Body Image From the Lens of a Porn Star
Advice on staying positive and loving yourself.
Our mission at tabú is to empower millennials with accurate, engaging sexual health content. With 60% of college students learning about sex from porn, we thought, “why not get insight from someone in the industry?” While porn is a great form of sexual expression that allows us to play out our fantasies, it is important to remember that what you see in porn does not reflect reality. We’ve teamed up with the witty, brilliant, and insightful Lorelei Lee to dispel the myths and answer all your questions about sex!
Hey Lorelei,
I guess I have a few questions for you:
Why is it difficult to find someone? I guess I’ve been yearning for a relationship for awhile now and it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Its probably not a good idea to invest in anyone but myself while in the industry but does it get easier over time?
I’m super self conscious about my body. I’ve had many directors in the short 4 months I’ve been just thrash at me about my body type. Its gotten to a point where I won’t eat or I’ve had moments of guilt where I’ve purged all the food I had just eaten. How do I cope with the criticism I’m continually going to hear in the future? Have you ever dealt with directors and producers who treated you like that? It really depresses me and I hit an all time low for brief moments.
I hope I get to meet you one of these days.
Respectfully,
I, a new porn performer
Dear I,
There is so much that I want to tell you. I have been where you are right now and I promise you it can get easier. Ten years ago, when I heard negative comments on set or in internet forums, I believed them. I took them deeply to heart. When I didn’t get booked, I blamed it on my body or face. I never believed the people who said I was beautiful, and I believed that being beautiful was a necessary prerequisite to success both in work and in love. At various times, I starved myself, I binged and purged, I went to the gym as though I were running from something and I ate the kind of dry-lettuce meals that feel like punishment. There came a point when this was utterly consuming, when I was overwhelmed by the negative feelings.
But these feelings, for me — and I suspect for you as well, didn’t actually start when I started working in the adult industry. They started much earlier than that — when I was barely a teenager and I compared my body constantly to other bodies. I wanted to be thinner, taller. I wanted my breasts to be bigger and my hips to be smaller. I wanted my hair to curl and my skin to change color. I wanted to live in any body except my own.
The hearing of negative comments began earlier too. I heard them from other kids at school, and then later from dates or mean girls or someone drunk at a bar. Sometimes these comments were actually directed at me, but I also took in anything that even vaguely echoed the mean girl in my mind, any cruel remark aimed at someone I thought looked like me.
In truth, no one was meaner to me than I was to myself. I clutched all of the bad things I heard, I let them burn my brain. I never held onto the kind things other people said the way I held onto criticism.
What I’ve learned since then, what is absolutely necessary for you to learn is that other people’s cruel remarks are never about you. Criticism of your appearance — no matter how pointed and specific to you it seems, no matter how it echoes the things you fear are true — is always, always about the person speaking. Often, people make these kinds of remarks as a direct response to their own insecurities; they criticize others in an attempt to elevate themselves. Sometimes they say negative things because they want to evoke a reaction from you — they want you to feel like you need to work for their approval. Unfortunately, there are some directors in the adult industry who want to make you insecure because it makes them feel powerful. Unfortunately, this behavior is not limited to the adult industry.
It is so necessary for you to know that these people are liars. They present criticism of your body as though it is a fact. It is a lie.
After 15 years of performing sexual labor, one thing I can guarantee to you is that there is no such thing as empirically measurable beauty. There is no such thing as the ideal body or the ideal face. The ideals that we frequently judge ourselves against were invented by ad agencies and by the marketers and manufacturers of beauty products and diet plans. The worse you feel, the more you will buy. They know this. They employ tens of thousands of people, working in an utterly gendered, ableist, sizeist, transmisogynist, racist beauty industrial complex every day to make you feel like shit. No wonder you are overwhelmed. The world is actually conspiring to fuck with your body image.
What I have learned performing sexual labor is that people’s actual sexual desires fail completely to conform to the ideas put forth to them by the beauty industrial complex. People try to conform. Young men will buy Playboy and leave it on their nightstands, then later in the locked bathroom they will download Butch Cougar BBWs 24 or Otters & Bears Playland 11 and then they’ll erase it from their phones, delete their browser history, claim their credit cards were stolen.
I have worked as a stripper, as a dominatrix, and as a porn performer. I’ve been in groups of men who look at each other while receiving bachelor party lapdances, as turned-on by the approval of their cohorts as they are by the body in front of them, performing to their friends’ learned expectations of very specifically gendered and often racialized sexual roles. I’ve had that same man who pantomimed dominant masculinity in front of his friends come and find me after the party, packing my bags alone in the other room, and beg me to come back later and tie him up, whispering urgently that all he wants is to be made to wear women’s panties on his face.
