7/14/2015

Opportunity Knox: The Duke Porn Star Makes a Feminist Case for Her Career Choice | Dame Magazine

HOME FEATURES SEX ED OPPORTUNITY KNOX: THE DUKE PORN STAR MAKES A FEMINIST CASE FOR HER CAREER CHOICE

Sex Ed

Opportunity Knox: The Duke Porn Star

Makes a Feminist Case for Her Career
Choice
A professor doesn't buy her argument, yet doesn't entirely blame
her, either.

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College-age people often make risky calls, as any teacher or parent

can attest. Its part of being youngexperimenting with
boundaries, with personas, with, well, everything. Its also
We're distilling and delivering the best in news,
biological: In humans, the frontal lobes, where we gain the ability entertainment, culture and exclusive offers.
to recognize future consequences, only fully develop in the mid-twenties.
Written by

Robin Kirk

As a Duke University teacher, I often see how risky decisions can either derail a students
future or firmly launch them into their lifes work. Sometimes, its hard to discern among
the brilliant and risky. They arent necessarily mutually exclusive.
Take, for instance, the case of Belle Knox, the Duke student slash porn actress, whose
story broke last week and was splashed all over the news. I dont know this student, but
her decision to pursue this career while enrolled at Duke certainly fits on my list.

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First the story: After winter break, Belle Knox, as she is known professionally, saw a
jump in her professional Twitter feed. A male classmate recognized her from an online
porn video. Knox, a freshman, swore him to a secrecy that lasted all of a winter
afternoon. Millennials have been raised on the Internet, but they tend to be as nave
about its reach as your great-grandmother are about its perils. The student didnt really
out Belle, because she had already sold images of her most intimate lady-parts to the
free teaser and pay-per-view sites that frat boysamong many, many other people
peruse with regularity.
Dan Savage, the writer and sex adviser, answers the following question a lot from his fans
http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/03/11/opportunity-knox-duke-porn-star-makes-feminist-case-her-career-choice

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Opportunity Knox: The Duke Porn Star Makes a Feminist Case for Her Career Choice | Dame Magazine

(of which I am one). May I (the caller inquires) put this [naughty bit] online and keep it
from my parents/partner/boss? Can I take part in this porn film and still look forward to
a rewarding career as an elementary school teacher, nurse, humanitarian or judge?
Heres me channeling Savages two-part answer: of course and always, inevitably, not yet.
Maybe things will change someday, but currently, our culture puts porn on the wrong
side of respectable. If photographs, videos, and Instagram snaps are posted, someone you
know will find them. Its impossible to curate whose attention youll be drawing when
pornographic images are transmitted into the ether. Knox was aware that hers were out
there, and she may have hoped to elude the attention of her peers, but of course it was
only a matter of time before her classmates would catch a glimpse. And once one student
sees the images, soon everyone will.

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Knox endured ferocious, revolting bullying online. According to later interviews, she
revealed she was also being harassed on campus and has since taken a leave from school,
as she told Piers Morgan on CNN. After her identity went viral on Internet chat sites
like Collegiate ACB, Belle gave an interview to the Chronicle, the Duke student paper,
which is what catapulted this storys international coverage.Knox told xoJane that she
entered the porn business because, I couldn't afford $60,000 in tuition, my family has
undergone significant financial burden, and I saw a way to graduate from my dream
school free of debt, doing something I absolutely love. Because to be clear: My
experience in porn has been nothing but supportive, exciting, thrilling, and empowering.

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Duke is a needs-blind school, meaning that students are admitted regardless of their
ability to pay. And, as with many schools, the financial-aid office assembles a package of
scholarships, loans and work-study funds (which is how I tackled my university
expenses). Of course middle- and upper-middle class families must pay something, and
its true that some are caught in a squeeze that can tip family finances into the red. Who
wouldnt want to leave school debt freeit seems almost impossible at a time when
college costs have become more exorbitant than ever. Of course, Knox could have
pursued a degree at a state university or, even thriftier, transferred into university after
completing two years of community college. But she got into Duke, and why would
anyone want to pass up a top-tier education? Still, there are other ways to handle the
financial burden without resorting to porn.

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But tuition, says Knox, isnt the main reason she makes porn. Shes always been a little
kinky and intrigued by the life. So when she turned 18, she started reaching out. Porn
liberates her and other women from societys repressed views, she argues. When Im in
Pornland, she told the Chronicle, I feel at home. This is where Im meant to be, with
these people who love sex and are comfortable about it.

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The question is: Is Belle Knox trying to turn the system on its ear by making a kind of
cultural statement about the extent people will go to pay for higher education at one of
the countrys best universities? Or is she a naf who hasnt yet grasped the consequences
of her actions?
Certainly there is such a thing as feminist porn. Femme Productions owner and former
performer Candida Royalle produces female-centered material that includes the concept
(revolutionary!) of the female orgasmand she isn't the only purveyor of feminist porn.
But there is a chasm between feminism and the kind of porn Belle Knox is making. One
of her early videosthe one that reputedly led to her being recognizedis on Facial
Abuse. There, a male performer and his cameraman insult, hit, and demean her as the
man pummels her mouth with his member, until Knox weeps, chokes, and vomits.

