Final Sample Chapter
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Chapter One
Education or Entertainment?
At ten years old, I wanted to be a surgeon. It’s probably for the best that I didn’t pursue it, I can’t cut in a straight line. By eighteen, I assumed I’d go into political consultancy, due to the nature of my internships. I never imagined that my career would begin in the adult entertainment industry.
In school and university, I was an overachiever and student athlete. I spent most days getting up at 4:30 AM to go rowing, followed by a full day of classes, studying, and then back to rowing. The pressure to perform in both the sport and school never came from my family. This was all internal. I was always very, very hard on myself and had high expectations. As a result, my life path always felt clear: get into a good university, complete multiple internships, and land a great job. I was content with this idea for my future and never felt like something was missing or that I wanted anything else. This made it all the more surprising to those around me, and even myself, when I started Freyja.
So, how did I go from a clear career trajectory to Porn?
If I had to pinpoint a specific reason that influenced me to start my company, it would be due to rowing. This is because I was sexually assaulted as a teenager in the sport. I won’t go into too many details about this, as frankly, it’s not what this book is about. Still, I find it hard to express my motivation and passion behind Freyja without bringing it up. As a direct result of this, I felt a strong sense of responsibility to take action and prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. Therefore, I ended up launching a campaign to change the sports policy towards sexual harassment & assault. I wanted there to be more regulations in place to help make the sport safer for women and men.
Overall, the campaign was met with some success and a lot of resistance. The whole situation left me with an aching feeling of wanting to do more. Every day I was racking my brain, trying to think of anything else I could do. Two years went by, and I still hadn’t come up with an idea. I couldn't shake the feeling that something was unfinished until one day, a conversation with friends about bad sex changed everything.
I first had the inspiration for what would later become Freyja in the summer of 2020. I was about to start my final year of university at UCL. The first Covid lockdown had finally been lifted, and there was a certain buzz in London as people could finally be reunited with their loved ones. To celebrate our newfound freedom, I went to a restaurant in Notting Hill with a group of friends. After not having seen each other for a while, we had a lot to catch up on. One of the main topics of conversation was the disaster that was Covid dating. At this time, most of the people I knew had either broken up dramatically or were getting married. The rest of us had desperately tried to date, only to find ourselves stuck on awkward FaceTimes and boring walks.
Naturally, from here the conversation shifted towards sex, and we started sharing horror stories from the past months. I spoke about a guy I had recently met and expressed how tired I was of people who would do things without asking. I blamed this on his clear over consumption of porn.
One of my guy friends then commented:
“It’s also annoying how some women will pretend to be a pornstar during sex because they copy porn.”
I responded;
“To be fair we’ve all kind of learnt off porn. I think when it comes to choking and slapping without asking, it’s because people watch a lot of porn and then assume that’s just part of sex so don’t think to ask.”
This conversation got me thinking about my relationship with adult content and sex education.
When it came to sex education, I was fortunate enough to have a mother who was great with these topics. I distinctly remember the first time she asked me if I knew what a period was. I thought she meant in the grammatical sense, so I started explaining to her how to use a full stop. Given that we spoke about everything at home, I was more prepared than my classmates for our first school sex ed talk. My school's introduction to sex was taught by my scary Maths teacher. Her joy in life was making at least one child cry per class… In this introduction, she made us watch a video of a woman giving birth. This quickly resulted in one of the girls passing out on the teacher.
About a year later I had another sex ed class where we had to go around in a circle, reading excerpts from a textbook about penises. If we laughed, we would be kicked out of the classroom. I may or may not have been kicked out of the room a couple of times... As one can see, my sex education was pretty awful. I didn’t even learn how to put a condom on, and to be perfectly honest, I still don’t know how to put one on. Even though I had conversations at home and a few at school, I was still woefully unprepared when it came to adult content.
I first came across porn at the age of 11. This wasn’t intentional. I just remembered hearing a couple of words from movies & shows that I didn’t know the meaning of. So, I Googled them. I specifically remember searching for something very laughable:
“What’s the difference between sex and an orgasm?”
This search eventually brought me onto a tube site (these are the sites that look like explicit YouTube). At first, I didn't understand what I was seeing. After more investigation, I came to the assumption that this was how sex was supposed to be. When speaking with my friends in the restaurant, I realised that I was not unique in thinking this. We all had very similar experiences and we were using porn as a replacement for our lack of sex education, be that consciously or subconsciously.
