What others have said: it’s a way for women to make good side money. Men who consume porn, like yourself, make this possible. If that makes her dirty and you’re still clean, see the hypocrisy.
If you can’t handle it, quit now.
As I’ve ruminated on this, I think this is the real issue. I don’t want her to weaponize her experiences, by taunting me with lurid stories, or dumping emotional baggage about abuse onto me.
My ex did that repeatedly. I think that more than anything else is what I want to guard against.
I want to be clear that I don’t think this makes her dirty. It’s not that at all.
But imagine seeing somebody you are starting to like doing modern conventional porn: I’m willing to fully accept that these are my hangups, but it definitely is causing me to feel a certain way.
I’m not really sure what exactly I’m feeling, other than it’s on the front of my mind.
Well, an important factor in how you proceed is whether or not she is past and done with that segment of her life. If so, you have to decide whether or not you can also get past it and continue on with your relationship.
One thing you said bothers me, and that is the fact that you are bothered she made money via sex. If you found out one of your male buddy’s was paying for sex, would you end your friendship with him? I doubt it. This is the classic hypocrisy many men have, and that is sleeping around and even paying for sex is no problem, but your daughters/girlfriends/wives have to be “pure”, or it’s traumatic in scope. Decide.
Google tells me she is a “retired” porn star who was active from 2013-2017.
If that is what you are worried about, the fact she did porn is not relevant. Any one who would act that way towards a person they claim to love has problems and is a bad human being.
The consent came when she accepted a check to be filmed for distribution (which would be the case if she was paying her way through school doing this). That is the whole reason why she got paid for doing it. You might as well argue that I’m watching Alan Alda without his consent each time I turn on MASH.
It might be a different matter if it was some ex-lover revenge porn never meant to be seen but that’s obviously not the case here. And some people’s reaction would probably change from “I dunno” to “Poor you” if that was the case.
Trying to call someone out for hypocrisy over this feels like a pointless endeavor. Even if philosophically correct, someone likely isn’t going to slap their forehead and say “Wow, now my mind is changed”. At “best”, they’ll force something they’re not ready for to prove how not-hypocritical they are and just make stuff much worse down the line for both parties. Yay morality.
I have to apologize for the video-my excuse is that it was about bedtime for me, and the song instantly popped into my mind (thanks to all those Thread Games on songs). I’ll ask the mods to delete it.
I might. In the past a friend shocked me by revealing he paid for sex. I lectured him on why this was wrong and that I had instantly lost a great deal of respect for him when he told me. I have known a few gilrs (note this was decades ago. They were girls. I was a boy at the time) who turned to prostitution to survive. These were genuinely tragic stories. I have never known a girl or woman who decided truly of her own free will when there were other ways to make money to choose prostitution.
Paying for sex is huge problem. Sleeping around is not. Before my beloved, my last serious relationship was with the woman from Panama who once gave a dead bat in a jar. The story of the night we met cannot be told here. If you cut out all the NSFW details all that is left is- I went to a party at a friend’s place. We ended up being sexually intimate. We exchanged contact information before we left.
It is a shame I cannot tell that story here. I am very proud of that night. I would hope she is proud of it as well. I do not think of her as ‘dirty’ or a ‘slut’. She was an empowered woman who was not constrained by outdated mores or notions of female sexuality.
After my Dad died, Mom started dating. She is also an empowered woman who is not constrained by outdated mores or notions of female sexuality. My late niece had a shirt that read “My Grandma Is On Tinder”. Strangers thought it was funny. People who actually knew Mom thought it was hilarious because she actually was on Tinder.
My niece knew she could always come to me whenever she had a problem or a question. Knowing that I am uncomfortable discussing my sex life with my family or having them discuss their sex lives with me, she never told me about her sex life. After she was killed, my sister told us a story. One day, my niece said “Mom, I have something important to tell you” rather than going on with a polite speech about how she was no longer a virgin, she blasted the Lonely Island song I Just Had Sex from her iPhone and danced around the room. I don’t know how much sex she had. I am very glad she had some before her life was cut short.
My beloved, the woman I hope to wed and spend the rest of my life with, is not surprised when I ask if shje would consent to fulfill one of my fantasies. Some of the non vanilla things we have done were her idea. The rest she repeatedly gave her enthusiastic consent for. I have never wanted a wife who is “pure”. I want a woman who will have a joint bachelor/bachelorette party with various strippers, that ends with us taking the stage for what guests think is an announcement but turns out to be us making love onstage while the groomsmen and bridesmaids enforce the rules of ‘no touching the performers’ and ‘no recording of any kind’.
I think you’ve gotten a lot of good advice. I don’t think you should jump to an answer, i think you should examine your feelings, and talk with her.
If you are mostly worried about her weaponizing her past, well, as @DocCathode said, that’s not a feature of “people who did porn”, that’s a feature of “shitty people”.
If you are just going to be uncomfortable dating a porn star, you should break up now, when no one will be badly hurt by it. You can feel guilty for being hypocritical if you want, but we all have our hang-ups and weaknesses, and it’s good to recognize yours and act to minimize the damage they cause. And a bitter unhappy relationship is a lot more damage than walking away.
