Porn Stars: The Death of a Sex-Industry Profession

A few years ago, the figure of the porn-star-as-mogul had become integrated into mainstream pop culture. Now, they can barely get work. Richard Abowitz reports.

Whither the porn star? And: wither the porn star?

In recent years, if not exactly mainstream, the porn star became a recognizable popular culture figure. She was a raunchy symbol for a debauched time. Placed on a pedestal, the porn star was OK with us gazing up her skirt. During the aughts, porn stars penned bestsellers and helped stock cable-reality-show casts. Even in suburban malls “Porn Star” T-shirts were ubiquitous. There were Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick, and Sasha Grey: all were well known in mainstream pop culture. They appeared on magazine covers, hosted nightclubs in Las Vegas, and starred in music videos by popular bands.

Then the moment passed.

As if to underline the lack of star power in porn these days, at the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards in Vegas last month, three of the nominees for Crossover Star of the Year were primarily known for encounters with Charlie Sheen (Capri Anderson, Kacey Jordan, and Bree Olson). And the winner of Crossover Star of 2012? Fifty-eight year-old Ron Jeremy.

The veteran Jesse Jane (who appeared on the cover of Drowning Pool’s discDesensitized in 2004) remembers when things were different. With almost a decade making movies, Jane is one of the few stars left from porn’s pre-recession, golden crossover years. “I came in at the perfect time when people still cared about stars,” she says. “Now, no one has a fair chance at what happened for Jenna, Tera, and me.”

The adult film actress Cytherea attended the 28th annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas in 2011, Ethan Miller

“It’s a permanent change,” says Alec Helmy, publisher of adult industry trade publication XBIZ. “It is similar to what happened to radio jockeys.”

There are certainly still plenty of big names known to porn fans, including Jessica Drake and Asa Akira. But the days of porn stars gaining ubiquitous success have come to an abrupt halt.

In the industry, no one is exactly sure why. The theories offered by agents, performers, and directors vary. Steve Javors, of another adult trade publication,AVN, thinks porn stars are victims of the economy. “What is happening to porn stars is the recession,” he says. “Companies don’t have the money to market stars that they did a few years ago. Porn stars will come back.”

But others in the industry think the brief period when porn minted celebrity has passed for good. One constant mentioned by all interviewed: the near unlimited number of women who are willing to do scenes. These days, the term “porn girls”—as opposed to “stars”—has started to gain currency reflecting the more vocational quality of a contemporary career in porn.

“The sex is the only part about being a porn star these days that is not hard work,” says porn’s current It girl, Brooklyn Lee.

“The market is oversaturated now,” says Brooklyn Lee. Lee is porn’s latest It girl. At the AVN Awards, Lee, 22, won five awards, including Best New Starlet. She says: “There used to be a few hundred girls and now there are thousands. So porn superstars have fallen by the wayside. There aren’t girls like Tera and Jenna, who transcend the boundary of the industry anymore.”

Jesse Jane agrees. “The industry is so oversaturated with girls,” she says. “I’ve been in the business nine and a half years, and I can barely tell you who is in now.”

Mark Spiegler, a talent agent who launched Sasha Grey’s career and manages some of the top names in the business, including Lee, now turns away more aspiring porn stars than ever before. He notes that if a lot of people are willing to do a task, the star aura of the performers quickly vanishes. “A few years ago there were 100 girls in the entire industry, and now 100 girls enter the industry each week. They used to all be stars; now they all just think they’re stars.” The result, Spiegler says, is that “they’ve become interchangeable.”

One 35 year-old fan attending the Vegas porn convention, who did not want his name used, put it this way: “A few years ago I would rent porn DVDs based on who was on the box cover. Now, I am on the Internet always wanting to see someone different.”

The recession may be one reason, again, for the unprecedented number of women who want to shoot sex scenes. Another reason offered by Spiegler is the change in a porn star’s status from the stigmatized margins. “Ten years ago a girl fell into porn,” Spiegler says. “Now there are a lot of girls who dream of doing porn.”

As with any labor oversupply, the result has been a phenomenon perhaps unique to this Great Recession: unemployed porn stars. “For a lot of girls, it is a struggle,” says Lee. “I know a lot of beautiful girls who do great scenes who can’t find work.”

Many of these underemployed performers find alternate ways to earn a living, all of which further erase boundaries between porn stars and fans. “A lot of girls will do movies as publicity,” says Jane. Then the women monetize that publicity via social media, selling custom DVDs, live cam shows, and, of course, prostitution.

Then there are file sharing and tube sites. “Piracy is a huge factor. People don’t look the same way at free content,” says XBIZ’s Helmy. “Porn stars became like rock stars a few years ago because so many people were buying porn. But free doesn’t create that same impact. The Internet is a flatter landscape for porn stars, because of piracy. You still have big names, but they won’t have the same impact as Jenna.”

Despite the smaller stakes, success in porn now requires all the schmoozing of any competitive career. Lee says: “I spend most of my time trying to make contacts and do the business side. The sex is the only part about being a porn star these days that is not hard work.” Despite her career being on fire now, she knows that means a lot less than “back in the day,” by which she means around 2006. “I have done a Pink video, but there really isn’t the mainstream opportunities like I heard existed for Jenna and Tera.”

Jane says of porn today, “The industry has lost a lot of glamour.”

Lee doesn’t disagree. “For me, it is still worth it,” she says. “For a select group of girls, it is worth it. I got into this because it was intriguing to me. I always watched porn. It is not easy money. I feel lucky I get to work four or five times a week.”

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Richard Abowitz covered Las Vegas for over a decade as a senior writer and editor at Las Vegas Weekly. For many years Abowitz wrote the Movable Buffet blog and print column for the Los Angeles Times. Abowitz is currently editor of JH Weekly in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

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Afghan Women Speak Out Against Protests Over U.S. Quran Burning

by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon 

While Afghan women deplore the burning of the Quran by U.S. troops, they are even angrier at the bloody protests that followed. Activists tell Gayle Tzemach Lemmon how they’re working to calm the violence.

The bloodshed and the images of street protests coming out of Afghanistan have horrified Americans who wonder why in the world their men and women are giving their lives to a country that would so wantonly kill them. Their anger is heartfelt and understandable.

Women rights activists march during a demonstration in support of Afghan Member of Parliament, Semin Barakzai outside the Afghan parliament building in Kabul on October 13, 2011, Shah Marai, AFP / Getty Images

But what the video of men in the streets misses is the quiet majority that deplores theburning of the Holy Quran but refuses to take part in violence. And the women who are trying to calm the uproar while getting on with their work.

“Most people are more angry at the protesters than at the U.S. troops who did it,” said Manizha Naderi, executive director of Women for Afghan Women. “One person actually said, ‘When the Taliban are blowing up schools or mosques, aren’t they burning the Quran? Mosques are filled with hundreds of copies of the Quran. How come no one is saying anything about this?’”

Another journalist who is covering the protests notes that the men on the streets were incited by a media-savvy Taliban who understand the value of the images created.

“I was a witness from the beginning of the demonstrations. The Taliban sent lots of email to people. They said, ‘Stand against foreigners, [especially Americans,] fight them wherever they are, find Americans, kill Americans, enter their bases and start jihad against former invaders,’” said one Kabul-based journalist who asked not to be named for security reasons. “The Taliban get lots of benefit from these games.”

On Twitter, Afghan activists said that while they shared in condemnation of the Quran burning, the violence was harming their country—and benefiting neighbors who want to see the country unstable.

“Request frm a religious cleric why women not demonstrating for Quran. I explained we’re not violent. He declared us ‘muslims with no feeling,’” tweeted human rights activist and Afghan Women’s Network member Wazhma Frogh. On Saturday she wrote, “Deeply sad for loss of ISAF and afghan lives. All being done by enemies to make us abandoned again.”

“Female MPs were trying to calm down the enraged male parliamentarians who were declaring jihad on national television, provoking more violent protests,” said Frogh. “For male politicians in this country, this was a big opportunity to engage more public support by condemning the Americans, while for women it was the chaotic situation that mattered, because women are more threatened in such circumstances.”

