Porn Work

Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism

Heather Berg

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469661933
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.

1: Porn Feels Different Than It Looks

Porn Work on Set

At a San Fernando Valley set house, performers waited poolside for filming to begin. We had all been told to arrive at 10 A.M., but filming would not begin until that afternoon. Devlyn Red joked that I should title this book “Hurry Up and Wait.”¹ “Most people think behind the set there’s big orgies going on,” Dick Chibbles said, laughing. “We’re all sitting around.”² One performer reclined with his cell phone. “He’s probably messaging with his kid,” Chibbles offered. He pointed to two others chatting near the catering table: “They’re talking about cars.” It was a typical day on set—monotonous, often boring, and with a lot of lag time. In this sense, it was no different from most workdays.

“Porn feels different than it looks,” veteran performer Nina Ha®tley told me.³ The performers I interviewed echoed this—what you see in a finished scene reveals little about what it felt like to shoot it. You do not see the waiting, the retakes, the ankle sprains, the process of building chemistry with a scene partner or the racialized and gendered dynamics that can make that process so fraught. Every porn scene is a record of people at work, and yet the work of porn is invisible.⁴ And so, when fans tell Conner Habib they “love [his] work,” he thinks, “What do you mean you love my work? You masturbated watching me last night—why don’t you say that? Because you don’t love that I spent nine hours and balanced myself on a motorcycle with five people shining lights down on me, that’s not the part that you like. You don’t even think of that part.”⁵ This chapter focuses on that part, turning to the set to explore the work of porn production.

Porn workers navigate the production process in the context of industry-wide crisis. Paid scenes under a director are few and far between and competition for those castings is intense. Each day on set is both a gig and an audition for future work, and managers are quick to remind performers that if conditions do not suit them, someone else will gladly take their place. Workers negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions while this threat looms. At the same time, the interpersonal skills that make it possible to meet the demands of on-set sex are also tools for navigating (and subverting) power dynamics with managers. Meanwhile, crisis cuts both ways, and workers find power in the dynamics of the gig economy. Porn workers build brands and cultivate performances that make producers money. These same things also give workers leverage. Against the threat of replacement, performers wield name recognition and increased autonomy in an age of democratized production. Managers can be replaced, too, or rather rendered obsolete. This chapter focuses on paid scene work done under a director and producer (we will turn to self-produced scenes in chapter 3), but performers’ growing independence from traditional managers shapes the politics of the set even when one is working under a boss. What does this reveal about the dialectics of paid sex?

Genre and the Conditions of Work

If porn work feels different than porn looks, it is still true that the look of a finished scene gives clues about its production process. Performers who have the privilege of being able to secure work in various genres—from gonzo to BDSM, features to queer—make calculations about the kind of work that meets their needs. Some seek out productions with directors they respect, industry prestige, or partners and types of sex they personally enjoy. Others prefer not high-status work but the most pay for the shortest possible hours. Genre conventions become less fixed as more and more workers produce their own material and thus set the conditions for their own performances. But in most paid scene work under another’s direction, genre gives performers a reliable picture of what they might expect from a workday.

For performers who can afford to pick and choose paid gigs, deciding what genres to work in often means choosing between the more physically intense but less time-consuming work of gonzo (sex-focused scenes) and the endurance challenge of performing in features (multiscene productions that include dialogue).⁶ Chanel Preston put it this way when I asked what types of scenes she preferred to shoot:

I like that I can switch it up. I like acting; I enjoy it. I’m not amazing at it but it’s something different, so I enjoy features. I don’t enjoy being on set until 4 A.M. But I like that I can go do that, and on another day I can go shoot something really crazy and wild and be out of the office in four hours. But then, I can’t shoot that all the time because it’s really hard on my body. So some months I am shooting a lot of that and some months I’m shooting a lot of features, and both of them get really tiring. One’s physically draining, the other you’re up all night.⁷

Performer-director Lily Cade explained, “My favorite sets are those where the people involved care about what they’re doing or sets where it’s just fast. Either one. If I’m going to be there all day, have it be for a reason. Or get me out in two hours.”⁸

