The headline:
“Mom did porn to buy son’s Christmas presents”
The story, as told by the New York Post:
A single mom has been more naughty than nice this year — but all in the spirit of Christmas.
Megan Clara spent the last year starring in porn movies so she could afford everything on her 5-year-old son Ashton’s Christmas list. The 20-year-old UK resident says she was devastated last holiday season when Ashton complained he didn’t have the same expensive presents as his friends. Making nearly $120 a week, she was only able to buy an Etch A Sketch, cuddly toys and new clothes
“Last Christmas I could barely scrape any money together, it was really tough and I couldn’t help but worry Ashton was going to be left out and disappointed” the mom from Portsmouth, England, told Caters News Agency.After seeing an old friend “stripping off,” Clara got in touch with her friend’s photographer. The rest, she says, is history.
“My job’s amazing, I love being in front of the camera,” she said. “My idol is Katie Price, I thought if she can make money by glamor modeling it was worth me giving it a go too – I’m in awe of her.”
The young mom now gets paid $743 per scene and has spent almost $2,200 on her son this Christmas.
“Ashton has wanted a bike for over three years and I’ve finally been able to make his dream come true. It’s an amazing feeling. The only downside is that he now bribes me into buying him toys for being well-behaved,” she said.
The adult film star already received backlash about her chosen profession, but says that “some people are just jealous.”
“I know not everyone agrees with the adult film industry but I’m a great mum, why should it matter what my occupation is,” she said. “I love the excitement and get a rush. Plus it pays well too.”…“This year has been a complete roller coaster and a whirlwind, there’s been ups and downs but now I’ve learned to ignore what other people think.
Here’s what I think, whether Clara cares or not: There is so much wrong with this story that it qualified as a Christmas Kaboom, but my head, in the spirit of Christmas, didn’t want to explode all over the tree.
The headline is misleading, and incompetent. How does the Post know that Clara took to porn just to buy Christmas presents for little, spoiled, greedy Ashton? Because she said so? Journalists are supposed to use their judgment, ask question, and not blithely accept every whopper they encounter. Editors are obligated to make sure they do. The premise of the story is nonsensical on its face.
How about this headline?
Mother Blames Five-Year-Old Son For Forcing Her Into Porn
The woman won’t take responsibility for her own career choice, so she concocts a heroic tale of sacrifice for a gullible tabloid. How will Ashton feel when he’s older, encountering his mother doing god knows what while exposing her naughty bits on videos shown to him by his classmates, when he learns that she told the world that if it hadn’t been for his incessant mewling about how his friends had more presents than he did, she would have been an accountant or something?
She’s a foolish mother, and he’s a spoiled kid….assuming we can believe a thing in this report, which we can’t. Ashton should have been told that he understood neither Christmas nor gratitude, and punished by having his “Etch A Sketch, cuddly toys and new clothes” given to poor children who would appreciate them. What kind of single mother gets this kind of reaction when she has scraped and saved to make his Christmas as good as she can, and concludes, “Gee, I guess my only recourse is to become a porn actress”?
While the headline seduces us into admiring the mother’s love and sacrifice for her child, the story itself proves that no sacrifice was involved. She likes doing whatever she does on camera. She’s rolling in cash…so much that she’s using a lot of it to make sure Ashton grows up to be the entitled, money-grubbing jerk he promises to be. This was the part where she slipped up in her story, though, not that the gullible reporter noticed or cared. “Ashton has wanted a bike for over three years,” she said. He’s five. What 2-year-old wants a bicycle?
This heartwarming tale is mind-bendingly, Mobius strip hypocritical, if you think about it for a few seconds. The mother is initially represented as a courageous single mom, who humiliating herself doing degrading sex acts for public consumption, all so her poor child can have something, anything, to look forward to Christmas morning. Well, no. actually, he got enough presents for a normal, well-raised, properly grateful child—he just wanted more. So his loving mom, having no other options, swallowed her pride and dignity, suppressed her inhibitions and gag reflex, and…well wait, she says she loves porn. She’s getting lots of money…she loves the excitement and “gets a rush.” How dare anyone judge her and the adult film industry…that the Post’s headline represents in a negative light in order to paint Clara as a hero.
