Hey everyone, it’s Tina. It’s Friday evening here in Eastvale, and I’m sitting on my couch with my absolute daily lifeline—a massive iced Tesora from Philz with heavy cream and sugar—while my sweet little white Shih Tzu, Daisy, is curled up napping next to me. I’ve got my music playing, which you all know is my primary language for processing everything, and today, there is a lot to process. We need to have a real talk.
Every single day, we are judged for the absolute stupidest things. People will judge you for what you wear, how you parent, what you eat, or how you live. But the wildest part? The people judging you are rarely picture-perfect themselves. They have entire cemeteries of skeletons hiding in their closets that they pray no one ever finds out about, yet they walk around acting like they are morally superior to everyone else.
I want to dive into a topic that gets whispered about, judged heavily, and completely misunderstood: the adult industry. It completely baffles me—I mean, I truly do not understand—how men and women automatically assume that just because someone was in the adult industry, had sex on camera, or performed oral sex on video, they are somehow a walking, breathing, living STD.
Let’s break this down, get real, and hopefully, educate some folks along the way.
Let’s be completely honest for a second: everyone watches porn. When you are young, you watch it to learn what to do before you do it for the very first time. Your parents watch it. Your grandparents watch it. Heck, your great-grandparents probably watched it on grainy VHS tapes.
People act so incredibly outraged about someone acting on film and exposing their naked body, as if we don’t all have the exact same body parts. It’s basic anatomy and physiology! We all know what is under our clothes, we all know how the human body works, yet society acts completely scandalized when someone gets paid to show it.
First things first: people need to educate themselves. The assumption that getting paid to have sex on camera makes you disease-ridden is just mathematically and factually incorrect. The way some people react, you’d think a former adult performer walks into a room and every disease known to mankind suddenly starts floating through the air like a cartoon cloud.
Here is the reality of the industry: you have to get tested. Constantly.
Before anyone steps foot on a set, before a camera even powers on, everyone is rigorously tested for everything. If an actor actually had an STD, do you honestly think the industry would keep employing them? It’s a multi-billion dollar business; they don’t mess around with liabilities. Professional performers often have far stricter testing requirements than the average person having casual sex.
Fun Fact #1: An adult film star getting swabbed and blood-drawn every 14 days is probably a thousand times cleaner than that random person you took home from the bar last Friday who hasn’t seen a doctor since 2019.
Fun Fact #2: The general public usually only goes to a clinic to get tested after they start showing symptoms (when something burns, itches, or goes wrong). Performers get tested preventatively as a mandate to work. The safest women out there are the ones who were in the industry because their health was literally their livelihood.
People love to project, but let’s be honest about the real world. Stigma is not science.
Every single day on this planet, millions of people are having sex. Sex has existed longer than every single one of us. People meet, they date, they hook up, they get married, they get divorced, and they get their hearts broken.
But suddenly, if a camera is involved and someone gets a paycheck for it, society decides they are a “bad person.”
Let’s look at the “socially acceptable” alternative. Every single day, people are out here having free, unprotected sex with partners who break their hearts, give them absolutely nothing in return, don’t help them grow as a human being, and certainly don’t financially help them pay their rent.
To me, sex is sex. Whether you have it in private, get filmed and get paid for it, or have your partner film you on a phone while you’re together—it is the exact same physical act. The only difference?
One is a business transaction.
The other is a personal relationship.
Why is one demonized while the other is just considered a “messy dating phase”? Why does society judge the person getting paid to do a job years ago, but completely ignore the people sleeping with random strangers every weekend for free, learning absolutely nothing from the experience?
Make it make sense.
Let’s talk about the nuances that people gloss over, specifically the pros and cons of entering the adult industry, because it is rarely black and white. On the pro side, the industry can offer financial independence, a way out of survival mode, and a source of fast income when you feel like you have no other options. Sometimes, when we aren’t in our right minds, going through things, missing love, or wanting attention in all the wrong places, the industry provides a temporary sense of validation.
But the cons hit you much harder, and usually not until you get older. The reality is that the decision has a massive ripple effect. It affects you when you want to settle down, when you want to get married, and when you have kids. Suddenly, you are dealing with people in your inner circle giving you dirty looks, whispering behind your back, and talking badly about you simply because you decided to have sex on camera for the internet to see. It impacts your family, your children, and the people around you, making it incredibly difficult to just live a normal life without your past constantly being dragged into the present.
When Mo and I got married, it reinforced for me what a real partnership looks like. A strong partner will look at those internet trolls, look at the people trying to weaponize your past, and say, “And? That’s her past. Grow up.”
