Final Writers memo

The focal topic of my paper was women’s place in the porn industry. This initially just started as a focus on Mia Khalifa and her career. At first, I was just focusing on how hard it was for women to leave the porn industry once they entered it. Mia Khalifa is a former adult actress who was only involved in the industry for three months. Since then she has maintained a public presence creating several new projects including several podcasts, a variety of sports shows, and online gameplay streams. However, wherever she goes the title “porn star” follows her. I wanted to talk about how heavily society marks women for being sexually deviant and never lets them live it down. But then I just started seeing all the different ways that men in the porn industry were treated differently. It started by noticing that James Deen was finding a lot of mainstream success and he was able to be discussed outside of the industry as just a normal actor. I found this to be the case with several male adult actors. Then I started digging more into Deen’s life and found that despite being one of the biggest and top paid actors in adult film he also has several rape cases filed against him. Women in the industry can’t find mainstream success simply for existing in film, but a man who is accused of rape can? This lead me down a deeper path of finding out about women’s treatment of the industry and it was devastating. Women are constantly raped, coerced, and intimidated into staying. Yet no one cares. This was a hard thing for me to look into honestly.

This is why when I was making the he videos I wanted to go extremely somber. I did a lot of fades because I thought it felt really kind of sadish. The font I chose was also meant to be a bit academic, I think that it perpetrates the idea that this is a serious topic. I also tried to use silence to really establish when things are bummers. Leaving the screen with just text to really run home the point that people need to linger on the serious topics brought up.

Video adds the difficult topic of visually expressing what’s happening. I also ran into a problem with length. I mean there’s only so much b-roll I could use for my topic without becoming really explicit. I also was dying trying to get timing right but alas.

I kind of made the video with a collegiate audience. I think this hits for young college age people on multiple cylinders. 1. Young people watch porn. Just analytics wise basically anyone in the 20-28 range is watching porn regularly. 2. College age people tend to care about social justice like things so they’d be invested