Ethics Alarms 
Tremendous. Right out of Dickens.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
What if all he wanted was his two front teeth? Have you priced dental work lately?
Nasty, by the way. Just nasty. I envy the guy that lands this gem.
Hey, that’s not what Santa means when he…aww forget it I can’t even.
Let’s take a look at this Mom’s choices?
Maybe she could have become a theft, sneaking into people’s homes to steal their Xmas presents for her child.
Maybe she could have become a retirement specialists deceiving people to put their savings into Credit Default Swaps where she’d get a tremendous bonus and they’d get the financial equivalent of a lump of coal.
Maybe she could have become an Internet blogger taking cheap shots at people she did not know and with very little information. Judgmental bullying — ahhha a true Xmas use for our social media.
Porn has one redeeming value which most professions lack — the consumer knows if he got what he wanted. You can hire a lawyer and spending tens of thousands of dollars only to discover he threw your case because he wanted to work on a more lucrative case. Your surgeon can be high and pills and you never know why the operation had complications. You cn have a judge determine your legal case and never know that the other side’s attorney is the judge’s former law partner. You can buy a car, let’s call it a Pinot, and not know that Ford decided to save a few pennys and give you a exploding bomb if hit from the rear. Or, your school teacher can be blown to bits in a space shuttle because a NASA contractor decided to be silent about his defective O-rings. You can eat a Chipotle thinking it was great and get violently ill a few hours later.
With porn, however, you know if you are pleased with what you got. If you buy more, it is not because you were deceived.
As for buying stuff – if the three wise men can bring gold to the baby Jewsus, why can’t a Mom buy her son a bike?
Someone’s been hitting the eggnog pretty hard.
But sometimes the results are pretty cool.
https://www.instagram.com/p/_s5ZnrvHyI/
Can you imagine how famous the lady in the video can become.
I can’t tell if this is parody or a serious defense of the mom…
Everything written was the truth.
I often ding comments like these, but this one was like some kind of secret code. I have no idea what he’s trying to say, but who knows? Maybe it’s deep…
Question for everyone: is this a Comment of the Day? Because I can have a ball with it—rationalizations, straw men, irrelevancies, logical fallacies—it’s virtual cornucopia of illogical nonsense. I get one like this very rarely. “If the three wise men can bring gold to the baby Jewsus, why can’t a Mom buy her son a bike?” Heck, that sentence alone is a gold mine.
That’s just it. I want to be magnanimous and assume “Jewsus” was a typo…but there just enough snark types out there that would use just that kind of spelling to make other subtle digs at other pet peeves…and given the nature of the nearly incoherent rant, I can’t be magnanimous. So I’m stuck on passing judgment here.
” Let’s take a look at this Mom’s choices?
Maybe she could have become a theft…”
Those were her only choices, as you see it? Thievery or becoming a scammer? If you’re not making enough, you either get a better paying job or re-prioritize how you use money, or both…going straight from the low-paying job that isn’t providing what you need to making porn because you wanted to buy more presents for your child is such a crock. She wanted a lot of money, faster than she could make it at a better job, or she always wanted to go into porn and needed a handy excuse.
Why not have a discussion with her son about living within their means, or if that’s too hard for him to understand at this point, about not being demanding and selfish? Most people’s answer to demanding children isn’t to rush out and buy every single thing they want, let alone making porn to pay for it.
I pity this poor child. He’s not going to have an easy time of it when he goes to school. He’s in a photo with her in the Post article. At the very least, the child should have been left out of the pictures. If she wants to flaunt herself that’s her decision, she has no right to link him to that.
Did she commit a crime that was malum per se or malum prohibitum? From what the article says, she did neither. While some places like Saudi Arabia make porn a crime, for the most part, porn is OK in the UK, in the US and other western nations.
We have members of Congress who take bribes, who receive less condemnation without any lectures about how they should teach their children to do a decent day’s work for a decent day’s pay.
