Octomom, Bambi Woods and the Women of Pornography

Nadya Suleman has declared bankruptcy, has had the public embarrassment of a public accusation about the poor living conditions of her 14 children, and now has reportedly turned to pornography for money.

The way I know all of that is that every step of her difficult circumstances has been streamed into the houses of people around the world via news stories, television reports and TMZ interviews.

I don’t think anyone relishes hearing any of these details.

But Nadya has been splashed in the press before. She is “Octomom,” the woman who had octuplets through In Vitro Fertilization, even though she was a single mom on public assistance with six  IVF kids already.

Early in her odyssey in the glare of 24/7 media, she publicly refused to ever do pornography. As her desperation increased, she started saying she would do anything to support her children. A lot of our media culture’s usual money sources were closed to her: Her welfare status made her too unsavory for a reality TV show. She was considered too weird to be the next “John and Kate Plus Eight.” A Duggars-style “14 and Counting” was out of the question.

So she has turned to the biggest entertainment industry in America: pornography.

Her story and many, many others show that the myth about pornography Americans like to tell isn’t true.

Americans like to say that pornography empowers women; it allows them to use their sexuality for their advantage. It likes to tell the story that the short-lived “The Playboy Club” TV show tells: That women in “adult industries” are control of their own destinies.

“It was the early ’60s,” explains the Hugh Hefner character in one episode, “and the bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be.”

Gloria Steinem helpfully dispelled that myth. She had gone undercover in Chicago’s real Playboy Club as a young woman. “Clearly ‘The Playboy Club’ is not going to be accurate. It was the tackiest place on earth. It was not glamorous at all.”

Actually, the tackiest place on earth probably wasn’t the Playboy club … but the modern pornography industry, according to former pornography workers like Shelley Lubben.

“Sex-packed porn films featuring hot dirty blondes whose man-eating eyes say, ‘I want you,’ are the greatest illusion on earth. Trust me, I know,” the anti-pornography crusader wrote.  “I was 24 years old when I entered the world of porn. I put on a good show but I never liked performing tricks in the sex circus and preferred spending time with Jack Daniels rather than the male performers I was paid to fake it with.”

Another quote from Lubben:

“That’s right, none of us hot blondes enjoy making porn. In fact, we hate it. Some women hate it so much that I would hear them vomiting in the bathroom between scenes. I would find others outside, smoking endless chains of Marlboro lights.”

There is a lot of money in pornography, but for women in the industry, that money comes at a terrible price.

Venereal diseases are just the beginning. “I work in this business and I know how many girls end up in the hospital suffering torn rectums from brutal scenes,” wrote one man on an adult DVD industry website. “I know how many of these teenage girls have to go to an emergency room or a 24 hour clinic with chronic [e-coli-like] infections.”

There are heart-breaking videos on YouTube about the exploitation of porn. I can’t link them because they are so explicit and horrific. Gail Dines, the secular feminist who wrote Pornland, delivers a devastating PowerPoint demonstration showing just how brutal pornography is these days. Tyra Banks interviews pornography workers and ex pornography workers. In one memorable exchange, a porn star defends a scene in a movie in which she licks a toilet seat to titillate the audience: Even this, she says, is empowerment.

But the saddest anti-pornography video I have seen isn’t even an anti-pornography video at all. It is an early 1970s interview with Bambi Woods, the star of Debbie Does Dallas whose real name remains unknown. The host of a pornography promotion show (such things existed in the 1970s. Who knew?) is prompting the sad-eyed woman to answer questions about pornography, but she isn’t following the talk-dirty script he wants.

She smiles gamely and tries to be positive, but here’s an abbreviated version of the interview:

“How does a beautiful young woman get into movies like this?”

“I owed somebody money.”

“How did you feel about the sex scenes in Debbie Does Dallas?”

“I was uncomfortable. “

“What’s next? Another movie?”

“I’m not sure if I want to do another one or not.”

“Why wouldn’t you make another movie? … You’re hot, you’re popular …”

Bambi looks sadly into the distance, an anxious look on her face. Then she grabs her cigarette for a deep drag. “I just, I wasn’t very comfortable in that sex scene, and that’s about as far as I could go in a sex scene is what I did in that movie. And it wasn’t really very much.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do on the screen?”

“Anything I didn’t do in that movie I wouldn’t do.”

Nobody knows what happened to Bambi Woods. Some say she dropped out of the pornography industry, hid from her past and raised a family, hoping no one would find out who she is. Other reports say she died of a drug overdose.

She is like so many of the women of pornography: Wounded souls desperate for a future.

Many of them have a history of abuse. They have been taught from a young age to consider their body an object of use. Many are runaways or abandoned.  Many are addicted to drugs or alcohol. They say they have to be in order to do what they do, and to numb the shame.

Viewers aren’t looking at their faces, but former pornography performers say the haunted look in their eyes reveal what’s really going on: A deep sadness, self-loathing and chronic depression.

You would think that a civilized culture would try to rein in an industry like this.

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