Edit: And in addition to that, porn has very low barriers to entry. No 19-year-old that's suddenly getting the idea, "hey, I want to be a highly paid professional athlete!" is going to even get started with that, because the field is already full of guys/gals who've dedicated half their lives to it at that point (the vast majority of whom will end up failing anyway, per the preceding paragraph). Porn allows a lot more people to just drift in, which lowers the average levels of motivation and dedication among those who give it a try, leading to more fast dropouts.

Edited by - shalalin on 4/5/2024 5:28:47 PM

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As someone who has been producing for a few years and known producers for nearly 20, the vast majority of girls leave after 1 or 2 shoots because they realize porn is not for them, and not because they had a bad first experience or got roped into girlsdoporn-type situation. Imagining yourself becoming a pornstar, and actually doing it, can be two very different things not unlike you wanting to skydive and then realize you don't like it after the first try. Some may love it, but many won't.

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Edited by - Tessa on 4/6/2024 10:08:13 AM

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Women who wanted to aspire to a longer career, they often used to start with girl-girl. magazine layouts and spread shots, then ease themselves in with some vanilla boy-girl and then go from there to: Mulitple partner threesomes, orgies, DPs, blowbangs, the smart ones made good business decisions to get the maximum buck for their (fuck) time.

Maybe stars today still do the same, I don't really pay much attention anymore. About 10-12 years Cherie Deville did this pretty much to the letter as she debuted in LA porn - I guess she had already done an amateur Boy-Girl screw shoot under name "Lana" first but I didn't put two and two together - when she first started as an enthusiastic lesbo vag lapper and she worked her way up from those humble beginnings, by degree, to become a premier starlet / amabassador for the smut business.

In the post 2000s days of plotless gonzo most girls are kinda one scene (or only a few) and done, if they're not doing anal then all the sex acts variations on the theme of an intro interview and strip tease, BJ, oral for the girl, couple different positions to show off all the female body parts, (T, A & V shots) and then a pop. Often with little to make any of it special, it's just a dude setting up a camera and then point and shoot video style.

As has already been mentioned, there is always another set of young girls coming in soon who want to be cast so there is an endless supply to feed the demand.

Every day another girl turns 18 who needs the money, is a natural exhibitionist and loves the camera and is maybe attention starved or wants to show the world what she has in terms of her physical beauty or sexual skills.

Put that together with a strong libido, probably the sex hormones are never as strong as they will be when men and women are in their sexual prime of 18-25, the perceptioin of "easy" money (why work a boring job at Walmart for endless hours making minumum wage if you can have pleasurable sex for money) and also the internet's social media culture means lots of young people think nothing of posting and distributing provocative images, I think the never ending supply of girls if anything will get stronger.

My take on what's happened in the last few years anyway.

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They go out and ruin themselves with bad plastic surgery and cover themselves in hideous tattoos, and then are no longer marketable except to certain niche audiences.

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Or, alternatively, you start an OnlyFans, choose your collaborating talent, shoot at your home or wherever you please, on your own schedule, and it takes little more than a little investment in a camera or two. You get to keep all the proceeds (or split with your collaborator). All the rest of the details are up to you. There's more risk, but there's more freedom and the possibility of greater reward.

But, ultimately, I think you're right about wanting to have kids, too. This is true for every industry, even for physicians. More women give up their careers in the interest of raising a family. And doing so after a porn career is just that much harder, so you see more women make decisions to leave far earlier than you might otherwise.

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I know some will argue that an anal scene shot for Tushy will look different from one shot for Tushy Raw but are they really? I mean yeah the lighting is going to be different and they will offer some different camera angles but ultimately you will still get the same female performer appearing with the same male performer on both platforms basically doing the same things. Why would fans care all that much if that same performer appears 3-4 more times if we are going to get the same scene that we already have?

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Further, there's a demonstrable difference between, say, spending 1-3 10 hour days on set per week having interrupted sex, popping Viagra or whatever to stay hard (for the men), doing stills and whatever else, in front of 3-5 people (typically), and the demands of a professional baseball player playing in 28 games in 30 days in front of 30,000 live fans plus 1,500,000 people on average watching on TV. Professional athletes are training constantly, on game days, off days, off-season, spending hours in the gym and studying video, maintaining specific nutritional plans, going to trainers and therapists of all sorts to maintain their health, plus all sorts of other commitments like team travel, charity events, media interviews, and all sorts of other things.

Not even your most famous pornstars come even close to any of this kind of commitment, or have to do so much to maintain such a high level of performance. That isn't to say that pornstars don't have skills, or don't have to maintain their bodies by going to the gym or eating well (though that's arguable, depending on the kinds of videos a performer typically shoots; think Nicole Aniston vs Skylar Vox, no offense to Skylar), but there are very few professional athletes who are able to let their bodies go without seeing such a drop in their performance that they can no longer perform at the highest level. For the most part, a gym rat pornstar can let herself go and simply do BBW or MILF porn and still get away with it, at least for some time.

That said, I actually don't disagree with you that there very important psychological demands on pornstars. I just think they're demonstrably different and unique to each. Whereas the MLB player has to put up with the psychological demands of playing in front of 30,000 live fans and 1,500,000 TV watchers, the pornstar does feel the pressure of being able to perform on set, pop at the right time, position, and per the demands of the director, and also, importantly, provide a cumshot that's acceptable (right color, amount, etc), which you won't exactly know until you do it.

