A long time ago, when my daughter was still gestating in my wife’s womb, Jean and I tried to come up with a name for her. “Sasha” we already liked, but what about a middle name? Jean had a good idea: “Grey,” as in Sasha Grey Gross. It had a ring to it, but instead we went with Sasha Raven Gross, which seemed a little quirkier.
That decision turned out to be a good one, as not long after Sasha Raven emerged into the world, we learned there was a porn star named Sasha Grey about to emerge into the world of mainstream entertainment. (She was in Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” and is now doing a guest shot, as herself, on “Entourage.”) It’s bad enough that my Sasha is already saddled with the Gross name—to have the porn star connection really wouldn’t help her in middle school.
I thought about this again this week, when I learned that Laurence Fishburne’s daughter, Montana, would soon be making her debut as a porn star. Obviously, everyone’s now bringing up Chris Rock’s famous line about strippers: “If your daughter’s dancing on a pole, you’ve failed—you’ve failed as a dad.” This seems pretty clear-cut, right? When your kid forgoes Harvard Med for sex work, you must’ve done something wrong.
But is there any positive way to spin this? I mean, our children are bound to disappoint us in one way or another, whether it’s their fashion sense, favorite bands, or their desire to submit to bukkake for profit. Does one fuck-up (a literal one, in Montana’s case) mean we’ve utterly failed?
To put this in more personal terms: How would I feel if Sasha Raven became Sasha Grey? I guess, after I was done vomiting and banging my head against the wall, I’d try to think rationally. First, is she a good porn star? Or merely a porn “actress”? (I would, of course, have to take other people’s word for it.) Is she doing the job well, getting the right roles, not letting herself be taken advantage of? Is she breaking ground and transforming the industry? Is there a way to help her build her own production company, so she’s not beholden to others’ whims? Not that I’d want to be too intricately involved in any of this, but wouldn’t it be better to offer constructive advice than to bury my head in the sand?
The fact is, the porn industry has become a major component of the American economy, and the thousands of people who work deep, deep within it, or merely on its fringes, are someone’s sons and daughters—and other people’s mothers and fathers. You may not like it, but it’s reality—even if you don’t accept it, it won’t change.
So, to Laurence Fishburne, I say: When people ask, “How do you feel that your daughter’s a porn star?,” have a good answer prepared. Here, I’ll let you borrow the answer I’d use for Sasha: “Well, at least she’s not a Republican—or a blogger.”
