When is 24 too old? In porn, of course.

Mamamia writes: When we hear the words “porn star” we tend to stereotype.  We have certain images and connotations that go with the profession.  Just like we would with any stereotype.

When we initially read Aurora Snow’s story we were interested in her profession – and seeing it from her perspective.  But when we discovered more about her background we were intrigued to read about her life.  Her real life.  Her life away from the set intrigued us as much as her life on set.  It made us look at the image of the porn star that we had constructed for ourselves.

The background story is about challenging stereotypes.  Yes, Aurora is a porn star on screen but off screen she is just like you and I.

In 2009, Aurora Snow’s brother Keith was horribly injured in a motorcycle accident. Her nephew almost lost a father and Aurora almost lost her brother. His spinal cord injury rendered him a quadriplegic at the age of 24. Aurora helps look after her brother and is the champion of his cause; to raise money to send him to Project Walk. There is a small chance he may use his hands again. A smaller chance that one day he will walk.

What makes this more interesting is that Aurora Snow is not your ordinary small town girl. Aurora Snow is a small town theatre actor turned porn star. She was raised in a family based on the value of love and, with three younger brothers, she loved them all. And she stars in adult movies. More than 600 of them.

But at the age of 24, her industry considers her old.

Imagine trying to find work in an industry where you are considered an “older woman” at 24? Actually just imagine trying to get a job in an industry were you have to take off all your clothes during the interview? Aurora has  been there, in fact she’s been a lot more places than most of the rest of us have and she gives us a fascinating glimpse into the porn industry and how she went from barely legal to MILF.  She writes:

“I thought 24-year-olds were supposed to play college girls. I knew that I hadn’t aged in dog years, but that’s how it felt when producers would read my age on paper and pigeon-hole me without even bothering to see what I looked like. Because I was 24, I was immediately slotted into the “older woman” category. My days as a barely-legal actress were forever over.

I soon learned that it’s unwise to state your age on set unless you can say you’re somewhere between 18 and 21. Never mind that I look young—in porn, they care more about your birth date than how you actually look. A director who’d once wanted to hire me on the spot after meeting me later refused after learning my real age. He was dead-set against hiring any girl over 21 years old. A photographer on set managed to convince the director to hire me anyway by showing him some provocative photos we’d recently shot. But by porn standards, once you hit 25 you’re pretty much out. I can only be thankful that I understand the rules of the game. I don’t take it home with me, and I can look back at my career, and even the industry’s tactics, with a sense of mirth.

Today I’m 28—still relatively young, as far as I’m concerned. But once my career took a turn for the older, I decided to look on the bright side. I would be able to produce new videos in a niche market previously unavailable to me. What better way to broaden the fan base? There is something for everyone in porn, a niche that appeals to each fantasy and taste. I had obviously hit the teen market hard, but those who watch the young-girl lines are unlikely to also watch the MILF-series lines. I began to see it as an opportunity to create new fans.

As such, my career has changed in the last few years. In addition to the MILF market and the porn parodies, which also hit the mainstream media with Not The Bradys XXX (I played Jan), I’ve expanded into fetish work. Despite spending a decade in this business, it is exciting to discover there’s still so much I still haven’t done. There are still new genres to explore—the world of bondage, submission, and domination, for starters—all branches of the same tree. I have only just begun to sample its fruit.

Oddly, my changing role in porn doesn’t seem to register with the mainstream world. If anything, I have been pleased to discover that thanks to the Internet, what might be bad for the industry is good for me. My name gets out there and more people, people who don’t even watch porn, discover me. I have been approached more often for mainstream projects, like my cameo in Judd Apatow’s Superbad. I have also begun doing non-pornographic independent films like the not-yet-released film A Place to Die, directed by Sage Stallone, Sylvester Stallone’s son.

But I’m still at my core the girl who changed her major in college to business, and now I have a new goal, too: One day, I’m going to law school. I think my years in the industry will make me a great lawyer. Porn has helped me there. I may be still be shy, but being “Aurora Snow” has taught me that my ambition can take me to the unlikeliest of places.”

Aurora’s article originally appeared in The Daily Beast