Bubbles of Market Inefficiency

It is fact and accepted custom in the straight adult pornography industry that male performers make considerably less than female performers do. Generously, in a 1-on-1 scene, a guy can expect to make 60% of what his female co-star does, and often considerably less. Various factors affect this figure, of course. A marquee name will make more, and a total rookie less. Still, a massive inequity exists.

It's equally factual that being a male porn actor is much more difficult than than being female talent. Both sexes encounter some psychological hardships, of course, and there might be an argument to be made that women have more physically strenuous roles (depending on the scene), as men are unlikely to experience cervical bruising or anal fissures as a result of a shoot. Still, it's "wood failure" that's the bane of directors everywhere. People often ask me why so many old, ugly men keep showing up in movies over and over and over again, and the answer is simple: Relatively few men can do what it takes to make a scene work. Getting hard on set, staying that way and then popping on command is incredibly difficult.

Cordon bleu pastry chefs make more than burger flippers. Doctors make more than paramedics. So considering that there are more female straight porn performers than male straight porn performers out there by at least an order of magnitude, due to the disparities in the relative skill-based barriers to entry of each profession, why is it that female pornstars make so much more?

My guess? It's a combination of two factors. The first is simple Keynesian "sticky" pricing in action. In many cases, wages are slow to change with the vagaries of supply and demand. The market does adjust, but it adjusts slowly. In a small and incestuous community like the porn industry, where you have some male performers doing the same job for thirty-plus years, guys are just used to being paid less -- it's an artifact, a legacy of the past. The new guy only make two hundred a shoot because because the director paid the last new guy two hundred bucks, so why should he pay this new guy any more? Short of union action, it's going to take a while for pay to rise in a situation like that.

That leads us indirectly into the second factor: The fickle nature of porn consumers causes the supply-and-demand figures to skew in a way that may not be obvious at first blush. Consumers simply get bored with a girl they've seen over and over and over again, and thus the industry has an insatiable appetite for new female talent. Most of the time*, a woman that winds up on too many boxcovers saturates the market and loses her value and hireability. Male talent, on the other hand, are typically not the central attraction of a scene. Reduced to the status of anonymous meat puppets, often serving simply as a surrogate penis for the viewer's own fantasies, they usually exist on the fringes of the consumer's consciousness. Viewers don't get bored with them because they don't focus on them. Consequently, the demand for new male talent is relatively low compared to the demand for the latest fresh-off-the-bus teenage starlet.

To put it a bit more succinctly, while the number of male performances shot in a year is roughly equal to the number of female performances shot in a year**, the market allows each female performer to do less of those performances, and thus demands a much higher number of female performers to do those shoots. Consider: According to IAFD, porn workhorse Lee Stone has 1370 titles to his credit in his eight-year career, which means he does about 170 titles a year***. Inari Vachs, a successful pornstar by any reasonable measure, had an extra year to work with and did only 370 total. Even the ubiquitous Aurora Snow does less than half of Lee's number, with an average of about 70 movies per annum in her five years on the meat market.

Hmmm. Lee does 3-4 times as many movies as a full-time, successful female pornstar, and makes about 1/3 - 1/4 of what they can make on each shoot. Maybe the disparity isn't as big as I originally though.

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*Exceptions are rife, of course, but consider how many Jennas, Janines, Shanes and Asias there are out there, and how many anonymous teen starlets have passed through the industry meat grinder after a few months on the job.

** Figure that girl-girl scenes balance out gangbangs, approximately.

*** Not accounting for compilations.