Porn pretends to be something it’s not. For the viewer it depicts a fantasy of sex. It makes it seem like this is what all sex is like. It tells the lie that if you aren’t doing it like that, you are missing out. Or if you’re body isn’t that perfect, you are unattractive-that sex is about performing.

But it is not just the viewer that has lies fed to them. Porn lies to porn stars and porn addicts alike.

Porn tells porn stars that they will have everything they need. It tells them that they will make a ton of money. It tells them that their sex lives will be out of this world. It tells them that they will have the most glamorous life they can imagine.

And some do make a lot of money. Some do become famous. But for every Jenna Jameson there are many porn stars whose name you will never hear.

The truth is that porn is not all that it is made out to be.

This is brought home nowhere better than in the story of Shelley Lubben. You may have heard of her.

Shelley began prostituting herself before entering the porn business to make her name there. She found herself in the porn capitol, theSan Fernando Valley, making movies that required her to engage in increasingly harder acts. She took drugs and alcohol to meditate the pain that porn caused. She became an addict. She contracted genital herpes, an untreatable sexually transmitted disease and her life in prostitution and porn caused her to have two miscarriages. She contracted HPV which soon became cervical cancer.

This wasn’t the life that she had been promised.

Sadly Shelley’s story is a familiar one to many girls who find their real life a million miles away from the life they depict on screen. Visit her website and you can read pages of stories just like Shelley’s.

Girls like Becca, a porn star escort who spent years travelling the country having sex with strangers. Or Tanya who experienced physical abuse while engaging in sex for porn. The stories go on, stories of girls and men being treated literally like meat, of having unimaginable things done to them by sometimes more than one man at a time.

Porn is not empowering. It leads girls to act out in ways that they never imagined when they first started. It destroys their bodies in horrible ways due to the abuse that is inflicted on them during “sex” scenes. It leads to addiction, to rehab. You can work for two years in porn and then it’s over. And that’s if you are lucky. Then there is the constant putting up with men thinking they can treat you as they wish because you are a porn star so you must always be up for it-rape, unwanted pregnancies.

This is not the life that porn promises.

But thankfully for many girls this is not the end.

For women like Shelley they have been able to find a way out. They have been able to make a life outside of porn. For every story on Shelley’s site of girls who have found themselves living in porn, there is a better ending, one where they are set free to live a real life; loved and accepted by God simply as they are.

Which brings us back to Jenna Jameson.

When asked by Anderson Cooper how she would react if her daughter wanted to join the industry she replied,

“ I’d tie her in the closet…it’s not something that I would want my daughter to go through. It’s not something that any parent would choose for their child.” (CNN interview, 2004)

The biggest name in porn.

Not wanting her daughter to work in porn.

Maybe she knows something we don’t.

Maybe she knows the truth.