I have some limited personal experience here, through friend of a friend connections I spent a weekend hanging out with a bunch of porn stars, including Ron Jeremy, Liv Wylder, Flower Tucci, Aurora Snow. This was a convention situation.
Most porn stars tend to have a fairly open attitude regarding sex. Sex is not necessarily a defining element of committment to a relationship.
A couple of the porn stars had done stints at The Moonlite BunnyRanch, a legal brothel in Nevada run by Dennis Hof (he was also there). Several of them had something resembling relationships at the time, including relationships with other stars. I overheard an exchange between one couple that appeared to be setting a signal for “this is someone I want to take home”, but I’m not entirely sure on that, and it seemed odd they wouldn’t have that already defined.
As part of the gig we made visits to several strip clubs. Comments made included “why would I bother paying these girls when I can get paid to sleep with chicks?” There was also apparently some wild things happening on their bus rides across the city, but I wasn’t present for them.
I did not witness any drug activity. There was some drinking, but I didn’t witness anyone getting sloshed. However, drug activity could have been done a bit more discreetly without me being aware.
They are concerned about staying clean from STDs and regular testing.
Are you sure that’s the only plausible explanation? Correlation isn’t causation, after all. Perhaps they are heavy drug users because they have all that porn money. Substance abuse isn’t unknown in other sectors of the entertainment industry, is it, Drew Barrymore? Lindsey Lohan? Charlie Sheen? Andy Dick? Robert Downey Jr.?
No, not sure at all. However, if a poll question was: “Do you think that more than 50% of porn actresses got into porn for the easy money to support their substance abuse?”, I would answer Yes
I don’t know about straight porn stars but I know a few gay porn stars and like other said, the main reason is drugs.
For a gay porn the pay isn’t that much only about $400 per scene and a movie takes about 2 days to film, at least their scene does
The pay off comes in drugs and the ability to hustle. If you have the status of a “name” you can charge more if you’re into charging for sex and when you dance at clubs you can easily make 1 or 2 thousand a night.
So the porn itself doesn’t provide much money it the options that it opens that make it attractive to gay men.
For a year or two I met regularly (at the dog park) with a friendly but slightly messed-up woman, a porn star from the glory days of the 70s. She was called by one reviewer “the well-known industry veteran.” (I’ve looked up some of her films, and she is unrecognizable.) She is, I presume, dead of AIDS now, after what she told me about her long-term HIV infection since then.
She had lived pretty steadily, for years at a time, with some well-known (for the cognoscenti among us) men in porn movies.
What most interested me, as we began to talk more freely, was whether she had orgasms on set, or at home with the same actor that she had worked with that day. The answer was yes and yes.
This is my impression too. From what I’ve read of the mainstream porn business (not the amateur and fetish stuff) the whole scene seems surprisingly square.
It’s the 70s and 80s that has the sleazy, drug addled reputation. But I don’t think it’s the case anymore.
Abby Winters is not representative of the porn business. All the girls they shoot are amateurs; it’s based in Australia, which is far removed from the “Porn Valley” in California where the bulk of the business takes place; and there’s no actual sex on the site, only posing and “lesbian” stuff, no hardcore whatsoever. It’s still a good site though.
For some extra insight I can highly recommend checking out a documentary series by Louis Theroux. He’s a BBC reporter, who goes out of his way to do ‘weird weekend’ doco’s. One I saw a while ago was on the porn industry.
Wow, I’m behind the times that was filmed over a decade ago. Still it was interesting to see that there seems to be a lot of otherwise ‘normal’ people in the industry.
I’m having trouble with this. Is it hilarious or awful or sexist or absurd or willfully blind or what to say that two women doing just about everything sexual with one another’s bodies is not “hardcore” and certainly not “actual sex”? Queen Victoria lives!
Although her site does get many amateurs to pose on it, do you think the rest of the industry grows them in hydroponic sex farms? There are probably proportionally as many women who do only one or two porn shoots in any other variety of porn. Abby does have regulars who work for a while, the same pattern as everywhere else. And the California porn movie industry is only a small part of the overall internet worldwide shoot-anywhere porn industry.
Just BTW, she’s not based in Australia anymore because of a change in their porn laws. She relocated to Amsterdam. And her Wikipedia page has a comment that they will start doing boy-girl shoots again. (They did a few years ago.) (That is, they did a small number of them a few years ago.)
I have a cousin who was an pretty famous porn star (and director) in her day, which was the 70s & 80s. She’s a very nice, well adjusted, fun, friendly, married, individual, who is always a welcome sight at family gatherings. Today, she is a performance artist and author.
OK, PC police, sorry I’m not being inclusive enough. I’ll have to recalibrate the needle on my pornograph.
I was a member of that site years ago and I don’t remember there being any penetration, which I would personally use as the standard of whether something is “hardcore” or not. But maybe I’m mistaken. In any case, that site was on the arty hipster end of the porn spectrum; the stuff the OP talks about - in other words, any situation where anyone would be called a porn “star” - is on all the way on the other end.
Re the convergence of drugs and porn stars just from a common sense perspective it’s a lifestyle where drugs are going to be prevalent in social situations even if they are not all over the set. At one time or another it seems like a number of porn stars are constantly cycling into and out of rehab.
Even if the drug lifestyle is not precisely why someone gets into porn it’s a pretty powerful magnet to keep them there if they become enmeshed in the drug lifestyle. There are certain jobs and lifestyles where drugs are a big part of the landscpe and porn is one of them.
Thank you for this common sense and reality check. Likewise, I was also going to note the OP’s phrase “relationships with the opposite sex,” said as though gay & lesbian people don’t exist or don’t count for anything, or as though fidelity to one’s partner is somehow irrelevant to gay & lesbian relationships. (It isn’t!)
As for motivations for taking up sex work, when it’s a question of trans women, obtaining food and a roof over one’s head are more compelling reasons than drug addiction. May I offer the first cite in the thread on a point of controversy:
