Wasting time on Facebook, I happened on an article from a few years back about the plight of a former porn star. It had shown up in my feed as “liked” by a relative of mine who had long ago quit attending church, and I clicked because I was kind of intrigued as to what about it had appealed to her. The former porn star, Bree Olson, was very unhappy with how people were treating her. She said that she’d gotten into the porn industry when she was 19 and experimenting sexually, and she was amazed at the amount of money she could make. She’d quit school and performed in the porn industry until she was 25, when she left the business. She said she’d gotten caught up in a media frenzy and discovered just how much people hated her, so she quit porn because she wanted to be liked and respected. She says:
I left a career where I made millions to try and gain respect. I pushed and struggled for years. People look at me as if I am the same as a sex offender. They look at me as though I am less than in every way, and they assume the absolute worst in every way. I had never realized how progressive my mind was and how scared people were of sexuality until this. I also realized I could never go back and be a nurse or a teacher, or work for any company really that can fire me under morality clauses for making customers feel “uncomfortable” because of who I am.
She also did a video with Real Women Real Stories on YouTube in which she describes how people treat her when they find out who she is. They call her horrible names and withdraw their friendship. She says she might as well have the word SLUT written across her forehead. The interviewer asks her how she wants people to treat her, and she becomes very emotional. After a pause, she says she wishes people would treat her like a “married, registered nurse with 2.5 kids in Indiana,” and she starts to cry. After a pause, the interviewer asks “how would that change your life?”, and she responds “I would be SO happy”.
The article closes with
“People hate me and if they knew me, I’m one of the nicest people they’d ever meet. It’s a shame. It’s a shame for everyone….
Porn didn’t hurt me. The way society treats me for having done it does.”
Apparently, once you’ve been in porn, it’s pretty hard to make it back in the regular world. Every once in a while, you hear a news story about a teacher getting fired from school when her past in porn came to light. I heard of a former male porn actor who’d made it through nursing school and gotten a job at a hospital, only to get outed and fired after a couple weeks on the job (he was considered too big a liability risk).
So what’s the proper way to react to Ms Olson’s predicament? What’s the Christian way? Or maybe I should ask, what’s the Christlike way? I have to admit, I have a lot of conflicted feelings.
My first thought is that I feel bad for her. It sounds like she’s been the recipient of a lot of people’s venom. Taking pleasure in another person’s pain is evil. It’s one thing to lash out in pain or frustration against a person who has hurt you directly, but it’s another thing entirely to find something about another person you don’t like and use it as excuse to indulge your lust to cause them pain. That’s just wrong. Even when it comes to punishing people who deserve to be and need to be punished, taking satisfaction in their suffering might be excusable, but it’s not noble. I don’t think God feels that way.
My second thought is that it’s remarkable that she’s so instantly recognizable. Does everybody watch porn? It seems to me that if our society was truly comprised of such upstanding moral citizens, they wouldn’t be able to recognize her, and she could fly under the radar a little better. [1]
On the other hand, there’s another part of me that’s not nearly as sympathetic. Ms. Olson dug her own hole. If she wanted to be treated like a married RN with 2.5 kids, then that’s what she should have aimed for. If she didn’t want to be regarded as dirty and disgusting, she shouldn’t have done dirty and disgusting things. There are powerful feelings and emotions associated with sex, and most people feel simultaneous, often contrary pulls in their desire for intimacy, love, self-respect, and release. Her seedy business seeks to profit by inflaming the simple, self-indulgent physical appetite. If you descend to appealing to people’s baser natures, then maybe you shouldn’t be so surprised by their baser behaviors. Of course it’s hard for Ms. Olson to find a legitimate job. How can she expect an employer to take on the distraction of customers or co-workers being able to pull up shocking videos of her on the internet? What does it do to a brand to employ such a person? What kind of distraction gets created in a classroom if the students could google up their teacher’s porn videos?
