Disney Star To Porn Star With Maitland Ward
"It's a fear of certain men, certain people in society, that if women become sexually free, they are completely free. They're completely uncaged. Because as long as we keep women as the sexual property of a man or within a sexual cage of society, we can keep them there." - Maitland Ward
To be a woman means navigating the world under constant pressure. No matter what age, ethnicity, or industry there are always negative voices telling us what we can and cannot do. Today, more and more women are breaking barriers and redefining perceptions around women, our voices, and our bodies.
The choice to ignore naysayers and negativity is a difficult one. No one understands this quite like Maitland Ward. Making the transition from mainstream Hollywood to the pornography industry, all while in the public eye, is not an easy feat. In this episode of Enoughness, she examines how confidence and following intuition opens up life to pathways of success she never knew were possible.
Maitland Ward is a pornographic actress, formerly known as Rachel on the popular 90’s TV show Boy Meets World. She is the recipient of XBIZ Award for Best Actress in a Feature Movie, based off her most recent film Drive. Today she is building the bridge between mainstream and pornographic entertainment, benefitting women everywhere. In this episode you will hear about:
How she followed her joy for performance & navigated the early stages of her acting career
How she gained confidence to reject mainstream Hollywood standards for women and take the leap into pornography
Her experience working in the porn industry and making award-winning features
The ever-evolving conversation around sexuality and women’s bodies
How do you deal with comments that are negative? Has there been a point in time where you've felt really sensitive and affected by negativity?
It's interesting. When I had that big press release, I got very little negative commentary. Everybody had the headlines, Rachel from Boy Meets World is in porn. But for the most part, it was all very upbeat and positive. It was like, "Hey, I'm in porn and I'm proud I'm doing this."
I think the press responded in that way that I wasn't didn’t say, "Oh, She’s ashamed she did this." I noticed that a lot of the journalists were in their 20’s and 30’s, and were much more open to porn and to sexual performing. I think people see that I'm genuine about my love of it and want to create special things. Not just try to get attention off some terrible sex tape.
But, whenever anybody is negative, I try to combat that with being positive and showing that I'm happy and I am making stuff that I always dreamed of making. When people are trying to say to you, "Oh, this trash," and you're like, “I just love it. I'm positive. This is great.” What do they say? What are they going to say back to you? Oh, you're not happy. And if they do, what does it matter?
I read about when you hit your thirties, you were told that you weren't allowed to be sexy. At what point did you feel like you couldn't fully be yourself and you were searching for something more?
Whenever I would say, "Oh, I want to think about getting back into acting," they would send me out for soccer mom roles. That was not something that I was interested in. The publicist I had said that once you get past 30 or 35, nobody's going to hire you to play anything sexy. You're not going to make any money that way. He thought he was being practical. And I was like, I don't care. I won't do those roles.
So then I turned to social media. And I didn't really plan it. It was just, I kept doing what I like to do and then people identified with it. I was shocked that I got to have a career in sexy cosplay and people were interested in that or that they wanted to see my like Playboy-Esque stuff or that they would pay for content. It was fans and the social media that built my career.
It seems like you've had a lot of confidence in just following what your heart wants. Where do you think that confidence comes from? And have you ever had moments where you've doubted yourself?
Oh my God, of course. And I think the confidence came with age because I would have never been this confident when I was in Boy Meets World times. I had to go away and I had to rediscover myself and go to school and just train, theater-wise, and learn and write and it was a very lengthy process of an evolution.
I don't know. I just got to the point where I was like, I really just want to be myself and do my own thing. And that really came about when people were telling me, you can only be one thing and I'm somebody who's I'm not going to take that. I'm going to rebel against that. And especially since they're saying that to me, I'm going to do it more. So I think that propels me.
Can you take us behind the scenes of the actual filming and what that experience is like?
Yes. I have to say, on deeper.com. It is exactly like a film set.
People always think it's going to be, like I said in the article, this seedy kind of environment where people are doing drugs and there's orgies. There's so many rules on a porn site. You don't understand. We have to, first of all, we have to test us. Aside from Coronavirus, now it's Corona every day, but we have to test for all STDs every two weeks. There's consent beforehand. You have to say exactly what you want to do, what you don't want to do. The scene is planned out ahead of time completely. So there's not - sure little surprises - but not like anything unexpected. So it's very technical in that way. Of course it's enjoyable and it's fun and it's great, but, it is performing. You have to know where the cameras are and you have to know the lighting and the angles. You have to get certain places at certain times and scenes.
