What a strange and wonderful thing porn retirement is. Colton Ford leveraged it into a singing career, Vince Ferelli was cast as one of the background Spartans in the sequel to 300, and Jake Genesis basically immolated himself in flames of born-again lunacy. But, you know, different strokes and all that.
When Genesis quit porn and went back to the Catholic Church, he decided to burn every bridge on the way out. He claimed that pornography destroys families, victimizes the people working in it and (in his own words) “cuts deeply the innate dignity of the human person.”
Uh-huh.
Look, I have no idea what exactly Genesis’s own personal experience during his stint in porn was, so I’m not going to pretend it was sunshine and rainbows any more than I’d entertain the notion that it stabbed his human dignity. I will, however, say that pornography can’t hurt you; only your perception of it can.
Allow me to explain in less floral/douchey terms. When someone makes the claim that porn somehow hurts them personally, more often than not this is a projection. People aren’t always comfortable with the idea that they’re sexual beings with needs. The idea that someone can simultaneously be sexualized and humanized isn’t really a widely accepted one, so the conclusion that most arrive at is that sexualizing yourself or someone else is dehumanizing.
The problem here is that someone like Genesis believes that yet decided to try his hand at sex work anyway. This probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but when someone with an ingrained sense of sex-shame tries to make sex his line of work, it’s bound to fuck with his head.
Doing porn isn’t for everyone. It’s not a matter of body image so much as it is a matter of your own personal boundaries. If having sex publicly is outside of your comfort zone? Don’t do it. If you’re only doing it for an easy paycheque, or because you think it’ll make you famous, or you want to have your ego stroked, or because you think you won’t actually have to put in any work? Save yourself and others a lot trouble and don’t do porn. If, however, you’re comfortable with yourself and your sexuality and you want to share that with others, by all means, go for it. Fuck and suck and rim and jizz to your heart’s content.
As porn becomes less of a cultural taboo, more people are going to try it for themselves. Unfortunately, that means some people are going to go into it with selfish or misguided reasons, and it’s going to blow up in their faces. This raises more than a few questions: Why do you want to do porn to begin with? What do you have against it? If you can’t be completely honest with yourself about the answers to these questions, then you might have bigger problems in your life than a couple guys fucking on camera.
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