18 Year Old Girls / False Positive Sex

The increasingly popular pornography genre of 'barely legal' pornography, created by a seemingly endless stream of 18 years old girls who offer themselves up to the pornography industry for the chance at becoming a porn star, had me thinking about myself at 18.

I didn't grow up in a pornified culture, the 1960's,  but I did experience the potential power of being young and sexual.  Recently, I spent some time watching youtube videos of Sasha Grey whose self nominated entry into the pornography industry at age 18 resulted in at least 80 films in the first year. Most of them of the body punishing variety. Sasha readily admits to a voracious appetite for Internet pornography (her sex education) beginning at age 16 and an 'I can do that' response to these images.  But, in looking at her face I noticed a blankness, a frozen look. Her eyes seemed flat, sort of dead, and I thought I recognized in her a small part of myself when I was her age.

The temptation to return the line of fire on the patriarch with the weapon of sex, to defend and to retaliate or to find value is seductive indeed. Having sex as a commodity to offer or deny may be the first time in her life that a girl feels empowered. I don't know Sasha's personal history as a young girl but I sense that her use of sex as an instrument of power-over is reactionary. Against what events exactly, I don't know. We do know Sasha formulated her sexual appetite and education from countless hours watching Internet pornography.

Watching Sasha speak in interviews gave me the pause to remember when I thought that sexuality could be used as currency.  At least that's the way it appeared.  What Sasha and other young women don't know(what I didn't know) is that there is a boomerang effect when using sex as a tool of power-over. The reality is that she is repeatedly oppressed and becomes more objectified with each reactionary offense.  Until her eyes are dead.  She offers herself up in total self sacrifice believing she is in control but her actions are false positive.  It is the annihilation of Self in an effort to defend oneself.

A young woman whose perception that her sexuality is her only weapon, perhaps her only value, is a pornographers (wet) dream.   Our best societal remedy is to place integral value (and lots of it) on young girls and boys as individuals, to prevent abuse, and to challenge the pornified culture that has become normative with a narrative that sex is a personal intimate exchange of equal engagement not an opportunity to weild power over another.  This of course would require equality of gender, an activist cause which we ignore at our own peril.