Keeping Sasha From Reading to Our Kids Is Not Enough

LOS ANGELES—I am a staff writer at AVN but I am also the parent of a precious 7-year-old boy who attends a public school in Los Angeles. That means that former adult performer Sasha Grey might possibly have read to my son as she now infamously did to first and third graders from a elementary school in Compton for a program called “Read Across America.” My son is in second grade at a school not that far away from Compton, but as far as I am concerned it is way too close for comfort. You see, I do not think Sasha Gray should have been allowed to read to those children, but I would take prohibitions on people like her several steps farther. I would not allow a Sasha Grey to be able to write for publication, either, and I would also prohibit her from speaking in public. Nothing personal, but we need to be consistent as a society. Yale University, which just cancelled its annual "Sex Week," has gotten the message. One of the Compton parents who complained about Gray reportedly said, “People like her should not be around children. It’s a lack of respect to children and society.” I could not agree more, even though for many people, including my colleague at AVN, Mark Kernes, the parent’s comment is an outrage. In his headline for an article on the story—“Compton Horror: Sasha Grey… Reading to Kids!"—Kernes ridicules the complainers, but he doesn’t have any kids. A lot of people in porn don’t have kids. Sasha doesn’t have kids. And yet these people feel justified in either creating this issue or weighing in on it as if they really care about kids. I’m not convinced. Let’s get a few things straight, shall we? No one has the right to tell me what I have to expose my children to. It happens all the time, but that doesn’t make it right. In school districts around the nation, heated debates are taking place about what to expose our children to and what not to expose them to. In Texas, as in other states, school boards are adding creationism to curriculums, to be taught alongside the “theory” of evolution. In other more liberal school districts, content that promotes same-sex agendas are being included alongside the traditional concept of marriage as being for one man and one woman. All of this is being put before children who haven’t a clue about the divisive controversies swirling around those subjects, nor should they. My little angel is developing just fine without being manipulated by the ulterior (and largely political) concerns of adults. Now we get some knucklehead school administrator who decides that Sasha Gray can read to kids. Sasha Gray, whose performances as an adult actress are legendary in their… how shall I put this… animalistic appeal. Don’t believe me? Google her; her content is still all over the place, though it should no longer be available on the internet by… never! She’s now a “mainstream” actress with a few nice credits under her belt, and she’s an author, too. I covered her photo essay book, Neu Sex, when it was released. But the fact remains that Sasha Gray is one of the most famous porn stars alive today and found her fame by fucking on camera for money, and no matter what she does for the rest of her life, that will be a main fact of her life for the rest of her life. In Kernes’ article on the subject, Gray, like innumerable performers at the beginning of their career, says she is done for now with roles that build on her porn star past. “I don’t want to repeat myself, and I think if I continue to take those roles I will only be given those roles.” Fair enough; typecasting is common in Hollywood, perhaps even more so than in porn! But that has nothing to do with the sort of people who are permitted to be exposed to my son and countless other children who don’t deserve to be burdened by anyone’s sordid history. If a porn star wants to go into the reading-to-school-kids business, maybe she should have thought about that before taking the porn plunge. Same thing goes for teaching. There have been a few recent incidents in which the porn pasts of teachers were exposed. Guess what; they were fired for not providing the proper role model. Oops… too bad for you. The kids don’t need your sort of teaching! And they don’t need Sasha Gray reading to them, either. Or reading anything she’s written, or hearing anything she’s spoken. Sorry, but with the internet ruling our lives, as attractive, intelligent, creative and ambitious as she may be, each and every one of us is one click away from Gray’s porn star past, and that’s just the way it is. So, as much as I know nothing will ever come of my idea—because, Lord knows, the mainstream loves the money and traffic it gets from “porn” every bit as much as it needs to complain about it—the time has come to put and keep adult expression (and expressers) where it and they belong: Away, out of sight, behind closed doors, where only adults can see or hear them. I don’t mean to literally lock these people away, of course. I’m not a fascist. But stopping at reading makes no sense to me when a Sasha Gray can simply use the occasion to talk about her career plans in one network interview after another. It’s time to put all that away. These porn stars think they can use porn as a stepping stone to larger ambitions, but I’ll be damned if one of those stones is my son. If free speech does not extend to obscenity, then why should it extend to the makers of porn? Likewise, porn stars may be people in their private lives, but in their public lives we should make sure that no one ever thinks of them as anything else. Porn stars, retired or not, should not be allowed to teach children, speak in public or be seen in organized public gatherings that are not “adults only.” I might be open to letting them read books to their own children, but only if we ultimately decide that they will continue to be permitted to breed.