According to Vanity Fair magazine, one of the biggest trends of the summer is the “porn star memoir.” These books, “authored” by “actors” and “actresses” such as Traci Lords, Jerry Butler, and Jenna Jameson are available not behind the counter of the seedy local sex shop, but in the windows of your neighborhood Barnes and Noble. I must admit I was struck by the Vanity Fair portrait of the common themes of these memoirs, themes that ought to drive Christians to compassion and prayer.
The author, James Wolcott, identifies a “basic DNA” of the pornographic film “star.” The first and most important is a childhood deprived of a father, either through neglect or abuse. As one memoir mentions, “Any man that crossed my path was fodder for a father figure.” Another mentions that she thinks of her father while shooting her films, remembering how he looked at the women in his “girlie magazines.” If she is one of them, she wonders, “would he love me then?”
Another basic building block of the pornography “star’s” life is the adoption of a new identity. Most of the names featured on the covers of these memoirs are pseudonyms, and not only because the old names weren’t sexy enough. Instead, the new names enable the “performers” to convince themselves that someone else is participating in this life. As Wolcott explains, “It’s not ‘me’ doing these things on the set, it’s my alter ego, who just happens to share the same body and Social Security number.”
Wolcott then details the degradation of these figures, a degradation that is both psychic and physical. A particular sex act that is particularly hard on the human body, once occasional in the porn world, is now omnipresent as “consumers” wish to see women not just violated but humiliated.
It would be quite easy to walk past the display of a porn “star’s” memoirs at our corner bookstore clucking our tongues in righteous indignation. But instead perhaps we can pray for a multitude of men and women who are someone’s daughters and sons, and who are those for whom Christ died. Perhaps we can love them enough to pray for the liberating power of the Spirit to show them a Father who values them for more than the aerodynamic abilities of their body parts.
And let’s remember that it is not just they who seek to evade conscience, and to dull the knowledge of coming judgment. These porn stars may seek to do so through false names to mask their sexual shame. But they know it won’t work, any more than garments of leaves did in the primeval garden. Behind all of our hiding places, the voice still asks, “Adam, where are you?”
