Angela White is one of the biggest names in porn. In 2020, the Australian-born superstar became AVN’s first three-time Female Performer of the Year winner, leading to The Daily Beast calling her “The Meryl Streep of Porn”. In addition, she boasts one of the largest OnlyFans accounts in the world, raking in millions of dollars a year from the platform alone. So when it comes to adult entertainment, there’s perhaps nobody more qualified to speak about the often misunderstood industry. We recently sat down with White to clarify some common misconceptions.
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White says she was a very sexually adventurous teenager. However, her behaviour was always deemed inappropriate, and she fell victim to slut-shaming in high school. Pornography was the first place she saw “women being celebrated for having sex with multiple people and expressing and exploring their sexuality”.
“I wanted to get into porn as soon as I saw it at the age of 14,” White explains. “I waited till I was 18, then contacted a few companies that I wanted to shoot for, and the rest is history.”
As an 18-year-old still in high school, the teenager jumped on a plane overseas to shoot her first scene. Having waited four long years to finally live out her dream, White described the trip as “exhilarating” and a “really cool life experience”.
A sense of accomplishment radiates through White’s voice as she describes her first moments on set. This feeling of pride challenges the broad myth that all new women in the industry are degraded, victimised and coerced into believing they have no other options. White firmly believes this stereotype is not only untrue but rooted in longstanding gender inequality.
“That myth in and of itself is quite sexist because it’s always the women that are considered to be victimised , never the men.”
“If a man goes into porn and is having sex with a bunch of women, he’s considered a champion. He’s celebrated, but a woman is slut-shamed. That myth in and of itself says a lot about our society and culture and how we view women in relation to sex.”
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While Acknowledging the progress made in the past few years, White believes women in porn still face an uphill battle. Although the general public is now more familiar than ever with the porn world thanks to increased media exposure, it seemingly continues to be reduced to clichés.
“Women are still being slut-shamed for expressing their sexuality on their own terms, but with the explosion of OnlyFans, I feel like adult entertainment has become a little bit more normalised,” she notes.
Speaking of OnlyFans, White is an advocate for porn behind controlled paywalls like the popular subscription service due to its industry protocols, duty of care and compliance measures over user-generated content uploaded to free sites where people can be at risk of being exploited. Furthermore, OnlyFans’ rise provided sex workers with an opportunity to earn an income during the pandemic.
“OnlyFans was amazing for sex workers ,” revealed White. Especially in porn because the industry shut down for quite an extended period, given that we couldn’t have sex six feet apart. Well, some people can, but most dicks aren’t that big… “
She continued: “The industry shut down for a long period of time, and OnlyFans was a great way for performers to work from home, do solo content, interact with fans, and do custom videos.”
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