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| Porn Users Forum » The Psychology of Porn - Actresses |
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| 06-22-08 08:56am - 5801 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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Monahan (0)
Active User  Posts: 348 Registered: Jan 17, '07 Location: SF Valley, CA |
The Psychology of Porn - Actresses There's a response to today's poll question that prompts a matter about which I've been thinking for a long time. That's the psychological thing. (The poll question has nothing to do with this subject, but the response is from a member who moderates in a psychological forum on the web.) I have always found myself watching the babes and thinking about how the porn business has changed and what effect being in the business has on the female porn performers. Back in the 60's, porn was all under the counter and any female who was even identified incorrectly as participating in porn was scarred for life. Over the counter "porn" back then could only show boobs (any below the waist stuff had to be airbrushed out) and was still available only in the big cities. Back in the beginning of open porn (i. e., when Playboy first showed muff in a photo layout in the 1970's) followed by Linda Lovelace's fellatio performed on Harry Reems in 1972 in Deep Throat, most porn magazine and movie producers with any sense of decency warned the girls that their lives would be permanently changed and that they would probably not get any jobs in the entertainment industry if they were known to have been in porn. Playboy and Penthouse even asked its models to sign statements acknowledging that they got and understood the warnings. These days, however, actresses like Jenna Jameson are A list celebrity millionaires and are established as roll models for today's girls. A graduating senior in a nearby university brags about her success in porn in her yearbook. TV dramas are treating porn actresses as they would anyone who has been successful in any venture. (Little negative commentary, sometimes sympathetic treatment, etc. Law & Order even explores the question - can a porn actress be raped on a movie set when she's decided in the middle of a scene that she's had enough?) So my question is, is participating in the porn industry causing any psychological damage at all to the girls entering the business in the 2000's the way it did in the past as described in the books written by Ginger Lynn, Linda Lovelace and Christy Canyon? Would you accept it as a career path for your daughter? (I'm not asking if you'd encourage it...but how would you react if your daughter told you that's what she will be doing and that she'll be extremely careful in choosing her work and her partners and will take every precaution against STD's.) | |
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| 06-22-08 11:02am - 5801 days | #2 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
"Cause" can be a tough one to pinpoint. Was the porn career a contributing factor in Savanna's suicide? Or was it the substance abuse? Or was it the unhappy childhood? You could say there were multiple causes, still just looking at the question from a "nuture" (vs. "nature") perspective. Some people get stung by bees and have very little reaction, while others go into anaphylactic shock. The point is that for women who are more emotionally fragile, a porn career could be bad idea and it could "cause" psychological damage in a sense. Then there are others, like Tera Patrick and Jenna Jameson, who seem to have things in perspective and do OK. And having tons of moolah may not bring happiness, but it sure can help to keep misery in check. It probably helps to be a strong, self-confident and assertive woman with a positive self image. (Not exactly news, eh?) Asia Carrera seems like that also. And she's got a way-high IQ, too. And I don't have a daughter, but if I did, of course I'd object to my precious baby doing that for a living. Dad isn't Dad if he's not there to protect his daughter from threats, real or imaginary. I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. Edited on Jun 23, 2008, 03:47pm | |
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| 06-22-08 05:56pm - 5800 days | #3 | |
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PinkPanther (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,136 Registered: Jan 08, '07 Location: Oakland, CA |
Yeah, even girls that I like getting dances with at strip clubs - I'm always glad when I hear that they're in school and if they're going on about how hard school will be and how much more fun they could have dancing for a living and partying at night, I'll always encourage them to go for the hard work and have more options open to them, even though it means that I'm deprived of their company. Cause otherwise I'd have a bad taste in my mouth whenever I spent time with them, feeling like I'd sold them down the river. If I don't see them for a year at a time because they only come back for Summer break, at least I know that I pointed them in what I felt was the best direction for them and can really enjoy our time together. | |
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| 06-22-08 11:40pm - 5800 days | #4 | |
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exotics4me (0)
Active User  Posts: 664 Registered: Jan 12, '07 Location: USA |
Hey Monahan, The first thing we have to do is go back to the basics of Psychology to discuss this. I'm not for sure the exact number, but lets say the majority of Psychologists believe self-esteem/worth is built during the childhood years. A problem we have in America is the "Couch Psychologist" those who watch Dr. Phil and think they are now Psychologists. I spent hundreds of tedious hours in classes discussing Freud, as I am a Freudian based Psychologist. This is very different from Dr. Phil or the more mainstream Psychologists that are on tv. The most common thought about the mental damage a porn star could have would be that the woman feels dirty, used, manipulated and so on. The thing is, that isn't the damage I see or believe happens. The damage that I believe can and does happen is Model A is an average girl from small town USA or small town Hungary for that matter. She is well-built, average face, and has had maybe 3 or 4 boyfriends by the time she is 18. She turns 18, becomes a porn model and all of a sudden, little