It’s spelled Asia Carrera.
To actually answer the OP, female porn stars are already organized, albeit in an unofficial way. Why do you think AIDS testing and condom usage is now mandatory? Because the majority of actresses refused to work otherwise and the producers had to give in.
The demand for new “faces” in the porno business is constant, so women quickly realize the power they have in the genre. Actresses can dictate who they will work with, what acts they will perform, and their working conditions. A mid-level star can receive over a thousand dollars for a single day’s work.
So the reason porno actresses don’t unionize is that they’ve already got every reasonable advantages a union could bring.
It’s admittedly been a few years since the newest porn film I’ve seen was produced, but last I checked condoms were few and far between.
Well, like you said in the OP, “There are hundreds of men waiting to become porn stars (admittedly only a couple per cent of them will be able to), but beautiful women who want to do porn are far more scarce.” So that would lead me to believe that if a director wanted a girl for use in his porno, he’d be willing to accept any (many) demands she put forth. The dime-a-dozen guys would be far less able to issue demands and have them met.
So, from a labor-relations standpoint, the workers that already have decent pay and leverage would not need to organize. (the porno women)
The workers that get paid less, and don’t have any leverage with management, these people would be the ones more likely to form a union. (the porno men).
I have no experience in the porn industry, but from the interviews I’ve seen and the stories I’ve read, the women do wield much of the power. It is more difficult to find an attratcive woman willing to perform sexually on camera than it is to find a man to do the same. So, if a director wants to keep working with women, he needs to meet the demands they set forth. Unions are a means for workers to get management to listen to their demands. The porn women already have “management” listening to them, to a certain degree. So why bother organizing?
Happy
The reason female pornstars don’t get organized is because female porn actresses are usually women who don’t have a lot of alternatives: how many little girls do you think want to grow up to be pornstars? Not a lot I’ll wager.
Because of the inequities in our current system, inequities which show no real signs of being improved, there will always be a class of powerless women available for porn producers to take advantage of. So porn producers would just ignore the union and go scoop up the next abused teenager off the bus from Omaha.
So, let’s review. The reason that porn actresses don’t get organized is either that (1)there are so few willing porn actresses that they already wield all the power and call all the shots, thus eliminating the need for organization, or (2)that there are so many willing porn actresses that anyone who won’t play ball is discarded for whoever comes along.
Anyone have a cite that’ll clear all this up? The closest I’ve come is these two quotes from www.asiacarrera.com:
From reading her site, I got the impression that Asia’s pretty responsive to fan mail. Maybe someone should write her, including a link to this thread, so that she can weigh in.
There’s this problem:
Relevant to this somehow is the fact that most gay porn stars are straight men. It’s women who become stars in straight porn; very few men are considered stars. If a man wants to be treated (and to earn) like a star, he has to go where the money is: gay porn. So most gay porn stars are just “gay for pay.”
Why are these mutually exclusive?
From what I see, like any entertainment there are different eschelons of “actresses” - a bunch on the bottom and a few that have that “special something” that allows them to climb to the top (for the purposes of this post I’ve turned my Double-Entendre Meter to “low”).
An average starlet just-starting-out can decide whether she’ll do girl-on-girl or anal or whatever. She gets paid more based on what she’ll do, and if she won’t do something that’s vital to the “plot” cough, then they’ll find another. In that regard, it’s pretty much like any market: you pay more to get more, but if you can’t get it one place you’ll prolly find it somewhere else.
Now someone like Carrera, who can sell porn based on her name alone, can choose what she’s going to do as anything she puts on the market will get sold. In that case, she’s like any other big name - she’s cornered a commodity: her face/body/personality/image, and people will pay to get what she is offering.
Granted, I’m sure that a starlet’s eventual power is based on just how “nasty” she can get, but still. . .
Guys, guys ,guys.
Female porn stars are usually paid per scene. Some female stars do upwards of 100 scenes a year. The pay rate per scene varies depending on what happens in the scene. An anal scene pays more then your standard sex scene. A double penetration may pay more then an anal scene. An ass to mouth scene may pay more then a double penetration.
