If Porn Is Not Shameful, Why Doesn’t Miriam Weeks Use Her Real Name?

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A Duke University freshman is offering the world a textbook lesson in what not to do if your college classmates find out you’re doing porn. Miriam Weeks attempted to “un-out” herself, giving an interview to the Duke Chronicle, which agreed to protect her anonymity despite the fact that word was out all over campus that she was getting boned on camera as “Belle Knox.” Then she wrote a confessional piece (as “Lauren A.”) for a feminist Web site that included this:

I am not ashamed of porn. On the contrary, doing pornography fulfills me. That said, I vehemently want to have my privacy respected — and I ask that anyone who knows my real name respect the fact that I am only discussing this publicly because it was made a public matter when I was confronted by a fraternity member who chose to tell hundreds of other men in the Greek scene.

Do you want to have your cake or eat it, Ms. Weeks? Because you cannot be “famous” as the Duke University porn star, claiming that you are unashamed to do what you do, and then demand that the world never mention your real name which — as you yourself say — is already known to hundreds of your fellow Duke University students, to say nothing of Google: Miriam Weeks is “Belle Knox.”

One cannot impose amnesia on the Internet by force of will.

The feminist sisterhood, however, has never cared much for facts or logic, and so Emily Shire at the Daily Beast stubbornly pretends that nobody knows who “Lauren” actually is:

Lauren’s challenge against her harassment as a porn actress reveals how pointless and shameful our stigmatization of adult film performers are. It hurts sex workers who love their careers and want to enjoy full lives outside of pornography. Worse, it may further hurt the sex workers who are subjugated and are too afraid to ask for help.
Lauren’s openness with her porn career raises many questions, but I fear people will only think to ask the wrong ones. We shouldn’t be wondering why a smart young woman with her whole life ahead of her would choose a career in porn. Instead, we should be wondering why it should preclude her from doing anything else she so chooses.

You see? It is not pornography which is “shameful,” Emily Shire tells us, rather it is “our stigmatization of adult film performers.” But what would Emily Shire (or, for that matter, Miriam Weeks) say about the “adult film” consumers? Shouldn’t we stigmatize guys who wank to porn? Does Emily Shire have any respect for those on the demand side of the porn industry’s supply-and-demand equation?

What about the commercial producers of pornography, who profit by commodifying sex on a worldwide scale?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating censorship, but I am advocating honesty about what manner of commerce is being transacted by Miriam Weeks. Legal though it may be, it is shameful from start to finish, and we ought not pretend otherwise.

You don’t see guys publicly declaring that they wank to porn. As shameless as he was, Anthony Weiner never claimed to be waging a courageous fight against the “stigmatization” of wanking. And you didn’t see anyone praise his “openness,” did you?

So, Duke University freshman Miriam Weeks from Spokane, Washington, is unashamed to be a “sex worker,” and evidently expects to be praised for this by her feminist comrades, because getting boned on camera is so empowering, you see:

 I am a women’s studies major. I hope to be a lawyer — my dream is to be a women’s rights, civil rights lawyer. I’m really into writing, journalism. I’m kind of a creative person, which is a lot of the reason I like doing porn. I really am a person who values my family and my friends, and I am also really into spirituality. I like astrology, Zen, all of that.

I’m sure her fellow alumni of Gonzaga Prep are proud of how Miriam Weeks is representing her “spirituality.” And how else is a prep school girl supposed to afford $58,00 a year tuition at Duke?

The porn-star-student was outed by fellow freshman Thomas Bagley . . .
Bagley told The Daily Caller that the starlet divulged her secret to him . . .
Bagley said she swore him to secrecy. Naturally, then, he went and told a bunch of people at a fraternity rush event almost immediately.

Stupid is as stupid does. Why are “smart” kids so stupid these days?

“I feel like girls at Duke have to hide their sexuality
. . . We’re caught in this virgin-whore dichotomy.”

Eh, you’re not “caught” anymore. That “dichotomy” is over for you.

 

151 comments

  1. She could have saved on college costs by attending the University of Washington rather than a private university on the other side of the country well-known to have a deeply corrupted and stupid undergraduate arts-and-sciences division.

  2. Progressive behavior and stupidity is not exclusive to the liberal bastions. There are quite a few progressives in Eastern Washington. Unfortunately.

