Electra Rayne doesn’t want to be called a porn star.

“I don’t like using the word ‘porn star’ because I’m really new to the scene and I haven’t had a lot of recognition yet,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “It is not that the word bothers me, like when other people call me a porn star, I don’t care; it’s because I don’t feel entitled to that word.”

Rayne, 19, who requested to be only identified by her stage name for privacy reasons, aspires to be a forensic scientist someday — but the day she turned 18 she started looking for work in the adult entertainment industry.

She said she had wanted to enter the industry for a long time, and last summer she began her foray into the business as a nude model for artists. Her first modeling gig, she said, happened almost by accident.

“I heard about this modeling website and so I made a profile there and figured nothing would really happen and I woke up with 61 messages and emails from the site,” she said. “So I just started booking freelance jobs.”

After last summer, Rayne said the demanding travel the job entailed — most of the adult film industry is based in California, and she is from the Chicago area — made it hard for her to keep shooting material, which she had been doing up to four times a week. Rayne started as a full-time student at Northwestern this fall.

Today, she balances majoring in physics and linguistics, a work-study job, and an adult film and modeling career, shooting stills in the Chicago area “once every other week.” Both of the times she has flown to California to shoot films in the last few months have been during Reading Periods, a time she said she finds very convenient.

“As a freelancer I can just work around my schedule,” Rayne said.

In Evanston, Rayne stays active through cam modeling, performing on the Internet through live streaming. This kind of performance, she said, can be especially flexible because she can do it from her own dorm room.

“If I just find I’m a little more freer than I expected this evening, then I put on a little bit of extra makeup and my Squirtle crop top and I open up my laptop,” she said. “It works out that the best hours for camming are after 11 p.m. here, so if it’s weekends, it’s great.”

Rayne also stays busy on campus as a member of the NU Kink Education Society, for which she serves as co-president and an organizer of this year’s Sex Week, which started Monday.

Three of the panels during the week feature sex workers and members of Insex, a pornographic website Rayne has worked with before. She will participate in some of the panels, including one that focuses on the role of women in sex work. Rayne said this issue is very important to her and is one of the reasons why she hopes to succeed in the sex industry.

“Sex shouldn’t have a stigma and nudity shouldn’t have a stigma,” she said. “I don’t like when people say, ‘Oh, look at what she has to do,’ because it makes it sound like if sex work is some kind of bad thing when it’s just a job.”

Cristina Polenica, who graduated from School of Education and Social Policy after Winter Quarter and is currently co-chair of Sex Week, said people, especially women, who work for the sex industry are often objectified. Events like Sex Week, she said, are meant to help dissuade students from this mindset.

“These are real people too,” Polenica said. “They have to live, and this is the type of work that they’re doing to support themselves and it should be just as legitimate as any other kind of work.”

Rayne said she doesn’t perform in adult content with the goal of becoming famous. Mainly, she wants to achieve enough success in the industry to be able to bring attention to issues like equality and female motivation in the sex industry.

“I would like to get to the point where a newspaper can be like ‘Porn star Electra Rayne opens up with issues about women’s health’ or something and people would listen to that,” she said.

When Rayne first started shooting films, she said she didn’t tell her mother about it not because she was afraid her mom would disapprove, but because she didn’t know how to bring up her new job in conversation. However, when Rayne’s mother — who also requested anonymity for privacy reasons — found out, she was very supportive of her daughter’s choice.

Rayne’s mother said it is empowering for her daughter and daughter’s co-workers to be able to perform in this industry regardless of social stigma.

“Just because people chose to enjoy doing this for film or enjoy doing burlesque doesn’t necessarily mean that people can walk up to them on the street and touch them,” Rayne’s mother said. “There’s a big misconception, just because I do this on film doesn’t mean (it is real life).”

Rayne — who says she is completely financially independent and receives financial aid from the University to cover tuition costs — said her job as a sex worker helps her pay for other expenses such as textbooks, food and outings. However, that doesn’t mean she does the job for the money.

“All the costs associated with college are too expensive and I know that there are some people that feel like sex work is their only option,” she said. “(But) I don’t feel like sex work is my only option, I just really like it and I think it’s a good thing to be doing.”

Instead, she said she believes performing in “fetish porn,” niche sexual entertainment, offers her a way to give back to a world that helped her understand her sexuality when she was younger, while making some extra cash on the way.

Rayne and her mother said they appreciate how “sex-positive” the overall NU population is. Both women said they were afraid Rayne would suffer the same stigmatization that affected Duke University student Belle Knox in 2014, when she was outed as a porn star by one of her classmates in an incident that became national news. Knox was harassed and ultimately had to take time off from school.

“I don’t want people to look at (Rayne) in a different way because she chooses to express one portion of her life like that,” Rayne’s mother said. “It is unfortunate that people will do that.”

However, Rayne said she has not encountered such a situation at NU, saying her friends have been really supportive of her work.

At the end of the day, Rayne said, she is just a person who happens to perform in porn as a job.

“I guess I just want people to know that sex workers are normal people and do normal things and have normal lives,” she said. “I’m just a normal person, other people who do sex work are normal people, we have normal lives and normal sex lives.”

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Twitter: @marianaa_alfaro