How many people are actually IN porn?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve never been much into porn. Back in the day when I would have liked it the mags cost money and I was poor and my parental units would not have approved. And I was too damn self conscious to buy it anyway.

And after that, it kinda became like being hungry and looking in at an all you can eat buffet but not going in to eat. What’s the point? I just laid back and thought of England when the need arose.

So, anyway, I kinda missed the whole “shitload of porn” on the internet thingy as it developed.

Well, being newly single, I “discovered” it for myself recently.

And yep, there is a shitload out there. And a fair bit of seems to be of the “bored housewife who knows somebody with a video cam variety”. Not to mention all the more professional stuff.

And that got me wondering. What fraction of the population actually has videos of them having sex and you can tell its them if you know them on a porn site?

2

Since porn ‘actors’ aren’t members of SAG it’s hard to know how many of them are out there, let alone for a particular country.

My guess is that it’s a very small percentage of people who do it, but I have no way of determining exactly how many or what percentage of the population they represent because there is no good way to count them.

3

I wonder about this too. I’m sure it’s a very slim percentage of the total population, but out of the 7 billion or so on the planet, it adds up quickly. What I mean is that I nearly see a new girl/s everytime i open a new one. I’m doubly astounded at the fact that most of them are gorgeous.

4

Well, there was that young plumber that happened to look a hell of a lot like the pizza delivery guy. And that middle aged housewife looked amazingly like that female boss :slight_smile:

5

Lots of women are gorgeous when they’re in their early 20s.

6

Being naked and having sex rather than pointing and laughing at you helps too with the gorgerosity.

7

It is fairly amazing what a makeup artist can do.

8

Funny.

Actually, we have a porn director on the board. I believe his name is Mike South.

9

Some of those women look a heck of a lot cuter in the “before” photos.

10

Lots of girls do that stuff anyways, but it doesn’t change the fact that most of them have fantastic bodies. Ironically, I don’t believe I have never seen a video of any of the girls featured in the link.

11

Give some of your friends a call, I bet they’re starting to wonder why you haven’t left the house or answered the phone for the past six months.

12

This is a question that can be approached to a good approximation by reasoning it out, like the classic “how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?”

Start with a round number. Four million people are born in the U.S. each year, so two million of them are female. That mean each year 2,000,000 girls turn 18 and become legal for porn. Estimate that 1 in 100 do porn. Remember, the question is not how many become porn stars, but how many ever do even one porn act. That puts the number of new faces each year at 20,000. That’s an average, obviously. Some won’t start until they are 19 or 20 or 29. Over the course of a lifetime, though, use 20,000 per year. Let’s say the average age of death is 78, so that gives us 60 cohorts of women in the total porn pool. That’s 1,200,000 American women. That’s high, since the percentage of women turning 18 in 1953 had far fewer opportunities to do porn than 18 year olds today, but if the last few years of the explosion in year means that 2 in 100 do so then the difference will be lessened. Make it an even 1,000,000 for rounding.

Porn historically has demanded new female faces constantly, with the few men who can perform on camera dominating their side of the industry. Ten women for every men is a reasonable estimate. Add in another 100,000 men total.

The same logic can be used worldwide, with less certainty. In round numbers, the world sees about 150,000,000 births per year, therefore 75,000,000 girls. If we did a straight-line extrapolation that would give 37,500,000 women who have ever done porn. But the opportunity for many of them to do porn is probably less today than in the U.S. and was much less even a few decades ago. And the population has increased much faster worldwide than in the U.S. over the past 60 years. I wouldn’t cut that number by 10, but dividing by 5 seems reasonable. That results in 7,500,000 women total, and 500,000 men.

Those numbers seem to be in the ballpark. They include some grandmothers who did a stag film a long, long time ago, and some girls whose boyfriends used a camera to film a blowjob last week and put it on the net as well as all those who passed through the revolving door at Vivid and such places. It’s certainly not precise, but it’s a good place to start.

13

I wonder what the etiquette is if you meet someone new, and you are sure that you have seen them performing in a pornographic video. I assume that the polite thing to do would be to pretend that you didn’t know.

What, however, would be the position if you spend the night with someone and only then realise that you recently saw the naked body, now beside you in the bed, romping energetically with two members of the opposite sex? Or, indeed, the same sex, or any other combination your fevered imagination can dream up.

14

I dated a woman who was in 3-4 productions. She actually told me fairly early on and that she wanted me to know so I did not find out from a friend who recognized her or something similarly messy.

Its been 5 years, we still go out now and then, as recently as a few months ago, I have never seen any of the movies she appeared in.

15

It used to be a whole lot of women but only a few men. Now with Viagra my guess is that there are more men doing it than in pre-viagra days.

16

I think this is the best approach to the question, but at the same time it falls apart right there at the end. Is that estimate too high or too low? I could see it go either way. I don’t think we’re going to get a conclusive answer one way or the other.

I would like to point out that I think the porn industry has got to be in some financial straints considering how it is so EASY to find it for free. If no ones paying for it, how is there any money in it? If there isn’t any money in it, why would you do it? Sure, plenty of people would do it just for the experience, but that comes at a mighty risk that I think outweighs the former quite heavily.

17

I had a friend once who suggested that a girlfriends attractiveness could be computed by the formula “beauty times availability squared.”

18

Well, I see what you’re hinting at here. But recent discussions over in ATMB suggest that such persons may simply be spending their entire waking lives on SDMB.

That must define SDMB as a kind of porn.

19

We could look at similar jobs in the sex trade. There are 400,000 women in the US employed as strippers (cite) and 100,000 working as prostitutes, maybe (PENet: Prostitution Issues: Statistics). The number of porn stars (especially if amateurs are included) should be somewhere in that ballpark.

20

Definitely! Pre-V, porn was limited to a relative handful of reliable “Woodsmen” who could get it up, get it in, and get off on time. A big dick wasn’t enough. In the movie Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy his ability to actually come on cue is discussed. In the documentary Inside Deep Throat one of the tech people mentioned that the late Harry Reems “…would get hard at the sound of the camera motor”.