I have been helping someone who is writing about the biz lately and I was asked for some success stories from the ranks of porn performers.
Real success stories that didn’t involve tragedy, drugs, yada yada
I thought of only 3 one being Ron Jeremy, It was easy to come up with the tragedies, hell there’s lots of those. But it got me to thinking that it does seem that almost everyone who enters this biz pays a price for it. Now yer prolly thinking gee South, Stevie Wonder could see that shit.
It brought me to some basic truths…..If you come into this biz with a drug problem, it’s going to get worse. If you come into this biz with emotional issues they are going to get worse. If you expect to come out of this biz well adjusted you damn well better come into it very well adjusted.
The problem is that the industry attracts the very people who have the least business being in the industry.
Don’t get me wrong here, my intention isn’t to bash the industry, I’m a part of the industry and I have met some of the absolute best people I have ever known as a result of being in this industry, I have also met some of the absolute worst, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground.
So if you guys can think of any true success stories lemme know.
5 Responses
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Even the most together in adult are broken on some level. Ive been in adult in some form for over 20 yrs. Owners,models ,strippers ,managers etc etc some broken little, some broken lots but all broken.
I’m a success story. I may have been sidelined by divorce, but I came into the industry level-headed and left it when I knew it wasn’t the right direction for me, anymore. I was never drunk or stoned or on prescription meds during a scene. I know you and I never worked together, Mike, but anyone from my stint in front of the camera can tell you that I showed up early for work, had everything I needed (including dialogue memorized), and if it wasn’t memorized, I memorized it before the first scene was shot. I constantly fed lines to my scene partners. (Joey Ray being the most useless deliverer of dialogue. I say that affectionately of course. It was very amusing. :D)
The question is, what do you define as a “success story”? What qualifies a porn performer to say, “I succeeded in the adult arena?” I did not leave financially rich, but I did leave life-experience rich. Everyone is “damaged” by something. We do not live in a pretty sitcom. We all live in the same world and no one escapes unscathed lest they die bored and extremely lonely. We need clearly defined lines to know who qualifies. If a success story means a person leaves without having learned anything, I am a complete failure. How are ya doing, Mike? 🙂
I’m well Julie…How are YOU? Glad to see ya back and I don’t think leaving the business rich, in terms of money, is really any measure of success. If you think you were successful, I would agree that you were. In my experience life-experience rich is the greatest rich of all, even if it’s a bad experience (not saying yours was or anyone’s was) but the point being a bad experience can be a good experience if we learn from it.
I see myself as a success story but the question is would anyone else see me that way? Are the reasons I see myself that way something that I can attribute to my time in porn or would I have arrived at pretty much the same place just from growing older and wiser. It’s hard to quantify in a way that an outsider might understand. It’s even harder to do without sounding biased one way or the other. For example if I tell the world everything in porn was good you’d know I was lying, but if I tell the world everything is bad you should know I’m lying but because of society’s mores and norms you would be more inclined to want to believe that everything was bad.
Defining what is success is something the writer and I are having a hard time doing. I’m gonna toss your name into the pot for sure. I expect you will hear from one or both of us.
I’m doing better. Moving; enjoying a quieter existence. 🙂
I would say you’re a success story. You have managed to continue making a living for a considerable stint in the industry, you’re kind, intelligent, yet charmingly self-effacing; humble, in my opinion. You stick to your roots and people respect you. I suppose, to me, that is the greatest gauge for success. Respect. How many people listen when you speak, care about your opinion and have only kind things to say about you when you’re not around. Everyone has their critics, but when even the critics respect you, that’s something.
As far as good and bad, I was thinking about that the other day. Some of the best saints; “good” people, come from “bad” experiences. Good and bad happen to all of us, but how we handle it determines how self-aware we are, which is brilliant because even the least self-aware person can wake up at any moment and realize that, while we can’t control everything around us, we can control how we cope with it. Extreme pain creates some of the most amazing people: Nelson Mandela, Buddha, my friend who passed away. “Bad” porn world… It’s not “porn” though. It’s people, and laughter, and pain, and unexpected moments of bonding, and tenderness, and zen and chaos. It’s just life. People are so weird with their fixations on sex. It’s all just life.
Man, I sound really hippie today.