Photo used under Creative Commons license from flickr.com user brh_images. The photo is not of the Duke student.
My blog for today was originally going to be about how cats are taking over the Internet and my hostility toward modern people-loving cats — when I’ve loved them forever. Instead of going on a rant about how I loved cats before they were cool, I decided to write about Duke University and porn.
Now I’ve grabbed your attention.
Over the weekend, it went viral that a freshman student at our rival school does pornography to help pay her nearly $60,000 annual tuition.
My first thought was:“Jeez, Duke is expensive.”
News got out about the student, who has been named Lauren to protect her identity according to The Chronicle, Duke’s independent daily newspaper, when student Thomas Bagley was watching porn and recognized her. He then told his friends about his revelation, and as he walked with Lauren to a party one night, she told him the truth and made him promise he wouldn’t tell anyone. Unfortunately, he didn’t keep that promise.
The day after her secret was revealed, Lauren had more than 230 friend requests on Facebook and was taunted on sites such as CollegiateACB. The Chronicle mentioned that if anyone said, “Did you hear?”, the response would automatically be, “About the freshman porn star?” To be honest, after I read about it this weekend, I myself am guilty for texting my friend at Duke.
As I read the article in The Chronicle, I wondered what the reaction would have been like if it wasn’t at Duke?
I don’t know that much about Duke, besides hating them for sports reasons, but I do know that it is a private university in the South. If this happened at a liberal arts school up north, would there be this much negative backlash? Would people care? What if this happened at this university?
To me, this situation raises a lot of debates: It encompasses the high price of college tuition, how the Internet can be destructive and how technology spreads information too quickly, and, of course, whether using your body for money is empowering or degrading.
For Lauren, being a porn star to help pay for college is nothing but empowering.
“For people to tell me that doing porn and having sex, which I love, is more degrading than being a waitress and being somebody’s servant and picking up after somebody and being treated like a lesser, second-class citizen, that literally makes no sense. To be perfectly honest, I felt more degraded in a minimum wage, blue-collar, low-paying, service job than I ever did doing porn,” Lauren told The Chronicle.
All Lauren is trying to do is pay her college tuition, and she’s paying by doing something she loves; I would love to be able to pay my college tuition by hanging out with cats all day. The moral of Lauren’s story is everyone should do something they love, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, and neither should you.