  11. “I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.”

    No, these are the lies she tells herself to feel empowered when she’s not.

  12. You needed the ™ behind “SPECIAL EFFING SNOWFLAKE,” to make it correct, though your addition to Special Snowflake™ does seem most appropriate in this case. 🙂

  14. Can we blame it on the Jesuits at Gonzaga, the legacy of Doris Duke (who was slutty without the excuse of having to pay for school), the higher education bubble (paging Profess. Reynolds), or just the moral decline and collapse of Western Civilization?

  15. Ya know, Dana, the “f-word” has a respectable and fairly inocuous lineage going all the way back to the PIE (No, not that PIE… Proto-Indo-European, you twit!) You can use it safely in the proper context!

  17. Whilst I am (fairly) certain that I could use the vulgarity on this fine site, I choose not to do so. Moreover, I have disciplined myself to use Fornicate! instead of the four-letter word even verbally, in instances in which many people would use the f-word to express shock, anger, pain or surprise. Not only do I thus avoid the vulgarity, my choice of words gains more attention, because it is unexpected.

    One liberal site threatened to ban me because I use the expression “urinated off.” Everything I say and write has a purpose.

  18. “I am also really into spirituality. I like astrology, Zen, all of that.”

    I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that passage.

  19. Stacy, porn stars don’t use their real names for the same reason a LOT of legitimate actresses don’t use their real names: because “normal” “decent” people won’t leave them alone in their daily lives if they know where to find them.]

    This is not striking a pose; I used to deal with exactly such assholes a LOT when I worked security in LA. Many porn stars (and actresses) seem to have a lot better grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy than the people who watch them.

  20. Conservatives never keep porn in their houses. Certainy none of us EVER sneaked a look at Dad’s Playboys, I’m sure.

  24. The © ship has pretty much sailed for the porn industry, thanks to the Russians and about half a billion pervs with PCs…

  25. The next time a porn star or actress walks up to a fan’s door and shoots him in the face I’ll believe it’s not.

  26. Well, I wasn’t aware of that, yet you were. What does that say about our particular consumption habits? 🙂

    No wonder his Wombatness needs a raise!

  27. If she was one of the “in demand” girls, she’s have been earning:

    $800 for a girl-girl scene

    $1,000 for a guy-girl scene

    $1,200 or more for anal sex

    $4,000 or more for “double penetration”

    Minus agent fees and the like.

    Perhaps I evaluate things a tad differently, but I’m not certain how getting sodomized for $1,200 is a threat to the patriarchy. Has what she has made over the last year — and she can’t have been working much longer than a year, due to her age — really been enough to overcome what this will do to her real-life career?

    Teh Patriarchy remains unharmed.

  29. Actually, the Patriarchy has enriched itself at her expense and will promptly discard her when her usefulness has been exhausted. The porn industry thrives on degrading innocence and she’s aided and abetted that degradation. The fact that she has so-called feminist defenders is rather astounding.

  30. That may be true, but it begs the question of why a young woman would voluntarily place herself in a position where she is required to create a false reality for people who’s own grip on actual reality may be tenuous at best. While a crazy stalker may pursue anyone, intuitively it seems more likely in the context of those whose livelihood is based upon making a bunch of maladjusted males believe you can and will fulfill their every desire.

  34. Richard, are we really talking about a porn star? High School pump gains notoriety at Duke University for doing cheap “barely legal” porn videos. She’s no star. I have noticed that North Carolina has become a porn hub but the net is running over with these common whores. She merely wishes to maintain the idea that she is still a good person now that she’s caught. This is the spring break crap. When there’s the veil of anonymity the girls head to the beach and go full on slut. A lot of married women do it for that matter. This one got busted. No offense but I’m not buying the security crap on this one.

  35. Lived in the area for almost a decade. Spokane is a lot like Buffalo or Detroit, very post-industrial/rust beltish, with a large urban minority class/culture.

    Gonzaga Prep is the toniest place to send your kids. The only sort of ‘value’ it reliably signals is a desire for your kids to avoid the riff-raff.

  36. It is probably just that I am a misogynistic h8r, but wow, how hard up must the porn folks be if they are putting HER on video? She should really be wearing a paper bag over her head while filming…

  39. Kirby, I’m talking here about the behavior of the men who watch the women.

    Is porn reprehensible? Yeah, probably, even if it has crossed my retinae from time to time. But the danger to women outside the porn industry in the performing arts is no different really from that for women in the porn industry: it’s what’s going on inside the men’s heads.

