On a dull spring night, nearly ten o'clock, Duke freshman Miriam Weeks was searching for new underwear. Go buy some underwear after a day of class— perhaps a good pastime for a female college student to spend a Wednesday night— but for Weeks, the underwear has a more obscure use. Two days later, at an exhibition in Atlanta called the Sexy Club, she was going to sell it for $50 per pair of panties to the men (and ladies!). ）。 Since entering the adult film industry last November, Weeks has made 30 to 35 films, and most of these men and women are "sexually interested" by her performances.
So Weeks needed to buy panties, "cheap panties," she said wearily, two fawns looking out the window with misty eyes. Against the backdrop of the street-side shopping district, Duke University's foyer appeared empty. "Do you think you can buy it at the dollar store?"
In just a few weeks, the news brought to light the scandal of a Duke freshman earning tuition by making adult films. Another identity of Weeks, Belle Knox ("Bella" comes from the Disney cartoon "Beauty and the Beast"), "Knox" because she has a crush on the suspect Amanda Knox: "I tried to come up with a name that didn't attract attention. The incident quickly sparked a national controversy. Of course, this is not the first time that female college students have been exposed to shoot adult films, but what makes the American people excited is that the student is from such a prestigious school as Duke University. There are quite a few who believe that an adult who pursues a legal profession and can make his or her life at higher education better is understandable. What right does society have to make a fuss about how women should dispose of their bodies? However, more people expressed difficulty in accepting, "I went, does she know what she is doing?" ”
These comments doom Miss Miriam Weeks' freshman year to be a topsy-turvy one, and she is "so famous" that she can't be more famous. For her part, she also sells her underwear to the highest bidder. In her world, a green light was lit high, guiding her forward.
The day before yesterday I first met Miss Weeks, dressed in a crumpled navy blue coat and glasses, with mashed potatoes for breakfast in one hand and a pink backpack in the other.
On the way back from the student center to her dorm room (a room full of gentle girlish air, piled high with books, shoes, and beauty supplies), Weeks briefly talked about her upbringing: Her father was a military doctor, so when the family moved to Spokane, Washington, because of his father's work, she went to a private Catholic high school. She is a very studious, having been one of the captains of the debate team, one of the founders of the charity project that delivered water filters to El Salvador, and a waiter at a home for the elderly. These experiences laid the groundwork for her acceptance to her beloved Duke University, which has some of the best law preparation programs in the country.
She watched adult films at the age of 12, lost her virginity at the age of 16, and couldn't remember when she found out she was bisexual. When she was at home, she would always ask her friends to lock her in a dog house, "I don't know why, but being locked up makes me feel particularly excited." 」 She said.
Weeks in high school was one of the best students at the school, but often mingled with college students on weekends. When the nude photos she sent to a boy were passed out, she was "almost locked in the house for a whole year." My mom always told me not to let my intimate photos come out. "She was depressed for a long time because of this, and even began to self-harm.
She believes that her experiences in growing up have nothing to do with her entry into adult film. When she first entered Duke University, her dad worked in a private practice. Randomly deployed by the Army Reserve to accompany the army to Afghanistan, the treatment is not even half of the previous one. Weeks said she asked the school to reconsider her scholarship application, but "no one seems to care." Her family could not afford the tuition expenses of up to $4,300 a month, and her parents advised her to apply for some personal loans that would turn into hundreds of thousands of unpaid debts by the time she graduated.
In high school, Weeks worked as a waiter — more despised in her eyes than in the sex trade. In desperation, Weeks once jokingly said to his roommate, him, I might as well go and be an adult movie star. ”
Subsequently, she began to seriously consider the possibility of this choice. "I Googled 'How to Be a Actress' and saw pages from various companies. There's a company called SexyJobs.com that caught my eye, and it's like Baidu in adult films. Weeks took a few nude photos of herself and submitted them to the company, including her height (162.5 centimeters), weight (42.75 kilograms, a self-statement ('I'm a naughty female college student'," etc.). Within days, a company called Fortune Abuse called and invited her to New York for her first shoot, offering $1,200 for a single scene. The night before leaving, Weeks recalled, "I was very hungry and thirsty. I fantasized that 'this is going to be very sexy.'"
Although Weeks insisted that the shooting was based on mutual agreement, the first shooting did not leave her with good memories. "They're trying to figure out ways that can provoke you and manipulate you further." I remember when I stripped naked, a man said, 'You have scars on your legs, you're a self-mutilator'. He saw the notch on my thigh with the word 'fat' written on it, and then he started calling me fat. When they shouted "boot," she was slapped and pushed to the ground. "Then I cried, 'Please stop, please stop, please stop.' Don't do this to me, please don't do this. They stopped and said to me, 'The shooting has to go on.'" "I just want them to know, 'Please don't get down so heavy.'" But things didn't get better, and I kept getting beaten, pushed, and spit on. They called me fat, called me a bad feminist, said I would hang up all subjects, called me stupid and brainless, and insulted me as a bitch. But I survived. You know people can sometimes empty everything, right? I don't think much about what they say. "It wasn't until she returned to college after filming that she felt the aftermath of the incident." I remember a moment when I felt like a broken shell, 'What the hell did I do?' It's simply the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. What if someone finds out? ”
Still, she needs the money. To better protect himself, Weeks signed up with a company called Matrix Models to fly to Los Angeles for the Christmas holidays to make five films — including a "threesome" movie co-starring "Sexiest" James Deen. She told her parents that she planned to stay at school during the holidays. She told her roommate that she was going to California — she realized someone had to know where she was — even though she didn't explain to her roommate what she was doing. In fact, no one around her knew she was making adult films—especially her parents, who thought their daughter was a virgin.
After the holidays, Weeks returned to school with a $7,000 pay and felt like he had found a way out. "I felt great, the whole person was excited. When the boy rejected me, I thought to myself, 'If you know I'm a star...' To explain the origin of the large amount of cash, she told her mother that she was selling marijuana, which was legal in washington state where she lived. My parents would rather sell their organs than turn me into a star. When my brother found out, he said, 'Miriam, if I knew that our family's financial conditions were so difficult, I would have done all the overtime while I was working.' But I don't want my family to be tired of it. I just want to try to keep a low profile and then make enough money to pay for the fee. I don't want to make a big difference in adult films. Here's how I see it: There are thousands of stars in the world, if not a hundred thousand. How unlikely is it that people will notice me? "She paused." I know now that this kind of thinking is really silly and naïve. ”
In fact, within two months, she was recognized. Shortly after returning to school from Christmas break, a friend of Weeks' name, Thomas Bagley, told her he recognized her in a video. He swore to her that he wouldn't tell anyone, only to turn around and tell all the members of his brotherhood. The next morning, Weeks received countless friend requests on Facebook, all of them boys they didn't know. A tweet confirmed that her nightmare had come true: "Belle's Twitter account received a 'attention reminder' from someone my level and I knew, and I couldn't help but cry. On Facebook's chat platform, Weeks accused Bagley of "ruining my life with my most intimate things" and scolding "I fucking hate you." (Bagley apologized to her for being "very, very sorry" and repeatedly made his remorse public.) ）
As one professor pointed out, if I were a student at New York University, it wouldn't be worth mentioning at all. But I went to school at Duke, a school that is on high alert due to the recent spate of sex scandals. As Weeks argues, Duke's largely economically privileged students and "dominant fraternal culture" plus the "conservative biblical cultural belt of the south" worked to create an "atmosphere of high contempt and repression of women." Still, her friend Jacob Tobia told me that "there are a lot of people in school who have a biased view of the whole thing, but that's only a small group of people." ”
When her story was leaked, Weeks said she tried to provide a narrative perspective that was at least "unbiased." "When I was exposed, I was still compromising with myself about who I really was. When I was betrayed, my attitude towards the industry was still contradictory. I was ashamed because I knew I was a smart girl —the only student in our high school to be admitted to Duke in ten years — and what was I doing? However, in order to grasp the direction of the story, she quickly became a champion of the industry.