Besides, you can argue public shaming has a role. Not every harmful or offensive behavior should be criminalized, yet there remains a need for a deterrent. For example, you don’t put someone in jail for saying something racist — you shame her instead. You let her know that that kind of behavior isn’t acceptable in your society. Bree Olson is warning girls about going into porn because of the consequential shame. If the shame weren’t there, would she be warning girls against porn?
But then the sympathetic part of me kicks in again. She was only 19 when she got into it. Just a kid. For whatever reason, it either didn’t feel wrong to her or the money was just too good. If the former, then I can’t help thinking something probably happened to her earlier in life that made it that way. They say a lot of porn actors were sexually abused before they entered the business. But maybe that’s just anti-porn propaganda.
I really don’t like people being condemned for life, unless they belong in prison. I don’t like that after a felon does time, he’s always marked as a felon and can’t get a job. I don’t like that after sex offenders have done their time and been released, their names and addresses are publicly listed for contempt and persecution the rest of their lives. I like the idea of second chances with a clean slate. My feeling is that if they don’t deserve a second chance with a clean slate, then they belong in jail. [2]
But I do believe the second chance is contingent on evidence of rehabilitation, and Bree Olson isn’t exactly repentant. It’s not like she’s come around to my values. In fact, she seems to imply that it’s my values that are messed up, not hers. In her warning to girls against going into porn, she made it quite clear that she sees nothing wrong with porn itself, she was just warning them that society wasn’t open-minded and that they’d live with the consequences forever. Now it’s possible Ms. Olson actually does feel participating in porn is bad and just hasn’t admitted it to herself yet. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to offend her friends in the business. But from what she says, it sounds like she wants to move society in a direction I oppose. That makes us opponents, and me less sympathetic.
Is shaming and shunning the appropriate response? There’s an alternative punishment that’s been tried in some places for shoplifters. In exchange for not going to jail or getting a criminal record, they’d be required to stand outside the store all day wearing a sign saying “I stole from this store”. I watched a documentary on it once. At the outset, it seemed to me a much better deal for everybody: real punishment (deterrent), in the moment, with a real second chance (no long-term consequence). However, watching the videos of these thieves doing their penance outside the store made me wonder if it really worked. Yes, some seemed pretty ashamed and penitent, but some treated it like a joke, and some became outright defiant. The “shaming” seemed to reinforce the shoplifters’ sense of separation from law-abiding society, rather than making them want to become part of law-abiding society. It was confusing, because shame has always worked on me.
The question of how to react to Ms. Olson’s predicament is pretty moot, really, because I’m not liable to meet someone like that in real life, and even if I did, I’d probably be unaware. But it is hypothetically interesting. I certainly wouldn’t abuse her, either to her face or on the internet, but I don’t think I’d want her as my kid’s teacher either.
Is public shame a good tool? Is it effective? Is it moral?
[1] Yes, I know this isn’t true. It only takes one person to out her, and then word would spread like wildfire.
[2] This is my emotional response, not an informed, data-supported opinion on public policy
Oh, and another question: what about those company morality clauses Ms. Olson’s warning about? Should they even be legal?
Women are socially shamed for having accepted money for sex. Yet, a man can pay money for sex and still be fully functional in society.
Monica Lewinsky became a caricature and a joke for late night TV. Bill Clinton? There was fallout, but he went on with his life.
Punishing former porn stars reminds me of the old rituals of burning someone in effigy, of scapegoats, or of literally sacrificing something or someone’s life in order for a village to prosper.
We needs to bring back Corn Gods for sacrificing — not people.
I think Stormy Daniels is pretty damned dignified. She’s amazingly confident and addresses her porn career head-on.
I don’t think I’d pay a bit of attention to her if it weren’t for Trump. But, since he’s made her nightly news I have to say I admire her strength of character and hold her in much higher regard than the current president.
alice, I think you’d have to explain your take on Stormy Daniels to me. She’s a part of the Trump circus I haven’t followed, but my understanding is that she’s a porn star who had an affair with Trump, got paid a bunch of money to keep quiet about it, and feeling like she could make a lot more money selling her story now, is trying to get out of the agreement to keep quiet. What about her do you find admirable? Or, are you only comparing her to Trump?