    Women in the media who have never done porn are commonly the victims of stalkers and dirtbags. Was that sports reporter who was video’d through a hole drilled by her stalker at fault? Was wearing a sweater on camera the act of a slut, deserving of shaming and embarrassment? Felony possession of breasts? Brand the Harlot!

    Are the videos cheap? Probably. I’m not into the “barely legal” stuff so I’ve never seen them. Would they be more respectable if they were higher budget and less worthy of shaming? Would she be less worthy of shaming if she had performed in a big-budget BBC remake of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”? Or been one of the actresses who performed fairly explicit S&M scenes in the recent BBC/BBC America series, “The Man Who Would Be Bond”? Or should those acrtresses be shamed, in the best Restoration tradition as no better than prostitutes? (eyes Belvedere—nah.)

    And would men be any more justified in abusing Miriam Weeks than they would, say, Sharon Stone? Or Felicity Kendall? Or Karen Black?

    I don’t blame her for using an alias. It’s a common and sadly necessary defense for women in the public eye, whether whatever they’re doing is related to sex or not. (I’d be surprised to find out Sarah Palin books rooms on her travels under her own name, for example.) I
    don’t like the fact that she does the “barely legal”
    stuff, which to my mind is basically for pedophiles who haven’t admitted
    it to themselves yet. I don’t like the fact that for too many people today getting a college education involves demeaning employment or taking on a lifetime of debt, while over-endowed universities bloat like hog carcasses in the sun with overpaid administrators and underqualified instructors.

    But using an alias? Not an issue for me. And not, I think, the issue at hand here.

  41. And I don’t know there was any evidence he was into porn. I will concede that I at a young age got some pretty weird ideas about how men should relate to women from James Bond movies, so it is possible that in the absence of any other more assertively positive role models for male behavior, porn is not a good guideline, to put it mildly.

    Much of that is that porn is largely sex out of any other kind of social context. Ironically, that is largely porn czar Bill Bennett’s fault. When he was trying to reign in the porn industry back in the Reagan years (coupled with the rise of the feminist meme that porn was violence against women) the porn producers, since they couldn’t cut out the sex, began to cut out any semblance of other human interaction to remove the context in which men could be accused of exploitng or abusing women,

    Prior to that porn movies tended to have actual plots and characters: badly acted in the great main, and poorly scripted, to be sure, but there was at least some minimal context provided that would let the audience member who cared decide if the characters were behaving badly or well. What the antiporn crusaders managed to do was remove not the sex but the humanity from porn.

  42. “That may be true, but it begs the question of why a young woman would
    voluntarily place herself in a position where she is required to create a
    false reality for people who’s own grip on actual reality may be
    tenuous at best.” That’s called acting, and you should no more restrict the arts because of what a lunatic might do, since you have no control over what he thinks he’s seeing and hearing, than you should ban guns because a lunatic might decide to use one.

  43. Actually, no you don’t. Is any actress obliged to be a character she performed full time for a fan’s benefit? If someone nags Leonard Nimoy in a restaurant to do the Vulcan salute is he obliged to cooperate or is the stranger being a dork?

  48. Not sure what your point is. Are you equating all gainful employment with degrading manipulation? Are you saying all work is prostitution? Or that the nature of one’s livelihood is irrelevant to what occurs to his spirit and soul in the Humanistic sense?

  49. So, who outranks whom on the McCain List:

    1 – Miriam Weeks, who copulates on film for cash, but (apparently) does so only with other adults; or
    2 – Kaitlyn Hunt, who doesn’t film herself, but has FIV sex with 14 year old girls?

    Enquiring minds want to know! 🙂

  50. You necessarily realise, I hope, that what one says is more significant that how one says it… using euphemisms as you do, I think only magnifies the obscenity factor!

    Years ago, in online debates in my favourite topic, in my local, liberal rag, I found that then obscure terms like “buggery”, “pederasty”, “catamite”, “tribade”, etc.would slide easily by the Forumzensurhauptamt and still get my point of view out… I had several such tricks to defeat the censors! I was only stopped in my crusade by the end of anonymous commentary…

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