Stoya is an adult performer with 53 credits to date. She is in the process of directing her first film. She has won three AVN Awards, including the 2009 award for Best New Starlet. She is also a freelance writer and has contributed to Vice, Esquire, The Guardian, and the New York Times.

When a porn star says that she has been raped, she faces the idea that her job means she had it coming. Stoya – in her first interview since accusing James Deen – and a chorus of adult performers argue that the problem in porn isn’t the sex: it’s the culture

Stoya says she couldn’t sleep. After arriving in Serbia on 18 November to begin work on a film, she had been woken by nightmares. Just one paparazzo waited for the internationally recognisable porn performer and writer at the airport, and even he had slunk off when the production assistant sent to meet her had told him, after he asked if this was Stoya, that it was not. Stoya couldn’t sleep in the converted attic room with the stark white wood floors where she stayed after 12-hour days on set, making a narrative, non-porn film that would keep her offline and occupied. “There’s no room for anything else,” she said. She spent her time awake rehearsing her role in the film: a woman who would be raped by someone that she knew.

When I first started, I was only doing nude photographs, so it’s still the kind of thing that might upset your grandmother, and you don’t want to have a loud conversation about it when there are people with small children around, but it’s so far away from hardcore pornography. And my social group and my friends and acquaintances were all pretty open and pretty artsy and pretty explorative when it came to sex. So it wasn’t really a big deal. It was like, “Hey, what did you do last week? “Oh, I took these pictures with my boobs out!” “You have fun?” “Yeah!”

And my parents, they had different reactions, but the core of it for both of them was, “You’re our child, we love you, typically when you make a decision you have thought about it somewhat, and you consistently deal with the ramifications of whatever you choose to do. Are you on drugs? Are you being forced to do it? No? Then cool.” My mom was unhappy with the whole performance of stereotypical femininity. That was a little hard for her to swallow. She was like, “Really? With the fake eyelashes?”

Dylan Matthews: Did it help that you were doing alt-y stuff early on? Girls and guys with tattoos, not sort of people with lots of implants and what people's perceptions of porn might have been at the time?

Stoya: With my mother, not really at all, because at the time — this was before people found out that the woman who was supposedly running SuicideGirls actually wasn’t in charge of it, and it was owned by a man. There was a common view at the time that porn was especially empowering and I remember my mom sitting there going, "I guess doing things that you want to do can be empowering but there’s nothing inherently empowering about showing up in front of a camera with your nipples out. That’s as empowering as brushing your teeth."

It didn’t really help at all. It led to further conversations. It helped me understand her perspective and I think talking about it helped her understand my perspective, and it was good for our relationship, but it didn't help her feel better about it. Stoya First of all, after that one time with the Huffington Post he’s asked me to remember that not everyone has chosen to live their lives in public, so I'll tread very carefully here. No jokes at all here, especially if they might go viral.

My dad’s view is, on the one hand, I’m an adult and he has to trust that he has done his job raising me and that my mom has done her job raising me and I can go navigate the world and make my own mistakes and make my own decisions and just because someone might think it’s a mistake or he might think it’s a mistake does not in any way mean it necessarily is. That’s what you do with children. You raise them, and then you have to take your hands off and go, “Okay, you live your life now.” He does always seem to have this squeamishness about it where he’s genuinely interested in how my life is going and if my career is going well but at the same time doesn’t really don’t want to hear any details or discuss details. It’s like, “Oh, how are you?” “Well, lalalalala …”