“Everyone” is an artist..”

My dad was born in a fairly uninteresting outer london place called "burnt oak" . On the tube its one stop before the end of the northern line (but potentially the end depending on how the trains are acting up on most days)

Lineage is a funny thing isn/t it? I think it is something that my generation (and those later) rarely think about, (unless adopted or in other newschool family arrangements that make parentage less clear). but perhaps i’m jumping in too soon. i should explain why the subject is on my mind at all. My family is disparate at best (on both sides) allegedly quite big but operating in a much smaller cliquier fashion. How do i start? My mother’s maiden name for example, the name is not a birth name of my grandfather, it is one he created specifically to differentiate his branch of the family from the others. he added to his surname a hyphenated suffix that means "the first" in his dialect. the first because he was the firstborn. thus the name that my uncles carry is one that exists nowhere else in our family and nowhere else in ghanian culture. when asked by an african of my mother’s maiden name they are often confused by my response,

My own surname is also a strange one. it is unusual to have the name quin with one n, and i often wonder if my paternal great grandfather did his own doctoring when he arrived in the country from ireland. but thats a question i have yet to find and answer for. it is my father’s side of the family that has recently thrown up the question of my being the end of the line.
it all began a few weeks ago. i have a second cousin on my father’s side who i rarely see, as he lives outside of london and isn’t terribly close to my father. i met him when I was 10 or 12 dreaming of moving to London, being older and a quite monied accountant he took it on himself to introduce his young cousin to the side of London my parents had not revealed to me. I remember buying tea and biscuits at fortnum and maison and seeing a rather stand out producton of arcadia at the opulent theatre royal. i was impressed and precocious and he enjoyed impressing me. i think he had already begun to see me as a rather "exotic" relation, being very different from the rest of our family

This second cousin of mine has a daughter, one who i have guessed to be even more spoiled in her upbringing than me (thus are the similaties between an only daughter and the youngest one). as said daughter has recently become married my second cousin thought it would be nice to have a get together of all the distant relations of our generation of the family. especially as most, if not all,have never met. and so i recieved a politely formal invitation to attend a luncheon in his private club in epsom surrey, home of polo and massive green overly tended lawns. i accepted the invitation in a similarly polite and formal manner and as much as i am invited in being exotic (mixed race, american, "creative", "urban", lesbian (well i dont’ think they know about that) and the youngest..) the prospect of the whole event seemed similarly (terrifyingly) exotic to me.

the african side of me sees family as a closer bigger entity. there is none of this 2nd, 3rd, 4th cousin twice removed business. all is simplified by age. is the relation older and not a sibling? they are an uncle or aunt. the same age? a cousin, younger? a nephew or niece.

the briitish side is more difficult. my grandfather was briliant, charismatic, and a ladies man. He married several times. i never met my biological grandmother, but i know she had a problem with my mum not being an intellectual, and then with being african. the woman my grandfather married before my childhood was the one i loved as my gran. My dad has two sisters. his half sister is my dearest aunt. his "whole" sister didn’t really approve of mum being black, and thus never formed a relation with me. all of this came to a terrifying head at my grandfathers funeral where i (aged 19) met most of my dad’s family for the first time. being the only black person in my dad’s family. and having had pictures of myself over the years in my grandad’s house, EVERYONE knew who i was. I had less obvious clues to my relations and found the whole experience even more painfull than it obviously was already.

funerals and weddings are these strange events that bring families together. the only closeness i felt was to my step-grandmother’s daughters. they were no blood relation to me but we were open to eachother, we smoked and they offered their scarves to dry my tears.
i coudn’t comprehend who all the others were.,,.

but back to the present, and the impending epsom luncheon.
today i came home to a guest list and family tree dictating how all were related to one another. staring at this family tree I was suddenlty struck by a realisation. I am the end of my great grandfather’s line. you see my great grandfather was the only one with children, he had two boys and two girls. of the two boy, my grandfather is the last with living relations. he had my father and my two aunts. i am an only child. and so I, the remaining quin stares at me from a web of branches.

this is made wierder for me by the fact that i am also the end of my mother’s lline. something that carries even more weight in ghanian culture. . in her culture a families lineage is determined through the women, why? the obsession is not with a name but with blood. and the only way to truly be sure that a child is of the families blood is if they are born from a woman of the familiy’s blood. the theory being a woman can say anyone is the father, but a mother can never fake her relationship to the child. and for my mum’s family i am the last daughter of a daughter. when my mum married my father the elders worried. how would a child born to a foreign man in a foreign place ever understand the importance of her worth to her family, to her culture?. rightly so. my mother never told me of this. it was my cousin who softly informed me years ago.

