Jess lanai

Part of the reason this blog is so fun for me is the fact that I get to talk about the porn.

For quite a few years porn felt like a forbidden subject even to my own thoughts.

Just because porn is one of those things where you don’t know how people will react to it.

I’ve had bad reactions. Not a lot. But when you’re young a little feels like a lot.

The idea of being rejected by people because of it caused some regret and creates what I call a regret split.

It splits you off from the part of yourself that made the decisions you regret. Which can just really limit your perspective on why you did the things you regret.

There’s an entire aspect of a personality in the things we regret.

There are two types of women that do porn. At least as far as I’ve noticed.

The women that get louder.

And the women that get quieter.

I was the type that got quieter.

As the quieter type I embraced consequences. When people had a bad reaction to my doing porn I didn’t argue with them. Not even in my mind.

My strategy for gaining acceptance became to just overcompensate with my social strengths.

Which meant I listened to people more. I paid them a lot more attention and I learned how to please them.

There’s a lot of porn girls like this. Lots of sex workers like this.

We are very charming.

We’re funny. We’re engaging. We’re hyper attuned to a person’s emotion and we actually listen to every word that is said. We have complete presence with people because we try to bond with them instead of trying to impress them.

It’s an attitude of service.

No one really trains you how to be porn star. We just sort of catch on.

It’s a very up and down sort of thing. The actual act of doing porn, of being around the sweet and hot porn guys and posing for the camera gives a lot of confidence.

But then the reactions from the real world drag that confidence back down. So it’s a bit confusing but there’s a kind of resilience that gets trained into you.

I can face very difficult discussions because of having done porn.

If someone says the worst thing they can say I can stay present with it and talk about it.

That is most definitely of result of porn star training.

My second boyfriend helped me get over the shame around porn.

Within the first few days of us talking he asked the body count question.

A question I hadn’t had to answer since my first boyfriend which at that point was many, many years ago.

It was a very terrifying question for me. Because a bad reaction from someone I liked would be very painful.

It messes with the identity. The person I like doesn’t like me because of what I did.

If my second boyfriend had been mean about it he might’ve set me back. It might’ve taken me a lot longer or maybe I never would have developed my current attitude.

It can be frightening how much people can affect us.

Obviously he was nice about it. More than that he talked me through it. Challenged a lot of the beliefs I had around having done porn and opened me up to thinking about it from an inquisitive place instead of a shameful place.

The part of me that had been split off started to reintegrate.

He is also the person I get to credit with helping me quit smoking, which has massively improved my life as well.