At the dungeon and on set, I’ve worked with women of all sizes, ages and shapes. It’s become clear to me that industry hiring practices and payscales that are racist, transphobic, ableist and sizeist utterly fail to reflect the real desires of consumers. I’ve worked with fat women and skinny women, women who have stretch marks and scars, women who have wrinkles and saggy bits of skin, whose genitals are every shape and color imaginable. All of them receive fan mail and all of them receive hate mail. Generally the amount of good and bad feedback they receive is directly correlated to how well-known they are, or how well-marketed they are, and not at all to their actual appearance.
Good directors hire performers based on their skills, reliability, and attitude on set more than the specifics of their appearance. Good directors know that in porn everyone is beautiful. That in fact, film itself makes performers beautiful in the eyes of the consumer. Good directors know that viewers respond viscerally to the fantasy of the medium — to the thrill of seeing in bright light and closeup, of seeing explicitly and permanently committed to pixels what they think of as secret and private. Good directors know that within that fantasy world any performer who knows how to work the camera, how to talk and move and play to the light, will be transformed into a kind of beautiful that has little to do with the actual attributes of their body. A kind of beautiful that was never real to begin with.
All of which is to say that any director who tells you otherwise is simply bad at their job. Further, you do not need them.
We live in a time when the means of production and distribution are widely accessible. In the fantasy-for-sale industry there has never been a time when the performer was more powerful than we are right now. You can make money without those directors. There are multiple platforms on which you can sell your own photos, text messages, emails, phone calls, web cam shows, and video clips. Ask a friend to hold the camera, film something on your phone, and know that you do not need anyone mediating your image.*
None of this, of course will necessarily heal the deep insecurities that you describe in your email. Having this knowledge is one thing, actually healing yourself is something else. It is a process, and it is one that will take time.
Self-hatred shapes your brain. You get so used to feeling bad that you cannot remember how to feel good. You have to relearn it, slowly.
Maddeningly, the best way to feel better about your body is to stop focusing on your body. Of course, not thinking about your body is one of the most difficult things to do when you are deep in the throes of body-hating hell.
If you have medical insurance or can scrape together enough cash, by all means, find yourself a good, sex-work-friendly therapist right away. (One good place to look is the Kink Aware Professionals listings from the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom). Additionally, cultivate your support network. It’s likely that the level of insecurity you’ve described is getting in the way of your ability to make social connections and to be intimate with people, both physically and emotionally. Fight against the voices telling you that you are not good enough, and push yourself to do things with other people. Try to find activities in which your appearance is secondary. Rather than go out clubbing or partying (any social situation that requires you to dress up can magnify body insecurities), take a class in something you’re interested in, or try hanging out with just one or two people at a time.
Learning a new skill — whether it’s cooking or Spanish or art history or whatever else you are interested in — is also a good way to keep reminding yourself that you are not defined by your work. Both in terms of your body issues, and in regards to your question about meeting someone, the societal ideas about what it means to be a sex worker will undoubtedly loom large. Being a sex worker in a world that hates us can be incredibly isolating. It is so important not to let other people limit you or make you feel small. Having a regular activity in your life other than work can dramatically change your self image, can remind you of the myriad other skills you already possess, of how to interact with people you aren’t trying to get to hire you, and of the multiple ways that you are valuable and successful and fun to be around. This confidence can make every social interaction easier.
I do not believe it’s impossible to find love while working in the adult industry — I know literally hundreds of sex workers who are happily coupled. I also know hundreds more who are happily single, and who are happily enjoying every other available romantic configuration. I know that dating just plain sucks a lot of the time for everyone, and that the difficulties of navigating romance can be compounded by the intense discrimination and judgement sex workers face daily (especially when dating). I wouldn’t say to only invest in yourself, but I do believe that investing in yourself is a necessary precursor to a satisfying relationship. Just as body issues are likely to become easier if you focus less on your body, dating tends to be more satisfying if you have spent some time giving yourself what you need, and if you feel confident that you are capable of taking care of your own emotional needs without anyone else’s help.
In addition to doing a social activity like a class, every day try to actively be kind to your body. Every day do something that is simply pleasurable — a bath, a walk, a few moments of sitting in sunshine. Please, remember that you are important. That you are already beautiful and also that being beautiful is actually not all that important to who you are or how lovable you are. Please remember that you deserve happiness. That you deserve pleasure and that you deserve love. I promise you this is true.
*Of course, be aware of the laws around the distribution and production of adult content — most websites on which you can publish will have a page describing how to follow the Federal 2257 record-keeping regulations and any other applicable laws.
Send your questions to: xoxoloreleilee@gmail.com or tweet them @missloreleilee. To ask more questions about sex and get answers, download Tabú in the app store today!