and to make this all the more ironic for both sides of my family i am born ..

a lesbian…

one of nature’s jokes perhaps? so what does it mean? i know many of my age and my culture would shrug and say "so what" but actually it makes me feel a powerful and important burden of blood that is difficult to ignore. i don’t have a definitvie answer to the kids question. my instinct has generally been against biologically having a child. i never thought about surnames and kids and marriage with real seriousness. but suddenly it seems very important to at least consider giving birth to a child (later…later) and at the very least for them to have a hyphenated version of my name. because it doesn’t seem right for my family (collectivelly) to end with me somehow.

in the meantime. what will i wear to this brisk "family" country club luncheon. the dress code on the invite says "smart casual jacket and tie optional" . the question is do i don the jacket or the tie? perhaps i go with braces…

  A Dalston Dinner invitation

I had just moved back to

London

, and found myself (once again) with the arduous task of finding somewhere to live. With the classifieds in LOOT picked clean by half nine, the last ad I had highlighted shown like a beacon. The words “unconventional” and “artistic individuals” certainly grabbed my attention

On arriving at the address it was obvious which house I’d come to see. Amongst a neat row of pale Georgian terraces was one that looked like a box of paints had unceremoniously been tipped right over it. Even in the grey light the myriad of hues made me want to reach for my sunglasses. A violet door graced a citrus door frame. This was given no respite by the exterior walls, lime and canary respectively.

Somewhat excited, somewhat intimidated, I knocked tentatively on the door. After some time, long enough to consider leaving, it opened. An intense pair of eyes scanned me over without subtlety I didn’t mind, but I at least wished he’d make his inspection inside.

            “Come in”

. If I had found the exterior overwhelming, it was conservative by comparison to what lay within. Somewhere I could hear Martha Stewart fainting.

             “I suppose you’d like a tour”

He said it as if my wanting to see the house was an odd, for someone who came to see the house? As I continued to walk through the place, everywhere I turned a rainbow splash of colours blinded me. I had never seen a house like this before. I was amazed by the broken plate mosaic on the fridge, the fuchsia fresco in the bathroom, the pulpit in the living room.

I thought I had seen as much as my eyes could handle, but it was time to see the room for rent. He took me to the end of a long hallway where a rickety orange ladder rested. I fleetingly questioned whether my name was

Alice

, and I had mistakenly eaten or drank something.. I smiled at him weakly, but not enough to mask my confusion. He gave a huffy little sign and looked upward. His gaze led my eyes up the ladder to an open hatch. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to make the connection that this was the portal to the room.

Grateful for not showing up in anything other than trainers, I gingerly edged up the ladder into the space. It was a loft room, fairly spacious, reasonably bright and all in that bold shade of orange. I climbed down what felt like far too many rungs of the ladder (mentally calculating my likely agility when laden with shopping, and accident factor when drunk).

            “It’s very bright isn’t it?”

I stared up at the hatch and tried to imagine how on earth I’d ever get my futon up there. He then took me to the “dining area” as he called it, a collaged over table in the kitchen with a few mismatched chairs. Two others sat there nonchalantly, and though facing me neither seemed the slightest bit aware of my presence. The landlord paused momentarily, only to say

            “So what is it exactly that you do?”

            “I’m a filmmaker”

            “What kind of films do you make?”

Say Super 8! NO Say you make installations!

            “I”

He cut me off.

            “No no. I’m sorry. I really should have asked before you came. But we have    

             been looking for ever so long. And I thought that perhaps I was being fussy…

            But… Oh you know how it is .”

My face had never looked so blank.

            “Look…Sandra…”

            “Sara.”

            “

Sharon

…”

            

            “Sara”

            “Exactly!”

What?!

“I have to think very carefully about the make up of this house. The

Artistic balance shall we say. And I really believe that what this house needs … is…a painter… rather than.. a filmmaker.

But I want to invite you for a dinner. I think it will be very interesting for you. .. for your work. What do you think?”

“Um…”

“Perfect! Come to the house next Thursday at seven.

And don’t be late. I detest tardiness”

I walked out the door in a daze. For the days that followed I wondered whether to accept this most unusual dinner invitation. It got to Wednesday. I phoned a friend.

            “You went to see a room and he invited you for a dinner?..You’re sure he isn’t-?”

“ Yes. I can’t see him fancying anyone… other than himself. Although he is a bit obsessed with painters.

