← All essays
On Conversion
Porn
Content note: childhood sexual abuse referenced, early sexual development, mother as conversion enforcer, marriage as sex work. Survived-and-here-now perspective.
I believe that conversion reroutes people into shapes someone else needs them to occupy. That is one half of the work conversion does. The other half — the one I have not named yet — is that the same regime converts people away from shapes that were already authentically theirs. Some of what gets converted is who someone is becoming. Some of what gets converted is who someone already was.
This essay is about the second kind. It is the part of my own history that the “trauma made her a sex worker” narrative cannot account for, because in my case, the desire to do this work was there before the trauma was.
I watched my first porn when I was probably about two years old. I think it is actually one of my first memories. I referenced it briefly in Marked. a few weeks ago. Here is the longer version.
We were in Canada as a family on a trip when my brother and I were really young and my parents were still married. Mom and Dad were off in the other room, screaming — my father at her, my mother for her life. I was just old enough to start developing the PTSD I would carry forward. Old enough to wonder when the screaming would turn into violence, and what my two-year-old self was going to do about it when it did.
I was sitting on the king-size bed in front of the huge flat-screen TV in the hotel room while the rest of the family unraveled in the other room. My brother, next to me, was about four. He was flipping through channels.
It landed on porn. And what a porn it was. A group orgy with about eight people in some kind of brick hallway — almost like a school or government building shot in the 1970s. They were going at it. Sucking and fucking of all kinds. A beautiful mass of bodies.
It is a bummer that I was two and my brother was four and we were watching porn together. We are going to be talking about that and what it did to the two of us for the rest of our lives.
But here is what no one who tries to write me into the “sex worker because of trauma” narrative gets to factor in.
You sometimes know, watching something, that this is what I want to be. People know it the first time they see a violin played. They know it the first time they see a chemistry experiment. They know it the first time they see a courtroom in session. I knew it watching that orgy. Whatever those people were doing, that was the thing I wanted to do when I grew up.
Some people insist that I just had my wires crossed by seeing something too mature for my young mind, and that this is what made me want to do sex work. But that argument only works if you agree that wanting to be a sex worker is inherently villainous — and I do not agree.
Because do you know what I actually saw in that scene? What impressed itself on a two-year-old me, in a hotel room where the adults in my life had failed every single test of basic human decency by sunset? Joy. They were having a fucking blast. I knew I wanted to have fun in that way.
I am not naive. I know much of the “joy” in porn is simulated. I’ve talked about that. But it does not have to be. I have felt that joy every time I have cum in my life. I have spent the last several years trying to make porn where the joy was actually present. It is chemical. The orgasm releases what it releases, and the result is one of the better things I have access to as a human being. I think it is beautiful. It is part of my health and well-being. Part of my humanity. I want to capture and share it. In some ways, I cannot think of a more meaningful art to make.
Here is what came next, after I had the realization on that hotel bed at two.
I spent the entire rest of my childhood being routed away from the path I had just identified.
I hated being a child. I never identified with children. I was vulnerable, powerless, treated without respect, surrounded by adults whose intellectual world I had outgrown by the time I could speak.
While all of that is interesting on its own, it is all the more interesting because of who was running the conversion apparatus that kept me from the path I wanted.
My mother.
She literally acted like it was her job to stop me from experiencing the horrors of sex work, while at the same time being the central reason my early sexual life was made horrific. She paraded me as marriage-bait in front of older boys in my community, encouraged their attentions, and treated their interest as my future. She thought she was protecting me from one kind of sex work by aiming me at another. She did not realize, or did not care, that her vision of safety — getting me married off into someone’s permanent sexual property — was the more dangerous version of the labor she claimed she was saving me from.
Marriage is sex work. The labor of being someone’s wife, in the kind of arrangement my mother had in mind for me, is sex work performed in private, for one client, without labor rights, for life. The pretense that this is something other than sex work is the central conversion my mother was trying to enforce. She had been converted to that pretense in her own marriage to my father, which had destroyed her, and she could not imagine any other vision for me than the one that had already cost her everything.
You think people do not experience sexual assault inside marriages? Most of it happens inside marriages. Who is more likely to be having sex with a person they choose, someone doing porn, or someone in a marriage? Who is experiencing sexual autonomy? The answer is mutual attraction and mutual consent, which is the idea we are sold on in marriages and porn, but often not the reality. I am no sex doll, to wait in chains while some husband comes for his daily pump and then drops me back in isolation. I am a performer of eroticism, I want to capture the art of sex in front of cameras I control, with partners I choose who choose me back. It is seemingly too much to ask, and I want that to change.
That is the actual frame. Sex work was the identity. The trauma was the apparatus the regime used to try to convert me out of it.
The first conversion attempt failed. They sexualized me before I had words for what was happening, and the people doing it thought they were ruining sex for me — when what they were actually doing was making sure I would associate sex with violence and fear in ways I would have to spend the rest of my life undoing. I am still undoing it.
The second conversion attempt was marriage. I got married. To a man I loved as a brother and not a husband, which is what we eventually figured out and named. The marriage was a survival arrangement, the way most marriages are for women and queer people raised the way I was. The kind of marriage I’d like to write about in a future essay titled Comp Het as Survival Strategy.
Both conversion attempts shaped me. Neither finished the job. Here I am, writing this from the apartment in Cap Hill where I live with my wife and the man I used to be married to and now consider my brother. The identity that survived two attempted conversions is the same one that recognized itself at two years old, sitting on a hotel bed in Canada, watching an orgy in a brick hallway and thinking this is what I want to do when I grow up.
That identity is still here. The publication you are reading is one of the things it engages in. The actual porn is paused until the meta gets vaccinated.
Stay tuned for a future essay, Comp Het as Survival Strategy — about the marriage I named above, about what it means when sex work becomes the only legible path to survival for women and queer people, and about why so many of the marriages we are taught to celebrate are conversion arrangements with paperwork.
— Jack
← All essays