
But I don't think that that's exactly a fair conclusion. So it is possible to watch After Porn Ends and come away with the impression that being in porn is a traumatic psychic and social wound that will never heal. But at the same time, it's clear that if you're a former adult performer a lot of people are going to judge you-and you can see how, living with that, having Mensa declare you worthy might pack a certain punch. Given the way many of the ex-stars talk about their families and spouses and kids, he's obviously making a gross generalization. One expert talking head argues overdramatically that being an adult star cuts you off from all personal ties. Even more poignantly, he suggests that his career in the adult industry made it hard for him to form normal relationships, and thus may be responsible for the fact that he never married and has no children. Randy West-who otherwise seems fairly happy with his career-talks bitterly about the fact that most charities won't allow adult stars to donate to them. Houston lost her job selling real estate when a client recognized her. And nearly all of them talk about the bitter stigma of being in the adult industry. A number of the former performers link their entry into the industry to child sexual abuse and/or to drug addiction. There's certainly a fair bit of evidence in After Porn Ends, available on iTunes now and on DVD later this month, to support such suspicions. The antipathy and contempt porn workers face is more intense, but the stories here could confront any non-former-porn-star in the swelling ranks of the lower middle-class. The natural conclusion to leap to, of course, is that the neediness and the porn career are inextricably intertwined: that Carrera entered porn because she needed to be loved, and/or is so unsure of herself because she's ashamed of her porn career. For someone like her to need the approval of someone like them is an apocalyptic admission of neediness that's depressing to think about. Yet, despite all of that, what she wants is validation from some random group of self-declared smart people. This after all, is Asia Carrera, a woman who ran away from home at 17 and pulled herself together to become a successful businesswoman and a world-famous name and face. Eventually, though, the society did feature her in an issue of its magazine devoted to Mensa celebrities-a big moment for her, she says. She explains that Mensa links to all its members' websites, but that they wouldn't link to hers because. You don’t need a slightly spurious porn link to tell you that the front page of the internet is clearly doing something right.The most heartbreaking scene in the documentary After Porn Ends, about the post-porn lives of 12 adult stars, may be when Asia Carrera talks about her membership in the high-IQ society Mensa. In other words, Alexa data shows that Reddit has grown massively – and that is entirely consistent with what the company itself says: in November 2017 it self-reported 250 million average monthly active users, and now it’s showing 330 million. Still, that doesn’t mean that these metrics aren’t useful, as long as they’re consistent with themselves. For proof of this, just look at the next slide on the deck from rival market analysis firm Similarweb: it gives Facebook an average visit length of 13:28 – about two minutes more than Alexa reckons the average person spends on it in a whole day… The Alexa rankings – as I’ve written before – have historically been a bit flakey as they required the Alexa toolbar to be installed, heavily skewing things towards tech sites. Perhaps most importantly though, these metrics only give you a snapshot of things.


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