“Well.. I don’t have any plans tomorrow night..”

We were at the house the next evening at five to seven. What transpired was even further through the looking glass that my last venture. A circus performer smoked her pipe sagely, and spoke of the failure of her painting career. A photographer mumbled (partly in French, partly in German), as he chain smoked joints. A young Saint Martins student took deep drags off her filterless gitanes, as she told us how the host had rekindled her passion for painting. Overall, there was a lot of smoking and talking about painting.

Our host told my friend and I, how he liked to plan elaborate parties. He spent months creating complicated characters, and then sent out invitations dictating who all the guests would come as (not dressed as, but total characterisation as). He told us he liked to administer silly weddings at these parties, from his pulpit in the living room. He told us he would invite us the next time he had one.

We never received an invitation to the “unconventional” house again.

having one of those end-of-the-days where i feel a bit like this..

(click on the picture) …. 

You pursued me from afar from the moment I first opened my eyes. When we finally came together I felt particularly special to you. I felt like I was someone who really got you, your sensibilities, sentiments, ideas. But then I also always gave you space for your secrets, your intrigue. That was what had attracted me to you in the first place. I would always be the first to champion you, both those new, and to those jaded. No one could be more devoted to you than I.

But how can I say this… the pedestal I put you on has shattered. I’ve lost my suburban wonder. I’ve become too spoiled by having you, (and all you have to offer) on a plate all the time. Anyways, ours is a open relationship, and with the amount of people you are involved with, why should I matter?. Transient is your middle name after all.

There was a time when I resolved that ours was true storybook love. I would build my castle in your kingdom. I made all the commitments you would expect me to make. But something was fluttering in the back of my mind. Before I said my vows, was I really ready to settle? Really? My eyes began to wander and images of other cities became all the more enticing. By comparison they seemed so much more edgy, alive, political, alternative, sexy, beautiful. I questioned my decision to commit to you. What were you doing for me anyhow? Your charms seemed considerably lacking.

I felt this on and off for some time. But let the record hold that I was never ever unfaithful to you (well… we don’t count those 8 months with new york, you were very cool about that, and I came running back anyway.) and I would never hear of anyone talking any part of you down (well maybe in regards to the weather, but it is terribly temperamental). Let’s face it, 10 years is a respectable time for a serious relationship. I loved you too much to give up on you entirely, but I wanted to escape and forget you for a short while. I began fantasizing about it… often.

I told myself t a trial separation would revive what we had again. And just as I was on the brink of making my rendezvous plans, as my dreams filled with possibilities of

paris

,

Barcelona

or

new york

, you threw a couple characters my way. The kind of characters that gave me that exciting thrill of discovery. The kind of thrill that drew me to you in the first place and kept me crazy about you for years and years. And these other two loved you just as much but were also a little jaded with you.. Our collective energy collided and I had the kind of Saturday night I was sure you could only have on holiday in uncharted urban lands. And I realised that these experiences are always possible, it’s just sometimes you have to radically alter your routines to find them.

I’ve been too demanding . You can’t always provide for me the way I would like you to. I have to make the effort. I may know you more intimately than when we first met, But there is still so much of you that I could know. So forgive me for doubting you. I’m sure you must go through it often but. I’m sorry.

But hey I was thinking, rather than us getting all married  and settled can we go about things less conventionally? I was hoping we could have a series of mad tempestuous affairs.. I have a feeling you’d be up for it…

This morning before I came to work I stopped at the drug store. I was waiting at the counter to pay for a bottle of water when I noticed the shelf behind me.

A wide selection of condoms were stacked on the shelves, in a rainbow arrangement of colours. I noticed that just to the left of the condoms, was a wide selection of home pregnancy tests… on the other side of the condoms was a wide selection of…contact lens products???

?????????????????????

 

It was someone’s job at some point to design the layout of the store

and decide what should go where and why. The logic of placing pregnancy tests next to condoms seems both cheeky and pragmatic.

(After all, if one doesn’t work, you may need to purchase the other)

But contact lenses?

