History has been the witness to a handful of rare, exceptional and fearless women who risked 
everything in order to step outside the conventions of their time and break through the glass ceilings that confined and defined their roles as women in culture. Whether it be the 15th century trailblazer, Joan of Arc, who defied all gender conventions in order to lead the French army to several victories over the English during the 
Hundred Years War; or the 16th century Carmelite nun, Saint Teresa of Avila, who pursued her calling as a mystic, writer and reformer of the Catholic Church even amidst the tumultuous backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition; or the feminist writer, Betty Freidan, who in the 1950s spoke up against the increasing discontent women were feeling in their confined roles as mothers and housewives, thereby catalyzing the second wave feminist movement. These are just a few of the rare heroines of our history: women with exceptional courage, character, dignity and fortitude who spoke their truth and acted fearlessly in service of a cause much greater than themselves.
And six centuries after Joan of Arc was burned alive at the stake at the age of nineteen for standing up for her cause, and only sixty years after Freidan wrote her groundbreaking book, The Feminine
Mystique, igniting one of the greatest revolutions in Western culture, we find ourselves at an interesting, and somewhat confusing, juncture in women’s history. The young women of my generation now live in what is often deemed a “post-feminist” world, where freedom of access and unprecedented options are increasingly at our fingertips, and without much work on our part. We have also grown up in a media-saturated postmodern consumer culture where nearly all spiritual depth has been stripped away in favor of superficial and easy to swallow sound bites, and where the role and importance of the individual consumer—including all our personal desires for freedom and fulfillment—have been raised to an all new alter of the sacred. Within this climate, where words like morality, duty, higher purpose and obligation have become largely outdated relics of the past, the young women of my generation find themselves birthing a whole new image of what it means to be an empowered, rebellious and fearless female at the beginning of the 21st century, and she is truly unlike anything we’ve seen in recorded history.
There is perhaps no young woman who embodies the many diverse and often contradictory values of postmodern female empowerment more potently and starkly than the 22-year-old porn-star, actress, model and rising starlet, Sasha Grey.
For those of you who haven’t yet heard of Sasha Grey, let me suggest that you soon will. I first came across Sasha a little over six months ago, while doing research for an article I was writing about the effects of hardcore pornography on teen viewers. As soon as one enters into the underground world of adult films, it is nearly impossible not to stumble upon Sasha Grey, as she has become a fast rising star with an increasingly wide fan base ever since she entered the pornography industry at the tender age of eighteen. Before turning 21, Sasha was already being called the next Jenna Jameson and had received several major AVN awards, including best female performer of the year, best three-way sex scene and best oral sex scene. In 2009, Rolling Stones magazine wrote a feature article on Sasha and distinguished with the honor of being “The Dirtiest Girl in the World,” because of her willingness to do things on screen that would make most of us (and even most pornstars) cringe, including licking toilet seats, drinking her own urine and asking male co-stars to punch her in the stomach.
Sasha is also 
one of the first professional pornstars to have successfully transitioned from the adult film business into mainstream film, most notably starring a lead role in Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh’s, The Girlfriend Experience. She was also cast for the seventh season of the HBO series, Entourage and is set to appear in three more upcoming movies. Aside from her successful acting career, Sasha is also a sought after model by mainstream magazines and fashion designers such as American Apparel, and has appeared in music videos by the Smashing Pumpkins and The Roots. As a staunch business woman and lover of music, she has also began her own industrial music collaboration called aTelecine and has long-term goals of becoming a producer of both adult and mainstream films.
Sasha is definitely no ordinary pornstar. At 22 years old, she is one of the most successful and 
wealthy women in the United States, and she is still in the infancy of her career. She is also no porno bimbo, nor an innocent young victim of the malevolent pornography industry; rather, Sasha is well-known for her sharp intelligence, her love of her job and her deep passion for art and existential philosophy. Deemed as a truly pioneering “postmodern pornstar”, Sasha continues to blur the lines between adult film and mainstream media. As she says in a recent interview, “People like to categorize and put me in boxes, but I try not to see any lines between what I do. I just see a giant canvas that is my art and is my business.”
Sasha is bold, intelligent, beautiful and determined, and seems genuinely unconcerned with the controversy and criticism that surrounds her public image. And despite the cold, distant and often disembodied 
energy that Sasha exudes, I must admit that when I first came across her work I was deeply captivated by her presence. I found myself spending countless hours watching her archived interviews as well as some of her more questionable and controversial adult films. Sasha stirred a mixture of intense and confusing emotion within me and I often found myself vacillating between flagrant disgust and idolizing admiration. There was something about Sasha that spoke to something very deep within me. She was in fact a blatantly stark and unapologetic reflection of the very voice of rebellion that I knew so well within myself, even though I had no desire to be a pornstar. More generally, she was the extreme and honest expression of an archetype that has become increasingly pervasive within my generation as a whole.
Academy award-winning director Steven Soderbergh, who worked with Sasha on the set of The Girlfriend Experience, was quoted saying that, “Sasha is truly fearless.”
