivity. Because of these expansive arenas of social communication, pornography is clearly even more accessible and porn stars are utilizing these connections to speak back. For instance, porn actress Sasha Grey appeared on The Tyra Banks Show in 2007 on the segment “Teens Working in the Sex Industry” where she defended her position on choosing pornography as a profession and subsequently blogged and recorded about her experience on her MySpace and YouTube accounts. While Grey is known for her youth, intellectual maturity, and even moments of existential discernment, she was extremely frustrated about her portrayal on the show and stated that her appearance on Tyra was highly 4 Consider also: Facebook.com (personal web page), Twitter.com (personal 140-character thoughts/opinions), YouTube.com (personal videos), Tumblr.com (personal photo scrap-booking). 5 exploitative and how the ‘art of montage’ was employed very strategically.5 The porn star is speaking back. Historically, porn stars did not have many avenues, if at all, to speak back to the public. The illustrious 1972 film Deep Throat staring Linda Lovelace is a prime and pivotal cultural moment and example of pornography’s mainstreaming. Besides the movie’s context of suffering a legal battle of obscenity, Deep Throat additionally gained controversy because of Lovelace’s (or Linda Susan Boreman) string of political activism and allegations of the film. In her contentious 1980 biography Ordeal, as well as the documentary Inside Deep Throat (2005), she famously says, “everyone that watches Deep Throat is watching me being raped.” She commenced in working along side Dworkin in the anti-pornography movement, appeared in Dworkin’s books, as well as published her own memoirs condemning the industry – her 1986 Out of Bondage stated, “It is a crime that movie is still showing; there was a gun to my head the entire time.”6 Boreman’s aligning with the anti-porn movement and her attesting to the “behindthe-scenes coercion in which [she] was forced to play the part” undeniably struck a cord within mainstream, national consciousness about the adult entertainment industry (Williams 203). For Boreman to get national attention concerning her situation at the time was, undoubtedly, extremely difficult and her mainstreaming provided an ample amount of material for the antipornography movement to make use of. What other avenues did Boreman have during the 1970s when Deep Throat premiered? More importantly, talking back required writing various autobiographies to explain to the public how she was exploited and treated unfairly within the industry. While there is no denying that Boreman was put through extremely uncomfortable and dangerous situations, my point is to highlight the historical context that preceded an increase in 5 6 http://www.myspace.com/sashagrey/blog/325149723 Toronto Sun Newpaper, 30 March 1981. 6 the visibility of the porn star within mainstream media. Because her avenues were limited in comparison with today, Boreman’s only avenue was to project her experience to the public mainstream. Moving forward to television interviews of the 2000-decade, I want to look at how the porn star has spoken back today. As mentioned before, Sasha Grey appeared on The Tyra Banks Show in February of 2007. Throughout the segment, Tyra Banks makes comments to Grey that entirely situate her as an Other that has chosen a life of pornography that seems to be synonymous with crime and the continuous edits to show the live audience reactions of disapproving glares only adds to the highly televised spectacle. Banks to Grey: “I’m looking at you right now and you look like someone I went to middle school with;” emphasizing how “difficult it is for me [Banks]” before going to break; a voiceover of Banks when the show returns, “Sasha Grey looks like a school girl but the only thing this teen studies is her scenes for her upcoming X-Rated films;” when Grey explains to Banks about her goals outside of the porn industry – “I want children. I want to travel the world. I want to see. I want to explore. I want to live life” – Banks responds with: “I hope you sit down with yourself, one day and really do some…soul-searching to find out why you’re in this industry;” Grey speaks up and is visibly annoyed, defending her choices stating, “I know why I’m in here,” but is interrupted by Banks looking condescendingly at her, “You haven’t told me…I haven’t really found a true reason, a deep soul reason…all this ‘Oh-I-want-to-save-theworld-and-all-that-show-sexual-exploration,’ for me there’s something deeper” and quickly adds, “we’ll be right back” and it cuts to commercial.7 Grey states on her YouTube account that she was told to come to the show dressed like an eighteen year old (at the time she was, indeed, eighteen) and when she presented herself to the wardrobe department at the studio, they told her that that is not how a ‘normal’ eighteen year old 7 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxUq_zzvAaA 7 dresses and re-dressed her with her hair pulled back tightly, ‘kabuki blush’ to make her look even younger, a pale pink, simple sweater, jeans, and brown flats; she explains that the “art of montage” and editing had created “an illusion” that she had “nothing to say” and that “75 – 80% of what I [Grey] had to say was cut out.”8 On her MySpace blog she writes, “Why did I do it? It's free publicity, and people that were really interested would look me up and find out what I stand for and what my beliefs are;” “‘Every edit