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@RandomRanger made the following observation last week:
As this was posted in the context of Scott’s recent article on the Vibecession and I’d say that is an issue largely unrelated to the porn industry I decided to post a separate reply.
Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.
Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell. It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc. She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly. She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock. She’ll never have children or if she does, they’ll turn out to be screw-ups. Society basically throws money at her because she was willing to turn into a social pariah without status for their amusement.
Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.
This paragraph inverts the justificatory burden, to my mind. If society wants to prohibit some profession they need a good reason for it. Thing are permitted by default, not forbidden. In the United States, at least, it's not like no one ever tried! They were consistently prevented by courts ruling that the first amendment protected the production and distribution of pornography. This in a sense just moves the discussion "up" a level, why not amend the constitution to permit restriction on pornography? But prohibition of pornography has never enjoyed that widespread degree of support.
Do they? I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.
Why would she want any of these jobs? At 800k/month She will make the lifetime salary of many of these professions in a few years. Comparing to the warehouse worker, she made the equivalent of ~30 years doing that work in one month! It's also kind of funny if you read the first paragraph of her wiki page:
She had one of those respectable jobs and gave it up!
If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.
She clearly has a talent that means she doesn't "deserve" poverty. Even before she was getting rich from OnlyFans she seems to have had a fine career. I'm also skeptical she wants or needs my sympathy. I suspect things are going pretty well, from her perspective. There are plenty of things about the current pornography industry I think are bad but few, if any, seem to apply to Bonnie Blue.
I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.
It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films, and that the career of a female porn star who enters the industry in the 21st century lasts, on average, three years.
Why?
Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.
Imagine you meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.
I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.
I guess two things that come to mind.
1. I notice the shift in goalposts from "she doesn't have any friends" to "the average woman probably wouldn't be her friend." I'll agree to the latter, but the former doesn't follow from that.
2. This also seems to ignore the existence of both happily single and lesbian women, for whom the potential partner stealing is presumably not an issue.
I don't disagree with anything in this paragraph, I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.
I missed this on a first pass: the link I linked to earlier did analyse this exact question and found that the average female porn star's career duration had fallen from nine years in the 1970s to three years in the early 2010s (the report was published in 2013). The analysis also found that the average woman (regardless of ethnicity) gets into porn at the age of 22.
Given my earlier point about how a woman's perceived attractiveness tends to diminish over time, we can tell a story about women getting into the industry when they're very young, making some money while they're pretty close to their prime years, then retiring when their star is starting to fade.
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Well, it stands to reason that if no "average" woman would want to be friends with Bonnie Blue, her pool of potential friends is dramatically restricted. If the only women who would want to be friends with her are
it stands to reason that her pool of potential friends is minuscule compared to the average woman's. Not to mention that, even if a woman falls into one of the above categories, (even if she loudly claims to believe that sex work is real work), she might just have an instinctive disgust reaction towards associating with sex workers.
So, no, I don't know for a fact that Bonnie Blue has no friends, but given that we both accept there are a lot of women who would have perfectly understandable reasons not to want to associate with her (and given that many OnlyFans content creators report chronic feelings of loneliness), it seems reasonable to assume that she has few same-sex friends, if any. (Maybe she's a fag hag who has a group of gay men she goes to brunch with: other than other porn stars, a promiscuous gay man is probably the only kind of person who could hope to match her in body count. They could trade war stories.)
What "many" ways are these? I accept that she's an unusually successful and famous porn star, and that you would naïvely expect a porn star who's making bank to stick around longer than one who's making peanuts (although who knows? maybe the reverse is true – you make bank at the outset and then quit while you're ahead before diminishing returns kick in. Mia Khalifa was a household name comparable to Bonnie Blue, and she was very keen to point out that her initial foray into pornography lasted less than a year). But I don't know that Blue is "not average" on many axes other than her sizeable wealth and fame.
As an aside, I really dislike this style of argumentation where I try to make a prediction based on historical data, and you point out that the person we're making predictions about isn't average, therefore historical data is completely useless for making predictions and we might as well throw darts at a wall.
Like, imagine if we were curious about how long Michael Jordan will live for (I don't know why we want to know this, just roll with it). I might look up an actuarial table for the life expectancy of a black American male born in the year whatever. But then you jump in and say "but Michael Jordan is not average on many axes! He's unusually tall and unusually rich! Therefore looking up the average life expectancy of a person born in that year is of no help to us at all!"
Averages are just that, average. They will describe an average person more accurately than they describe a non-average person, but that does not in any way imply that they don't describe a non-average person at all. At best they might describe a non-average person just as well as they do an average person (we might find that Jordan's height and net worth have no impact on his life expectancy, or one has a positive effect and the other negative, which cancel out); at worst they give us a ballpark figure, a lower or upper bound which is more relevant to the conversation than pulling numbers out of a hat. As I said, I'm open to the idea that there might be a positive correlation between a porn star's financial success/level of fame and the duration of her career (but there might not be), but citing two examples of successful porn stars with unusually long careers doesn't come close to demonstrating that. And I find it kind of rude that I'm trying to answer a question with empirical data, and you're rubbishing these efforts because "Bonnie Blue isn't average, therefore averages are completely useless in making any predictions about her future career trajectory".
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