Indeed, Sasha’s name often coincides with the word fearless in many of the articles written about her (at least the positive ones). Sasha has increasingly become the embodiment of a new “fearless 
female” archetype that is arising with force in my generation. She definitely looks quite different from any archetype of the fearless female heroine that we have seen in the past. Although she 
does give the finger to all social and moral convention, saying fuck you to the man (and in this case literally fucking the man…well, in fact fucking groups of fifteen men at a time), while doing whatever she damn well wants to do despite the social consequences, the major difference between Sasha and say Joan of Arc, Saint Teresa of Avila or Betty Friedan (aside from the obvious), is that her rebellion seems to serve no higher purpose than herself. Despite some of the quoted aspirations that Sasha gives for her work, such as her desire to empower women by freeing them from all sexual repression and inhibition, as well as her noble attempt to “let women know that it is ok to act out their sexual fantasies and to be sluts,” there is still no drive behind her rebellion and her uninhibited freedom of expression that really serves anything other than her own personal freedom and self-aggrandizement. I don’t wish to paint Sasha as morally reprehensible, because I actually appreciate her blunt transparency. Rather, I simply find Sasha an intriguing example of the wider impulse of rebellion that seems to be pervasive in my generation and embodied in cultural trends like Girls Gone Wild and Hookup culture, as well as exhibited to differing degrees in some of the major female icons of my generation, such as Lady Gaga, Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Kaci Battaglia.
Sasha Grey represents the extreme embodiment of our postmodern impulse to create ever-increasing freedom of self-expression for all. But like many in my generation, her rebellion lacks any real direction, depth or cohesive purpose. Sasha exemplifies our often misguided postmodern tendency to create rebellion simply for rebellion’s sake, a trend that tends to implode in on itself because it is unconsciously embedded in the value free-for-all and consumerism of our postmodern landscape, and therefore often lacks any real vision beyond the immediate—and often impulsive—desires and interests of the self. When asked in a recent interview whether Sasha considered herself to be a feminist, she responded by saying:
“Every woman is a feminist in her own right, whether you’re anti-porn or pro-porn or somewhere in-between. Feminism has become such a generalized, watered-down viewpoint that someone can say, ‘I’m a feminist because I believe in sexually empowering women.’ That is my view on feminism. Someone else might say ‘Having sex is just wrong no matter what.’ Both sides might call themselves feminist…. Everybody is entitled to their own opinions. You don’t have to subscribe to my opinion and I don’t have to subscribe to yours, and that’s that.”
Sasha’s statement may sound fair enough on the surface, but what it fails to acknowledge is that in a world where all opinions are made relative and ultimately unchallengable, and where empowerment 
can mean whatever we want it to mean, very little if any traction is left for generating deeper personal or cultural transformation in the world at large because it fragments and scatters us all into isolated islands-unto-ourselves. In a somewhat paradoxical twist, the very rebellion my generation often seeks to enact by refusing to put any limits on our “personal freedom of expression”, actually has the reverse effect of dismantling the deeper possibilities for a real revolution in culture and consciousness that we could potentially ignite if we were able to channel our energy and righteousness into a cause and collective purpose much greater than ourselves. It seems that this is the exciting challenge and opportunity that now awaits us as young women: to find a collective purpose that would allow us to continue the work of our historical female heroines and make positive use of the very freedom that they fought so hard to gain for us.
What this collective higher purpose will look like is for us to create together, but it will require that we do it togeth
er. That means that we have to widen the scope of our vision and see ourselves as more than separate individuals and personal islands-unto-ourselves. The world is in deep crisis, and it will only be by bringing our unique individual gifts into the wider folds of collective consciousness and shared purpose that our species will ever have a chance of making it through. This is no easy task, because even for those of us young women who aren’t aspiring pornstars, we are all still the products of our culture, and we are all deeply impacted by the pervasive cultural values of individualism and self-interest that dominate our postmodern climate. In her recently published book, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009), American psychologist Jean M. Twenge
shared the fascinating results of her meta-analysis of over 37,000 college students across North America and revealed that extreme narcissistic traits had in fact almost doubled in prevalence among youth from 1982 to 2006. Perhaps more surprising still was that the largest share of this increase was among young women. It therefore seems that one place we might do well to start channeling our awesome rebellious energy is into breaking through the very confines of narcissism and self-interest that still hold powerful reigns on our own consciousness, and which often stifle the higher potentials of our development as young women.
Our revolution may then start by having the courage to challenge the false ideas of empowerment and fearlessness that have so often been sold to us by postmodern consumer culture, and begin to realize that, although not “wrong”, uninhibited self-expression (sexual or otherwise) will never ultimately take us where we want to go, nor will it support the deeper possibilities for real freedom that we t
ruly yearn for. In order to inspire a real revolution in culture, we will have to mature out of our more adolescent forms of rebellion, which will mean putting some containment on our free self-expression, not to repress it, but so as to create some space to check in with our own motivations, and to channel that energy into a more cohesive and collective purpose that can lead us all to deeper and more meaningful change in the world at large. As we embark on this journey, we do well to look to each other for support, as well as drawing guidance from the wisdom of our female elders. And let us always find renewed strength, courage and inspiration by looking to and honoring the lineage of awesomely righteous female heroines from our past.