The absolute moment people find out you used to be in the adult industry, it’s like they turn into unpaid FBI agents. They channel their inner Olivia Benson, investigating the root of your past like they’re solving a major crime. They immediately look up old films, start posting links, and tell everyone you know that you have all kinds of diseases.
They build these wild stereotypes to make themselves feel better, purer, and superior to you.
A lot of women in the industry shot one or two videos with one or two guys. But because it’s on the internet forever, haters will dig it up a decade later and throw it in their face like it happened yesterday. It’s a desperate attempt to feel powerful. If you’re spending six hours researching someone’s adult content from fifteen years ago, I have a question: Who’s actually obsessed here? Because it isn’t the performer. It’s you.
Speaking of digging up the past, let’s talk about the dating scene. Females are funny. The exact moment they find out that the guy they like is interested in another woman, they will dig up her entire life. If they find out that she’s been in the adult industry, it’s like they struck gold.
They will throw it in the guy’s face multiple times, treat him like garbage for even liking her, and then pull the ultimate high-horse card: “At least I’m not like her. I’m better. I would never do such a thing.”
Meanwhile, they aren’t perfect themselves. They have done plenty of dirt that they are conveniently keeping secret from the guy. They continue to put on a massive facade, trying to mimic him and pretend they have the exact same interests just so he thinks she has always been “the one” for him. But down the road? The truth always comes out. He eventually finds out that she is just like the rest of the females in the world—flawed, messy, and hiding her own secrets—whether they were in the adult industry in the past or those that haven’t been.
Let’s talk about the men who have children with women who used to be in the industry, yet constantly judge them. This is where emotional intelligence (or the absolute lack thereof) really shows.
Why do these men feel the way they do? Mostly, it’s fragile ego and societal conditioning. If you had a child with a woman, and you later found out she had a past in the adult industry, that revelation must tell you something deep down. Before you knew about the camera and the videos, something in you saw her true value. You saw a woman you trusted. You saw someone you believed was worthy of being the mother of your child, someone you trusted to carry your seed and build a family with.
But the moment society’s stigma enters the chat, the male ego panics. Because she didn’t tell you about the adult industry right away, you want to use it against her. You want to tear her down, call her a walking STD, and act like you are the victim. The wild hypocrisy here is that you’re often the one out here sleeping around with different women unprotected, not knowing what these females have, blindly believing whatever stories they tell you. Yet, you want to point the finger at the mother of your child—a woman who, statistically, was tested far more rigorously than any of the random hookups you’re entertaining.
How does a mother’s past actually affect the child? It doesn’t. Having a past in the adult industry does not make a woman unfit to be a mother. A past career choice has absolutely zero bearing on a woman’s maternal instincts, her ability to love, protect, and provide for her child. Raising kids—whether you have a son, a daughter like my Maureen, or a whole house full of little ones—is about presence, responsibility, and unconditional love. It has nothing to do with whether a mother’s past makes her baby daddy’s friends uncomfortable.
The only way a mother’s past hurts the child is if the father creates a toxic environment by constantly judging her, disrespecting her, and bringing adult drama into a family space.
If you are:
Embarrassed by her past…
Treating her badly because of her old choices…
Telling your buddies she’s a “walking STD”…
…but you are STILL sleeping with her?
You need a serious reality check. You cannot have it both ways.
If you are deeply affected or embarrassed by her past, have some emotional intelligence. Sit down and communicate with her! Ask her about her journey. Express how the outside noise is affecting you. Talk to her about why you feel the way you do, instead of being immature, judging her behind her back, and letting your family disrespect the mother of your child.
We all take different paths in life. We all have chapters we’ve closed. When you are twenty, you make choices that you might cringe at when you’re 33. That is called being human. It is incredibly easy to point fingers, dig up someone’s past, and show it to their family just so you can look like the “innocent” one who never made a controversial choice.
But judging someone as an object, assuming they sleep around, or treating them like a dirty secret just proves that you are the one who needs to grow up and get educated.
If somebody built a better life, learned from their experiences, found happiness, raised a family, and became a good human being, then maybe that’s the story worth talking about. Not a video from twenty years ago.
Own your past, whatever it is. If people refuse to let your past stay in the past, that’s a reflection of their stagnant lives, not your lack of growth. You don’t owe anybody a public performance of “good behavior” to be worthy of love, respect, or safety.
Until next time, keep your standards high and your emotional intelligence higher.
— Tina