I Am the Human Face on the Other Side of Your Screen

I am the human face on the other side of your screen or I was at one point in my story. I have been healing for a few decades now from years I was trafficked in P(opc)ORN and I now speak my story to spotlight the issues that arise out of my story. When people ask me “what is one thing you want people to get out of your story I respond, “that there are humans on the other side of the screen when we watch P(opc)ORN and some of those are being harmed. I was one of those. 

I was trafficked on a hardcore adult P(opc)ORN set at 14. There are a million corners of the P(opc)ORN industry; this was mine. 

My father trafficked me first when I was 11. I don’t know the backstory on that. He looked like the guy next door because he was. He was a community leader and a religious leader, but also he was likely a clinical psychopath. That may be all the reason I need to understand why he did what he did. 

When I was 14 I was trafficked on a working adult hardcore P(opc)ORN set. They spun it as a promotion. More likely it was because I had begun to look too old for the clientele of the underage brothel that liked their girls really young. I thought it would be just like the brothel, but with cameras. It was not even in the same world let alone the same category as the brothel.  It was not just filmed prostitution. 

I had survived extensive trauma already in my 14 years of life when I was trafficked in P(opc)ORN. My father’s sexual abuse began at age 5 and advanced to really twisted by age 7. When I was trafficked at 11 into the underage brothel many of the men that paid for sex with me liked abusive, aggressive or punishing scenarios. I was not an innocent doe eyed girl when I was trafficked in P(opc)ORN. I was a fighter, a seasoned survivor with 9 years of survival skills and techniques up my sleeve.  

I was not nearly skilled enough, though for the arena I stepped into. The dynamics on a P(opc)ORN set were different than anything I had faced before. There were no time limits except the shoot itself, which lasted for up to a night. There were no boundaries as to what violence could be done other than what could be imagined and what could be imagined was extreme even in the context of my past trauma. And it was me not just against one man paying for sex with me, but me against a whole set of people. The power of that gale level force would be overwhelming for any person at any age, but for a teenager it felt nearly insurmountable. 

That dynamic of you against the crowd in the face of the headlong high speed movement towards the finish line of a completed shoot makes it hard to say NO, hard for your NO to be heard when it is said, and sometimes erases your NO completely as if one human being overpowered or harmed is irrelevant against the movement and will of the crowd on set. 

Stepping into this fast flowing motion and will is normal on set, but it does not mean that everyone is the same. Performers who I refer to as the humans in P(opc)ORN become part of this motion and collective will, but they do not create the world nor do they generally pull the strings in this world. The humans in P(opc)ORN are mostly stepping into roles and storylines of sexual violence written for them. They are not writing their own stories or their own characters. What you see on the screen has been written and spun by producers and has little to nothing to do with their own identity and desires. 

Producers hold the power and they use it to move the humans in P(opc)ORN according to their will. They live by the “end justifies the means” philosophy. Getting what they want on that screen is what is most important to them. Whether they cross ethical lines, abusive lines or even human rights lines is much less of a consideration to them. And since in hardcore P(opc)ORN all the sex and violence is actual and tends towards a more graphic or extreme nature they have a lot of leeway in how they get that shot, that scene out of you. In my story I experienced the producers like extreme versions of my father and I was terrified of my father. 

Are P(opc)ORN producers still human? Of course they are, but they often are more like my father without conscience or connection to the humans in P(opc)ORN that they are moving, directing, and quite often, as in my case, harming significantly. Significant harm ranging from physical abuse to sexual violence to exploitation and trafficking happens much more often than it should for the humans in P(opc)ORN. 

All of these dynamics that I experienced on the hardcore P(opc)ORN set I was trafficked on create a world with its own norms and culture. It is a world that is hard to understand from the outside. When I stepped onto the set that first night I falsely believed I understood what I was stepping into. I did not. 

Recruiters in P(opc)ORN spin a world of fame and freedom, even empowerment to come, but that is not my story. My father got money for me, but I never received even a dollar. My trauma being indelibly recorded on film meant that recognition for me equaled years of looking down to avoid catching the glance of men who might have seen one of my films. And I have never been more overpowered than in those three years I was trafficked in P(opc)ORN when I was fighting like hell to survive.

It took me a long time for my equilibrium to adjust to what felt like the upside down world of the P(opc)ORN set and then just as long for it to restabilize when I was finally out, finally free. Freedom was not the end, but  just the beginning of another fight for me, my fight to heal. The fallout from the three years I was trafficked in P(opc)ORN was extensive. It was more of a reconstruction than a healing.

There was a dynamic on the P(opc)ORN set that I called rushing headlong until I crashed. What that looked like on set was being thrown into an accelerating, escalating flow of sexual violence. The fallout from that in my life was a repeated storyline of crashing emotionally when the feelings from those traumas arose, withdrawal from any situation where someone seemed to be driving me forward with any level of intensity, and a distrust of any person or system that wanted to control or drive me. This had many implications in my rebuilding especially in the work world. 

My will was severely tweaked because when I fought they hurt me worse so my instinct to fight became connected to flinching as I anticipated the extreme response coming. This severe flinching had nothing to do with present danger and everything to do with a PTSD moment of remembering the repeated pummeling I had received in P(opc)ORN.  And when every step forward invokes a flinch it takes a lot longer to gain healing and momentum in your forward movement. 

The most devastating fallout from those three years in P(opc)ORN, though, was my self-destruct mode. I won’t give you the graphic backstory on this one. You can read or listen to my book “Coming of Age On a Porn Set: Trafficked in Porn at 14” if you want more of the details of my story. Our primary human drive is survival against the harm coming at us and my survival instinct was stronger than most so becoming a human turned against myself, as if I was the harm in the world, was devastating in a “walls of my world crumbling” kind of way. I lost a sense of my own humanity and in connection to that the truth that as a human I had human rights that had been violated. 

Becoming human again in my eyes with a functioning will, a restored sense of appropriately directed justice, and the ability to step in and out of movements, drives, and flows not in reaction, but in a strength of choosing what was right for me has been a long fight. Healing for me was rarely soft glow glittery moments. Healing is worth it, but it is hard work that rarely comes easily.

I am now working on my second book about the phoenix rising, mma level fight it took to rise through mud, blood, fire, and ash to heal and speak my story. 

If I had not been human, if I had been more sociopathic or psychopathic, like my father I might not have broken so deeply, but I was human. I was always human and I was trafficked alongside humans, many of whom, whether they knew it or not, fit within the definition of trafficking. The rampant force, fraud, and coercion on set make that a very likely probability. And the level of harm via repeated sexual violence on set meant that most everyone on the set I was trafficked on walked away with some degree of harm. 

There are a million corners of the P(opc)ORN universe. I imagine each set, setting or context is its own unique world with different dynamics and atmospheres. I am not saying that every P(opc)ORN set is the same or that I know what happens on every P(opc)ORN set. What I am saying is that there are humans on all of those P(opc)ORN sets caught in the flow of headlong motion, facing the force of one person against the crowd, and that many of those humans in P(opc)ORN, many more than we are now speaking about, are being harmed.