NEW YORK CITY—With roughly eight months of performing in adult movies and web scenes under her belt, Belle Knox has parlayed her notoriety as "the Duke University porn star" into a flurry of mainstream media attention, with articles by or about her on Huffington Post, xojane, TMZ, the New York Daily News, Daily Beast—the list isn't exactly endless, but there's no sign of it stopping anytime soon.
Her most recent essay into essaying is an "opinion" piece on Time magazine's website, titled "'Duke Porn Star': I Lost My Financial Aid," about Knox's struggle to remain at the university in the face of rising tuition and fees—and her charge that it's actually government-backed student loans, not to mention President Obama's recent campaign for increased diversity at Ivy League and even lower level universities, that are causing the increases (even though a recent bill to drop interest rates on student loans failed).
"Demand for education, kind of like demand for porn, is pretty inelastic," Knox writes. "Kids like me have been told our whole lives that higher education is the only way to be successful in America. President Obama made it clear he wants to keep that demand high in a speech in Austin, Texas.
“I want us to produce 8 million more college graduates by 2020, because America has to have the highest share of graduates compared to every other nation,” Knox quotes Obama as saying, adding, "Toward that end, he increased the amount and number of Pell Grants."
But that's getting a bit ahead of things. Knox begins her complaint by noting that due to her earnings from porn stardom, Duke's financial aid program is stripping her of the $13,000 in aid she was receiving to offset Duke's roughly $62,000 annual tuition bill—which she notes later is about to rise by another $1,800 for the 2014-15 academic year.
But Knox has some strange ideas about why she's been successful in porn: "[M]y porn work pays the exorbitant tab for one simple reason: Demand for porn actresses, especially extremely young ones like myself, far exceeds supply," adding, "How interesting that the same basic principle explains why my tuition bill is so high in the first place."
As a magazine that's just passed its 30th year of covering every aspect of the adult industry, we must admit we've never seen a "demand for... extremely young" porn actresses that exceeded the supply of such performers—unless one is of the opinion that consumer demand for young porn actresses is never satisfied.
But Knox is trying to make a point that many young libertarians (of which Knox is clearly one) take as gospel: "Market forces" are what control prices, not manipulation by large corporations and Wall Street brokers and hedge fund managers. Hence, Knox has to argue that there aren't hundreds if not thousands of young women trying to break into adult every day, but who are unable to do so due to lack of classical attractiveness, out-of-control drug problems or STDs, but there are still plenty—in order to make her socio-economic point. But being willing to have sex in front of a camera doesn't have nearly the cachet it did even ten years ago, and some high schoolers even look at porn performing as a worthwhile post-school objective. In short, there is not (and has never been) a shortage of "extremely young" female talent.
But Knox seems to think that student loans of various geneaologies are almost too easy to get. In fact, forget the "almost."
"For years, lawmakers have worked toward the clear goal of making sure every American kid enrolls in college," she writes, with an astonishing lack of political awareness. "Pell Grants aren’t the only method. Guaranteed loans have ensured every kid, regardless of credit score, parental income, or likely ability to repay, can borrow money to go to school. The federal government has for decades effectively subsidized college education through grants and loans, with predictable effects."
The "predictable effects," of course, are higher tuition, higher fees and "administrative bloat"—rather than, say, the fact that university boards of directors are stacked with the very same monied corporate heads that sent the economy down the crapper seven years ago, plus alumni who think nothing's too good for the people that run their sainted alma maters. Try telling that to the many "adjunct professors" that have been hired to teach 100- and 200-level courses because the tenured faculty, besides shrinking outrageously over the past decade, is too busy teaching the upper level courses and writing books and articles under universities' "publish or perish" philosophy.
Knox correctly notes, "Further boosting demand for a college, a moribund economy has made delayed entry into the workforce attractive and competition for jobs fierce," but somehow fails to make the connection between that "moribund economy" and its consequent lack of jobs, and the very university Board members who not only approve high salaries for universities' upper level management but who personally raked in the big bucks when the feds bailed out too-big-to-fail banks, investment firms (think "AIG") and companies like General Motors.