Best wishes.
…and DJT. 
I want to second this comment. This is such a smart and sensitive thread. Many thoughtful, well-made points.
It’s one thing to say deal with her as she is now and don’t look at her history, but our present-day selves grew out of that history, which is always there. Whenever she meets a new guy, she has to deal with his reaction to her history if and when he finds out. When you have The Talk with her you’ll need to get a sense of where she is with her past. ISTM that sending you those beach pics was almost an invitation for you to investigate. Some nascent relationships can put off these serious conversations while the boy & girl/guy & gal 
get acquainted on a playful, superficial level. Looks like y’all won’t have that luxury.
I think she’s handled that part pretty well. Given you hints, and the ability to find out if that’s likely. That gives you time to react in private and decide how you want to go forward. I suspect she doesn’t want to waste a lot of time developing a relationship that is going to be soured by the reveal.
I’m more amazed at the insane coincidence of her sending you a bikini photo and you happen to see her on a porn site the same day, like actually clicked on a thumbnail and watched a video with an interview for some reason and stayed watching long enough to notice the same tattoo. You need to buy a lottery ticket.
Incorrect. Alan Alda gets paid every time MASH is broadcast (at least legitimately). That’s not the case with porn models, they sign up to get paid for a certain retail video, which is almost always pirated, meaning that most porn viewers are thieves.
okay thank you for that insight
Dude went on two dates with a single mother of two and is now having an existential crisis from wanting to jerk it and discovering some work she did long ago. I can tell already the OP isn’t mature enough to handle this, jealousy will eat him up and end this one day or another.
It could just be jealousy. That’s a perfectly valid emotional response to thinking of somebody you like being with someone else.
Emotions aren’t logical, you can’t reason your way out of them, either you can cope or you can’t cope. Your responsibility is to figure that out, make that decision, and own that decision entirely yourself.
If it’s helpful, if I detected this much jealousy in myself for whatever reason, I know myself well enough to understand that I’m not going to get over it. For me, jealously doesn’t go away. I’d need to tell her that my jealousy about her past is an obstacle to having an exclusive relationship, and I’m sorry I’m not a better person than that, but I’m just not wired that way. Maybe she says something that makes me see it differently, or maybe I just lose out on something good. Either way I don’t make it her responsibility.
Cool, but we were talking about consent. Since people in paid adult films aren’t typically being promised residuals, they are consenting to a one time payment to be recorded knowing that the recording will be available for future viewings from whoever. Whether or not someone pirated the film is especially irrelevant since the actors don’t get paid more either way, they took a lump payment for their consent.
Glad to help.
One other aspect is that this isn’t likely to just stay between you two. It seems like you easily found her work and she’s currently promoting herself. The longer you are in a relationship, the more likely that your friends and family will also know about her past one way or another. Even if you are okay being in a relationship with her, you probably will also have to deal with the reactions that people have about her. For instance, your son and his friends may find out at some point and there would be some fallout from that. If it was me, I would not pursue this brand-new relationship just because I wouldn’t want my child to deal with what hurtful things the other kids might say to them. It might be different if this was someone who I was deeply committed to, but if it was someone I only had a couple of dates with, I wouldn’t consider it worth it.
Yeah, this is amazing to me. Finding the woman you’re dating from a very generic, vert basic search term on a porn site seems like…I don’t know, it seems remarkable.
Some of you have no faith in me. I may be feeling jealousy, but I can work through my feelings.
Some thoughts at this point:
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I actually don’t have a problem with a woman who does porn, or who made money from sex work. Re-reading my OP, I don’t see that I said otherwise. Just as I don’t have a problem watching it. It’s adult entertainment.
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I do think I am more fearful of her trying to make me jealous, as my ex-wife did. If she doesn’t cross that boundary, I may be okay.
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She does genuinely like me. And I like her. That’s pretty nice right now. (I mean, there are possible issues, but it’s not this past. She’s not highly educated (she wasn’t “working her way through school.” She was a porn star). She doesn’t vote or watch the news. She likes her cocktails. Those might be the death knell, eventually)
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I like a physically affectionate girlfriend. I like having really good uninhibited sex. It’s ridiculous to think that a woman who comes into a relationship with those skills didn’t have practice elsewhere. So as long as she hasn’t decided that now she only wants to do it under the covers in the dark, i think I’m okay with this (to be clear, I’m not saying that we are going to be doing it “porn style”. I realize that isn’t realistic. But if she’s sworn off oral sex, for example, that’d be an issue)
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For what it’s worth, she was one of the most attractive porn stars you can find. It’s rare to find a tall beauty with lean legs and large natural breasts (she went by (name redacted by Aspenglow) for those inclined to search). She still looks that way. Lucky me!
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I will take it slow. Not necessarily physically (before this came to light, she was texting me about wanting me “inside her”). But definitely emotionally.
Imagining I’m in your shoes I could see a dilemma if she was still doing porn. But why care about it now that it’s in her past?
Just be happy a beautiful woman is interested in you.