Fresh off a very insightful analysis of skyrocketing college costs as well as a number of adult films in 2014, including “Naughty Cheerleaders 4″ and ” Teen Wonderland,” Duke University porn starlet Belle Knox has penned an essay for Jezebel lamenting the hierarchical nature and lack of solidarity among employees at all levels of the sex-worker industry.
A note at the end of the essay explains that Knox – whose real name is Miriam Weeks – is still enrolled at Duke University as a women’s studies major. The note also says she is the Duke campus coordinator for Students For Liberty, a libertarian organization that boasts over 1,000 campus branches worldwide.
Students For Liberty champions three principles: economic freedom, social freedom and intellectual freedom.
The (once) 18-year-old, once cash-strapped coed has certainly been a living, breathing exemplar of the first two principles. She used the assets she had at hand, as it were, to generate money to pay tuition at Duke.
As for intellectual freedom, she has also written voluminously about her budding porn career — at TIME, the Huffington Post, Forbes and Playboy (to name just a few).
Knox also has an online reality show in the works called “The Sex Factor.” It will involve eight would-be porn starlets and eight would-be porn studs competing for “porn stardom and a $1 million prize.” She’s the host.
At the same time, Knox has continually indicated a penchant for goofy, overly class-conscious, leftist cant. This trend continues – in no fewer than 966 words – in her Jezebel essay.
“[F]rom my fellow strippers, denigration for ‘sitting on a dick for a living’ stung, if no other reason than that I didn’t see it coming,” Knox writes by way of introduction.
She then suggests that she is “often asked if there is solidarity among sex workers” — but she does not bother to say who does the asking. In any case, she bemoans the existence of “the sex work hierarchy — or the whorarchy, if you will.”
Just like a college kid trying to reflect deeply on the first few months working in the cold, hard world, Knox spends the rest of the essay describing the particular “whorarchy” in which she now finds herself.
“The whorearchy is arranged according to intimacy of contact with clients and police,” she explains. “The closer to both you are, the closer you are to the bottom.”
High-end prostitutes services look down on street-walking hookers. Strippers hate all the prostitutes. “Cam girls and phone-sex operators” feel they are at the top of the sex-worker ladder.
Porn actors and actresses also segregate by the work they do, Knox says . People who do plain-vanilla sex are at the top. People who do “interracial or edgier scenes” make up the lower classes.
“I was marginalized within the industry for my work on a rough sex website,” Knox gripes.
Presumably, she is alluding here to her own work in “Feisty Bondage Heroines” or, perhaps, “Bared, Bound and Struggling.”
“Gay or trans performers are particularly ostracized by the mainstream due to the AIDS stigma attached to their work,” Knox adds.
Knox then tries to tie it all together in a grand theory of sex work by reaching for exactly the kinds of simple leftist tropes you’d expect a typical college freshman at a fancypants private university to reach for.
“As a feminist, I understand that the hierarchy originates from outdated, pernicious ideas about sex, gender, and class,” she writes. “I certainly was taught at a very early age that sex was a sinful, evil act and that women who engaged in sex were promiscuous deviants with mental disturbances. I struggle to overcome the shame I’m supposed feel about not fulfilling my (obviously class-coded) ‘potential.'”
Then, she lays it on thicker.
“All women are taught from an early age, through religion, media, and socialization that men do not respect women who are sexual outside of marriage, but require they be hypersexual within it,” Knox lectures. “Be a whore, but be respectable. Be slutty, but not too slutty. Use sexuality to sell perfume, food, clothing, cars but never, ever sell the sex itself.”
Knox has never been married, by the way.
Follow Eric on Twitter and on Facebook, and send story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.