What percentage of the population has been in a porn movie?

Factual Questions
1

I am given to understand, through, uh, friends who have told me and who would know such things, that the Internet has a fairly impressive amount of pornography, much if not most of it relatively low-quality “amateur” stuff or semi-pro material made to quickly get a few bucks.

Now, my… friends’… experience is that one can watch quite a lot of porn and never see the same person twice, or at most every now and then think “I saw that person before.”

It seems to me that the number of people who have had sex on camera for fun/profit has to be REALLY gigantic. Indeed, it seems to me that there is a near-certain chance that most adults in North America personally know at least one or more people who’ve had a case of the nakes when the cameras were rolling.

So how many people have been in porn movies?

2

Quick, someone give some serious answers so that I can make a Bill and Ted reference!

3

I’ve been in a couple of submissions for Dan Savage’s Hump! Film Festival. This is an amateur film fest, but you’ll never get to see them unless you go to the initial showings.

4

Would this include someone walking by unaware of what’s going on but being in the shot briefly?

5

I’m going to question the “most adults” part. At least assuming the OP is interested only in people who’ve been in publicly distributed naked vids. As distinct from private personal-use-only naked vids.
When did amateur porn become a thing? WAG 2005. What is the demographic that creates most amateur porn? WAG over age 18 and under age 35.

Going from those WAGs, almost everyone born before 1970 and many people born before 1987 are too old to have participated in this popular new hobby. That’s about one half the current US population, and 2/3rds of the over-18 population.

Of the rest, it’s still a tiny fraction. If we wag there’s 300 million Americans, then 100 million are in our porn-producing demographic. And more age into it every day. So that’s the denominator, the population of potential amateur porn actors.

What’s the numerator, the number of actual amateur porn actors? Good question. Let’s tackle it.

If one was an avid porn *watcher *one might spend 8 hours a day 365 days a year watching 5 minute shorts. That’s 365,000 vids per year. If you watched like that for 300 years you’d get up seeing around 100,000,000 vids. At which point you’d have seen a bunch of dupes unless every eligible person had acted in one.

My point being that a more realistic sample size for even an avid porn watcher is a couple thousand vids. 2000 5 minute vids is 10,000 minutes = 166 hours = 20 8-hour days. Or a half-year of 1 hour per evening watching. Good bet after that many you’ll be hard pressed to remember/recognize anyone.

And even if each vid really was two unique people, it’d only have taken 4000 people to make them all. 4,000/100,000,000 is 0.00004 = 0.004% = 1 in 25,000.

So your typical US suburban town of 50K people has one couple making porn. Do you know (or even recognize) everyone in your suburban town? Nope. Odds are you don’t know somebody who makes porn.

The odds might well go up 10 or 20x if you hang in *just *the right demographic of looks, attitude and “class”. But my 1:25,000 is already demographically filtered for age.

6

People had been filming sex since home movie cameras. Bob Crane was big into that and it may have got him murdered back in the 1970s.

7

What’s new as of 2005ish (or pick your own date) is widespread *distribution *of homemade porn. Which pretty well required the existence of vid-sharing websites and commercial porn websites to take off.

I’d wager that sometime on the second day after Daguerre finished his invention the first dirty picture got taken. Which was only 40,000 years after the first caveman drew some porn in a cave.

The urge isn’t new. The distribution tech is.

8

No. You have to get sexy to count.

9

I think the only way the vast majority of porn watchers would recognize someone is if they hung out on revenge sites where the identity of the fucker or the fuckee is given, or at least broadly hinted at. “Linda H in Tulsa - had a great time with her, that bitch”.

LSLGuy, I think your sample size is real low. The only thing I am interested is mature porn, and it is freakin endless even if you just limit it to subsets, BBW, Asian, Grandmas, etc.

Dennis

10

Agree that the volume is endless.

Where I was going (that probably got lost in my musing with numbers) was that any given person can sample only a tiny fraction of what’s out there.

So as a result their perception that there’s no duplication of actors and therefore “everybody must be doing these vids” is a defective perception.

It’s driven by their tiny sample size versus the relevant universe. Not by the (non-) fact that very few actors make more than one vid, and damn near everyone is in one.
Illustrative example: I’ve never ridden in a taxi driven by the same guy twice. Does that mean everyone in the US drives a taxi? Or does it mean I’ve only ridden in a negligible percentage of the taxis out there?

No matter how voracious your appetite for porn, and no matter how specialized your interests, they can still make it faster than you can consume it. It’s a variant on the expanding universe problem: everything gets farther apart and scarcer. Even coincidences like seeing the same actor.

11

And now they are producing sex robots as if we don’t have enough humans involved already.

12

8.7%

13

A large number of people may still represent a tiny fraction of the overall population. Even if there were 100,000 Americans who have been in porn movies, that’s still only 0.1% of American adults.

14

For personal use? I’d guess a lot, but I wouldn’t bet anywhere near a majority. For public distribution or stuff that has inadvertantly gotten into public distribution. Very low. 1 in 10,000?

15

Note that the OP didn’t say that most adults have probably done it. He said that most adults probably know someone who has. That’s a much more plausible claim.

LSLGuy, the fact that any given person only looks at a small subset of porn makes the result more extreme, not less. Because if even a small subset of porn shows no repeat of actors, then there must be a lot of people making just that small subset, and thus must be that many more making the entire universe of pornography.

16

This website has had disclaimers stating that they are not responsible for trauma incurred by seeing pictures of your ancestors Doing It.

Following the two-click rule The finest Vintage

17

I’d suggest 0% of the world population.

By extension, if 0% of the population appears in porn, there is no porn, and all those videos/images are a figment of our collective imagination.

18

I think it’s possible that young people who have grown with this widespread exposure to porn may be influenced by it in their own sex lives. I think it can normalize, in the eyes of those young people, extreme sex acts. Kids growing up with Pornhub, etc. may get a distorted idea of what normal sex is like.

19

I did see that. But I’m wondering what the OP means by “doing porn.” Private use? Yes, I think most adults know someone who has, at least in the US. Public? I don’t think so.

20

In the future, everybody will be in a porno for 15 minutes.
:smiley: