What It’s Like to Report About the Porn Industry

[Wilhelm]

Photo

Stormy Daniels (second from right) and colleagues at the Adult Video News Awards in 2012. Credit Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Last January, I was waiting behind a velvet rope on a red carpet at the Adult Video News Awards at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Steps away from the slot machines, photographers and video crews lined up next to me. Adult film stars like Nina Hartley, Jessica Drake and even Stormy Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, paused and posed for the cameras.

Except on this red carpet, unlike the hundreds I’ve stood on to cover film premieres, theater openings and fashion galas, begging everyone from Al Gore to Rihanna for a minute and a half of their time, the honorees at the AVN Awards weren’t being pulled away by publicists. Instead, the adult film stars wanted to talk.

I was at the AVNs on assignment for a previous employer, New York Magazine. At the time, I was writing about topics like sexual violence, consent, Title IX and the anti-rape movement on college campuses. The theory that adult film was shaping modern sexuality came up often in conversation. But, in the same breath, pornography was often dismissed as a subject that was too big, unwieldy, taboo and icky to tackle.

But as I started reporting on adult film, I approached it as a beat like any other, and I found that performers wanted to talk. They understood their significance in American culture, even if no one else did.

Whatever you think about adult film, it is one of the most consumed forms of media in the world. Pornhub, the popular pornography website, draws 80 million visitors a day. Exact figures for the size of the industry are scarce, but experts put total sales around a billion dollars a year. Plus, studies show that adult film has become a form of sex education for young people around the world.

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It is also, now, a regular subject in the news. A top adult film star, Jessica Drake, is one of the women who has accused President Donald J. Trump of sexual assault (he has denied the allegations). And of course, Stormy Daniels, whom I profiled with two colleagues, Matt Flegenheimer and Rebecca R. Ruiz, in a front-page story yesterday, is suing Mr. Trump, with whom she claimed she had a consensual affair, in order to be released from a nondisclosure agreement signed shortly before the 2016 election.

But gradually, the subject of adult film is getting a closer look. In 2014, scholars founded the academic journal “Porn Studies.” In 2015, the actress Rashida Jones produced a documentary, “Hot Girls Wanted,” on the amateur porn scene in South Florida. The film later became a Netflix series of the same name and remains a major subject of conversation in adult film circles. Recently, a New York Times Magazine cover story, “What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn,” explored how much pornography teens consume and what effects it is having on their personal lives.

Still, the industry remains shrouded in mystery, and very little has been written about the companies who make adult film. For example: Who owns them? When were they founded? How do they make money? Is it true that one company owns most of the content produced on the web? (Yes — MindGeek.) How hard was it for Ms. Clifford to become a top adult film performer and director?

To learn as much as possible, I traveled to industry conferences like XBIZ Miami, AVN in Las Vegas and Exxxotica New Jersey to meet industry leaders and understand their careers. I interviewed dozens of performers, agents, lawyers, producers, webcam models, website hosts and even executives from billing companies about how their jobs have evolved with changing technology.

I discovered issues that exist within the industry that the mainstream media avoids. Sexual assault and the #MeToo movement have come to adult film sets, with major accusations of sexual assault levied against prominent performers. Workers are organizing and demanding rights through a newly established union. In addition to exploitation within the industry, adult film performers say their work makes it difficult to get basic services like bank accounts.

As her lawsuit against Mr. Trump proceeds, it seems Ms. Clifford will remain in the public eye for some time to come — and with that may come a shift that finally puts this powerful business into focus.

[AlphaKing]

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