is a lie’ – Jean Luc Godard. The two things that pissed me off the most were: How they dressed me and did my hair/makeup. Tyra talks about exploitation but here she is saying I look like a middle school adolescent while they have me in a pink shirt and so much blush on it makes me look like I am about to shit out my nervousness (I was completely relaxed and at the end pissed).”9 Interestingly, both the Tyra clip of Grey and her own response on YouTube have around one million views each. Another instance, porn star and director Belladonna filmed an interview with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer in January of 2003 for the segment “Primetime Thursday” about pornography. Following her around for roughly two years, Belladonna’s portrayal was very much like Grey’s. The interview portrayed Belladonna to have fallen victim to the schemes and oppressive forces of the adult entertainment industry: some questions are directly asked from Sawyer to Belladonna – “So why won’t you protect yourself?” “Recently, did you have break down? What was it?” – while most other questions are answered by Belladonna from Sawyer’s voiceover commentary.10 Because this particular interview incorporated a large quantity of time following Belladonna, they spoke with her mother, her sister, looked into her family history and personal experiences she’s been through – such as dating, drug use, growing up Mormon and 8 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFTEoBR215E http://www.myspace.com/sashagrey/blog/325149723 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtLst3espU 10 8 living in Utah, molestation and so forth. In one particular scene, Sawyer is speaking with her mother and states, “I can hear lots of parents saying out there, ‘I’d be on the next train, plane, automobile,’ if I had to take hand cuffs I would get them home and get them out of it,” to which her mother replies, “She’s an adult. I can’t chain her down. I can’t tie her down. She has to find out herself.” Sawyer interestingly tells the audience in a voice over, “And the longer we talked the more unnerved I become by something. No matter how ghastly the stories are of what she’s done, no matter the pain she describes, she is always smiling,” proceeds to confront her about this while Belladonna’s mother sits off camera watching her, to which she cries and Sawyer asks, “Why?” “I like to hide my real emotions because I want everyone to see how happy I am. But inside, I’m not happy. I don’t like myself at all.” With plenty of photos of her as a child, being on the cheerleading team in high school, and familial snap shots, the segment capitalizes on this particular emotional response of sorrow and helplessness. Belladonna has stated on her website and in numerous interviews that she was very unhappy with Primetime’s depiction of her. While this interview actually ended up boosting her career, she stated in an interview on a adult entertainment review website, RogReviews.com, “I am not happy about Primetime but I would love to see the whole story air one day so everyone can see how much I had to say that was for the porn industry. If you know me you know that I loved shooting!”11 In an extensive interview by another adult entertainment review site, MrWebReview.com, Belladonna opened up about the Primetime experience and states, “I never said I was anti-porn. When someone follows you around for two years and they're a mainstream company, well, they told me it wasn't going to be like that. It was bullshit, made up lies, like me waiting for a contract. They took things out of context totally. Some things I said were true. At times, I felt pressured into doing things, but I made a choice to go on and do it.” When asked if 11 http://www.rogreviews.com/interviews/Belladonna2.asp 9 she would ever be interested in doing another, follow up segment with ABC she responded with, “No, thank you. I don't want to be embarrassed again.”12 While this interview is dated back to 2003, social media was still on the rise and she took to her website to engage with fans on her forum, blog about various topics, updated with information of films she was staring in and directing, and more. In 2009, American actor Charlie Sheen stirred up the mainstream television stage with his drug addiction, anger management issues, and his dismissal from Warner Bros. Television. The lead in the popular show Two and a Half Men on CBS, the show had stopped production, according to CBSNews.com, “following Sheen's series of bizarre interviews trashing his bosses at CBS and Warner Bros., including Two and a Half Men co-creator Chuck Lorre. Before that, the show was on hiatus while Sheen sought treatment in rehab.”13 On October 22, 2010, Sheen was eventually detained by police for having aggressive and hostile behavior in the Plaza Hotel in New York. Adult actress Capri Anderson had escorted him earlier that night to dinner and was found in the hotel room when the police arrived. About a month after the incident, Anderson appeared on an exclusive interview for the Good Morning America show on ABC, her headline reading: Inside Charlie Sheen’s Meltdown: Adult Actress Goes Public. The twenty-two year old was planning to sue Sheen and explained that he threatened to kill her, wielded a sharp object, called her a ‘whore,’ threw a lamp at her, put his hands around her neck and licked her face, to which she locked herself in the hotel bathroom and called her girlfriend who called the police.14 During the interview, she sits alongside