Her name isn't Belladonna, but that's what her fans call her. She's a star, winner of her industry's most prestigious award. Her field? Domination and anal sex porn videos. Also, she's a sweet Mormon gal from southern Utah.
Porn broke big during the 1960s as part of the wave of changes that swept across America's cultural landscape. At the forefront was Hugh Hefner. His Playboy Manifesto, a call for sweeping change in Americans' sexual mores, defined his existence-he was a wealthy, sophisticated gent popular with the ladies, but not tied down to any one.
Playboy's oeuvre was soon surpassed by far more explicit fare. In the face of this rising tide, libertines assured us that pornography was an innocent pastime, a way for men to let off steam or for couples to put spice back into a stale marriage. Pornography was nothing more than victimless entertainment.
Belladonna's real name is Michelle Sinclair and her story, featured earlier this year on Primetime Live and ABCNEWS.com, is unbelievable. Sinclair went to Los Angeles at the age of 18, looking to break into modeling. When job after job failed to crystallize, her agent suggested she try something else: porn. Initially, she spurned the lucrative offers of the porn industry (some of which promised thousands of dollars for filming one sex act).
"I always hated porn. I thought it was the most disgusting thing in the world," she told Diane Sawyer on Primetime Live.
Eventually, Sinclair changed her mind.
She took the screen name of Belladonna and went to a shoot, preparing for what she thought was a regular sex scene. Instead, the director asked her to do anal sex. Terrified of losing the money, she conceded. According to ABC, she had just turned 18.
A few months (and several shoots) later, now a veteran porn actress, Belladonna showed up on another set. She was told that she would appear in a prison gang-rape scene, to be shared between 12 different men. Again, she tried to back out. Again, she was talked into continuing.
"I really felt like a piece of meat...I had to do a lot of things I can't imagine anyone wanting to do," she said. Belladonna told Sawyer she was paid $4,000 for the scene. The director wouldn't look her in the eyes.
"Don't worry about it. Get the check. Gonna go deposit it in your bank," Belladonna explains. "You get addicted to the money."
According to industry insiders, the average lifespan of a porn starlet is roughly 18 months (during which they will have sex with more than a hundred different partners). Belladonna, at 22, has nearly tripled the average industry lifespan. Over her career, she has fled on several occasions (only to return), has begun using drugs, has performed hundreds of high-risk unprotected sex acts on screen, has contracted chlamydia, and has attempted suicide more than once.
In stark contrast to her private turmoil, the face she shows in public is different. It is always smiling a gap-toothed grin, even when describing stomach churning events to interviewers.
"I like to hide-hide everything," she explains. "I'm not happy...I don't like myself at all."
Sinclair's struggle isn't unusual. Millionaire porn actress Jenna Jameson, one of the few stars who has near total control of her films, scripts and partners, told Bill O'Reilly that "there is no doubt that this industry is hard. I have gone into counseling."
Pornography is an industry built on the brutalized bodies and souls of women. Counseling becomes necessary, even for the hugely successful. Suicide and chlamydia are often the norm, even for the stars. What of the no-name girls who pass through porn's searing corona, ignorant of the dangers lying in wait?
Porn is a burgeoning business, abetted by technology. It has grown commensurate with ease of access and privacy. Porn has moved from the XXX cineplex to a video store's back room to a computer screen. The only consistently profitable Internet businesses are the estimated 100,000 porn Web sites. Last year, they raked in more than $2 billion.
On the Internet, pornography is freed from the constraints of print. The Internet porn community celebrates women being tricked, bribed, cajoled or forced to engage in sex on film. Abuse is glorified. One site revels in its mission to trick young Latinas into performing sexually in return for promised green cards (which never materialize).
Other sites cater to even darker fantasies: bondage, incest, rape, torture and child molestation. Crush films, in which lingerie-clad women kill live animals, are just another entree in the porn industry.
In its wake, porn has left a changed society. The stories are as depressing as they are common. Media outlets reported last year that a group of teenagers gathered at a community center to film a 14-year-old girl having sex with two slightly older boys. All involved were younger than 16. They left behind a used condom.
Two parents were recently arrested for forcing girls to have sex on film. They then sold the movies over the Internet. One of the girls was their daughter.
In 1997, PBS's Frontline featured "The Lost Kids of Rockdale County." The program revealed that 200 teenagers, ranging from 12 to 18, had contracted syphilis from each other. The pattern of multiple, shared, overlapping sexual contacts was like "a ball of yarn."
It became a quick fad among Rockdale children to watch the Playboy Channel and attempt to duplicate the actions on the screen. They tried almost every sexual act imaginable-vaginal, oral, anal, girl on girl, several boys with a single girl, or several girls with a boy. Some of the girls, not yet old enough to drive, had nearly 100 sexual partners (putting them on par with prostitutes and porn starlets). Even catching a potentially deadly disease was passed off as just another pastime.
"We thought it was funny," opined one teen. "'Oooh, you got syphilis,'...It was like the cooties game little kids play."
Rockdale might be the most shocking incident, but it is hardly the only one. The pornographication of our culture proceeds apace.
It is clear that, far from being harmless, pornography is exceedingly harmful and even deadly. Like illegal narcotics, it corrupts everyone it touches. It destroys lives and marriages. It rends innocence.
Pornography is a moral anesthetic. It serves to normalize the sexual acts it depicts, to make what was once unthinkable seem acceptable, then desirable.
As porn spreads, so spreads the attitudes linked with it. To paraphrase Angela Carter, pornography is propaganda for promiscuity. Increasingly, it has become propaganda for depravity. Until and unless we can trammel this corrosive force, stories like Sinclair's and Rockdale's will become more and more common.
Jasyn welcomes feedback at jjones@chronicle.utah.edu. Send letters to the editor to letters@chronicle.utah.edu. .