Why should saline, and eye drops be shelved near the condoms and pregnancy tests? Any ideas to help solve this mystery are most welcome. All I know is I better not get distracted the next time I need to buy eye drops. If I came home with a box of condoms or a pregnancy test instead, My girlfriend would be unimpressed, and I’d definitely 

“have some ‘splaining to do”

every once in a while. in the middle of a fairly ordinary conversation or email exchange, i am suddenly faced with an age old question of Why…? I’ve gotten used to explaining various aspects of myself over my life? why the skintone? the accent? the departure from america, the choice of living in this city? and over and over i patiently reel out my stock answers. to new work colleagues, friends of friends, friends of family, cabdrivers, bartenders, the owners of cafe’s i frequent. i think I could live here for the rest of my life, and at age 80 i’ll still be sleeptalking through my

" yes i live here… ….for x years.. yup, still have an accent"

i can already feel the corners of my mouth etching into an eternal weak smile.

but there’s another "So why…" question I really am tiring of. So i’ve decided to go all out and answer it here in full. Then the next time someone asks me, I can either copy this entry in my reply email, or perhaps scribble the link on a napkin and pass it back to the person accross from me who’s asked.

so here we go… why am i gay?

All gay people quickly get used to knowing they are different, and thus questioning that difference, and get prepared to offer the answers they have arrived at when asked about that difference. I’m going to say something a tiny bit radical now and suggest that the answers that are arrived at are not necessarily innate and natural ones. I think the true honest answer for the why of anyone’s sexuality is because you are. simple. Sure you can meditate on the subject, and come up with some pop psych intriguing answers, but that seems to me worlds apart from the actual "it just ‘is"-ness of it.

I guess i can’t complain too much on the matter though. I have been out for long enough and to enough people to avoid the question most of the time. I know very few people now for example, who have known me as anything other than lesbian. Friends usually point it out to their friends before i come into the picture, to avoid any social mishaps. There is also a certain ease in having been at peace with my sexuality for so long, that makes my references to my girlfriend genuininely natural and incidental. In this way coming out becomes kind of organic, and in a way not like "coming out" at all.

i’m far warmer to the

"when did you work out you were…"

variation of the question. as it seems more relevant, and right on and intrigued. and i’m completely past response to the

" how can you be…but you’re so feminine/beautiful?"

variation. as its an irritating byproduct of a culture that is still coming to grips with the idea of lesbian and "beautiful" to not be mutually exclusive… (or sometimes its just a cheesy sleazy chat up line.)

But in fairness to those i’ve lost in the ether, who suddenly find me again, the question bares a different kind of relevance. This is because i am not a gay person who was "obvious" as a dyke even to my grandmother at the age of three. and tomboy that i may have been in my heart i was never good enough at sports, or angry enough about dresses to cause suspicion. The major matter of confusion for those long lost friends of highschool, and dc/baltimore rave days, is that i had boyfriends. lots of boyfriends.

i went through boyfriends like they were going out of fashion (maybe because with some i was more or less accessorizing..

a skater boy to perfect my grunge look,

a b-boy when my aesthethic was more hip hop…i really wish i was joking).

For me this in of itself was kind of a sign.

And it really did take me a long time to be comfortable with groups of women. And i really was always more comfortable with boys. and as much of a "freak" as i was, i was also very much a conventional teenage american girl, reading fashion mags, planning for prom, developing crushes on guys who showed me attention (or ignored me entirely). I also had loads of gay guy friends. Gay guy friends whose gayness was so resounding, that they had to shrug and claim it before puberty had even hit. And as soon as we all at least looked 18, we spent a lot of time in gay clubs. and i saw gay women who had a subculture all of thier own that didnt’ seem to relate to me.

If i now do the gay person pondering on their sexuality thing, i can now retrospectively see how girls i just thought i reeeeeally liked as friends were actually crushes. But at the time i didn’t see it that way. My diary entries make no mention of any interest in girls up to about age 15. There is however, full documentation of every breakup and make up i went through with boys. Suddenly that nascent interest in girls was very much present. But at age 15, in a highschool in northern virginia, there wasn’t much i could do about it. I saw a lot of other gay teens i met, dating other gay teens they met, just because they were the only ones they had met. I never got the idea of hooking up with "the only other gay in the village" just because you were like.. the only ones. on a desert island maybe.. but this wasn’t a desert island.

it was only high school…

Did i mention that even in the throes of my burgeoning "bisexuality", i had a very serious boyfriend? a totally in love with, planning on living together after highschool boyfriend? and the attraction between us was very much mutual and real? well then what happened? The short version is there was a girl. and then there was a lot more questioning, and then the split with that boyfriend…and then… another boy? and then… another boy?!

