The Psychology of Dating Porn Stars

So I’m doing my regular reading today, and there’s a blog I like to visit called “Pornblography,” which is linked on the right hand side of my site under the Blogroll section. Now, you may think this links to free porno or something, but it’s actually a blog maintained by a former porn actress turned reporter (or something). Anyway, it’s a very interesting look inside the world of porn, not just from someone who works in the industry, but a woman to boot.

Anyway, the great thing about this blog is that Carly, the woman who runs it, is also a very good writer and quite intelligent to boot. She has an entry up on there where she’s visiting the set of a porno shoot, and she talks to the director of the piece about some of the girl’s he’s dated in the industry. Below is the passage I found interesting:

Carly writes:
As I sat down on a couch that had no doubt been bathed in more DNA than Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder site, Rockstar Tony – fighting a hangover from the previous night’s excursion to Pearl – joined me for a chit chat. We discussed some Metro happenings, which are none of your business. We chatted about Kenny Guarino, Metro’s overlord, who had been sick as of late and reportedly lost 70 pounds, but is doing better (the rumor that I had heard was cancer, but even Tony didn’t know if that was true or not.) And then we got to discussing the issue that I somehow wind up discussing with everyone on a porn set: the perils of dating when you work in porn. This, of course, stems from Tony continuing to give me shit for posting that pic of him getting up close and personal with Devon Michaels, which prompted me to tease him about having a whoring status. He admitted to dating some girls in the industry, but felt that he wasn’t up to the game playing.

“I mean, I’m a decent guy and I want to treat them well, but they don’t want that,” he said. “They want a guy to treat them like shit. Take [an unnamed superstar], for example. She lives with a guy who has a list of people that she’s allowed to hang out with – almost none of them are guys – and he constantly tells her what a fuckin’ whore she is, how useless she is, etc. So here I am trying to be the nice guy, and they don’t want any of it.”

“Do you think that’s kind of their way of atonement for working in porn?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “It could be. But then there’s the ones who are just completely mistrustful of men. I went out on a date with [unnamed contract star] and she’d been through some shit – her husband really screwed her over, she’d been stalked by some real weirdos… so I go out with her, we have a good time, and a few days later I call her to tell her so. She doesn’t call back, so I figure whatever, I’m not going to hunt her down. Two weeks later she calls and explains that she’s been busy, but then says, ‘You haven’t been calling.’ I tell her I did call and she didn’t call back, so I figured she’d call when she had time. But that’s the thing – she wanted me to stalk her, and I just didn’t want to do that.”

“Control issues,” I said. He nodded. “But that seems to be the hallmark of both genders in this industry – they’d rather be with someone that causes them drama and strife than try their hand at something normal, because the normal is scarier. They know how to deal with the drama and strife – normal is the great unknown.”

Tony nodded again. “You’re totally right.”

‘Tis a conundrum.

You can read the entry here. The interesting thing I find with this conversation is that many women who have suffered some form of sexual abuse or suffer from extremely low self-esteem/validation issues fall into this category as well, so in a lot of ways, if you look at what is said here, it can be applied to all types of women.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that a lot of women need drama, and they need someone with a strong reality to overwhelm them. That is what attracts them to someone — a strong reality. And the drama is a way to knock them out of that reality and cause them to try and get back in. It’s constant stimulus for those “stimulus junkies” as TD would put it. I’ve had to deal with some pretty crazy women in my time (just look at my posts about “Ellyn” in the archive to get an idea), and this is always the cycle that occurs when I’m with them.

The trick is recognizing the cycle and controlling it, so you give them what you want with as little physical and psychological damage as possible. Do that, and you’ll be the best guy they’ll ever have.