You don’t even need to know any women, you just buy a camera, move to the San Fernando Valley, get on your computer and visit any number of online “adult model” directories, hire a girl (or whatever you’re into), do your shoot, edit (though not really even necessary from a lot of what I’ve seen, I mean heard about), and upload to any number of free porn sites, or create your own.
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Yep; I’ve heard that the San Fernando Valley is the porn capital of the US.
The better question is, how do porn sites generate revenue? Ads are the usual stream for free (non-porn) sites like the Dope or TV Tropes. But, uh, a friend of mine spends time on porn sites, and I’ve on - I mean, he’s - only seen one or two different ads. And I can’t imagine that mainstream companies like Amazon or WalMart or Lowe’s include Pornhub in their ad buys. So where are they making their profits? Just by selling memberships?
The other good question is, why do porn directors think straight men want to watch ten minutes of a woman giving a blowjob? I didn’t lock myself in the bathroom with the fan on just to see another guy’s wanger!
Once upon a time there was a woman named Xaviera Hollander who became a very famous sex worker and wrote a book called The Happy Hooker. During that time Ms. Hollander made a statement to the effect that she’d still be working as a secretary if wives would just perform oral sex. I suspect the directo is just giving the audience what they want.
A good chunk of the major porn sites are owned by the same company. That company also owns a number of the big name porn producers that also have their own sites. Those production company sites are where paid memberships kick in some revenue for access to exclusive content (that hasn’t leaked yet) and live streaming events. The tube sites push traffic to the paid membership sites that they own by posting shorter or lower resolution samples in many cases. Within the ecosystem a number of sites host paid live webcams and take a hefty chunk off the top for that business. That webcam market is big business. There’s even still a market for porn DVDs. Since the production companies selling them are linked to the tube sites the free stuff is effectively advertising things they sell.
Then those directors are apparently clueless about the significant difference between receiving a blowjob and watching somebody else receive a blowjob.
You don’t need many subscribers to make a decent turnover. There are a lot of consumers out there looking for a particular niche, ranging from vanilla safe-for-work softcore, to weird borderline illegal hardcore, and are willing to pay a small monthly fee for the high def, full length, guaranteed quality they reliably provide. When I worked for an adult site (a long time ago, it helped that we started early in the internet’s lifetime) we had about 30-40k subscribers at our peak, and that was a lot of income. You might not get that many now (hard to know for sure) but even 10k will net you some decent cash.
Surely the problem is that there are not many different things that two people can do during sex, or ways that they can do it. A woman only has three places where a penis can be inserted (four if you count between the breasts) and a man only has two. The options can be multiplied up by adding more people, but it is still pretty limited. If the movie is just porn with no plot, what else are they going to fill the time with?
This is why there is a constant search for more women to take part; since the audience is mainly heterosexual male, there is more demand for new women than new men. As said up-thread somewhere, reliable men are harder to find than willing women.
Linda Lovelace’s two books Ordeal and Our of Bondage are a good read, and a good story about the porn industry she was in at the time. Some of the women were forced into making porn under the threats of violence and death.
I have seen pictures of some prosthetic female figures that strive to emulate the real thing. Maybe the manufacturers will take that suggestion on board, but somehow I doubt it.
Your first post was from 2010 and as gaffa wrote nine years ago, there is good reason to believe that Lovelace’s situation was due to her horrific relationship with Chuck Traynor rather than being a standard or even significant minor part of the industry. My understanding is that virtually every person mentioned in those books has refuted her allegations about others. It should also be noted that she didn’t work in what is now thought of as the porn “industry.” Traynor worked in the criminal underground and used mob money to finance Deep Throat. That underground mostly disappeared after legal and freely available porn became standard.
There are dozens of books by women who have worked in the industry. Some report positive experiences, some are certainly negative. Women are exploited in porn - but many of the books take pains to emphasize that’s also true in mainstream movies and that, ironically, porn does not have a casting couch culture. Drugs are a more constant danger than violence.
Georgina Spelvin, the Miss Jones in The Devil in Miss Jones, wrote a memoir of that time period called The Devil Made Me Do It. It presents an utterly different picture of the industry. And also a very different one from The Deuce, HBO’s show about the beginnings of mainstream porn.
Normally I hate to play the “It must be popular, because so many examples exist” because market failure is a thing. There are pervasive tropes in movies that nobody likes. TV was pretty crap for decades.
However online video sites receive a heck of a lot more data about what is popular and what isn’t, and there is a lot of competition for attention. It is a pretty efficient market in that respect. If a lot of BJ movies are made and featured prominently it’s because a lot of people (OK, men) enjoy watching them.
My impression is that porn has all the same pitfalls of the rest of the entertainment industry. Namely: inconsistent pay, high pressure, extreme competition for work, a low ceiling for aging out, and all the emotional hills and valleys that come with being critiqued and judged and scrutinized. Add in the presence of drugs and alcohol, and it’s a business where it’s easy to get chewed up and spit out.
But again, this is the whole entertainment industry, not just porn.
Less and less true. Two third of women watch porn regularly. Women who never watch porn are pretty much as rare as men who don’t. They’re now a significant part of porn viewers, about 1/4. And in particular, they’re a significant part of gay (male) porn watchers. And “rough sex” porn watchers.
