Smut Shaming

Libertarian John Stossel interviewed a porn "actress" named Belle Knox for a segment that helped defend her life choices. He titled it, Porn Myths.

Belle Knox is her "stage" name. Her real name is Miriam Weeks, and she has her own Wikipedia page. You know you've made it when you have appeared in three dozen skin flicks and have your own Wikipedia page.

Knox claims she googled "how to be a porn star," as a way to pay for her tuition at Duke University. The estimated yearly cost to attend Duke is more than $70,000.

Knox based her "stage" name in part on Amanda Knox and in part on Belle from Beauty And The Beast. What Disney fairy-tale princess is based on a young woman having sex with her grandmother?

Early in the interview, Stossel asks a very good question, "How do you feel about little kids watching you? The computer is accessible to everybody, sometimes." Knox takes in a breath as if to answer, but pauses for several long seconds. She purses her lips and her eyes scan something off to her right.

Her eyes weren't scanning something on-set that distracted her. She was processing. She was mentally flipping through images that made the association between "child" and "computer" real in her mind. Perhaps she was imagining her niece or nephew sitting at the family computer and watching her "performances." She finally answers, "Sorry, can I think about that question a little bit longer?"

What she really wants is to just not think about that question, at all, ever.

One of Stossel's follow-up questions was whether Knox is a feminist or a sex slave. Since Knox, or rather Weeks, is campus coordinator for Students for Liberty, and is on the board of directors for the Sex Workers Outreach Project, we know how she is going to answer this. She is going to use rationalizations to intellectualize her feelings and excuse her behavior.

Stossel, ever the good libertarian, doesn't even ask her the biggest question, the question "why." He tees her up by saying "you are choosing to do this because you didn't want to hit your parents up for Duke's ridiculous tuition."

I didn't want to hit mine up, either, because my sister was also in college, and my younger brother was right behind us. So I got a job in the cafeteria, and worked summers in Alaska. Having sex with my grandmother never crossed my mind.

Yet it did cross hers. She could have made similar money with a few rounds of egg donation. But she "chose" porn. And she admits that she has "the mind and the emotional baggage of somebody much, much older than me." If Stossel wanted to ask what everybody was thinking, he would query whether she had ever experienced childhood sexual abuse.

Libertarians value freedom but they always have to cherry-pick their arguments like this. Knox is the unicorn, the immaculate porn star who has perfect agency. So the idea that they have ever been victimized has to be quickly dismissed. And any suggestion that porn is an industry that also cherry-picks young girls and consumes them isn't even considered.

In this way, Libertarians are to politics what pornography apologists are to culture. Libertarians paper over the restraint and responsibility that make liberty possible. And the pornography industry sanitizes their product by calling it "adult entertainment."

They used to call pornography, "smut," from the German schmutzen, or smudge, a word which carries the connotation "to defile, corrupt, make obscene." Knox is a broken and used-up girl whose only usefulness going forward is spouting nonsensical statements like "we don't have enough open and honest conversations about sex."

You first.