While the specifics of this piece are based on my personal experience with one company, I had no intention to decry the genre as a whole until many, many people I spoke to informed me their experience with various alternative and feminist porn groups mirrored mine. It is generalised; there are certainly companies who don’t reflect the ideology mirrored here and take on a feminist/alternative label, but much of this is widespread enough that the genre on the whole does need to change.

“I do think that altporn and feminist porn purveyors often try to use their niche as a way to pay performers less, which is really shitty.”

This particular example wants the performer to do a whole lot of work, to their precise specifications, and pays piece-work rates. It fits your description. It’s better not to do business with them. Instead go with some other porn purveyor that pays decently, unless these guys give you some other advantage that’s worth the difference in money to you.

I think in a sense though you are generalizing you experience with this porn company and applying that experience to all “alt” and “feminist” porn. That just doesn’t work. Like the insistence that makeup and plastic surgery are not allowed in these genres, which is just not true in my experience and observation.

Making this generalization isn’t accurate or helpful.

The same goes for presenting “feminist porn” as a counterpart to “regular porn.” It’s not a counterpart, but a category. In that sense maybe it should be viewed as any other marketing category for porn.

I do think that altporn and feminist porn purveyors often try to use their niche as a way to pay performers less, which is really shitty. “You should be doing this because you love it, not for money” is the kind of comment tossed around a lot and it ignores the fact that we all actually need money.

“It looks to me like porn is becoming a dead-end job for most workers”
-Who are these workers? In my 7+ years of being an indie porn model/producer, I have NEVER seen/heard anyone complain that there isn’t a demand for new porn… The idea itself is almost laughable!

“It doesn’t pay that well, considering the stigma.”
-I disagree.

“As the stigma is reduced, many more women try to join. The Internet is full of free porn with anonymous women doing all the usual stuff. To get decent pay you must develop a following, customers who want you personally and not just porn, otherwise you are in a commodity market where you are an interchangeable commodity. A buyer’s market no less. But there’s only room for so many stars with a decent following, too.”
-Women are never “interchangeable commodities”. To you, a model may appear as an anonymous woman with no following, but how often do you actually google search these models to find out if you’re correct? I often see stolen content from models I know/recognize being shared on free porn sites, with different stage names or video titles. And how do you know what kind of money a performer makes? The whole concept of being a “star” is irrelevant. A sex worker could have one or two customers who spend thousands of dollars on them and you just don’t know it because it doesn’t reflect in their number of video sales or twitter followers.

“If there are special niches — people who display a special personality, or who can put large eggplants up their asses, or who have enough holes in their labia to carry a variety of padlocks, etc — how many customers will choose each niche, much less a single performer in that niche?”
-Niches tend to either be physical traits (like big feet on women), or acts that most people can do (like vacuuming). As for how many videos a single performer can sell in each niche; the number is unlimited. I’ve personally sold dozens of videos of myself yawning. Almost all of my fetish fans are repeat buyers, and many niches intersect.

“Is there room for 10,000 non-commodity porn stars making a living wage?”
-It’s already reality!! (Plus, ugh, can you please stop referring to sex workers as “commodities”!?)

Usually I charge $4 per minute of my time. But I digress…

“I tend to think that porn is probably a highly competitive industry with a few big names and lots of people who don’t make much money.”
-Most full-time adult models seem to make enough to live comfortably (myself included). Do we all make tens of thousands of US dollars per month? Of course not. But does the average person NEED that kind of money?? I define my own success, no one else.

“Choosing to do innovative “special” porn for a living would be worse than trying to write fiction for a living.”
-I don’t know anything about being a fiction writer, but doing fetish (or “special”) porn is more of a money maker than vanilla porn. Trust me. Vanilla porn is available for free, and it’s everywhere. But very specific fetish porn is not, hence it’s in higher demand from paying customers.

“In bad economic times with fading moral constraints, innovative porn would be extremely chancy while standard stuff would leave a performer just one of the mob of expendable replaceable sex workers.”
-The fact that you would refer to ANY sex worker as “expendable replaceable” is disgusting.