As we walked across campus to the Public Policy Building, the conversation was once again interrupted. A professor came to ask if she would like to tell his students about her role in the sex trade industry. "I was scared, I was terrified," she told me when the professor was gone. But she patiently explained the "money deal" to a confused prep student, but she acted calmly. For herself, it's not easy to defend herself as a feminist while enjoying "heavy taste" sex. "Women in history who liked to tweak their tastes for sex have been marginalized by feminists." Weeks said. "Maybe you don't like being shot, but I personally think it's very sexy."
In fact, the heated debate over Weeks' experience has been going on for decades. "People often tell me that we've been brainwashed and that we're doing it because of boring theories like patriarchy and so on." As the godmother of Weeks, a star who defended the industry from feminism, Nina Hartley commented. "To be a lawyer, she's at least twice as good as her competitors to get out of the shadows of the past." Sasha Grey, a idol whom Weeks adored, stood up for the young female college student, both because of the she was making films on a large scale and because she believed That Weeks had the right to make them. "Just because I liked a more radical way of sex than my mother liked it doesn't mean I'm not a feminist." She said. "I think it's a really good idea for Belle to find a balance between sex and education. I hope that such things will not be labeled as 'sex scandals'. (But that doesn't mean the adult film industry is fully supportive of this.) Recently, adult movie star Belle Noire sent an email to Weeks calling her a "liar" and "mentally unstable" and accusing her of not "blaming the U.S. education system" for her actions. ）
Weeks knows that most people think women who enter the industry are mentally dysfunctional, or severely traumatized, or have an Oedipal complex. So she was very hesitant to tell me the true background of her story. It wasn't until we were waiting for soup at Panera Bread near the school that she confided in me about her experience of being raped at a private party in high school. She had been drinking too much and fainted in a room, and woke up to see a man who had been watching her at the party leave the room. She didn't have the strength to push him away. That experience, and her friend's reaction to the incident—blaming her for being too careless and unruly, and begging her not to resort to the law, because they were all underage drinking illegally at the time—was also the starting point for Weeks' interest in women's rights. The huge difference between being raped and shooting pornography with the consent of the person concerned made it natural for her to defend the latter.
However, the line between her two identities is also increasingly blurred. On the way back to school, she recounted her confusion. During the holidays and shooting movies, I put on Belle's mask. Other times, I'll set her up and go back to being that pretty girl, Miriam. But now that I've become very famous in the industry, the two identities have begun to merge. I answered the phone and gave interviews as Belle. She was no longer someone I could casually put aside. ”
Although "Belle is too hard to accept for a university like Duke — she's a somewhat lewd little girl who only shows up in my bedroom, and Miriam is a nerd who loves to sleep and loves her family and friends." "Miriam wants to get married normally, have children, and become a lawyer who fights for women's rights." I don't really know who I am sometimes, do you know what I mean? "Weeks looked at me with a pleading look." Don't you feel like you have a different personality when it comes to sex? ”
Suddenly her cell phone rang, a text message from a very handsome Anglo-Saxon white boy who asked for her number after class and texted her if she could have lunch. "Don't!" She exclaimed, unsure of the boy's real motives. But after a while, she gave me a big smile and told me how she would react if it were another one," Belle would say, 'I'm a lovely college girl.'" Come on me. ’”
The dollar store was closed, so we went to target supermarkets to buy her lingerie, and instead of choosing the narrow and fitted styles, she chose the untethered style that looked like she would wear to the gym. "They like the type you wear every day." She explains. "You can also make a lot of money by selling the clothes you wear when you shoot." And this advice, she got from her prists, who has many years of experience in the industry.
While picking through teen-sash-sized underwear, Weeks told me that her life was getting crazier, and that feminist manifestos she had written the night before staying up late ("I chose the 'bitch manifesto'; about how some people set the rules of society") talked about how Duke was trying to protect her from harassment ("'All the teachers the management told me,' you must keep her safe in the classroom").