her attorney Keith Davidson and begins to cry while speaking about the night, answering questions from the interviewer who is reading a report 12 13 14 http://www.mrwebreview.com/interviews/newbelladonna.htm http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31749_162-20040286-10391698.html http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/capri-anderson-tells-abc-charlie-sheen-threatened-kill/story?id=12207762 10 of the night at her: “And then you get up to the room and you said at some point when you got back to the room you heard him snorting something?” “But you were ok with being there?” is asked repeatedly, “So you locked yourself in the bathroom and call your girlfriend. Why not call the police?” “As you know his attorney says that one of the reasons this sort of got out of control was that you expected to be paid for sex in that room that didn’t happen. One of the figures that’s been reported is $12,000,” to which Anderson identifies as false and her attorney jumps in and explains that even if that were true, it only reveals that Sheen is merely a jock and the interviewer replies, “But it also says something about your client;” when the police eventually get to their hotel room, Anderson explains how “shaken up” she was and that she told them she did not have any “significant injuries” when asked and that she was “fine;” the reporter asks “But according to your report now, he had his hands around your neck, he threw a lamp at you, he threatened to kill you. You don’t tell that to the police?;” she explains at that point she just wanted to go home, explained that the police officers were “very condescending” and the interviewer’s last comment about Sheen’s behavior before the clip ends, “That’s not abuse, that’s a crime. Go to the police. Tell them that. File a criminal charge!”15 After Anderson’s appearance on Good Morning America and various press coverage, many celebrities and news sources spoke about the incident. While there is no denying that Anderson is a victim to Sheen, actress Kirstie Alley, for instance, wrote on her Twitter account, “you have two beautiful girls… PERHAPS for the sake of these children you can decide to QUIT hanging with PORN STARS & HOS” and “‘LOL…wow!...% defending Porn Stars and Hos as acceptable choices for parents….ya GOTTA love our 1st amendment.. lord knows.. IDO!!”16 While Anderson’s Twitter account is apparently absent of any sort of commentary 15 16 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiDdgM5Jlqk http://www.twitter.com/kirstiealley 11 about the incident, news sources and press coverage discuss her ‘claims’ to ‘extort’ money from Sheen, highlighting her sensational tale. The spectacle of Sheen’s meltdown proved to be a fascinating cultural moment in 2009 – 2010 in which a high-profile celebrity commences his rapid decline and the rhetoric around Anderson and her incident underlined the cultural phenomena of pornography and its female actors. In Ilana Nash’s 2006 American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture, she explains the cultural mythology of the American teenage female. Specifically, she focuses on the patterns of representation and the narrative cycles of these teenage girl characters and asks how these effect popular culture and the ways in which we think about teenage girls – the Nancy Drew series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Deanna Durbin series. Nash describes this concept of ‘double emptiness’ found within these characters and narrative cycles: “Combining the categories of children and women, teen girls are celebrated for their double emptiness – the child’s lack of experience, and the woman’s lack of agency or rationality (Nash 22). Much like the porn star, the double emptiness implies that she has a womanly body and a childlike mind, able to seduce men yet unable to challenge male dominance. She additionally acknowledges and explains this concept of the ‘chrysalis moment’ found within the narrative of these teenage girl stories as well, “a staple of girl-centered entertainment…half the fun is in the detailed voyeurism of watching the intimate process of change, turning the adolescent girl into an even more intensely fetishized object than adult women…the teen female body…is constructed as a public spectacle (Nash 24). In other words, these private moments of metamorphosis and change – a make-over, her first kiss, her first sexually implied encounter – are always viewed as a public spectacle and entertainment to the viewer. 12 Looking particularly at the three interviews on the Tyra Banks Show, ABC News, and Good Morning America, Nash’s concepts speak directly to the public spectacle of the porn star. The cultural mythology of the porn star maintain feelings of this sexual Other by drawing attention to and constructing their double emptiness. While these porn stars are clearly portrayed as victimized, undereducated, and poorly misguided women throughout these interviews, they are seen within this liminal state of possessing a womanly, sexualized body alongside a childlike mind. These porn stars further embody this “fine line between sexual innocence and experience” inside of these interviews to which Nash explains as an effect “of radical Otherness” (Nash 22). The porn stars’ public spectacle within these mainstream interviews projects this stereotypical image of a sex worker and without coincidence: through their media constructed double emptiness, the porn star only exists as a foolish girl incapable of making