For me it came down to two things… vanity and context. vanity because my superficial side is often all too attracted to one who is all too attracted to me. context because if there isn’t the kind of romantic/sexual interaction one desires, i think most will make do with what they’ve got. This is clearly proven in too many cases to count. ( and not just the obvious ones like the single sex private schools and prisons (see how i strung those together where gayness proudly prevails, or the liberal arts colleges where women happily spout lesbianism, only to graduate to conventional hetersexual married lives, or the quaint limitations of small town and suburban cultures where homosexuality is not considered ,just because no one in the community considers it.. (or do they) .

i do believe that there are some so hell bent on their sexuality that nothing can deter it, but the older i get and the older my friends get, the more i see and hear the stories of the lifetime indentified hetero who suddenly finds themselves head over heels in a same sex life partnership, or loud and shouting activist queer who finds themselves getting married and living the conventional lifestyle the parents had long given up on them having, or even intriguingly, the gay man and gay woman who really are queerly attracted to one another. With sexuality i do believe that anything is possible. we label because it is pragmatic to do so, because its less scary and it because it makes dating and relating to the same and opposite sex less of a minefield than it already is.

so what about me then? why do i label myself?

for one i like the label, i identify with it more than the other labels on offer, and i dislike the pretense and ambiguousness outwardly fighting against those labels suggests. coming back to this big old question of why, and the development of who i am, its abundantly clear to me that my interest and desire in women completely and totally overrides any interest i have in men. whether its always been that way or has evolved more to be that way through my experiiences is irrelevant. its a chicken and egg issue. its not which came first, but the fact that both ARE.

  There is a fundamental difference between how i can find a man attractive and how i DO find a woman attractive. does that make sense? what i mean to say is that seeing a woman i’m attracted to pass me on the street is above all logic. it is visceral, instantaneous, reflexive. while as i can see an attractive man, and after summing up the total of his parts: physicality,style, and character i can then arrive at the conclusion: he is attractive. it is never simply immediate.

when i was a teenager and i had crushes on boys it was the same. i was excited about a series of things i’d worked out i liked. however when i finally had the opportunity to date my own sex, i was running after women who often "on paper" were a little disastrous, but i was too consumed to do anything other than pursue them relentlessly.

but the honest truth is that after saying all that, the big why is somthing that can’t be explained. i might go out and test that theory and start asking straight people why they are straight. and after they laugh at the "joke" or perhaps raise their eyebrows and give a silly short answer, i might smile and ask them again and make it clear that i am serious. maybe it will be interesting for them? maybe its somthing that should happen more often? in the bizarre world that is todays relationships between men and women (and it really does make me grateful to be gay) maybe a little questioning about the "big why" of heterosexuality could do a world of good.

i guess we can all benefit from a bit of questioning. i’m certainly not harmed by it.

just a bit bored…

A few nights back i got home late, most likely drunk and try as i might i couldn’t sleep (a rarity when i’m drunk). After trying to read a chapter of a novel, scribbling incoherently and giving up on writing, being further annoyed at the lack of tv options, and answering every last email i had never gotten round to, i sat back in my chair, stared back at my laptop screen and drummed my fingers distractedly on my desk. The laptop seemed to challenge me, what now then? I think it may have been three in the morning. To make matters worse… I was out of smokes. After briefly considering calling someone in the states (a practical occasion for time differences)

I resolved that i was too drunk even to do that… The screen challenged me again, now what?..

Well i thought, maybe i should look up some porn? It’s worth mentioning here that this is something i never do (I know most people saying that would be lying, but i’m being boringly honest here.) In all fairness, back in the day when the internet was beginning to really kick off, i was a bit of a "cyber" fiend.

But i soon tired of that when i realised that most of the "women" in the "women only" chatrooms were men, no one ever seemed to type as fast as me, and imagination on the other end of the chat was usually severely lacking. As for porn in general, somewhere between my love of the craft of film, and the art of story, I never can get excited enough about two women pretending to be lesbian, in situations that are clearly contrived, with dialogue that really is best not to be spoken. It ends up irritating me more than turning me on.

But suddenly here i was in the middle of the night, a little drunk,  unable to sleep and bored beyond belief. At the very least i must be able to find something amusing if not erotic? No? And so i began my google search. Unbeknownst to me the days of free accessible pornography were long gone (as far as i could search anyway). But i have to admit I did get a bit of a naughty school girl thrill out of searching. You see, most of my online time is spent at work, where fears of looking up anything vaguely off colour, and being caught out are rife. I even get a little bit nervous looking at sites for gay organizations after hours at work. It may be legit and innocuous, but you never know if the IT guy will see it that way. but i digress…

Now i was at home, i could google anything i damn liked and i was going to do it. But the search for lesbian + video + porn + free turned out to be a tricky one. Every site i was led to had home pages that delineated membership at a cost. bored and drunk as i was, i still was sensible enough to keep the credit card details in my wallet. however, i did stumble on a full on litany of images….The funny thing about looking at a lot of pornographic imagery all at once (at least for me) is that very quickly you get numb to it. It made me think of one of the voice artists at work. She told me she had done a series of voiceovers for an adult channel. I remember her saying that recording take after take of "filthy" voiceovers, removed you to a point of losing any sense of sexiness in it.

