At a bbq this weekend I chatted with a woman who produced a show about sex addicts. “Everyone thinks it’s a BS addiction but it’s the real deal,” she said and explained that in her experience she’d found sex addiction very legitimate and often linked to childhood distress.

Several refills of Cava later, the conversation turned to whether all porn stars wind up in their given profession because of former traumas—an idea I’ve often heard and tended to assume myself in the past. But post-husband-working-in-porn, I feel somewhat differently. I shan’t make any definitive statements about the inner world’s of porn stars. But I can say that the huz returned home with stories of both the disheveled girl, maybe on or coming off of drugs, as well as the business-like gal blowing her way through law school with Head of the Class. While I’ve no doubt that there are a great deal of porn stars carrying hefty emotional baggage, I also wonder if this often-heard distinction may be an easy way for a layperson (my former-self included) to separate us from them. A way of excusing a willful decision to make money having sex. As it stands, and as Jenna Jameson confirms, no girl dreams of growing up to be a porn star. And as a likely future mom, I’m still not sure I’d want my little girl to dream of a Vivid career. Yet I do wonder if we would find fewer emotionally damaged porn stars were the profession to be legitimized like, say, modeling or acting. Oh, wait, bad examples of togetherness. Politicians, then? Or priests, perhaps? Shit, never mind, turns out we’re all a little effed up.