Performers are paid by the day, rather than by the hour, incentivizing long days on a feature set. Typically produced by larger companies with bigger budgets, mainstream features pay slightly higher rates. But because they take longer to shoot, average hourly pay often works out to be less than for other gigs. For some performers, features are not worth the effort. Charity Bangs performs mostly in gonzo and said she had no interest in dialogue-driven features “because I’ve heard how much time and effort is put into [them].”⁹ For others, features make for more fun, engaged work. Siri, a “theater geek,” said she is accustomed to long hours and enjoys the opportunity to practice her craft.¹⁰ Bad acting in porn is a running joke, and skilled actors are often proud of their talent. Features include parody films, and self-described nerds told me they enjoyed acting out their favorite comic book characters or sci-fi heroines. Because big-budget features are rarer and producers tend to cast the most popular performers, feature credits are also a mark of success. Screenwriter and director Jacky St. James explained, “You can get more attention for a feature than just a sex role. It’s grueling work and it’s exhausting, but it can put you on the map. If [performers] think strategically, they get it.”¹¹ As a director of romance features, St. James relies on performers making this calculation.

Often producing many scenes on a slim budget, gonzo production tends to prize efficiency—the kind that gets you in and out in two hours. Unlike feature and feminist directors who take on passion projects, directors here are often contracted by production companies to produce content over which they have little creative control. These directors tend to be more aware, then, that performers may want to get done and go home (indeed, they often share these hopes) and more interested in cooperation and efficiency than in workers performing authentic interest in a director’s vision. Efficiency can, however, strain in other ways. Directors who prioritize a strict schedule can put an enormous amount of pressure on workers to perform in a regimented way. And while this work requires less in terms of acting, time, and the emotional labor of convincing a director that you are thrilled to be there, it tends to compensate for light story lines with more intense sex scenes (this is why Preston says such scenes are harder on the body).

Preston is one of the top performers in the industry—of all the interviewees featured in this book, she worked most frequently (with eight to twenty paid shoots per month at the time)—which grants her the rare ability to pick and choose projects. Both she and Cade are white, cisgender, and thin and can therefore traverse the industry’s genre boundaries more freely. Most performers take the jobs they are offered. Except where performers self-produce, most scenes in the BBW (big beautiful woman) genre and most trans scenes are typically low-budget, gonzo productions, and Black performers are often confined to “urban” and “interracial” scenes (almost exclusively low-budget productions with plot lines organized around racialized themes). Ana Foxxx, one of the few Black women who gets cast in features, was happy to get work that departed from the gigs Black women typically have access to. In addition to the opportunity to do something different—Foxxx starred in the Ghostbusters parody, for instance—these films offer higher pay and better working conditions overall. Foxxx explained, “Whenever I’m on set and it’s a mixed demographic, they have everything on set: pizza, hair, makeup. And then I go and it’s a Black-only title and you’re looking around for water. There’s a difference.”¹² Directors, producers, and non-Black performers often explain these disparities as a budgetary issue. But, as Mireille Miller-Young argues, Black performers encounter poor conditions and low rates even as their performance labor is in high demand among consumers (and thus profitable for producers).¹³

Interviewees overwhelmingly talked about race in terms of this Black/non-Black dichotomy. “There’s two different sides: there’s the Black side and the white side. . . . They usually only mix when they’re doing interracial stuff,” explained Raylene, a white performer.¹⁴ “Interracial” means scenes with Black men and non-Black women. The subgenre is, as theorist Ariane Cruz elaborates, grounded in the foundational taboo surrounding sex between Black men and white women.¹⁵ Porn’s vision of whiteness can flex to make space for non-Black women of color: a Latina or East Asian performer paired with a Black one still makes up an “interracial” scene, while a white performer with a non-Black person of color does not. Porn’s gendered Black/non-Black dichotomy is fixed to such an extent that mainstream’s much rarer scenes featuring Black women and non-Black men belong to a separate category labeled, instead, “reverse interracial.” This is one area in which the politics of representation indelibly shape the production process. For porn’s labor market, this means that industrial segregation impacts Black workers, and Black women in particular, most intensely. This is not limited to mainstream scenes performed under a manager, but it is most intense here. As chapter 3 elaborates, self-produced scenes still exist in a broader racial economy, but performer-producers have more flexibility here to write their own rules.