average woman with a nice build is getting thousands of emails from men telling her how beautiful she is. This creates a very large ego inside the model. I'm not saying all of them, but just doing an in general example here. She stays in the business for 7 years, then retires, thousands of men are still writing her and telling her that she is the most beautiful woman on the planet. She goes home, and just like that, she is back to being normal average girl that only gets a little attention from men. Also, she is now going to be judged by some people. These things combine to cause her once large ego to become a severe drop in self-esteem. You probably know of Ozzy Osbourne, he said one time that all of his life he thought all those women were in love with HIM, but in reality they were in love with Ozzy, not John, and he said that was what made him straighten his life up and be faithful to his wife. Porn models usually don't have this in their retirement years. If one person judges them for being a porn model, they will now believe that everyone judges them. This is why you see so many porn stars that marry each other or you see porn stars marrying aging rockers or athletes. See Tera Patrick marrying hardcore rocker/actor Biohazard/Oz's Evan Seinfeld. See Jenna Jameson being with Tito Ortiz, just as a few examples. The damage is self-made, no different than a drug addict who thinks everyone is judging them. This is one of America's biggest weaknesses, our stars, be it porn, be it sports, movies, fall from grace and we slap their face on a National Enquirer and make a fool of them. I just don't see how a girl willing to take pictures or movies can be damaged from it, unless it is her own insecurity that causes it. In which case, the insecurity would have gotten her anyway, no matter what her career choice would have been. Now there are exceptions, but they all require a model being forced to do something she doesn't want to do. We've all heard stories of a porn producer telling a woman they will pay her $500 more to do this or that, now, if she takes that money, again, it would be her fault that it damaged her. I can give you a few examples, including one of myself. As I mentioned in that poll question, I am a college football blogger. A big reason that I am, I was at one time a college football player at a top 40 or so school. Everybody on campus knew me. One day, I woke up and couldn't walk, post-concussive stress syndrome. For the next week, I hated myself. I went from being a star to being a guy who could barely walk, in one day. Of course, I could have stayed down and let the syndrome and partial paralysis kill me with grief. But I didn't, and now I only have about 10% nerve damage in my legs and hardly notice it. This is a similar situation that a porn star would face, but many of them don't have the esteem or confidence to get back up once bounced out of the industry. So, they then play the typical American pity card. They can do that because porn is generally looked down on. They can claim a religion and they will be praised even more so, and pitied even more, which sadly, once a person has sunk to this level negative attention from others is as good as positive attention. All of this is based on attention. A woman's psyche and esteem is built and crushed by attention or lack thereof. As for a daughter, how I would handle it, I would ask her why she wants to do it. If it is for the money, then I don't have a problem with it. As with me, I destroyed my body for an education to get myself and my mom out of a very bad neighborhood, PinkPanther probably knows the neighborhood, most call it the Hollenbeck District of Los Angeles. So, in a little less obvious way, I sold my body out by playing football to get ahead in life. Now, if I had a daughter and she said she was doing it for the attention, or for the sex, I might be a little harder on her on that. I would probably talk to her about the type of attention she would be getting and how it could affect her mind, as I showed above. Huge amounts of attention to very little in a day. I will end this way, many Psychologists do believe the reason that women go into porn is because they didn't have enough attention growing up, especially male attention. I do think that does happen, but I really believe most of these girls today, especially the American ones, are in it to get paid doing something they love to do. I wish I knew where I got the Eva Angelina video interview. She talks about having sex when she was very young and filming it. And how her only plans in life was to be a porn star because "I have been giving it away for free all these years. I might as well get paid for it". On the other hand is Aria Giovanni. I don't know for sure how many degrees she has, but she has multiple degrees. And maybe the thing that should be applauded the most, once she realized last year that she had fell into that huge ego group and married a rock star, she then divorced him and now lives a very normal life, about 30 miles from me. I've seen her at the store buying groceries, driving thru Tommy Burgers or In and Out Burgers. Her intelligence shows, not just in the fact that she got the degrees, but because she also isn't letting her self become a "star". My grandfather used to tell me, "The biggest star has the farthest way to fall" and overall, that is what my opinion is saying is the damage these stars face. Just the huge fall. My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich. - Chuck Palahniuk | |
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| 06-24-08 01:19pm - 5798 days | #5 | |
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Wittyguy (0)
Active User  Posts: 1,138 Registered: Feb 04, '08 Location: Left Coast, USA |
x Edited on Apr 19, 2023, 02:27pm | |
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| 06-24-08 08:08pm - 5798 days | #6 | |
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exotics4me (0)
Active User Posts: 664 Registered: Jan 12, '07 Location: USA |
