The Cost of Porn to Performers

Porn Star Aurora Snow has written a thoughtful, and thought provoking, article for The Daily Beast titled Blood, Sweat, and Sex:  My Hard Life in Porn.  The article pulls back the curtain a bit and talks about the price that performers (mostly the women) pay in order to bring us the extreme acts that porn consumers clamor for.

Here's a link to the article.

Snow's words ring true for me.  The stories of female porn stars who have left the business due to persistent internal injuries or just plain physical wear and tear (literally) have drifted through porn oriented discussion forums and chat boards over the years.  Aimee Donovan comes to mind immediately as someone who suffered numerous, serious, internal rectal tears during her short career.

For most of the men who watch porn -- let's face it -- when we're watching there isn't a lot of blood getting to our brains during the viewing.  But, afterwards, when I've watched a particularly brutal scene, I admit to wondering how they do it week in and week out.  I've winced from time to time seeing some giant porn cocks pounding (and I'm not being literary, I really mean pounding) some poor starlet's rectum.  As a practicing bi-sexual male I've experienced anal sex from the receiving end but never from anyone who would be porn worthy in terms of cock-size.  And I can tell you that there's always a certain amount of discomfort involved even with gentle and thorough preparation and lots of lube.  The anus/rectum has evolved as a one way corridor -- it's function is to let things out, not take them in.  The internal tissues are prone to tearing.

But it isn't just that.

The internal vaginal structure of the human female likewise hasn't evolved to accommodate 9, 10, 11, 12 inch penises.  And the flesh separating the vagina and the rectum is definitely NOT designed for DP.  And each year we are treated to more and more extreme acts, to which we, the porn consumers cry, MORE!  MORE!  MORE!  Bigger!  Deeper!  Faster!  Harder!

There's an arms race of sorts among the producers of porn trying to find the next outrageous act to put on our screens, i.e. "I can't believe she just did that!"  Double anal, double vaginal, anal and vaginal fisting, huge toys, baseball bats, and all sorts of other extreme acts that were once relegated to the darkest corners of fetish porn are now, seemingly, mainstream.

BDSM porn is now a huge industry with women and men posed in "stress" positions for long periods of time and subjected to often brutal floggings, caning, whipping, and in some of the more extreme BDSM videos piercings of various female/male body parts.  I've seen video clips of women having their nipples nailed to boards or giant skewers pushed through the flesh of their breasts.  These fetish videos were once rare but are now much more common.

Our appetite for more and more extreme acts has a cost to performers.  We don't like to think about it, but we should.  Granted the people who perform do so willingly and they get paid (not enough, according to Snow and I have no reason to dispute that), but is our prurient interest in watching extreme sex acts on an ever escalating level worth what these women (and men) are put through?  Do we ever stop to think about the downstream consequences?

Snow compares porn performers to professional athletes.  I think this is apt.  Do we wonder about what happens to a football player after his career?  Stories about players who don't live to see 60 years of age or who are reduced to confused and befuddled stumble bums by frequent, undiagnosed, brain trauma are coming to light more and more.  Players who can barely walk because of repeated knee and hip injuries are common.  And, yet, our appetite for violence persists.

How jaded are we becoming?  Are we now immune to the physical destruction we're willing to watch in the name of sexual arousal and entertainment?

Not covered in Ms. Snow's article are the newly documented risks to performers from the practice of pubic hair removal.  Shaving and waxing are now believed to expose people to a much higher risk of STD's and other types of infection.  Ironically, pubic hair used to be the norm with most female stars sporting thick, luxurious, bushes.  Shaving was a fetish, a titillatingly forbidden act that suggested the idea of sex with pre-pubescent females. Now it's the norm in the industry and even stars with bushes wear their hair mostly on the pubic mound -- the labial area is still clean as a whistle (Dani Daniels is a good example of this).  Having eaten my share of pussy over the years I will say that licking a bare pubis is a real treat.  And, as a man who regularly "manscapes" the removal of hair heightens, to a degree, stimulation and sensation.  But there's a price to be paid.  The hair is there for a reason.  Removal is a risk.

I'm not preaching here.  I've watched (and enthusiastically reviewed) quite a lot of very physical porn over the years, and have been enthusiastic in my praise.  But Ms. Snow's words have, at least for the moment, given me pause.

Perhaps that's one reason why I have gravitated more toward story based porn with a higher emotional content, and, to lesbian porn which (mostly) doesn't feature the type of extreme penetrations common to what we loosely call "Gonzo."

When I'm looking at a nicely cooked steak on my plate I don't stop to think about how it got there.  I hate to use that analogy here but I think it's apt.  Because if I stop to think about how the steak arrived at my plate I might think about giving up meat.  I know that if I stop to think about how a woman might be injured while performing an act that I find arousing it will stop being arousing.  I suppose it's a good thing, in a way, that when I'm watching those acts most of my blood supply is focused somewhere other than my brain.  But how do I feel afterward?  After having the veil pulled back on the hidden costs of porn production to the performers perhaps I'll feel differently.

I am grateful to Aurora Snow for her forthrightness and I applaud her for bringing up this topic.  I invite your comments/thoughts.