“She said she wanna be a dentist really badly
She's in school paying
For tuition, doing porn in the Valley
At least you working”
- “Novacane," Frank Ocean (2011)1
The gender stereotype that the Valley Girl2 was “slutty” first developed in response to growing sex work in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. What was primarily concerning to Valley residents was not only that sex work was occurring in their white, middle-class suburb, but that valley girls3 and women were performing it. This was of deep local concern in that the Valley Girl was fashioned to export a very class-specific, white respectability and commercialism. And this hand-wringing kicked into yet another tier when porn production really took off in the area.
When I was growing up in the 1990s, 90 percent of all legally distributed pornographic films were either filmed or produced in the San Fernando Valley4. At the time, this generated such tongue-in-cheek names as “Silicone Valley,” “the porn capital of the world,” and “the San Pornando Valley,” thereby merging the location with a major economical contributor: at its peak, the San Fernando Valley was generating anywhere from 4 to 11 billion dollars5 in annual sales from pornography. On the ground, this meant that over 200 pornographic scenes were being shot a day in the Valley, according to one professional6.
There were a lot of factors that contributed to this preferred location. The Valley is very close to Hollywood, meaning a “pipeline of talent from Hollywood, which included directors, crew, and actors,” according to Business Insider, were a stone’s throw (or 20-minute drive) away. And they needed the work. In the 90s, mainstream film and television ventures diminished. Feature film-making declined 13 percent in 1999, but adult movie production rose 25 percent7.
The valley girl pornographic actress was once again blurring “important” gender hierarchies by embodying two distinct realities: sex work and the suburbs.
This professional and economic reality further added to the local ambiguity about valley girls and women. Much like the suburban-passing sex workers who reportedly worked along Sepulveda Blvd in 1985, the valley girl pornographic actress was once again blurring “important” gender hierarchies by embodying two distinct realities: sex work and the suburbs.
The presence of the porn industry in the Valley brought a new dimension to enduring narratives about young women who come to Los Angeles in search of stardom. With their forays into sex work, valley girls were changing a common American story about fame. Los Angeles Magazine observed in 2009:
Where would-be starlets once arrived in Hollywood during the 40s and 50s with dreams of studio contracts stuffed under their pillbox hats, today their counterparts were showing up in Encino and Northridge8 looking for similar contracts, albeit with a different kind of studio. Careers, fame, even crossover success were all now possible for young women – teenagers, really – who were willing and able to maintain a particularly grueling work schedule.9
Once again, the Valley Girl (and valley girl) was embodying gendered opposites in real-time: a sexually experienced ingenue, and a “good” girl from a “good” neighborhood who was a sex worker.
For my girlhood in the Valley, this produced a dizzying crash course in gender, expectation, and shifting realities. I entered junior high (and puberty) during the Valley’s pornographic peak. However distanced I was from the actual logistics of that industry, the proximity as a valley girl generated an urgency around me and my body. The message I received from adults was consistent: I was always one midriff-baring top away from whoredom.
The message I received from adults was consistent: I was always one midriff-baring top away from whoredom.
I was always in trouble with my public school administrators for an exposed navel, a rogue tube top, tank tops that did not follow the two-finger width rule, shorts that did not reach the bottom of my middle finger when I stood up straight (I’m tall). But in the context of the San Fernando Valley in 1999, this exercise in body policing was particularly farcical.
While I was being perpetually dragged into the school office for breaking dress code10 with vulgar spaghetti strapped shirts, entire pornographic films were being shot in our neighbors’s homes11. While my prom dress had to be measured by administrators for harlotry, girls I had grown up with were already making moves to enter the porn industry as performers.
The glaring hypocrisy—or rather clumsy attempt—to keep girls to a standard that the town has collectively thrown out, perfectly underscores an enduring tension for Valley Girls: a lingering, middle-class sensibility about skirt lengths when the truth is we’ve been wearing tube tops in 100-degree summers and are networking with porn producers on the weekends. We are always supposed to be the girl next door, whether we are going to prom or being cast in porn. And given that we are Valley Girls, we are literally the girl next door.
To keep girls to a standard that the town has collectively thrown out perfectly underscores an enduring tension for Valley Girls.
Between the Valley’s growing “seedy” reputation and “slutty” girls, Los Angeles began developing its own local story about the San Fernando Valley. In particular, the Valley Girl became an easy, one-dimensional bucket in which to dump the city’s complex relationship with sex and sexual mores. By projecting “sex work” and “trash” onto a very specific young woman who was an “outsider” to authentic Los Angeles, the city was able to tell itself a different story about its own talent, class, and creative economies: mainly that the dominant industry was somehow better than the practices that effectively sustained it.
The “slutty” airhead Valley Girl became a misogynistic and classist deflection of a key economy in Los Angeles. She was made to hold and carry this stigma while the broader city and culture pretended it simply didn’t exist.
Next week: the Valley is weird.
Today’s Valley Girl is very special as it marks my 10-year wedding anniversary to my wife, Astrid. She edits this newsletter out of not just her love for me but her devotion to my ideas. As a reader, you are directly benefiting from her support. Thank you, Astrid❤️
Thank you to Trish Bendix for suggesting this lyric.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.
Chaykin, Dave, director. Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley. HBO Films, 2004.
Abram, Susan. “Porn Industry Still at Home in San Fernando Valley despite Condom Laws, Web, Piracy.” Whittier Daily News, 29 Aug. 2017, https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2015/01/13/porn-industry-still-at-home-in-san-fernando-valley-despite-condom-laws-web-piracy/. Accessed 24 Apr. 2025.
Henkel, Stephanie. “Porn Industry Widens Focus.” Los Angeles Business Journal, 3 Apr. 2016, https://valley.labusinessjournal.com/news/weekly-news/porn-industry-widens-focus/.
Robinson, Melia. “How LA’s ‘Porn Valley’ Became the Adult Entertainment Capital of the World.” Business Insider, 6 Mar. 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-porn-valley-came-to-be-2016-3. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.
Encino and Northridge are in the San Fernando Valley.
Los Angeles, Magazine. “Postscript: The Teenager & The Porn Star.” 1 May 2009, https://lamag.com/news/postscript-the-teenager-the-porn-star1. Accessed 5 May 2025.
I’m in support of teenagers who have more recently protested dress codes as racist and classist.
In 1995, a house in Studio City was reportedly such a frequent location for porn shoots that neighbors complained and filming was shut down.