Mia Khalifa on life after leaving the p-rn industry: ‘I feel like people can see through my clothes, it makes me feel ashamed’
Mia Khalifa, in a recent interview, opened up about her struggle as a p-rn star and how despite leaving the profession, it’s a label she has to live with all her life. “I’m only a Google search away,” she said.
Former ad-lt star Mia Khalifa, in a new BBC interview, opened up about her experience working in the p-rn industry and how it damaged her. She explained how inexperience dragged her down and when she finally quit, the label refused to leave her. No matter how stressful the time has been for her, she says, the reality is that she’s only a “Google search” away.
Talking about how it all started, given that she had a decent college education, Mia said, “I don’t think low self-esteem discriminates against anyone. It doesn’t matter if you come from a big family or if you come from a not so big background, I struggled my entire childhood with weight and never felt attractive or worthy of men’s attention, and suddenly in my freshman year of college i started losing all that weight by making small changes and by the time i graduated i was ready to make a bigger difference. I felt extremely embarrassed about my chest because it was the first thing when I lost weight. I lost about 50 pounds and once I did that I started getting all this attention from men and I was never used to it and I felt like if I didn’t I wasn’t hanging on to it and doing what I was asked to do or what was expected of me, it would go away and after I felt and what was like that validation, and you know, the compliments for the first time, I don’t didn’t want it to go away.
Mia Khalifa said that she only earned ₹8.75 lakh as a p-rn star and only stayed there for 3 months.
When asked how she got into the p-rn industry, she said, “It wasn’t just ‘hey, you wanna come do p-rn? It was more like, ‘Oh, you’re beautiful. Would you like to do modeling? Oh, you have a great body, I think you should do nude modeling, stuff like that. And after coming to visit the studio, it was very respectful. It was clean. Everyone who worked there was nice, like it wasn’t sleazy or made me feel uncomfortable.
Asked whether or not she had a lawyer to guide her through the paperwork, she replied, “What 21-year-old man has a warrant attorney?”
Responding to questions about the stress of the experience, more so now, having moved on, she said: ‘I think post-traumatic stress mostly shows up when I go out in public. Because the looks I get, I feel like people can see through my clothes. And that brings me deep shame. It makes me feel like I’ve lost all rights to my privacy, which I did because I’m only a Google search away.
“The things that men see in videos, they expect from the women in their lives, and that’s just not the reality. Nobody does to be that perfect, nobody’s going to do those acts on a Wednesday night with the person he loves,” she continued.
Her story is not her own and that many actors and actresses will go through a similar ordeal. Accepting, she said, “Honestly, I started seeing this recently after the interview came out and people started reaching out and all the emails go out, my manager checks them, and when he receives stuff like that he filters it and sends it to me and reading the words of some of these girls who have been sex trafficked and forced into p-rn and all these stories of girls whose lives have been ruined by this, and by men who took advantage of it and by contracts that they didn’t even understand the lingo of, it makes me feel like maybe it was a good thing that I started to talk and I posted this interview and I’m talking now because other people feel the same way and even if they don’t they don’t relate on such a deep level as doing p-rn , they can relate to the level of insecurity and pressure to do something they didn’t want to do.
At one point, she was asked how and why she agreed to do this kind of work with a hijab. She said: “I told them word for word, ‘You’re going to get me killed.’ They just laughed. On the question of why didn’t she then say that she wouldn’t. “Bullying, I was scared. I was intimidated, I was nervous,” she replied.
