Porn Director: The Idea that Porn Actresses Are Not Prostitutes Is Silly (explicit language)

Candid comments from people who work in porn routinely skewer attempts by academics and porn defenders to ennoble the porn industry.

“Billy Watson” is the blogmaster at I Shoot Porn (explicit). In his June 1 post, “I Be Google’n”, he laughs at the notion that porn actresses are not prostitutes. He also gives ranges for what actresses earn per hour these days. If it seems like good money, keep in mind that these actresses generally aren’t working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Their expenses can be high, and most leave the industry after a year or two (U.S. News & World Report, 2/10/97).

And now, Mr. Watson…

These are all real, unedited search engine phrases that were typed into Google and resulted in a hit for I Shoot Porn.

I’ll take the time and respond to them as well. But you know that already, don’t you? And with that said, let the Google fun commence:

“how much does it cost to fuck a porn star” — Good question! Some porn stars do what’s called a “private”. I think I’ve mentioned privates here before. They’re kinda funny, too…not the privates themselves, but the porn stars who do — and don’t — do them. Some Porn Whores love the side cash, and they realize they’re a whore (as defined), which means they’ll have sex for money. Where they (the Porn Whores) get confused is this whole idea of whether a camera is actually capturing the sex on tape. See, some Porn Whores don’t do privates cause they “are not” a whore. To these Silly Rabbits, they’re “actresses” who have sex on tape as part of their job. They reject the idea that they’re a whore, which means they’ll never do a private, to which I say, More Power To Ya, Whore!

“how much cash do porn models make” — Currently it’s $100 an hour (or so) for “solo” work (masturbation / toys); $250 – $400 to suck cock; $700 – $900 to lez out; and $900 – $2500 to fuck a boy. This is the girlie rate; I won’t get into what dudes make, and I could get more detailed, but I won’t. Search my blog for more complete information on Pay Days in Porno Land.

See also:

Ex-Porn Star Shelley Lubben Talks about Days on the Set: Tedious, Intoxicated, Painful, Risky
“Porn is harder than prostitution, where you are treated nice if you are in the luxurious side of it. Porn was totally degrading and shattering. None of the men in prostitution treated me sexually like the men in porn did…”

Jenna Jameson’s Cautions to Would-Be Porn Stars
Jameson says porn has more pitfalls “than nearly any other occupation.” Drugs is one…

[The performers] don’t own any rights to their screen work, so scenes can be reused in compilations. And because the adult industry isn’t unionized and the movies are so cheap to make, the stars make a piddling slice of the overall profits…

Porn Actresses: Most Careers Are Short, Few Are Lucrative (explicit language)
Although the industry is dependent on fans for survival, many of the respondents reported a fairly negative image of the imagined viewer… Ironically, then, actresses and actors are motivated in part to receive recognition from a group they know little about and often disparage. In addition, they reported little pride in the products they produce. Like most artifacts in the “sleaze industry”, porn is disposable, mass-produced, fungible, and easily forgotten… Unlike the “straight” industry, actors and actresses are paid a flat fee for their performances, and receive no royalties for successful projects.

Carol Smith, former porn performer, quoted in Not For Sale
Cited in Biting Beaver; see our reviews of essays in this book
“What I saw were women just like myself who were desperate, addicted to drugs, homeless, and I’m sure probably at least 80 percent of them suffered from sexual abuse as children. I saw them re-living their childhood experiences by getting into that industry. They were looking for attention, pleasing men, and being abused. And that’s all they know. They think it’s great. They think it’s wonderful. I could’ve looked you in the eye ten years ago and told you that I loved being in pornography, was proud of what I was doing and that I was having a great time. But now I can tell you that it’s so far from the truth. I was very convincing. I could convince you. I mean, I could walk up to a porn star today and she could tell me the same story and I can remember being in that place.”

Interview with Ex-Porn Star Traci Lords: Abused as a Child; High on the Set; Power, Not Arousal; Bad Pay
There’s nothing loving about it, no. Absolutely not. For me, porn was about my pain in my life as a child. And I was completely acting out. I was a wild kid. I was angry at the world. And I was very rebellious, and I wanted to show everybody…

…[I]t was never intentional. I never set out to be a porn star… I was stoned. I was on a set. I was supposed to be a girl in a bikini walking around the pool. And you know, I got high enough, a guy hit on me, and it was a filmed thing. And that was the beginning of my career in that world…

The Science Behind Pornography Addiction
[Performers in the sex industry] have high rates of substance abuse, typically alcohol and cocaine, depression, borderline personality disorder which is a particularly serious disorder and dissociative identity disorder which used to be called multiple personality disorder. The experience I find most common among the performers is that they have to be drunk, high or dissociated in order to go to work. Their work environment is particularly toxic. One study on strippers indicated that they were likely to be punched, slapped, grabbed, called c**t and whore and to be followed home or stalked.

Los Angeles Times: “In California’s Unregulated Porn Film Industry, an Alarming Number of Performers Are Infected With HIV and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases. And Nobody Seems to Care.”
The Adult Industry Medical HealthCare Foundation (AIM), an industry- backed clinic in Sherman Oaks, administered voluntary tests to a group consisting primarily of adult film workers. Of 483 people tested between October 2001 and March 2002, about 40% had at least one disease. Nearly 17% tested positive for chlamydia, 13% for gonorrhea and 10% for hepatitis B and C, according to Sharon Mitchell, a former adult actress who founded AIM…

For chlamydia, 101,871 cases were reported for the year [in California as a whole], or about three-tenths of 1%–a rate health officials consider epidemic. The chlamydia rates in the porn world are about 57 times higher than those epidemic proportions…

[S]ays Dr. Peter Kerndt, the county health department’s STD control director, “…[E]ven we wonder why we don’t have the same legal requirements in California that they have with legalized prostitutes in Nevada…”

“If we had the numbers you’re seeing in California, our phones wouldn’t stop ringing,” says Rick Sowadsky, health program specialist for the Nevada State Health Division. He says the infection rates in California’s adult film business “are unreal. What a public health crisis…”

Pornoland’s unwritten law: “if we tell the truth about what’s really going on here, the fan will get turned off”
“Even the people who enjoy looking at pornography really despise the people they’re watching, and they have no sense of protection for them,” [former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop] said…

Bill Margold, a veteran porn star who now counsels young p
eople entering the business, says 18-year-olds are too young to make the potentially life-altering decision to go into porn. “I get 18-, 19-year-old girls who just don’t understand that once you do this, you are sociologically damned forever,” he said.

Penn State Law Professors Trot Out ‘Female Porn Leaders’ to Whitewash Realities of Adult Industry (explicit language)
As D.A. Clarke wrote in Christine Sparks and Rebecca Whisnant’s anthology Not for Sale, most porn performers work under conditions more akin to sweatshop labor than to professional-level jobs. Sex workers receive very little of the profits made from their bodies; they have no social standing, no health care benefits, heightened risk for STDs and addictions, and little protection against sexual harassment and violence.