her own choices. Moreover, the pattern of representation of the porn star in mainstream television interviews makes certain that they are seen as non-threatening, women who’ve made consequential mistakes, and that sexual activity should always be monogamous, private, and meaningful. Nadine Strossen writes about the dangers of mainstreaming in Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights since “we encounter mainstream language and imagery more often and at earlier ages than we do most sexual representation” and because “mainstream imagery is ordinary and everyday…it more powerfully convinces us that it depicts the world as it is or ought to be” (Strossen 142). She also looks at how the mainstream stigmatization of the word ‘pornography’ itself works to intensify how it should be thought of, “condemn[ing] an increasingly broad range of sexual expression, extending far beyond the scope of constitutionally unprotected obscenity to encompass virtually all sexual imagery (Strossen 91). Pornography itself within American is doubly empty: the act itself is reserved for ‘mature,’ 13 sexually responsible adults yet the subject matter is connoted to be ‘immature,’ obscene and lowcultured. Nash’s concept of the chrysalis moment operates in this pattern of the porn stars’ representation by illuminating yet belittling their experiences and subjectivities. Because of the mainstream values and principles that hold sex as heterosexual, monogamous, serious, and a transformative, private state of change within an individual’s life, the porn star disrupts this narrative and chooses public sex as a profession. By choosing to disturb this hegemonic ideology surrounding sex as a chrysalis moment, the porn star is then assumed to publicly expose supplementary chrysalis moments in their personal lives. For instance, when Banks asks Grey for a more soul-searching reason for her decisions with her life or when Sawyer asks Belladonna why she’s smiling all the time because she should be discontent and unhappy with her situation or even when Anderson is asked to publicly state such seemingly inane and trivial matters like why she locked herself in the bathroom, scared, shocked, and naked instead of running out of the hotel room. With social media and networking in the mix, this complicates another element of the porn star narrative cycle that brings forth this notion of the carnival. Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin is cited in Janet M. Davis’ in The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top who speaks of carnival and the carnivalesque spirit as “offer[ing] the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things” (Davis 28). Davis explains that the carnival operates, by definition, by the spectacle of the Other and describes what the circus came to mean in American popular culture: “shared laughter, at which participants poked fun at authority figures and celebrated the grotesque body” (Davis 28). Much like Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, the point of the carnival 14 image “strives to embrace and unite in itself both terminal points of the process of becoming or both members of the antithesis: birth – death, youth – age” (Stallybrass and White 17). The social inversion of the circus – inverting mainstream ideologies of high and low culture – provided an accepted space and place where subversive acts against mainstream ideologies could function while simultaneously exist in a liminal state of both desire and disgust. Even within the realm of the circus, female performers and actors were seen as threatening and were constantly re-contained and re-imagined in order to keep them in place – this “New Woman” in which Davis explains, was a “danger to traditional notions of domestic propriety” and mainstream ideologies of what were expected from women (Davis 91). While America is not in the circus age anymore and new technologies have expanded what we consider entertainment, Davis, Stallybrass and White’s notions still ring true within the porn star’s representation. Pornography is in and of itself a carnivalesque spirit – the realm in which it exists is completely within it’s own culture, rules, and management. The porn star speaking back presents an even more complicated issue: the spectacle of the public sex worker gains more mainstream visibility and acceptance but seen within this dangerous light of vapidity and silence. As Grey mentions before, the porn star is seen as having nothing of value to speak about and is instead displayed as emotional, reactionary, and perpetually apologetic in her interviews. More significantly, porn stars and pornography in general are not publicly advertised or marketed, do not have television commercials within mainstream channels, are kept in the back of video stores behind a curtain, require legal identification for consumption, and is essentially invisible to the mainstream public. This, moreover, is what propels pornography and is exactly what makes it a cultural, carnivalesque phenomena: it is highly desired, thought about, and wanted and simultaneously detested, reviled, and even banned in some regions. The image 15 of the grotesque, pornographic body, writes Stallybrass and White, “is always becoming, it is a mobile and hybrid creature…obscenely decentered and off-balance, a figural and symbolic resource for paradoxic exaggeration and inversion (Stallybrass and White 9). It exists underneath the social fabric of mainstream society while provoking questions of