LOS ANGELES — Angela White, the 2016 XBIZ Foreign Female Performer of the Year, was featured in an in-depth interview on mainstream site, TheDailyBeast.com.
In the article, titled “Meet the Porn Star Turned Academic Who’s Revolutionizing the Adult Industry,” writer and former adult performer Aurora Snow delved into White’s academic career and how she has used her education to push back against the age-old stereotypes found in adult.
“Australian porn star Angela White is working toward finding nuance in women’s sexual expression, sans labels,” Snow wrote. “The 32-year-old argues for the rise of a new type: an academic freedom fighter who understands the patriarchy and so refuses to claim she’s a hundred-percent empowered but also refuses to see herself as a victim.”
To start, White discusses how, as a teenager, she was bullied by her classmates for expressing her sexuality. She turned to adult as a safe space.
“I was introduced to pornography by a boyfriend and I finally saw this space where having sex with multiple people of varying genders was actually encouraged and celebrated rather than criticized,” White told Snow. “It looked like a utopia; it looked like a safe space.”
In the interview, White also discussed the transition from performer to a director that also edits all her own content.
“In the beginning I had someone editing for me but I’m a micromanager and nobody likes to be micromanaged,” White explained. “I would sit with my editor and tell him to take a few seconds from here and a few seconds from there, and then I realized it took longer to tell him what to do than if I just did it myself.
“So I taught myself how to edit,” she continued. “Same thing with directing and producing: I had my own vision in mind and wanted to bring that to life. This desire to discover, explore and express myself led me to producing and editing to have the final product really represent a part of me and a part of my sexuality.
White, then, explains how adult led her into academia.
“I was open with what kind of modeling I did — and that’s when the questions started,” White said about being public with her profession. “It took me aback and it’s also what pushed me toward academia. I didn’t understand why these questions were being asked of me. I was feeling so liberated and empowered, and people were asking me if I felt degraded.
"That’s when I started reading the anti-porn literature and learning about this narrative, about how women in the adult industry are abused, raped, degraded and only in it because they’re desperate for money or on drugs or forced by a pimp.
“These myths were so divergent from my own experiences,” White elaborated. “I wanted to research gender studies so I could spend my time further researching pornography and researching the anti-porn and anti-censorship views. This is something I am very passionate about. I got my honors, the U.S. equivalent of a master’s. In your honors you have to do a dissertation and thesis, and that’s when I started conducting qualitative research on females in pornography.”
To conclude the interview, White stated what porn has taught her, “It’s taught me to be an open person — it taught me to be open to exploration even more so than I already was. It’s taught me about the validity of my own sexuality as well as the validity of sexuality in general, and how much a performer’s conception of sexuality can change.
"Porn can be positive and transformative both for performers and consumers; it can be validating and life changing. For me, pornography was the first place I was able to see women being celebrated for having sex with multiple people of varying genders — and this was before slutwalks. This was back when it wasn’t cool to make out with women.”
To read the interview in its entirety, click here. For more information, follow White on Twitter.
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