The College Fix

Depending on your moral compass, the story of how Carter Cruise went from a pre-law/psychology major on the verge of graduation, to a porn star who hazes sorority sex partners on camera, is either thrilling or depressing.

Total Frat Move – founded by two frat brothers who now command a “multimillion-dollar media enterprise” – tells the (cautionary) tale of the East Carolina University student who started as a “really modest girl” before a $25 dare put her on the road to perdition.

Cruise pretty much gives everyone something to cluck their tongues about in her wide-ranging interview: Greek life stalwarts, cultural conservatives, affirmative-consent feminist types and domestic-violence activists.

And her near-effortless slide into porn should panic parents who send their daughters off to college hoping they’ll accomplish something that’s not carnal (if Belle Knox didn’t already panic them).

Let’s start from the beginning: she loves hazing.

I think it builds character, teaches respect, and is a rite of passage to becoming part of a sisterhood or brotherhood. … Obviously, some people take it way too far and do it in a bad way, but the idea of having to go through an ordeal and come out the other end as part of a sisterhood was really appealing to me. Unfortunately, before I got to ECU, my sorority had already been in a lot of trouble for hazing, so it was outlawed by the time I rushed. I was really disappointed.

Sororities are really bitchy places:

It was a lot of money and a lot of bitching. Every Sunday, we had a meeting at the house and everyone would just bitch at each other for an hour.

The influence of frat guys in coaxing this “really modest girl” into stripping for them:

Every year, this fraternity has an alumni golf tournament and they ask sorority girls to drive the beer carts. … To start the day, the guys were all shotgunning beers. One of the guys offered me $25 to do a topless shotgun. … I take my top off, shotgun the beer, and the guy hands me $25, which in college was a lot of money for me. In my head at the time, I’m thinking, “I just took off my top, drank a beer that someone gave me for free, and I made money? This is easy.”

Then, later in the day, I’m wasted, and the guys had started this tradition a few years back where every year they try to get the cart girls to get their nipples pierced. They asked me if I would do it, and I’m like “Fuck yeah I’ll do it!” because I never want to be a pussy. … But now everyone in the fraternity knew about my nipple piercings and their alumni had even paid for it, so every time I came by the house guys would ask me to show them, and I was like “Ok, fine!” because I thought they were really cool and looked good.

Then she went to meet an “erotic photography” guy from Craigslist – guess what happened:

At the end, he asked if I wanted to try some photos out and said I could stop whenever I got uncomfortable. I’d never even sent a sext to a boyfriend before, so this was completely uncharted territory for me, but I was like “Fuck it, I’m going to try.” I only got topless for the shoot, but I felt so sexy by the end of it, which is not something I normally feel, that the next morning when I woke up, I decided I wanted to do porn.

Why she hasn’t suffered the reputational harm experienced by Belle Knox, the so-called Duke porn star:

First, I was a super senior by the time I started doing porn. I already had my group of friends. I also worked downtown, so a lot of people knew me for me. Belle was a freshman and no one knew her. Second, she tried to keep it a secret and then people found out. I actually told people. So when I was in school, it wasn’t bad at all, outside of some girls in my sorority feigning outrage, but most of them have come around.

Her desire for violence – not hard to imagine Cruise filing a sexual-assault report when this experiment goes too far, because it’s her word versus his:

When I was in college, I was dating this really nice southern frat boy. One night, we were having sex, and I was trying to get him to be more adventurous, so I asked him to slap me. He got really offended and couldn’t believe that I’d even ask him to do that. We would fight about sex all the time, because he never wanted to try things. Then, one night, he’s wasted and we’re having sex and I’m like, “Fucking hit me.” So he slaps me, and I’m like, “That’s it?” So he punches me in the face, totally on accident, like he did not mean to hit me that hard, but I got a black eye.

Maybe that’s why Cruise is rather blase about a woman sexually attacking the newly famous porn star in a restroom – keep in mind she’s not giving affirmative consent:

I felt like I had this obligation to fulfill her fantasy and let her see how she felt about it. … Well, she grabs me by the hand, pulls me into the bathroom, throws me into the stall …

I couldn’t believe what was happening. I ended up going back to her apartment because at this point, I’m just like whatever. … The funniest part though was that the girl was really hot and pretty much unattainable on campus, so when I got back to the house where all my guy friends were staying and told them what had happened, they were so mad and jealous.

And then … the banality of the porn industry:

I take every scene I am offered for two reasons. First, the agency that I’m with only represents 25 girls at a time, so they require all their girls to do everything. If we were an agency with 200 girls, it would be different, but we aren’t allowed to have no-lists. I can’t say I don’t want to work with a guy because I don’t like him. This isn’t about dating. It’s a job, and just because you don’t like a coworker doesn’t mean you don’t get to show up for work.

The fear of being a “pussy” also drove Cruise into some pretty extreme sex acts as a porn star, echoing Belle Knox’s sad recollections about the things she did out of fear.

And in a line that sounds cribbed from Lena Dunham’s memoir, Cruise says she’d bring Bacardi 151 to a fraternity formal, “so I can be evil and make other people drink it.”

The sense you get from reading Cruise’s interview is she’ll try anything, she’ll go to any length, just to prove a point. But she shows repeated hesitance to just jump right in.

It takes the encouragement of men in her life to get Cruise to take the risks that turn her into the porn star who will do anything, who seems to have no emotional response to any of the extreme acts she engages in. She’ll “go really hard at the porn stuff” until awards season, and then somehow start her DJ career.

Or she could finish her degree, go to law school and help women who are abused by men without their goading.

Greg Piper is an assistant editor at The College Fix. (@GregPiper)

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IMAGE: Total Frat Move via Pinterest

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