sexual expressive forms, artistic licenses, and what it means to desire. The ways in which the porn star speaks back within this decade through social media and technology further refashions our sexual expectations and desires and elicits Davis’ New Woman concept; because the porn star is socially inverting and, taking a pro-sex feminist approach here, is sexually expressing herself through video she threatens ideologies and conjectures of womanhood. Pornography, like the circus, reveals underlying anxieties within American culture about a sexual body politic and makes a spectacle of the conventional. Cultural scholar Stuart Hall writes in his popular Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ that popular culture is a site of struggle and compromises, “they don’t function on us if we are blank screens…they do occupy and rework the interior contradictions of feeling and perception in the dominated classes” (Hall 67). He stresses that it is not the “intrinsic or historically fixed objects of culture” that are to be debated but rather “the state of play in cultural relations” (Hall 69). The relationship that pornography and porn stars have on mainstream culture reveals the complicated intensity of sex in America. Hall affirms that pop cultural forms “main focus of attention is the relation between cultural and questions of hegemony” and that “the meaning of a cultural symbol is given in part by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with which it articulates and is made to resonate (Hall 69). Pop cultural texts, like the porn star, are not popular by accident nor are they singularly popular for their participation in pornography. Hall is proclaiming that a cultural text that launches itself into the popular mainstream is serving 16 a purpose and manages to stay within this dimension because of it’s relevance. While porn stars are being negatively portrayed within interviews and are revealing particular anxieties about our bodies and our relationship with women’s sexuality, porn stars furthermore serve as historical archives of sexual freedom. Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook contribute to the development of an archive of feeling for porn stars and sexuality at large. Though it will be a continuous battle for the ‘correct’ portrayal of the porn star on television, or any other spectacle of the Other, the range of avenues and possibilities opening up for communication and exposure are only increasing today. Remnants of the feminist sex wars of the 1980s still remain within the discourse of pornography but it cannot be denied that it is here to stay; while Kipnis asks, “what does it mean to offend?” Hall would surely ask, “What does it mean to be popular?” In Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott’s 2008 The Porning of America: the Rise of Porn Culture, What it Means, and Where We Go from Here, they investigate how the highly manufactured industry of porn has changed the face of American pop culture. They conclude their book with an interesting and relevant question: “That genuine enjoyment [of amateur porn] is enormously appealing, attractive, and arousing – exceeding, even, the appeal of anatomical perfection of highly sexualized porn. What else but the attraction of real enjoyment can account for the astonishing growth of true amateur sites on the Internet?” (Sarracino and Scott 220). Aside from amateur pornography skyrocketing because of the accessibility of the Internet, I want to highlight this point of realness. The concept of ‘real’ is a culturally mediated and socially controlled ideology; what is one person’s idea of real is another person’s idea of fantasy. Pornography and the porn star are much more complex and heavily nuanced to exist in a simple and essentialist hierarchy of ‘proper’ or ‘correct’ sex. A stylized porn star, like Jenna Jameson, is no less or more real than a more ‘natural’ porn star, like Sasha Grey. Why? While Jenna Jameson 17 exists as the epitome of everything a porn star is, does, and looks like in recent, American cultural memory, she is fundamentally an entertainer. Sasha Grey who appears more ‘natural,’ down-to-earth, and has a more stoic composure is fundamentally, like Jameson, an entertainer as well. Entertainers are popular because they speak to an audience’s fantasy; their job is to amuse and provide lasting interest. They exist and gain stardom because they provide a material and immaterial product that is clearly in high demand. The porn star speaking back via social networking or on television is an extension of this fantasy – they become personal to their viewers, more authentic, more ‘real.’ While the interviews on television most certainly portrayed these women in a harsh and condescending process, these patterns of representation furthermore instills sensibilities of knowing the Other which therefore makes it seem easier for the mainstream to control them. At the end of the day, we want the porn star to feel and be marginalized and distanced in order for us to feel safe in our desire and take pleasure in objectifying and sexualizing them. As journalist and author Adrian Nicole Leblanc has said in photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ documentary Thinking XXX, “Sexual power for poor women is literally tied to economic survival. I think it’s like a big ‘fuck you’ in a way; it’s sort of like saying if I’m going to be used sexually or this is what I’m worth well then I’m going to make some money off of it” (Thinking XXX). 18