Wittyguy, Any person who is bothered by something they did when they were a teen has self-esteem problems. A person with a strong self-esteem would say, "Its my past, I can't change it" and move on. I would say that is even the very definition of a mentally strong person. My decisions when I was 18 were terrible, but as the old saying goes, "You live, you learn, you grow". If a 45 year old woman, such as Christy Canyon when she wrote her book, still is being negatively affected by something she did 20 years earlier, the only real answer is that she has esteem issues. She is dwelling on something that probably isn't near as bad as she makes it out to be in her mind, which shows insecurity. Insecurity comes from low self-esteem. One reason that I mentioned that I am a Freudian based Psychologist, is because Freudian Psychology is very harsh for some people to read. It is a reality Psychology that looks to remove all of the politically correct methods that "tv" Psychologists like Dr. Phil uses. For example, say I have a patient who is a drug addict. The first thing they do is ask me to prescribe pain medication, since the withdrawals are painful. I won't do it. If I do it, they become addicted to the pain medicine. That is very harsh to some, it is like I'm saying, "Lay there in pain and suffer" but 9 times out of 10, those drug addicted patients will come back to me 2 years later, hug me, shake my hand and thank me for being so harsh to them. I have a couple of tattoos that I regret getting when I was younger, but sometimes, I show them to my patients who are having trouble moving on beyond their past failures. One is on my upper back/shoulder that says, "Don't look over me" and the other says, "Failure + Acceptance of Failure = Success" As far as real mental damage, I hate to say it this way, but it is impossible to have real mental damage unless you are forced to do whatever it was that hurt you. The biggest problem we have in America are the self-loathers who go around painting this bleak picture of their world, and how awful life is for them, when in reality, the only thing wrong is that they aren't getting their way. My first time I jacked off, I thought I'd invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich. - Chuck Palahniuk | |
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| 12-31-08 04:30am - 5609 days | #7 | |
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ramscrota (0)
Suspended  Posts: 54 Registered: Jul 04, '07 Location: Geelong Vic Australia |
Interesting question, and I think monahan has made some really good observations about the changing times. I think these days it is very different. In past decades, is was a shameful thing, but nowadays, I think its seen almost as a 'cool' way for young women to earn a bit of money and have a bit of an exciting aventure as well. I think these are the kinds of girls who get attracted to amateur sites, and some move on and become porn stars | |
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| 12-31-08 04:31am - 5609 days | #8 | |
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ramscrota (0)
Suspended Posts: 54 Registered: Jul 04, '07 Location: Geelong Vic Australia |
PS Monahan, I love your avitar! | |
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| 12-31-08 11:13am - 5609 days | #9 | |
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Monahan (0)
Active User Posts: 348 Registered: Jan 17, '07 Location: SF Valley, CA |
Thanks. And thanks for resurrecting the thread. | |
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| 12-31-08 11:59am - 5608 days | #10 | |
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Tree Rodent (0)
Active User  Posts: 708 Registered: Oct 29, '08 Location: UK |
I don't know which avatar I like the best. It has to be either Monahan's penguin or Toadsith's Prisoner. Since the thread has been resurrected and I wasn't here when it was started I would like to add a few things. I could drone on forever, but I am always doing that, so I will try to keep it reasonably short. First thing is I agree with most of the things said by both Monahan and Exotics. The truth is rarely one whole. It is nearly always a combination of ideas and sides of an argument from all angles. If you look at the posts from both of these people they contain IMO an awful lot of the truth on the subject. With sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, when you start to look into them, you don't get the whole truth, but you do get some of the truth that can lead you on to discovering things about yourself. You can then use this to understand other people better. I really believe you have to understand yourself before you can understand other people. There are always gaps and flaws in theoretical disciplines. One of my favourite stories is about the contempt a lot of physical doctors have for mind doctors. There was this guy who kept trying to kill himself. No one really knew why. Successful. Lovely wife. Lovely kids. Mind doctor spent hours talking to him, trying to understand him. Finally the session was over. Out comes the mind doctor. Everyone was waiting with baited breath. "Well?" The reply was - "quite frankly I really don't know." Much to everyone's laughter and derision. Sociology, psychology and psychiatry obviously have their limits. I think Monahan is right about the generalisation. Knowing how complicated my mind is, and knowing how fu**ed up I am, I realise that it is highly likely everyone is the same. Everyone has complicated thought processes. With the porn actresses thing, I think there are so many reasons out there that it is hard to generalise. Everyone's situation and circumstances which lead up to them being porn actresses are so different that there must be combinations of thousands of conflicting thoughts and feelings. Naturally money is a big leading factor, but there are tons of different reasons for how you eventually choose to earn that money. There is a thing that I remember from a few years back. Originally it was thought that people only had a few characterisics and conflicting emotions which made up one personality, or state of mind at the time. Then they discovered there were literally thousands, all pulling in different directions. Exotics may well be aware of this report. It illustrates how complicated the human mind is. Being trained and qualified I am sure he would benefit and understand far more from this report, than a layman like myself would. Even so I was fascinated, and in many respects not surprised. I think we are all guided and governed by a ton of conflicting emotions, moods, and personality traits, as well as outside influences. Reading this back, I found it really was long and dreary so I edited it. It still is, but at least it's shorter. Edited on Dec 31, 2008, 03:41pm | |
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