Also, female stars can make much, much more money dancing then they usually will doing movies, so what tends to happen is that an actress will do a few scenes so as to get her name out there and then do a tour of the strip club circuit.
A number of porn stars also get income by working in brothels in Nevada or being “escorts.”
ABC’s Primetime had a story on the porn business a few months back. The story is summarized on the Primetime website, which says, in part:
If you’re interested in the experiences of one young woman who went from a large, rather devout Mormon family to the California porn industry, read this.
Oh, and i forgot to add something. On the show, it was evident that Misery Loves Co’s point about the different levels of pornstar fame and clout rings true. Some production companies put the women on contracts that pay annual salaries rather than a per-scene amount, insist on condoms, and take care of health benefits and other issues. In other words, the women are treated like regular employees who happen to have sex for a living. As the second link in my previous post says:
But there is much less choice and far more danger for a young woman just entering the business. The companies often insist on working without condoms, and, as happened to the woman they featured in the story, the women sometimes turn up to a shoot to find that, instead of having sex with one guy, it’s going to be a gangbang. Of course, they are free to walk away, but the pressure to stay and do the scene is great, and these struggling young women also find it hard to turn down the extra money they are offered to do the more “extreme” scenes. The women are also sometimes faced with male actors who treat them badly. The second site i linked to in my previous post talks about the friendly banter between the male and female actors before a shoot, then added:
When the story aired on Primetime, they made it clear that this rough treatment had not been planned by the director, nor had it been discussed with the actress beforehand. Not exactly the sort of thing she signed up for.
Gregory Dark (a very in-demand music video director, but he made is bones in the 80s as a porn director) was interviewed a couple of years ago by Esquire. The interviewer asked him how he got people to do the freaky, disturbing things they did in his signature works. His response (I’m paraphrasing; I can’t find the actual article) was “I kept waiting for someone to say ‘F— you, I’m not gonna do that!’, but it never happened.”
Porn actors are seldom, in any sense of the word, “organized.”
Another thing to consider: Lavish, well-filmed porn with attractive actors and aesthetic values makes less money than ugly people in a cheap motel room doing ugly things to each other, shot directly on videotape. They learned this in the early 80s and adapted quickly.
A few cites and quotes
http://www.rame.net/faq/part3.htm - the official faq site for rec.arts.movies.erotica
http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1997/mar/03-20-97/week/arts1.html - an online newspaper article
http://erosfilm.ru/finding/finding_04_eng.html - a European site that apparently hires performers
A couple of articles at Luke Ford’s website. No direct link because of nude ads. (hint - try www.hisname.com)
and
Jeeze, talk about stereotypes. What happenned to the Straight Dope? These kinda comments should be in IMHO, not GQ.
I DO produce porn for a living, and I can tell you that there are few “professional” porn stars (ie, they do nothing else but perform in porn flicks). I do four shoots a week, for the last few years, and I can tell you that most people in the biz are well adjusted, happy, sensible, (otherwise) employed people, who have indeed, entertained ideas about doing this (or something similar) for some time.
Of course, there are some under-educated people, but that’s not limited to porn, is it? Nor is substance abuse, or being poor. For you to think (let alone say!) that it does just goes to show how little idea you have about the real world.
I do need to say that I produce in Australia, where the scene is a little different to that in the US, and as a company, we go to great lengths to ensure fair pay and conditions for models - we’re pretty new. The biz has changed a lot int he last few years, and slowly the dodgy operators are being weeded out.
I suspect (hope) a lot of these prejudices waved about here are based on old annecdotes. Next time, think before you offer an opinion in a GQ thread, please.
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abby
Well, abby, what are you waiting for? Spill the beans. Do the women have the power in the porn industry? What happens if an actress refuses to do something you (or the director) want her to do? How much are they paid?
And the big question: why aren’t they organized?
I did not say it was limited to porn. Quite the opposite, in fact. When I alluded to “other groups of workers” I wasn’t talking about other porn workers, but poor, undereducated workers in other industries.