Alex Hum
Contributor
For nine years Donny Pauling produced pornography. He worked for Playboy and other well-known companies and he quickly worked his way up in the porn industry. But unlike many in the pornography industry, he quit.
The Catholic Chaplaincy at York hosted Pauling’s seminar, The Porn Effect, on September 27. Over the course of the evening, he shared his life story with the audience in Vari Hall B.
“It was not at all the fantasy I always thought it would be. I was slowly becoming accustomed to things that used to repulse me,” says Pauling, who began his career in pornography by producing photos online in 1997. “At the beginning of my career I would go into conventions and see things that would just turn my stomach, by the end of it, they were no big deal.”
The desensitization of porn is what really surprised Pauling during his years as a producer. He began to realize that porn was changing his life in a horrible way.
“I would be late for meetings because I’m looking online [for porn]. I would be up at night while my wife’s sleeping,” says Pauling. Porn began to become an addiction for him and took away time from his family.
From the very beginning, Pauling started his career in porn because of his deep hatred for the Christian community. He says that it was this hatred that fueled him to start contacting the websites and companies in search of an opportunity to make more money and enter the seemingly glamourous business.
Once he got into the business, he started producing and recruiting actresses behind his wife’s back. He lied and snuck around while his wife had no idea what he was doing. Pauling quickly found a niche in being able to recruit many actresses; his record stands up to over 500 models. In retrospect, he comments that most people who join the industry do not know what they are signing up for.
“Everything about the business is fake”, says Pauling.
But as Pauling became more engrossed in his work, the distance continued to grow between him and his family. In the middle of his career, he cheated on his wife. At first he chose to keep it to himself, until it happened again. He told her everything and exposed his double life.
“When I finally came clean with her, she ended it,” says Pauling. “I was producing part-time behind her back. She thought I had a technology consulting business. She didn’t have any questions about that […] I called her from a show that I attended, a convention for the pornography industry. I told her what was really going on. After that weekend, it was over.”
After the divorce, Pauling’s wife took custody of their young son. He found a new girlfriend.
Together the couple continued to profit together, using their relationship to make girls feel more comfortable. But Pauling began to believe what he was doing was wrong.
“There was a missionary group I met one year at a porn convention,” he says. “They would do make-up for girls and tell them they’re beautiful. In the course of four years they broke down my hatred to love. When the hatred was gone, I couldn’t justify what I was doing anymore.”
It is his experience that propels him to speak out and open the minds of his audiences to the cruel, grotesque reality of the pornography industry.
Pauling notes that the people who make the mistake of going into the pornography industry and exposing themselves, thinking it will be harmless, find out later on that it’s not.
“The content never goes away. When the person in the video or in the photos is a grandmother, they’re still going to have photos and content circulating of what they’d done. It affects them long-term,” says Pauling who admits that a lot of the actresses he worked with regretted their past, and their regret continued to live with them because of the porn industry.
Society never considers the people who are starring in the pornographic content and how they are sold out for money and seen as objects, Pauling says. The people are lost in the vast multibillion dollar industry, but “they’re all someone’s daughters, someone’s sister, someone’s future wife.” This is forgotten because “we’re raised in a society that tells us it’s all okay.” However if people can see the horror of this human trafficking as Pauling has and tries to illustrate for the good of humanity, there could be a stop to this monolithic industry.
Since his days in the industry, Pauling has condemned his involvement.
“I don’t feel like I’m destroying lives anymore,” he says.