“So they let you do whatever you want, and you get to put some tags on it to give customers some idea what to expect. It goes at the end of the list for each of the tags. Then customers ask for something that fits some set of tags. When your video comes up, they can see it for a small fee. They say whether they liked it. If they like it, the next customer who wants those tags (who hasn’t seen it yet) gets your video, and that continues until somebody doesn’t like it. Then it goes back to the end of the list.
If they like your video enough to ask for you by name, then they pay a higher price. The more videos you make that they like, the better you do.”
-Ok but you do realize that anyone with a webcam or cell phone can make any kind of porn they like, right? I mean, what’s stopping a hobbyist from hopping onto a camsite, or uploading their experimental videos to ManyVids? Then they’re in direct contact with the customer, and can do custom videos, etc without a middle-man. If it’s props or editing programs you think a model is in need of; that’s what models have wishlists for.

“You should not do it for a living because it probably won’t pay well, certainly not at first.”
-Do you have any stats, or are you just throwing your inexperienced opinion out there? Because as a model, I’ve found that most companies pay the same rates for all models, no matter if they’re new or not. A-list models probably get paid more but not everyone can be an A-lister, and that’s ok!

“You should have the rights to your own work, and sell it wherever else you want. They are providing you a service by showing it to people who rate it, and splitting the (small, at first) proceeds with you. They accept almost anything because they don’t know what people will like.”
-So what you’re basically suggesting is make a site like Clips4Sale, ManyVids, ExtraLunchMoney, Clipvia, iWantClips… etc? Except with less direction?? Because if the site doesn’t know what audience they’re catering to, how are they getting traffic? Why will a customer join THIS new hypothetical site, when there are already so many established ones out there with similar business formulas and thousands of videos available?

“So I am pretty sure I know as much as anybody about how to do it right, if you agree that nobody is doing it right yet.”
-I don’t agree that “nobody is doing it right yet” so…

“Well, there may be a few people who have actual clues from their experience, and maybe they are in fact doing it right and nobody’s noticed yet.”
-Who is nobody? Mainstream porn producers? Sites that offer stolen indie porn? Playboy-esque magazines???

“I don’t notice them here telling us how they’re doing it.”
-Not every single feminist porn producer and model is a writer/cares to publicly comment/reads titsandsass/etc, so your above statement is redundant…

“So here’s my challenge to you — Since you know what you’re talking about, tell us how to be successful at least at creating a new niche market that a business and its performers can be successful in.”
-Why do you need to create a new niche? This article is about labor practices within the adult film industry. You CAN have a successful porn production company without under paying and treating your models like commodities. This isn’t business 101. So back to “How would you do this stuff right?” – Listen to sex workers.

Hello, L. I am not yet an indie porn producer and I may never be, the usual business model looks fundamentally unsound. It doesn’t take a whole lot of capital to start a venture that will fail with the others, and it takes a big ego to think you can come in with a new plan and break even, when the market is glutted with the offerings of failing enterprisses having their going-out-of-business sales.

So I am pretty sure I know as much as anybody about how to do it right, if you agree that nobody is doing it right yet. Well, there may be a few people who have actual clues from their experience, and maybe they are in fact doing it right and nobody’s noticed yet. I don’t notice them here telling us how they’re doing it.

So here’s my challenge to you — Since you know what you’re talking about, tell us how to be successful at least at creating a new niche market that a business and its performers can be successful in.

I assume you’re not an indie porn producer/model, and if I’m correct; please stop writing these comments because you don’t know what you’re talking about…

My wife and I have our own history of being a favorite target of theirs, despite the fact that we go out of our way to produce content that pays proper rates, features ethnically diverse casts of people who love their job, and, whenever we can, builds upon well-written, sex-positive scripts peppered with progressive social commentary. Oh yeah, and we do it all without counting on a “day job.” But to talk to some of these producers, you’d think we were the Queens of the Patriarchy… Some went so far as to boycott the Feminist Porn Awards because one of our films was nominated, content that I’m sure they never saw and probably would have liked on its merits, content that we produced at a loss because we wanted it to be as good as it could be and weren’t going to skimp on paying people to do it. I’ve been content to just ignore these attacks for the most part, but it does make me angry to see them promote themselves and continue to be treated as if they are morally superior in any way. I’m kind of tired of ignoring it.