This summer, she will intern at pornhub, an for PR and marketing development, and spend all her weekends flying around the country to shoot adult films and participate in striptease shows. Not to mention that she's about to host a reality show called The Truth About Sex and provides a model of her pussy, anus, and mouth for an adult products company called Doc Johnson. In addition, Weeks hopes to see her family, even though her brother and sister no longer speak to her, and even their relationship with her parents "never goes back to the past." "Of all the people, my grandfather was really, really, very supportive of me," she told me, "and his attitude was, 'I don't think anybody has the right to dictate what you do.'" ”
So far, Duke university has made Weeks feel very lonely. Her roommates were very supportive of her, and she made some new friends through some clubs similar to campus Republicans (though she considered herself a liberal). But forums like CollegiateACB.com that support students' anonymous comments on their school sections are still full of insults and even death threats. There are 12 posts in the "How to make Belle die" column. One hateful tweet read: "The school should expel her, or we will have to find a way to make this bitch suffer ourselves." "On different occasions, she often mentions a lover who broke up before entering college, and she says it's hard to find and develop a relationship you can trust at Duke." Men don't want to date me, they just want to go to bed," she said in the car, "I may have had a relationship with them in the past and would have expected to develop further." But I soon discovered that dating and falling in love wasn't a Duke tradition. ”
Weeks wanted to take me to experience Duke's nightlife, and when we had bought underwear and a leg depilator, we went to a bar called Shoeters. The mechanical bull at the bar entrance and the signage at the entrance to the dance floor both give the impression that the place has a wild Western character. We managed to get to the door, but she froze. A young woman in a pink dress glanced at Weeks and immediately showed a look of surprise. She quickly ran back to the beer table and whispered a few words in the male companion's ear. Soon, the whole crowd was looking in this direction—as if Weeks were magically appearing in the bar as a unicorn, easily frightened. In fact, she was indeed vulnerable to fright.
She grabbed my arm and whispered, "They're all watching me." Let's go, I don't want to stay here. As soon as she stepped out of the bar threshold, she immediately turned around and disappeared into the night.
The second time I met her was at the Taj Mahal Ace Casino in Atlanta, where she was playing Belle Knox at a comic show called Sexy Club. By the time she arrived at her booth on Saturday, a long line of men expecting to see her had formed. Dressed in a plaid skirt, fishnet socks and a bandeau with the word "BJU" tattooed on it, and a coat with the words "schoolgirl" on the outside, she began to constantly sign up photos of herself with a dog collar, and the men only needed to spend $10 to hold her waist for a photo, and belle smiled shyly when she took the photo. When a man expressed his desire to make a very lewd adult film with Knox, she didn't lose her temper at all. "Thank you!" She replied happily. Nina Hartley (She's still a rare star of the eighties, a passing man put it) passed by Belle's booth and gave advice as an elder: Never do something in front of the screen that you wouldn't want to do at home.
At nine o'clock in the evening, Knox returned to the hotel to change into a black lace dress, eating cold french fries while counting the $980 she had just arrived. Soon she was asked to return to the red carpet again for repeated photographs. The Polish-American Starr sisters, dressed in matching tight skirts, seemed completely unable to stop the breasts from "running out". Miley May, a copycat Midley Cirus star, wiggled her hips seductively. Knox, on the other hand, just stood there most of the time, looking not far away, and at the moment she looked more like the quiet female college student Miriam Weeks.
Knox gives you a sense of intrigue but seductive, and she's not trained in the industry, so it's more real. She's a "real college girl," and her next film will be named after her. It's going to be a shot to unearth her innocence, director Luc Wylder said as she passed by her booth, and from many angles she lacked experience, but that's what makes her so popular in the industry. ”
When the awards gala performance began, Knox was in a good mood for receiving a text message from his ex. He said he missed her very much. The exhibition itself is also interesting. Knox won the "Best Newcomer Award" without any suspense. But it was still an exciting time for her. "It was the craziest and most out-of-the-ordinary year of my life," she said backstage, "but I'm thankful for the opportunity." I love the industry. As she had previously said to me at the dinner table, "I never felt respect when I was at Duke." And here, I was respected. ”
After the performance, she picked up the trophy and accepted everyone's congratulations before going to the celebration banquet in the upstairs suite. "I'm getting more and more emotional," she whispered. "For many nights I wondered if I had made the wrong decision and ruined my life. But I found that there was none. She smiled sweetly, "Today is a good day." ”