“Men may be penalized in the sense that, once a guy performer gets a reputation for not being able to complete his job, he will get hired less.” If a guy is hired for such a scene, then he’s generally expected to complete that part of the performance,” Tibbals says. “In a lot of porn (but not all porn), male cum is considered a necessary hallmark of production. Male careers, if they can consistently get and remain hard, can be long.”Īnd yes, to be fair, that part about getting and remaining hard is a serious threat to some men’s careers. Linda Williams, a professor of film and media at UC Berkeley and editor of the academic journal Porn Studies, echoes Tibbals’ sentiment. “Certainly there are ‘lifers’ - as Nina Hartley likes to say - but the vast majority of women come in and out of the industry in a few months to a few years.” Chauntelle Tibbals, sociologist and author of Exposure: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment. “Women and men performers in ‘straight’ porn have very different paths when it comes to career longevity,” says Dr. He also found that 96% of the most prolific performers were male. He found that 70% of performers were women and the average career span of a porn actress was between six and 18 months. That same year, data journalist Jon Millward conducted the largest study of porn actors thus far by using a sample of 10,000 performers listed on the Internet Adult Film Database. In a 2013 Daily Beast article, top industry agent Mark Spiegler (oh yeah, the most powerful people in porn are all men) speculated that there are more women performers than there are available opportunities. The trouble with relying on these numbers as the sole evidence that women out-earn men is that daily figures don’t account for career opportunities or longevity - two factors that influence potential lifetime earnings and favor men. Men earn between $500 and $1,200 for the same scene, with the big stars maybe hitting $1,500. For example, an unknown performer filming a girl-on-girl scene might make as little as $300, but if a popular star is involved in double penetration, she can rake in as much as $4,000. Men are paid a fixed rate per scene based on their reputation (gay male porn has a separate pay scale that, for sake of brevity, isn’t explored in this story), while women earn different wages based on their star power and the sex act. The latter bolsters the assumption that women make more than men because, on a scene-by-scene basis, they usually do. The most reliable estimations come from insiders who inflate or deflate numbers when convenient, or from pieces like the one on CNBC, which surveyed performers and crew members to break down what producers pay per scene. Locating exact figures is a difficult task since few in the industry like to disclose their salaries, and none of the major studios have been public with pay data. In 2012, a controversial Equal Pay Day PSA ran in Belgium, featuring porn star Sasha Grey telling women that if they want to earn as much as their male colleagues, they should do porn.
It’s treated as a fact, sometimes used to deny that women suffer any systematic wage discrimination at all (see: Reddit), or it’s tossed in as an aside in reports on the adult industry’s fiscal health, such as in this January 2016 CNBC piece on per-day earnings of adult film stars. As the gender-wage-gap debate rages on in courtrooms, at pundits’ tables, and on bitter Reddit threads, there’s one idea that has gone unchallenged: Porn is the one industry where women benefit from better pay than their male counterparts.