Fawzia Koofi, a parliamentarian from the northeastern province of Badakhshan who recently published a memoir, The Favored Daughter, said she was fearful at the outset that conservatives could misinterpret her condemnation of the protests. But she felt it was worth the risk, she said, and she chose her words carefully.

“Holy Quran is a red line, and we accept no disrespect to our religious beliefs, but we need to recognize this is a fragile situation, and if more people die and we destroy our country, we don’t gain anything,” Koofi said. “I told [parliamentarians], ‘Please don’t politicize this issue, because if you really politicize this issue this will benefit our neighbors.’”

Said Koofi, “I condemn the fact that there was a disrespect to my religion and to the Holy Quran, but I condemn also those who misuse and try to politicize any emotional feeling of my people.”

Koofi spoke about the “angry, unemployed Afghan youth” who are “used by different networks of neighboring countries,” namely Pakistan and Iran, to further their own ends in Afghanistan. “A few hundred people in the streets does not represent the Afghan nation,” she said.

It is clear why there were no women on the streets, she said: they understand the stakes are too high, for themselves and their children.

“I condemn the fact that there was a disrespect to my religion and to the Holy Quran, but I condemn also those who misuse and try to politicize any emotional feeling of my people.”

“Women are already afraid about the violence, and we don’t want to make the situation worse,” Koofi said. “In the worst-case scenario, if the international community decides to leave tomorrow, women will be the first victim of the Talibanization of the government.”

Frogh echoed that sentiment, saying that is why Afghan women like Koofi have tried, in their own ways, to stem the violence.

“I know many families, especially mothers, who didn’t allow their sons to go out of their home during the protests just so that they didn’t engage in violence,” Frogh said. “These are big indications of why Afghan women need to be in charge of their country. They won’t be manipulated by their neighbors like their male counterparts, nor will burn buildings to make the conservatives happy.”

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Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  She has spent the last five years reporting on entrepreneurship and economic development in mid- and post-conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and is the author of the March 2011 Newsweek cover story "The Hillary Doctrine."

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Why Men Are Settling for Mrs. Good Enough

A new survey shows that men are surprisingly likely to say they’d commit to a person they’re not in love with. When did guys become so desperate to settle down? Jessica Bennett reports.

Two days after a devastating breakup, I had lunch with the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the person who probably knows more about the science of romance and long-term love than anyone else on the planet. Our meeting wasn’t a ploy for tips on how to win him back—though, did you know that sex kicks the attachment hormone into overdrive?—but to discuss her latest study. It was about singles in America, conducted in conjunction with match.com—and I was, begrudgingly, again part of this demographic.

But after nearly eight years off the market, it seemed I had a lot to learn about the dating scene in 2012. Fisher’s study unearthed some startling tidbits about sex, romance, and hooking up among the 6,000 men and women surveyed: among them, that Republicans, apparently, have more orgasms; that gay men are more romantic; and ambitious women turn men on. But the biggest surprise? Certain gender roles appear to have flipped since the days of “The Rules” and He’s Just Not That Into You.

Rather than living up to the stereotype of commitment-phobic bachelors, modern men reported that they fell in love just as often as women, were just as likely to believe that marriage is “forever,” and scarcely bit when asked whether they'd prefer to “just date a lot of people.” But most shocking was how many of the single men wanted to settle down—and how willing they were to lower their standards to make that happen. A whopping 31 percent of adult men said they’d commit to a person they were not in love with—as long as as she had all the other attributes they were looking for in a mate—and 21 percent said they'd commit under those same circumstances to somebody they weren't sexually attracted to. The equivalent numbers for women were far lower.

“Give me a friend I get along with, have good sex with, and is willing to compromise, and I’ll build the love over time,” one man, a Colorado computer instructor, told me. It was as if he was echoeing the advice given to many-a-young-bride by the village matchmaker.

This man was in his 40s, but lest we write off these statistics as a symptom of the old (read: divorcees, or dudes with decreased sex drive), the percentage of men saying "yes" to imperfect committment was actually highest among men in their 20s, almost 40 percent of whom said they'd commit without love (compared with 22 percent of women). The gap narrowed as men and women entered their 30s, and widened again past 40. Yet regardless of age, men’s willingness to answer in the affirmative to both questions was significantly higher across the board.

Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, explains it this way. "We have a stereotype in this culture that it's men who are the ones who don't want to commit, who don't want to settle down, who are the scarce resources. But in fact, it's the opposite." As one married man in his 40s old her: "My wife isn’t perfect. She isn’t the best I’ve had in bed. But she’s a wonderful mother to our daughter, she’s very helpful in our business life, and we get along very well.’”

Getty Images

How very … utilitarian.

But more than simple utility, it's a stance that's reminiscent of the now-infamous argument for settling in Lori Gottlieb’s Atlantic article turned bestseller, Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. In it, Gottlieb counseled gals to forget the search for a soul mate and nab the next nice nebbish they could find (lest they end up, like Gottlieb herself, alone and regretful at 40). “Wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of ‘not Mr. Right’ while my marital value was at its peak?” Gottlieb wrote. “My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection … overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go.”

Though Gottlieb’s take was provocative, it was hardly new—“settling” is a trope that women have struggled with for ages. You know the old adage: a woman who can’t find a man is a spinster; a man who doesn’t want a wife is the envy of all his friends. Historically, of course, women needed marriage in a way that men simply didn’t: a woman without a husband wasn’t just lonely, she was broke, outcast, shunned. And so the modern marriage debates—the case for settling versus the case for singledom—have largely been written by and for women.

Until, perhaps, now. Modern marriage economics have catapulted women into the role of breadwinners in many households, and as more women have entered the workforce, financial freedom has meant independence in other spheres, as well. Women now have the ability to choose a mate for reasons other than his pocketbook; many are in fact choosing to reject having a mate at all. Where this leaves men? Well, as women’s independence has increased, it seems, romantic opportunity for men has suffered the opposite fate. "And that problem is bound to be worse for poorer men," says Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who runs the blog Family Inequality. “I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that."

But that also doesn't have to be a bad thing. “There’s this transformation going on,” says Tom Matlack, the cofounder of The Good Men Project, which aims to discuss and debunk modern male stereotypes. “It’s kind of like feminism on its head: for years, women were trying to earn the right to get out of the house, and here are all these men dying to get back into [it].”

But don’t take his word for it—listen to the chorus.

“We all marry our second or third or fourth best choice,” says one man. “It is just life.”

“At the end of the day, most of us just want someone who is supportive and sane enough to have a family with," a journalist friend tells me. "I think men have always been willing to settle."

Says Thomas Fant, a private health-care consultant in New York: "The idea of being alone in life can be so overwhelming. Soul crushing for some. Men certainly aren't immune to it.”

Or, as one middle-aged guy puts it: “We all marry our second or third or fourth best choice. It is just life." (Ouch.)

But perhaps there's a more realistic way to look at it: that single life for men can be just as challenging as it is for women. "When we are honest, when we rid ourselves of the fantasy, being a single guy is f--king horrible,” says Nick Soman, the 32-year-old founder of a social dating site called LikeBright. “People start looking at you and thinking, ‘You seem like a decent dude. Where’s the woman?’ You’ll go to these weddings, and you’ll be at the increasingly declining table of the singles. There’s, like, three guys and a girl. You’re all kind of looking at each other like, ‘Wow, these odds are pretty bad.’”

Soman doesn't need to worry: he's newly engaged. But it’s a sober reminder that life doesn't always resemble the bachelorette chasing bros of Wedding Crashers.

“Marriage is challenging,” says Matlack, of the Good Men Project. “Are you always madly in love with your spouse? No. But being a good husband and a good father is about trusting the other person, about being willing to deal with difficult stuff. I think it’s a sign of maturity on the part of men to admit that."

At the end of the day, he adds, “I don’t need the Victoria’s Secret model. I don’t need the infatuation that’s not going to last. I need a partner in life."

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Jessica Bennett is a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, covering social issues, gender, sex, and culture. She has won three Front Page Awards, and has been honored by the Society of Professional Journalists, the New York Press Club, and GLAAD, among other organizations. She also edits the Newsweek Tumblr. Follow her on Tumblr.

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