If you haven’t read it yet, you might take a look at the book The Elephant in the Brain. It talks a lot about the roles of shame as you’ve laid them out here. It also talks about the evolution of the human brain and how shame (in terms of maintaining cultural norms) is a built in feature of the brain.
All of which leaves me on the exact fence you’ve described. This woman is being persecuted because she broke some huge cultural norms. And that is beneficial to society. Do we want to normalize 19 year olds becoming porn stars just for the money? I don’t think we do. But is it okay to sacrifice someone’s entire life because they broke with acceptable societal behavior for a number of years. I don’t think we should…
Perhaps she should moves to a more tolerant, and less religious country. Isn’t it a problem that one of the most christian countries is also the least tolerant, has the biggest porn industry, and votes for Trump. Seems like there might be some hypocrisy there. There may even be parts of US where she would be accepted.
She earned millions of dollars in a few short years? Maybe there is her reward. The RN in Indiana with 2.5 kids will have to work for nearly 20 years just to get one million dollars.
I’m sorry you haven’t seen her on the news, Martin. How you could miss her I don’t quite understand but she’s perfectly comfortable in her own skin. She takes responsibility for her decisions and she isn’t going to be steamrolled.
She has figured out that the sloppiness of the contract she signed was never equatable and gave her various outs which she is pursuing with the same vigor but a whole lot more honesty than Trump pursues his with.
She’s smart. She’s confident. She’s fearless. She has her own brand of integrity that has nothing to do with her profession. You’d have to see her to understand the impact of all of that but I have seen her stand up for herself and for basic honesty and fair treatment and I admire her for it and for the way she is proceeding.
ji- Your point is well taken and as a retired preschool teacher I know exactly what it’s like to be at the bottom of the pay scale.
I don’t think Stormy Daniels is responsible for what I made or didn’t make while shaping little psyches and teaching some basic social and pre-literacy skills. Nor is she the only one to take advantage of what the market will bear. Not any more than Ivanka is for cashing in on Daddy’s name. [Does anyone think Don Jr. and Eric would even be employable without the Trump name?]
Sex workers provide a service and are compensated according to what the market will bear, just like any other worker. And BTW, porn is one of the few places where women get paid substantially more for the work they do. It would never occur to me to make moral judgements about other people or to participate in any kind of public shaming because we are strictly prohibited from doing so by scripture. Damascene had the comment of the day, I think. If anything, the public shaming of these kinds of workers demonstrates the astonishing and absurd double standard our culture still has around sex and sex work. And, not to start an argument or anything, but it seems to me that the teaching of some religions, including our own, are partly to blame for this kind of shaming since they seem to associate any sex that is not between two married people with shame, wickedness, etc. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but the puritanical attitude towards sex (and by extension, sex workers) IMHO does more harm than good. If I’m not fan of pre- or extra-marital sex, then I can choose not to have it. Anyone else’s choices aren’t my business.
Public shaming only works when the party being shamed was the beneficiary of an unfair power differential, or if they had been claiming some kind of moral authority. Neither of these apply to Bree Olsen, nor do they apply to most low-level offenders (like shoplifters) who are forced to wear signs in public. But sex offenders certainly deserve to be shamed and branded for life, as do morally bankrupt politicians and hypocritical religious leaders.
NO ONE benefits from permanently disabling or sidelining someone for a choice they may have made when they were young and lacked good judgment or desperate and couldn’t see what options and resources they might have had.
If someone should be shamed and branded for life it’s the people who are interested in doing that to other people.
A 19 year-old that doesn’t know have sex with multiple men for money while being filmed is wrong? Give me a break. Not to mention the harm that porn does to families and society.
Someone who has been abused throughout their lives and is desperate for affection and approval may well be prey to exploitation. Some of us have sufficiently privileged lives to find this unimaginable.