I think people would be very surprised to know how many women are prominent in porn. There are award winning directors and writers like the woman who I worked with, Kayden Kross, her company, Deeper.com. She's won director of the year, two years in a row. Porn allows women to make films unedited. In the way that she can write and have her voice and make her art the way she wants it. They're not going to get involved with telling her, you can't say this, or you can't do this. She has artistic control. And I think porn gives so much artistic control to women and not just her, there's other women who are prominent directors.
And is that common? Because, I think one of the critiques of pornography is that it is influenced by the male gaze, right?
Women are the ones that are making the award winning features and the award winning performances. Now, there's all different things. Similar to Hollywood, there's a lot of lower ranked companies that I don't know what they're doing, so that's where the stereotypes come from. We're talking about the ones that are awarded and are the high end projects. Because that's what I work on at Deeper.com. We work on high end quality projects. It's much more common than it is mainstream.
Let's just say mainstream, how many award-winning film directors are female? And yet in the last several years, women have won all these awards for porn.
How do you feel about the world's relationship now to women's bodies and women's sexuality?
Oh, it's ridiculous. The world is so freaked out if a nipple shows but they don't care if there's massive violence right in front of them. But, Oh, if you have a shadow of a nipple on social media it's going to wreck people's minds forever.
Just the fact that also the women's bodies are always sexualized.The male nipple is out who cares. But women's nipples oh they might create a reaction in somebody. So I think that's ridiculous.
And the relationship that people have with porn, like I said, the younger people are different. They feel that they really had been exposed to it and experienced it and watched it their whole lives on the internet.
But like older people ,well not old but older people, they have a different taboo relationship with it. So it's weird. It's because they watch it and they enjoy it. Everybody watches it. Yeah, but then they want to demean it and shut it down and keep it away and dehumanize the women making it and they want to shame women. They said, how could one possibly want to sexually perform or be sexual in a way, she must be on drugs. She must be crazy. She must've had a terrible family life.
It's insane, how people can't grasp that one might just love sex and want to perform sexually. She doesn't have to be messed up. But a guy performer, they just say, wow, he's a stud.
So what motivates and drives you now?
I do believe pornography can be art. I think the future is going to be more embracing of that, especially on streaming services. Even on like our website, you can stream there because these wonderful art pieces that and storylines that are, sexual too.
We also posed a question. How long after something is nude or pornographic does it become art? Because in earlier civilizations, you see these cave paintings of like total porn stuff, but now they're art in museums. So they were probably at the time, just their own porn or their own sexualization. So will all the stuff moving down in a hundred years to be like, oh, this is representative of this generation.
What do you want your legacy to be?
I hope that my voice will be heard not just for sex workers, but for women in general. That they can be free and unapologetic sexually. And that they can also make art and really good work.
I have to say the younger girls now are so business savvy. These 21 year olds, they're making so much money to help them in their future. And they're just really smart and doing things that. I never was able to do when I was that young. Just being able to have a business model!
Some of them come up to me and say, you know what? I always wanted to be an actress and make mainstream stuff too. And I think maybe I can be now. And I'm always taken aback by that.I hope that I can be a bridge between the two worlds. And then in the future, they won't even think about it.
How would you define Enoughness?
I think it's when I don't even know if I can define it because I don't know if I can ever feel it. I think there does come a point in people's lives, hopefully that they feel hopefully towards when they're very old, that they feel they've accomplished something that they've left like to the next generation. Like they've done something that will give to the future when they're gone. So I think that will be the only feeling of enoughness. Then I have, when I'm old, just to feel, you know what, I did something and I wasn't scared to do something. I don't have a regret that I didn't do something. So I think that's, it's enough if you don't not try, if you like, just try and do what you feel in your heart and your intuition, which you what's, your voice is telling you to do, listen to your voice every day.
And final question for you. What does it mean to you to be a woman?
It means, for me, to be my complete self. It's very important for me to be completely me and completely authentic and to not deny parts of myself. And, there's such a richness in women that we deny so much of the time. We think if one certain part of ourselves is elevated, we can't elevate the other parts of ourselves.
And I think being complete and full and your true self is being a woman.
EPISODE 29:
DISNEY STAR TO PORN STAR
WITH MAITLAND WARD
Thanks for listening, I appreciate you, and am here for you.
~ Lisa Carmen Wang, Founder, The GLOW, Leadership Coaching for Powerful Women