Last October, 19-year-old Kendra Sunderland created a video in the Oregon State University library in which she was topless and appearing to masturbate. Apparently influenced by the Duke University porn star, Belle Knox, Kendra calls her journey “empowering,” dropping out of school and quitting her job to pursue porn full-time. This may signal a new and troubling trend amongst college-aged girls who are looking for a quick way to make money and a career, without having to jump through annoying hoops, like graduating.
This sad story is more evidence of our pornified culture. Joanna Angel, a veteran porn performer, was shocked when new girls would come to set already knowing what to do based on the messages they get from society. “The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready,” she said. Young women coming into adulthood need to learn they are worth more than the sum of their body parts.
Kendra had been a contributor to MyFreeCams, a website where users pay live women to follow their sexual instructions in real time. During Kendra’s hour long filming, students walk by seemingly oblivious to what she’s doing. Someone in cyberspace recorded the session and uploaded it to PornHub. As soon as it was live, Kendra began receiving massive amounts of Facebook friend requests from strangers, “all frat boys,” she said in an interview with NY Daily News.
Now the video has been uploaded to many porn sites, and Kendra has gotten into some trouble: On January 27, 2015, state police cited her with public indecency and she faces up to one year in jail and a fine up to $6,250. She has also been banned from the OSU campus. Her parents are, according to Kendra, “kind of upset now,” and have stopped giving her money. She has also been banned from MyFreeCams for violating their user guidelines.
Rather than learn from this experience, Kendra has decided to push forward and try to prove everyone wrong. She’s dropped out of school and is trying to work as a professional model and porn performer. She, like Bell Knox, cited working in difficult conditions as a waitress and the compliments she received from viewers as reason enough to abandon the traditional workforce.
Kendra has also started a website called Date Broke College Girls, which connects college girls and sugar daddies in order to help women feel “empowered.”
The volatile mix of young women expected to be hypersexual and the concentration of a porn culture on college campuses is producing girls who feel they are better off selling themselves short. Exposure to porn during the development of sexual templates, like childhood and adolescence, has a destructive impact in adulthood. It creates a firm foundation for the acceptance of sexual exploitation, and a willingness to “consent” to actions normally rejected through common sense.