Before delving in further, one must acknowledge the generational differences in porn consumption. I was born in 2000, so my experience with porn is likely to be strikingly different from that of someone born in the early 1990s, thanks to the rise of digitalization. My generation had handheld devices, while older generations, at best, had a single family computer that had to be plugged in at all times. As a result, the rise of handheld devices significantly increased the accessibility of pornography. This is why younger generations likely have a very different, and perhaps more influenced, relationship with adult content compared to older generations.
In addition, up until now, it may seem like I’m being solely negative about porn. That said, I don’t think pornography is inherently bad or to blame for everything; that would be hypocritical of me. Porn is "intended" as entertainment, not education. It serves as an outlet for many people to explore and express themselves, and it can be consumed responsibly. There are great companies out there working to make adult content consumption safer and more responsible. Still, porn often ends up being scapegoated for a wide range of societal problems. The reality is that people are using it as a source of sex education because they aren’t getting proper sex education from their parents or schools. If we want to change this, parents need to have more open discussions with their children about sex. Meanwhile, schools must provide a more comprehensive and accurate sex education that covers a wide range of topics, including consent. Equally, younger generations need to be educated on the differences between sex and porn. This is espeically as porn will never go away, and it is inevitble that people will come across it, intended or not intended. That said, this doesn’t mean the porn industry is guilt-free. Several serious issues stem from within the industry itself.
During my time in the adult space, I heard many performers say:
“It’s entertainment, you wouldn’t watch a Marvel movie and think you have superpowers.”
And yes, while I respect that porn is intended as entertainment, I don’t think that’s a strong enough argument. Porn is still a product, and if a company sees that its product is being used in a way that causes harm, even if unintentionally, there’s a responsibility to respond. Ignoring that simply because “it wasn’t meant for that” doesn’t remove the impact or the accountability. So, even if it’s not porn’s fault, or its purpose, there still needs to be an adjustment made.
Moreover, another big issue when it comes to adult content is visual, ongoing consent. It should be clarified that the porn industry is all about consent. The problem is that this consent is not always shown in videos. Indeed, some studios will put consent interviews in their content, however, these are often cut out or skipped by the time they get onto a tube site. Therefore, consent needs to be shown throughout the videos, as it illustrates to viewers that consent is ongoing. This should not only apply to studios or tube sites but also fansites for content made by individual creators.
Furthermore, in recent years, there has been a large increase in ‘rough sex’ pornography, which has a prominent role on the homepage of tube sites. If you log into the homepage of a porn site you will most likely be met with hardcore content. The algorithm then suggests more similar content, bringing you down a rabbit hole. Now, if you are a younger person who doesn’t understand kink and the complexities of consent and fetish, you might interpret this content as just a part of sex. In turn, this can lead to performing acts without asking first.
In sum, the tie between bad sex education and porn was crystal clear to me. I felt as though I had finally found the answer I had been searching for. It seemed to be an opportunity to improve how we think and learn about consent. I just wasn’t quite sure yet how this would take shape. I turned to my friends and suggested that we should all do something about it.
My first instinct was to take a political approach, given my previous work experience in that space. I was familiar with the structures, the systems, and the kinds of actions that could lead to change.
The next day, I created a group chat called the “Porn Reformers” and assigned everyone a different area of the industry to research so we could start gathering data. The plan was to then look into legislation we might be able to improve. As soon as I got home, I dove into my research. I pored over countless academic articles and news sources, and explored UK, US, and EU laws regarding pornography. To my surprise, I found far fewer regulations than I had anticipated. At that point, I still had no understanding of who the "real regulators" of the industry were. I quickly gathered my findings and felt motivated to move forward. After uploading everything to a shared drive, I asked the others to meet and discuss it further.
Everyone read my message, but no one responded, and their section of the drive remained empty. At this point, I had never imagined taking this on alone; I thought we would tackle it as a team. The lack of effort on their part was disheartening, and soon my motivation started to fade. Adding to that, I was entering my final year of university and had to start thinking seriously about my future career. The timing just wasn’t right.
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This was the final sample material of my book: Why I Failed In Porn. If you’d like to read more you can buy the book today!