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In another of her videos, the male videographer-performer notices scars on Belles thighs.
She explains that she cut herself as a teen because she thought she was fat. The man
responds that this size 00 is still fat. The look of hurt on her face and the inauthentic
giggles in the performance that follows were excruciating to watch.
The videos I watchedfree teasers, to be sureare tightly choreographed (freedom?)
and entirely run-of-the-mill (empowering?), designed to appeal to precisely the
prospective fraternity brother who revealed her identity to his peers. I am trying to
understand how they can be spun as feminist. She does not appear to be in control of
anything: The narrative, if this can be graced with such a lofty term, is utterly
predictable, and everything is focused on male pleasure, the male gaze, and the inevitable
http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/03/11/opportunity-knox-duke-porn-star-makes-feminist-case-her-career-choice

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Opportunity Knox: The Duke Porn Star Makes a Feminist Case for Her Career Choice | Dame Magazine

cum-on-her-face crescendo.
And where were the condoms? There wasnt a single video I saw in which a male
performer was using a condom. As Elizabeth Stoker noted in a takedown of Belles
feminism in The Week, a 2012 study found that porn performers in L.A. had higher
rates of sexually transmitted diseases than prostitutes working in Nevada. In other
words, Stoker notes, the industry drive to respond to male sexual desire could well be
the reason performers like Knox are in danger of contracting life-threatening illnesses
like HIV. Is this what bucking the patriarchy looks like?
I dont mean to demean Belle for her choice to be a porn actress: She has the right to do
any kind of porn she wants. She says it brings her joy and is an artistic outlet. If, as she
has said, rough sex like the variety featured on Facial Abuse, is her thing, have at it.
She should not be vilified in person or onlineor anywhere. She has a right to choose.
But if shed only stayed at Duke a little longerand I, for one, hope she returnsshe
would have learned from a number of my fellow faculty members that there is a canyon
between sexuality and pornography, an ocean between feminism and facial abuse.
Pornography is fine if its what you want, but Knoxs argument that shes producing
something feminist doesnt get my passing grade.
On CNN, Belle railed against a culture that represses womens sexualityand shes
right. But she threw me when she argued that American culture views sex as bad, not to
have sex, not to show our bodies to be in porn and have that sexual autonomy is so
incredibly freeing. We live in a culture that bombards us with sex and pornified ads,
where women only appear scantily clad or buck naked. Open any fashion mag and youll
see Belle Knoxsize teens with a bit of pricey couture dangling from a swatch of
unwrinkled flesh. In movies and TV, women are cast as prostitutes or girlfriends, and for
reasons that are usually murky, must appear in panties and a lacey bra in their starship
quarters (Star Trek: Into Darknesss Alice Eve, I am talking to you).
At Duke, women still fight against whats been dubbed effortless perfection. While
men slag around in ripped shorts and flip-flops (so the perception goes), women must
earn top grades, wear the latest couture, drink on par with the boys, win the coveted
spots in specialty programs, stay model-thin, land plum internships, straighten their
unruly hair (and pay for the pricey high and low lights) and always, always be sexually
available for weekend hookups that wont tie them down with a boyfriend or, horrors, a
potential soul mate.
Every semester, exhausted, dejected, starving, hungover women fresh from a pharma
refill of Plan B dump their knock-off Birkin bags on my office floor and weep big tears
because the stress is overwhelming. And Im not even touching the issue of rapean
epidemic on many campuses. Many women dont report rape because they are too
ashamed and actually dont remember much of what happened, because they were
blackout drunk when someone took the cell-phone photos.It wont surprise you to learn
that I buy my tissues at Costco.The status of women on campus breaks my heart,
frankly. I thought my generation had made more gains, but its glaring how much work
we still have to do to make the world a safe and welcoming place for our daughters,
whatever their choices in life.
What is porn if not shaved and waxed perfection? In fact, Belle is feeding precisely the
monster that makes college life for women such a contemporary bear. The culture wants
young women to be pornified. It pornifies them even before they hop the L.A.-bound
flight Belle flies to film. It pornifies them as teens. It pornifies them as little girls who
plaster on unneeded makeup and false eyelashes and butt-enhancing heels.
Belle has voiced some regrets about how events unfolded. In appearances that followed
her first interview, she says she underestimated how quickly her fame would spread and
how dramatically it would envelop her family, who were unaware of her online career.
But she continues to defend her choice to do mainline porn as empowering and feminist.
I just cant see the feminist argument here. What Belle has done is simply take the
culture at its word. If its porn you want, shes serving it up, in exactly the format and
style that the culture relishes. I imagine shes not the first college student to work in
porn. Indeed, the Duke label has boosted her videos into true star status, a triple-play for
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Opportunity Knox: The Duke Porn Star Makes a Feminist Case for Her Career Choice | Dame Magazine

fans: young, brainy, and spread-eagled.

But its the same old same old, in pretty stockings and a stained bow.
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