On the surface, the tale of the teenage Duke University porn star sounds like the plot from an overheated miniseries, or some bad episode of Law & Order, or another American Pie sequel: female freshman decides to pay tuition with porn; said freshman entrusts the wrong feckless frat boy with her secret; frat boy fails to keep his mouth shut; news breaks loose across campus and the web; anonymity is all but gone; freshman is forced to tell her story before everybody else does.

Certainly, this young woman’s story highlights the priapic contradictions at the heart of contemporary American sexuality. As the misogyny-laiden tweets and college-age blog threads have so immeasurably demonstrated over the past week, America may be the biggest producer and consumer of porn, but Americans - young and old, and mostly men, of course - have little patience for a female student paying her way through an American college - at nearly $60,000 a year, no less - with the porno performance fees. Today, most actors in this and other sex industries don’t get a chance to discuss the 50-plus shades of grey that color their working lives because of the pressure to fight back - and the immediate silencing of their freedom to defend truly important life choices.

The history of sex workers’ lives - at once public and private - is one of moralism and ventriloquism. Either you have to denounce what you’ve done, or somebody else will do it for you. From the Bible to Chuck Palahniuk, feminist manifestoes to government consultations, sex workers themselves rarely get to tell it as they experience it, unfiltered. At the volunteer-run Centre for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, the city birthplace of sex workers’ rights, the personal worker memoirs and sex positive histories are drowned by the sea of books written by politicos, psychologists and radical anti-sex work feminists. Meanwhile, in the back room languish old skin flicks and raw VHS footage from sex worker rallies of times gone by, yet to be catalogued. I’ve never checked to see whether the library holds a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne branded with her A and sent to the public scaffolding therein, but it’s most likely a dog-eared one.

In the internet age, of course, that type of material won’t ever need to flounder the same way. And yet the great democratic triumph of this particular social-media moment - of shaming from coast to coast and north to south - is clear: a porn performer like “Lauren A”, the Duke freshman, can write her own narrative, have it disseminated widely, and then a blog like XoJane can turn off the comments to allow her voice to resonate. And only her voice, for a change. But so, too, do the increasingly exposed corners of Facebook, Twitter and all the rest force Lauren’s anonymity to disappear in minutes - indeed, even before her story went national on Valentine’s Day.

Indeed, the now-famous but still not-so-famous Duke “porn star” is a sex worker with voices louder than her once-silent preference, and that is the unforgiving advantage the still-anonymous haters hold: it’s now near impossible to go it alone making money for sex in America.

Given that syndication and affiliate marketing are so crucial to the porn industry’s profits, porn and privacy go together about as well as frat boys and sexual maturity. But the way Lauren has been stripped of her secret identity in the public domain, able to be approached in lives both virtual and real by those who respect her and those who would bombard her, is something Thomas Bagley, the frat boy who allegedly blew her cover, won’t ever experience.

Forbes writer Suzannah Breslin suggests that Lauren’s mistake wasn’t to appear in porn so much as to think she could get away with maintaining her stage name. But the sad truth is this: the ‘outing’ of women - and it is almost always women - who dare to embrace their sexual agency, commercial or otherwise, is just a routine part of ‘slut’ history. And it’s only getting worse. Ask Dr Brooke Magnanti - aka Belle de Jour, who was outed by the London Times back in 2009. Or Christina Parriera, the student and sometime adult performer who sexted with Pasadena College Professor Hugo Schwyzer and was exposed when Schwyzer confessed to sleeping with his students. Or the Irish teenager who was filmed giving oral sex to another reveller at an Eminem concert and ended up in hospital due to the online slaughter. Public humiliation is humanity’s age-old punishment for sluts, in America as anywhere else. Only now the internet is the virtual scaffolding of too many Hester Prynnes, the hashtag our scarlet letter, with no end in sight.

What’s more, given the social stigma that persists around female sexuality, sex worker narratives are still forced to express moral accountability and, more often than not, a political position, even though we don’t let sex workers feed directly into policy-making. Lauren’s open letter on XoJane is bursting with agency, celebratory of her own bisexuality and her experiences in the porn industry, and, on the main, unapologetic. That said, she still finds herself having to justify her porn earnings as payment for college and her appearance in ‘rough sex’ videos (she balks at calling them rape fantasy porn clips) - all of them videos that are perfectly legal in America to make, to perform in, and to watch. Meanwhile, those who would consume the very porn videos in which she stars are more than able to retain their anonymity without justifying their purchases. Which, if you believe in consenting adults’ right to watch adult content featuring other consenting adults, is exactly how it should be.

But performers like Lauren shouldn’t have to justify and defend sexuality on behalf of everyone else. As I learned during my time as a pro-domme, sometimes you just have a bad day at the dungeon. And the threat of “outing”, online or otherwise, only further removes us all from those complex truths about sexuality and the ways capitalism capitalizes on it.

Granted, Lauren’s account of her own experiences seems wholly positive. So here’s to Lauren for handling her own sexual narrative with a maturity most of the Western world couldn’t muster. She’s certainly making good use of her education so far.