Reader Submitted
September 10, 2008
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4 Comments

SUBMITTED BY $PREAD MAGAZINE: Well, this is ass. Fast food chain Subway fired a porn actor employee (via Autumn) when a customer alerted management to his work in porn. I encourage everyone to write Subway and express your outrage that they would fire an employee because of asingle customer threat to boycott.

There are a couple of interesting (by which I mean, irritating) elements at work in this situation, the most noticeable of which is, of course, the intense hypocrisy. Apparently, this particular customer is a consumer of porn, if not Kurt Wild’s actual pornography. How else would he recognize Wild? He either watches Wild’s porn, or spends so much time in the DVD section of his local sex shop that he recognizes performers on the covers of DVDs he hasn’t even watched when they’re wearing a Subway uniform. (I certainly hope it’s the former.) Either way, that’s an awfully large rock for him to be launching from inside his porn-filled glass house.

I don’t know what type of -ism this qualifies as (classism?) but it makes me furious, and it’s way too common among porn consumers. “Sure, I’ll habitually consume the product you create for me, but I’m still going to denigrate you as a whore, mock your attempts at having a normal life [see: Jenna Jamesons's pregnancy], and generally try to shame you out of the public sphere.” If you’re not mature enough to treat the workers who create your porn like actual human beings, you’re not mature enough to be watch porn. (Or should I say, you don’t deserve to watch porn? Porn is a privelege, not a right, as our government has made painfully clear.)

Also, I think this is a really dramatic illustration of how little porn actors are paid. (I know women are paid more but, I’m sorry, from the fees I’ve heard quoted, it still seems shockingly low to me.) It’s possible Wild just liked his job and didn’t want to quit, even if he could afford to given the money he was making doing films. But, odds are, he needed both income streams. I don’t really know where people get the idea that appearing in porn is the fasttrack to Forbes Celebrity 100. (Jameson is anomalously wealthy, and I don’t think she’s appeared there once.) The money is in the production end, and performers who have done well for themselves did it by going into production, not appearing in more films.

In his email, Kurt Wild, the fire-ee, says he doesn’t think he would have lost his job if he was a female in porn. I disagree. I think the stigma of porn transcends gender and sexual orientation, and I can easily imagine a customer complaining about a female porn star handling his food. If sex is dirty, then people who have a lot of sex are dirty, and anyone who’s got TEH SEX DISAEASE should not be in food service, right? We’ll just file “wearing gloves while toasting bread” next to baby-making and mainstream film acting on the list of things porn stars aren’t allowed to do, .