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I’ve always wondered what the life of porn stars looked like after they stopped doing movies. These girls always come from nowhere, the majority makes a few movies and when they quit the business they leave without a bang.
And then what?
What kind of job do you take up, do you tell your boyfriend and what do you tell the kids? Since porn stars work with aliases it has been a mystery what kind of life they’re living unless they branched out to some other spotlight career like Traci Lords, Sasha Grey and Linda Lovelace. After Porn Ends sheds some more light on retired girls and gives us a glimpse of what they do now that they don’t have sex in front of a camera for money anymore.
This documentary has got a wide variety of stars who once performed on a regular basis. They can be divided into three groups:
- Men who do this for money and never show any regret doing this.
- Females who entered the world of porn willingly and mostly have no regrets.
- Females who rolled into porn because of financial and/or personal problems. The majority of them regrets this choice and in most cases finds religion after quitting. Featured are Asia Carrera, Nina Hartley, Mary Carey, Houston, Crissy Moran, Randy West, Richard Pacheco, John Leslie, Amber Lynn, Seka, Raylene, Luke Ford, Bill Margold, Shelley Lubben and Tiffany Million.
The stories the guys tell are mostly lighthearted. They have funny anecdotes and none have any real regrets. Like most of the actresses they start off with some (nude) modelling until someone asks them if they want to perform. Skip to today where Alex West as now had sex with approximately 3000 women. The only regret he has is that he had genuine feelings for performer Tera Patrick but didn’t quite know how to act on them due to the fact his porn job made him out of touch with dating.
The women are a different story. There are a couple of them like Nina Hartley and Seka who have had both feet on the ground the moment they decided to start porn and the moment they decided to quit porn. Though Hartley’s iMDB page still lists her as active, but seeing as she’s already 30 years in the business it’s a safe bet to say she has enough experience to commemorate on the past 30 years.
On the other side are a lot of women who entered porn because they were living on the streets, hooking or just had a difficult childhood. They started doing something which they didn’t love and in some cases got out worse than they started. A lot of them have found saving in becoming religious, some even taking it a step further by becoming anti-porn activists. A bit hypocritical and narrow minded in my opinion. Just because you had some problems and decide to blame an industry doesn’t mean you should project that onto other people.
After porn the women became stay-at-home mothers, bounty hunters, real estate agents and such to varying degrees of success. Most of them have a sad touch to them though the things that happen to them, like cancer or the sudden death of your partner, happens to the average Joe just as much. What struck me the most was how some of them really went too far with plastic surgery. Some of them had pretty bad looking fake boobs back in the day, but today some of them have become a bit scary after doing lip injections and probably multiple facelifts. The end credits give us a small update on how it went with the featured performers. A couple of them are battling an addiction and going to AA meetings and some of them have returned to acting in porn to make ends meet.
One of the most interesting aspects is of course porn stars and their kids. It’s a topic that isn’t touched upon really. The kids that are featured are both female and older if not adults. They don’t mind that their father or mother made their living once that way, but I was hoping to get a view from a young adult boy. He’s most likely to browse Pornhub to aid him in relieving himself and is bound to come across videos of his mom. They also never really say if the two featured kids have seen the work their parents did. I think not.
The performers featured have done a lot of work and therefor returning to purely anonymous lives is hard, but what about all those girls that only did a couple of movies? I guess we’ll never know if they tell their partners or kids what mommy did for money.
The movie itself is rather amateurishly shot. On multiple occasions the camera pans for no reason and at one point when a porn star starts to cry they have to adjust the lens making the image blurry. Aside from the performers there are also some other people who get to do their saying. Of them the historian and the researcher are actually the least interesting. They come to conclusions we can make ourselves just as easy.
It’s an interesting documentary, but could have benefited from more performers and more in depth daily lives. Now most of them are just talking heads while it’s probably more intriguing to seem them actually do their day-to-day routine.