After a few hours she said, its not even funny, you could be reading the weather. I had a silmilar feeling looking at the pages of all of these porn sites. As i began to sober up, I made it through to that numb stage. I was first struck by the realisation of how fetishised my sexuality is.

I know this is an obvious thought. But i’ve been out for so long, and my life is so relatively normal that it seemed a little insane that for many "lesbian" was not just a too many syllable-d word for the opposite of straight, it was a full on kinky perversion. A keyword that when searched could only lead to porn.

I thought about these straight men (and perhaps even straight women?) who were sitting in front of their computers, or gazing over video titles keen to see LESBIANS!!!! Real live LESBIANS! Having LESBIAN sex! Or even just kissing (LESBIAN KISSING!!!) .

Honestly, the number of sites and clips i found just devoted to women kissing? I love seeing any two attractive people of any gender kiss, when they really want to kiss. But the thought of someone unzipping their trousers, or jumping onto their partner eager to see it, is utterly strange to me.

Then it struck me that everytime some guy on the street has screamed, growled or lasciviously whispered "les-bian" at me and a woman i’m with walking past, their ideas are fueled by what the porn industry is delivering to them. Suddenly without wanting to be, I become a walking breathing kink. Me kissing my lover is not related to love, in their eyes it’s an exciting perversion. This getting off late at night on online porn thing was really not working out the way i wanted it to.

and then something else got me.

my keywords brought up another keyword in great volume.
the word? TEEN.

Now maybe my concerns are derived from some research on the sex industry I’ve been doing for a documentary proposal . But I’m sure its no shocker to anyone reading this, that a lot of women in the sex industry aren’t quite there on willing and aware terms. The thing that really freaked me out, about all these sites that revolved around the iconongraphy of a teenager, was the way the women… girls?! looked. First was the bodies. Bodies that weren’t quite women yet, that must (hopefully?) be of age to give consent, but worryingly looked a bit younger. Even less sexy than this was a uniformity i saw in their collective gaze.

How do i describe it? the words lost, unsure and even helpless come to mind. I was really sober now. I wanted to scream out at the screen WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY ARE YOU THERE? DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE DOING THIS? ARE YOU WORRIED ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES? ARE YOU UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THIS SCENARIO?

And in my mind i heard a vague "well.. because.." . What would follow isn’t relevant.
in the end it doesn’t matter.

Let me be clear. I’m not against pornography or the sex industry. I do believe there is a place for it. I don’t necessarily think it harms society, and I recognize there are a lot of cool forward thinking sex radicals out there . But as fascinated as i am with the industry, I’m getting to a point where i can’t get away from a lot of not so arrousing facts. There are a lot of women who are being drawn into the industry because they think it is an easier option than it really is, or they really think it will lead them to an entertainment career, or they crave validation for their body image, or because the pornstar as an entity has become so fetishized, that they are deluded into thinking it is an attractive option.
and the sad thing is, with the level of inequality in wages between men and women, the sex industry is the ONLY industry that can quickly and (seemingly) easily offer women extremely lucrative reward.

This disturbs me even more when it comes to teenagers, young women, because I now realise the industry is thriving on them at a great volume. A volume that i just can’t see relating to the number of women who really WILLINGLY want to take part. You can argue that these films and images can only exist with women who are willing to appear in them. But more likely is the fact, that the demand to see these images drives the need to supply. And what of all the others who see and pay for these images, online, video or magazines? Can they not see that these are girls (not women) who don’t particularly seem to be in the moment of what they’re doing?

Is it just me who doesn’t find it sexy to see individuals engaging in sexual acts, just because they’ve been told to and they’re getting paid? I don’t think that’s political. I would have thought that the point of pornograpy, is seeing erotic imagery that you can believe, with participants who seem to be excited about what they’re doing. Seeing arrousal creates arrousal right? What does seeing genuine vulnerablity in a questionable situation provide? How do you know the next site won’t reveal ar family member? What if it it was your daughter? Not very sexy huh? Well the scary thing about teenagers is that their families rarely really know what they’re getting up to. ..

And thats not always a good thing..