Pornstars, both during and after their careers, also have unique psychological demands. In most places, it's never acceptable to have done porn. As you said, it disqualifies you from a lot of jobs, or at least it far more difficult to get those jobs after a porn career. It's still societally improper, and it will be difficult getting a job, raising a family (and your kids will one day know about your career and their friends might happen upon your videos and share them, dealing with current family who knows about the career and probably disagrees with it (in many cases, at least), finding and having friends who accept your career, and even just finding a supportive significant other who won't judge you for your current or past porn career. There's also, of course, the risk of STIs and pregnancy, and everything that comes along with having sex with many different people who are also having a lot of sex with a lot of different people. And, for a pornstar, maintaining a healthy personal sex life can be difficult, given their chosen career and the acts. They also sometimes have to deal with stalkers and people trying to take advantage of them, but, then again, so do some professional athletes.

Professional athletes don't deal with the same kind of societal disapproval, but instead are largely honored for their accomplishments. But they have a whole host of other psychological demands. It sounds privileged to say -- and it is -- but dealing with large amounts of money (at least in the case of top male professional athletes) isn't as easy as people think. Given the short careers of professional athletes due to performance decreases, injuries, new and fresher players, and changing priorities in their lives, they make a lot of money in a very short amount of time. For many, maintaining the quality of life they enjoyed while still making the big bucks puts financial strain on them, which is why 35% of NFLers go bankrupt or are financially stressed within two years of retiring. Their lives during their careers, though, aren't exactly perfect. Again, they're constantly undergoing physical demands very few people can withstand, traveling away from their families for many days of the season and with few actual days off, dealing with major injuries that will plague them for the rest of their lives (including traumatic brain injuries for many contact sport athletes), constantly under scrutiny from the media/journalists/analysts/fans/coaches, feeling the pressure of possibly being traded or sent down (in which case their living situation becomes tenuous), plus finding a significant other who isn't just a gold digger or who will try to extort you and ruin your career (see: Trevor Bauer), none of that is exactly easy, either.

My point here is that the demands of each are unique, and I don't see it as at all obvious that pornstars have demonstrably greater demands in most senses compared to professional athletes. Indeed, I'd argue that even the minor professional athletes, whose personal resources are probably more on par with many pornstars (though I'm sure some pornstars are making bank on OnlyFans, even doing softcore stuff or teasing -- see Bhad Bhabie/Danielle Bregoli's $52,000,000 made on OnlyFans, though this is atypical), still have potentially greater demands than many pornstars. They still have all of the physical demands as the other professional athletes, perhaps lesser fan pressures (since they play in front of fewer people), greater travel demands (same amount of travel, but less travel comfort), for far less money ($12,000 a year in A, $26,000 in AA, $63,000 in AAA) than their top level counterparts (interestingly, the average pornstar salary is estimated to be somewhere between an AA and AAA professional baseball player). So even trying to equalize in some way each career path, I still don't see it as obvious that pornstars somehow have greater demands. They're just different, some ways better, some ways far worse, but the considering the totality of each it would seem to me that the demands of the professional athlete are far greater, especially when taking into consideration the life-long preparation required to become a professional athlete, not just being able to respond to an ad, presumably getting an STI test, and showing up to an office or whatnot to have sex on a casting couch for $1,000 (their reported compensation for the shoot). This kind of preparation (and the resources it takes) alone demonstrates that the pressures experienced by these high level athletes is far greater and far more consistent.

A studio doesn't care about investing money into a performer to make them into a legend, when that performer can skip around to different studios and, now, create their own content and generate their own revenue. And I highly doubt you'd find any performer so new to the industry and yet so committed to a career in porn that they're willing to invest in themselves to pay for a "porn bootcamp." They're not exactly out there going, "Yeah, after I hit the gym I'm going to work on my gape for a couple hours." Once they learn the porn shoot angles, the rest is just how well they're able to consistently act interested in what's going on despite the frequent stops and whatnot. Whether a naïve new girl does one or two videos and disappears after making $1,000, or if she becomes a legend and makes a total of $300,000 a year doing a combination of studio and private work, studios don't have to care, because in either case, they're easily replaceable by someone else willing to do the job. She might look a bit different, or have different skills or things she's willing to do/not do, or moan in slightly different ways, but for the most part when a porn actress disappears, the industry forgets her and moves on (for better or worse, or right or wrong). Us fans are left wanting, but the studios just don't care. The investment just isn't necessary, and they have no reason to care about a performer whose investment wasn't necessary to begin with.

And, not to harp on this even further, but with the industry changing so much toward pornstar-led content creation, this will get even worse. Meaning, there will be performers who will come and go, ones who will collaborate with and support each other, and this will, in my opinion, make many of the studios even more of a vestigial organ than they are currently. Considering how quickly studio-led content is ripped and posted, and how easily a pornstar can produce quality content that's (imo) more attractive than cookie cutter, derivative studio-led content, and without having to placate shady studio owners, producers, directors, and so on and so forth, the industry is changing for the better. With the industry leaning more heavily toward pornstar-led content creation, pornstars can generate content faster, relatively cheaply, on their own terms, with performers they trust, keep a higher percentage of the revenue while maintaining rights over their content, re-use their own content to generate additional revenue, and, theoretically, maintain a career longer or end their career sooner with a greater amount of control over their content post-career, the only downsides are they have to market themselves, attract and grow their subscriber base, do their own legal/IP work, and obviously handle health concerns on their own. But the potential benefits of this model have to look very attractive in comparison to the tired, old model.

Anyway, this was far too long of a post, so I apologize. I'm just not convinced by your view given the above, and I actually think that the changing porn industry will actually improve their conditions, which will make the disparity between the unique demands of each even further apart, maintaining, imo, that the professional athlete has greater demands overall than the pornstar.

Edited by - veridical on 6/13/2024 4:30:22 AM

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How can you square a lack of competition with a very low barrier to entry? Surely that it a contradiction.
If there is a low barrier to entry you would expect lots of people to go into Porn which should also raise the requirements of people to do Porn in the same way.

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