So of course, "Colleges today have zero incentive to lower tuition or make college more affordable," when Boards and management no longer care primarily about students but rather mainly the "bottom line" that protects their salaries and patronage!
What's interesting, in a sad sort of way, is that Knox gets some aspects of this issue dead-on correct: "NPR published an article days after my story went public about colleges on average hiring more bureaucrats than teachers. It detailed how my tuition goes toward new football stadiums, building luxury dorms, new dining halls, and rock-climbing walls—and don’t forget visits from Snooki and music artists."
But what Knox doesn't seem to understand is that this isn't a result of it being easier to get loans (that in reality, like home loans in the later 2000s, were given out by banks and loan companies that never expected them to be paid back; they were just fodder for securitization and possibly some future government bailout); it's to (supposedly) make the universities more attractive to students who can afford the tuitions—you know, the 20 percent who own 85 percent of this country's wealth?—and if any of these expenditures result in patronage in hiring builders and/or kickbacks to management, well, that's just a "happy accident"—aka the "price of doing business"! After all, what is one to make of Rutgers University being willing to lay out 150,000 buckaroonies for torture defender Condoleezza Rice to give a 20-minute lecture to students, the vast majority of whom oppose the U.S.'s wars of aggression—and who knows how much Brandeis was about to give virulent anti-Islamist and pseudo-feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak at its graduation—besides the honorary degree, that is?
And Knox knows this! Or at least part of it: "I’m hardly the only student who’s struggling with these sky-high bills. Experts predict a massive student loan default on the horizon, on par with the last major mortgage crisis. And, like the mortgage crisis, it’s likely the banks and lenders will be bailed out, while the students will be saddled with wage garnishments and ruined credit." So is that the fault of the students (and their parents) who sought the loans, hoping against hope that their kids can benefit from the college education many of them were unable to take advantage of themselves? Or is it the greed of the banks and other lenders who were (and are!) only too willing to make bad loans because their friends in government, highly influenced by Wall Street/bankers, will wait until the securitization and loan trading drives the system into a mini-recession which they will use taxpayer funds to bail the lenders out of?
And indeed, Knox recognizes "the fact that not every child should go to college" and rails against those who would "lend someone $150,000 to get a BA in underwater basketweaving," but she fails to realize that the lenders in the "private market" in which she puts so much faith are exactly the same people who, knowing who really runs the U.S. government, will be among the first to seek bailouts if the loans they make go south—and for that reason, need have no higher standards for loan eligibility than those who currently provide student loans!
Her solution, of course, is competition: "Competition drives down prices and improves products and services, as entrepreneurs strive to win customers by offering a better deal in terms of quality and cost," Knox quotes Sheldon Richman, VP of the libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation, as saying. Yeah, competition will insure that cable TV subscribers will get a much better deal if the Comcast/Time Warner merger goes through! Citizens will get a much better deal on healthcare as long as competing for-profit insurance companies are part of the Affordable Care Act! And perhaps Knox seriously believes that today's "entrepreneurs" are pure enough to reject students that aren't ready for or able to succeed at college, rather than giving them the loans anyway and expecting the government to bail them out when the loans go bad!
But what the hell: Lots of teens go through a libertarian phase, and we're guessing that politics won't play much of a role in the celebration of Belle's 19th birthday at Headquarters Gentlemen's Club, where she'll be "available for autographs, photographs, and lap dances," and "A portion of Belle’s earnings during her lap dance performances will be donated to Maggie’s, a Toronto-based non-profit sex-positive advocacy group." (Okay; so politics will pay a little part...)
Headquarters is located at 552 West 38th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues) in New York City. For more information,click here or call the club directly at 212-967-4646. Headquarters can also be followed on Twitter.
To book Belle for adult productions, contact Matrix Models.
