5 Feet of Fury

‘Traci Lords, we still love you’

Lynn Crosbie:

Like Jameson, she was raped before working in the skin trade – and Lords was raped at the age of 10. “Were you overdeveloped at 10?” Larry King asked her, astonishingly, in 2003.

She describes this crime as someone having taken her “power away,” and she says she took this power back through what Waters calls “sexual terrorism” – a wild, risky girl, she dramatized the rape by becoming a sexual powerhouse.

Still, as Lords recently revealed, “as free and loose as I might have been with my body, and as destructive as I might have been, my soul was where the pain was.”

Here is a more profound paradox: If porn stars are both reviled and loved, how does their own self-image operate in this continuum?