Please Respect Mia Khalifa’s Rebrand, brehs

Doobie Doo

Veteran
Joined
May 2, 2012
Messages
61,334
Reputation
24,265
Daps
397,288
Reppin
Raleigh, NC


NOT COPYING THE WHOLE ARTICLE
Please Respect Mia Khalifa’s Rebrand


On TikTok, the woman briefly known as Pornhub’s No. 1 performer is amassing a more supportive, more female fanbase. Creeps and jerks will be blocked.

0e99efc1-add3-43e2-9ea6-cd42ecbe20cb-header_20220405_miakhalifa_bustle_shot1_0002_v1-copy.jpg

Daniel Prakopcyk
By Charlotte Shane
May 10, 2022
“Is this normal? Is this happiness?” social media superstar Mia Khalifa asks herself. She’s reflecting on her current state of mind while she waits for her berry lemonade, expressing disbelief at how far she’s come: “I’m at peace. What is this?” We’re at Mandolin, a Miami bistro with an octopus dish beguiling enough to convince Khalifa, who suggested the spot, to drive three hours in traffic from her new home in the suburbs to get there. The house won her over with a large, quiet outdoor space that offers some much-desired tranquility. “There are peacocks all over the neighborhood,” she says. “They wander into our yard.”

Six years ago, she left Miami and swore she’d never come back. It’s the city where she started her career — and where, for a time, her career started to ruin her life.

In 2014, 21 and fresh out of college, Khalifa moved to Miami because her then-partner took a job there. Khalifa got a job too, at Fuddruckers, but her priority was getting implants. Considerable weight loss in her late teens left her self-conscious about her breasts, so she saved up and strategized for an augmentation throughout college. She reasoned that Beverly Hills was too expensive, even for a short-term stay, but Miami struck the right compromise between affordability and caliber of surgeons. That practicality had guided her before: Khalifa, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in a D.C. suburb, went to the University of Texas at El Paso because it accepted the college-level credits she earned in high school, which allowed her to graduate sooner.

One afternoon, about a month post-op, she was approached by a man on the street about nude modeling and, after a few weeks of considering the offer, went for it. Her stage name came from that of her dog at the time, Mia, and the rapper Wiz Khalifa. (She liked his music, and also, it “felt Arabic.”) In what may be one of the worst showbiz predictions of all time, she was told to pick something else “because it — and I quote — ‘sounds slutty and people won't be able to spell it.’” (Millions, if not billions, of Internet searches suggest that’s not a problem.) The production company she worked for, Bang Bros, had fewer qualms about leveraging her proximity to the Middle East when it proposed she wear a hijab for one of her scenes. Presented with the idea, Khalifa — who was raised Catholic — told them, “You motherfukkers are going to get me killed.”

The adult industry is no stranger to media stunts and irreverence, but the exposure the video earned her was, and arguably still is, unprecedented. In less than two months, her clips had more than 1.5 million views and she was declared Pornhub’s “No. 1 ranked performer.” The formerly unknown industry newbie began receiving death threats and widespread, often condemnatory international news coverage. Even ISIS got involved by reportedly hacking her 2 million follower Instagram account, which was subsequently deleted by Facebook. Khalifa defended the scene as satire, telling The Washington Post, “there are Hollywood movies that depict Muslims in a much worse manner than any scene Bang Bros could produce.”

She quit filming before the peak of the media storm, having worked in the industry for a matter of months, but still, her notoriety mounted. Attempts to take cover in conventional jobs like bookkeeper and paralegal were doomed. Though she cut and dyed her long, dark hair, co-workers and clients alike made it clear that they’d seen her on their screens. She says their behavior was so disruptive that one employer, a construction firm, stopped letting customers into the office.
 
Top