We have years of cigarette manufacturers declaring that cigarettes were god for our health and then years more testifying under oath denying that the cigarettes were bad for our health. All the time, they knew that cigarettes can cause cancer and death. I do not recall lectures about how the executives should be better role models for their children.
We have multi-millionaire investment bankers who crashed the economy with the securitized mortgage bundles and credit default swaps, yet they were not chastised for being a bad influence on their children. Rather, the government declared the doctrine of Too Important to Prosecute.
Acting out in excess is a normal human reaction, and she has already recognized the downside when he says she now has to bribe her son to behave. That admission is probably a prelude to her taking corrective action. Her story is not over; like all of us, her life continues. She has many more chapters to be written, and so far, she has done nothing criminal.
It’s 5 in the morning, so I’m going to leave the more nuanced work of chopping this example of probably 20 or so ethics ratinalizations in your reply to more capable hands, and just point out the most obvious. This is what’s known as the comparative virtue rationalization, or “there are worse things”. It’s a ridiculous one, in that it can be used to excuse literally any bad behavior, and proves absolutely nothing. It’s one that children often use, and good, sober parents correct their children when they try it so they don’t grow up to be people who think it would fly on an ethics site. I mean, seriously, did you not sniff around in here before you pinched this off? Well, just remember that you asked for what’s likely coming to you in the next day or two.
“Hey! Why are you raping my dog?” “Well, it’s not technically illegal in this county. Besides, I don’t hear you lecturing congress or cigarette manufacturers, so just tell your kids to mind their own business”
You can do lots of awful things that aren’t crimes, and I think that giving this interview declaring that she did porn to pay for her kid’s Christmas presents, and including him in the photographs, is an awful thing. She’ll find out when he goes to school how foolish this was.
Criminal acts are not the only acts which are wrong.
He’s used “jewsus” twice, in different threads.
I noticed that. Given that he just just released another semi-coherent rant full of rationalizations, false analogies, and non-sequiturs, he’s begging for a solid take down. I don’t have the time right now, though it would be enjoyable.
This might actually be Mel Gibson.
Any other day it would be COTD, but on Christmas I’d like to keep a higher standard. TGT could have made a masterpiece out of this, even some of the regular antireligious commenters usually do better.
While I would welcome the take down I say let it go. It’s Christmas. His gift can be remaining in blissful ignorance of his ignorance.
I think someone needed a hug and a long walk outdoors, yesterday.
Here is my one word reply to scottzwartz…
Idiot!
It does not matter if it is a parody or serious. Use your own mind to make decisions for yourself.
Thanks for the epiphanal comment. I hadn’t been thinking for myself until I read that. My eyes are opened now.
Better take him seriously. I heard he landed in Roswell on a plane with no propeller, carrying nothing but an anal probe and a letter of introduction to J. Edgar Hoover.
Epiphanic*
Gads I knew that didn’t sound right.
I busied away with pen and paper in an attempt to reverse-engineer exactly which acts she performs to earn $743 per scene, but after an hour or so I figured out that it’s probably just a clumsy conversion from a flat rate of 500 pounds.
Plus it didn’t help when your wife walked up and read over calculations over your shoulder.
In honor of the Star Wars sequel, which inevitably leads me back to remembering “Space Balls,” all I can say is, “My, Scott. You have a big schwartz!”
https://ethicsalarms.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/clara3.jpg?w=750&h=500
(oops, redundant)
I found the coincidental placement of illustrations both mildly amusing and disturbing….
There are some levels of utter stupidity that are not fixable, this lady is eternally cursed with such a level.
She is a person completely devoid of character, she is blaming her son for her choices and her after action rationalizations are spiraling her immoral actions into the abyss of moral bankruptcy.
Her choices, her consequences.
You can’t fix stupid!
Isn’t your condemnation a little excessive?
I couldn’t help but notice that you actually didn’t disagree with my condemnation, you’re just questioning the level of my condemnation.
My answer to your question is NO; in my opinion, this moral bankrupt woman earned every single word!