Off Camera

Jessie Andrews was eighteen when she started doing porn, and the press couldn’t quite figure out what to do with her—she was from Fort Lauderdale, she DJed, she had opinions about music, she didn’t perform damage in the ways the narrative required. The "teenage porn star with an outside life" angle got a lot of mileage in 2011 and 2012, as if the genuinely interesting thing wasn’t what she did on camera but the fact that she existed off it. She was good at the work—actually good, not merely competent—and she had the kind of dark-haired, effortlessly pretty look that photographs well from any angle. But what stayed with me was the interviews: the composed, unapologetic way she talked about her choices, the conspicuous absence of either shame or performed liberation. Just someone who’d decided something and was living inside that decision. Whether that reads as clarity or compartmentalization, I still haven’t made up my mind.