Non-Black people of color contend with the strains of fetishization, and in some cases (such as Asian men in straight porn) erasure,¹⁶ but no non-Black interviewees reported hiring discrimination or pay inequality at anywhere near the rates Black workers did. Instead, they were careful to acknowledge the specificity of the porn industry’s anti-Blackness. Wolf Hudson, a light-skinned Latino performer, was surprised when I asked him whether he experienced racist casting or pay discrimination. “I don’t get cast that way. . . . The Latino community and the Asian community, they don’t get it as bad as African Americans. When you say ‘IR’ [interracial] you’re not saying those communities, you’re saying ‘African American.’”¹⁷ This applies to non-Black performers’ racialized “preferences” regarding coworkers as much as it does to porn’s top-down approach to genre. When non-Black performers refuse “interracial” scenes or charge higher rates for them—both standard practices in mainstream—these moves are explicitly anti-Black. “Girls who say they don’t do IR will perform with a Mexican guy,” Hudson explained. “You mean you don’t do Black.” As this book was going to press, worker organizers formed the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective to address such industry racism through mutual aid and advocacy.¹⁸ Central to their efforts is peer education geared toward teaching performers how to produce their own content, a nod to the extent to which class mobility is a tool for escaping workplace racism.

Provisions such as those Foxxx describes are a crucial occupational health measure in a job that can be both physically exhausting (for performers and crew alike) and require fasting. They also give clues to a director’s approach to working conditions more broadly—directors who see no need to provide food and water are likely to also skimp on rest breaks and lube supply. As in other jobs, access to safe and respectful working conditions is deeply racialized and classed. Porn’s genre boundaries simply name these hierarchies. “Even sometimes working for the same company, just under a different title, I’ve noticed a difference,” Foxxx told me. The pages that follow chronicle a typical porn work flow, and the hierarchies Foxxx describes mark every stage of the process. They do not, however, foreclose opportunities for workers’ intervention.

Consenting to Work

Before the porn workday begins, workers negotiate their terms. They do so armed with a sharp understanding of their location vis-à-vis the power dynamics of waged work. On the one hand, they are keenly aware of their precariousness as de facto independent contractors who can be fired, or quietly not hired again, at will. “If you don’t want to do it, they’ll find someone who will,” workers told me when I asked about negotiating rates, on-set activity, partners, and so on.¹⁹ But workers also say that the reverse is often true—if one director does not want to hire you for the kind of work you want to do, someone else will. Performers may be replaceable, but directors are too, especially as directing has been democratized in the digital era. In porn, you can also hire yourself. It is much safer to say no to a boss if you can be your own. And workers suggest that the algorithmic management characteristic of platform-enabled work, while constraining in its own ways, does not feel “bossed” in the way conventionally waged scenes do. Workers laboring under a single boss risk far more in refusing demands. This is, indeed, a primary reason many sex workers prefer an industry that frees them from a single boss’s authority and offers the potential to seize the means of production.

Performers also understand that managers rely on performers’ brand names for sales. Directors told me that they rehired performers who were a “pain in the ass” so long as internet algorithms showed their scenes sold well. Performers know full well how much leverage their popularity gives them. In this sense, porn workers have a lot more power than most workers in straight jobs, where workers’ lack of name recognition and consumer loyalty makes them more easily replaced. Popular women performers in straight mainstream and men in gay productions have the most leverage in this respect—it is almost exclusively their “brands” that companies use to market product. Men in straight mainstream productions, on the other hand, are keenly aware of their replaceability—“I’m a piece of meat to them,” Herschel Savage said when I asked about negotiating.²⁰ But despite the term “porn star,” the industry has fewer stars than it does working actors. Porn workers calibrate the demands they make according to their relative (and always shifting) leverage in the labor market.

More than direct coercion from individual managers, performers highlighted the pressure to remain competitive amid a seemingly endless supply of willing worker...