Porn Stars and Poor Grammar

I made the mistake of going to one of my favorite porn stars’ Twitter feed.  It was a mangled Sarlacc Pit of grammar where words were fed in as whole thoughts and spat out as fragmented dreck.  The “Hey Guys hanging out on here Your The Best” was, literally, the most coherent thought on the page – the rest read like a dyslexic man frantically transcribing a snake-handler’s talking in tongues.  I was deeply disappointed.
And I would have posted that thought on Twitter, except I knew what I’d get: “Ha ha, what’d you expect from a porn star?”
My answer: an intelligent woman.
Just because a girl fucks a lot, even for money, doesn’t make her stupid.  In fact, a lot of the interviews I’ve read with porn starlets are excruciatingly honest about the what porn is- they’re aware that they’re a commodity, and are using that to make money at something they enjoy.  They’re businesswomen, often more competent than given credit for, their considerable intellect hidden behind the cumshot. (Or, as is often more accurate, an intellect hidden behind a porn consumer base that doesn’t value verbal fireworks.  Though I could easily see a classic literature-inspired porno series where a beautiful women reads Dickens, then gets dickened.)
Which is not to say there aren’t dumb women, or lost women, in the porn industry: a reading of “The Other Hollywood: An Uncensored Oral History Of Porn” will give you many a tale of the overdosed, beaten, and lost.  But the same could be said of the entertainment industry in general, and most of the female voices describing their experiences in porn here are wise and insightful – not just about porn, but about life.
It’s safer to think of women in porn as stupid, easily guided.  After all, these are beautiful women who have sex freely, shamelessly, and in some cases exultantly.  It’d be kind of terrifying to a lot of men, and women, if there were beautiful, smart women who loved to fuck.  So it’s better if we can shovel those women off into the corner as airheads, and the rest are abused women; nobody would do this willingly, of course. That’s what porn is – full of living examples of How To Live Your Life Wrong.
Except man, we love to watch.
Then I thought, you know, maybe even that’s not the case.  Because if you compared this starlet’s feed to, say, Gordon Ramsay’s feed – a man who is highly intelligent on television, a master chef who can taste the difference between five kinds of tuna, and yet has yet to discover the proper use of the apostrophe.  Someone’s ability to communicate via the written word and their intellect is linked, but by no means is it an absolute link. Perhaps she’s just not good with words… and as I know all too well from getting ingrained in arguments with well-spoken stupid people, the ability to speak clearly is not equated with the ability to think clearly.
The truth is, I can assume little from what I see.  But I do know that if you think “porn star” automatically equals “dumb,” that probably says more about you than the starlet in question.  And it annoys me that if I’d said, “This porn star is dumb,” a bunch of people would have thought that the status quo.