LOS ANGELES — Former adult film star Aurora Snow this Thursday will be a guest speaker at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass.
Snow will lecture a class called “Sex, Drugs and Rolling Dice: The Regulation of Vice” about her experiences in the adult industry. She told XBIZ she hopes to “humanize” the subject of pornography in her remarks.
Harvard Law School is a professional graduate school of Harvard University and widely regarded as one of the most prestigious centers of legal education in the world. It holds the distinction of being the oldest continually operating law school in the country.
“Being asked to do this is amazing honor,” Snow said.
A 2011 inductee into the X-Rated Critics Organization Hall of Fame, Snow said the opportunity came about through a friend of a friend that knows Harvard Law Professor Stoughton, who was seeking someone from the porn industry to lecture his class on the topic of “vices.”
“He was looking for guest speakers to bring into the classroom and they were going over people they knew in the industry,” said Snow, who is a regular contributor to the TheDailyBeast.com, where she writes about current topics related to the porn industry.
Snow said the professor had read a lot of her Daily Beast pieces and they started a dialogue.
“We sent a few emails back and forth and got on the phone a few times,” she said. “And we did all this when I was pregnant last year, so we had to plan it for after the baby came. We decided on March 6, and it’s finally here. I’ve been waiting for this for many months.”
Snow first wrote for TheDailyBeast.com in 2010 but didn’t start contributing regularly until about a year-and-a-half ago. Now she posts a new column at least twice a month. Some of her past subjects include controversial issues such as racism in porn, STIs, the mandatory condom debate, and how “Video Killed the Porn Star.”
“Some of what I’ll be talking about is some of what I’ve written about,” Snow said. “I’ve been writing various pieces about how porn has changed from when I got in and it’s a much different arena. Even in terms of pay, the wages are so different now. And when I got in, the internet wasn’t a huge thing.”
Snow, a native of Santa Maria, Calif., performed in more than 600 porn movies and directed more than a dozen others in a career that started in 2000 and continued into early 2013. During the last four years she became extra selective about the movies she did primarily because she dedicated much of her time to being a caregiver. In 2009, her younger brother was involved in a motorcycle accident, leaving him a paraplegic.
“That year I began taking care of my brother and my nephews,” Snow said, noting she spent most of her time in Central Coast, Calif., about three hours from Los Angeles. “That first year I would be running down to LA to do a few porn titles and then traveling back. It was the only job that I could run out, do a few scenes and make enough money to come back and take care of my brother and his kids. Also that year was when I thought I might want something different in my life, that I might want a family of my own.”
Now a resident of Missouri, she gave birth to a son in December. When she’s not being a mom, she reviews Blu-ray discs and TV shows for Blu-rayDefinition.com and also works in TV production with her fiancée. Snow said she stays in tune with current events in porn by maintaining the relationships she built during her time in the industry.
“I talk to a lot of people that are still currently in porn,” Snow continued. “Any time I’m doing a Daily Beast piece I conduct a lot of interviews, and also I do travel to LA frequently. I feel like with my years of experience it makes me a more thorough journalist when it comes to writing about it. I really enjoy covering an industry I’m fond of.”
On Thursday in Cambridge, Snow plans to do a 10- to 15-minute presentation and then lead a Q&A session.
“This is my first time speaking at a college,” Snow said. “I’m really excited to have my first speaking engagement at a college be Harvard. I hold Harvard in very high regard. As a kid, it was always a place that I wanted to go. I used to dream about Harvard when I was in high school. So it’s pretty amazing to go there in any capacity. And as a guest speaker, it’s almost a bit of a dream come true in a way.”
