Back in the 1990s I remember getting a phone call from a young lady known as Sana Fey. She was a magazine model and a feature dancer, back then she was a low end feature because she hadn’t done porn. In those days features made a lot of money, but only if they had a name from doing porn, and box covers. It wasn’t unusual in those days for a girl to do a boy girl scene for free if she was promised a box cover. This of course led to producer directors promising the boxcover to 5 different girls then creating a collage and putting them all on the cover, which is not what any of them had bargained for but it led to the box covers of today.
Sana Fey had decided to make the leap to hardcore boy girl and had chosen me for her first scene (yes I paid her….quite well even) She also got the box cover, we became friends and even dated….As she wanted her feature dance rates went way up.
Fast forward to today.
This weekend I got an email from an absolute stunner, who has decided she wanted to be in porn. We met and in person she was even prettier, she reminds me a LOT of Kayden Kross in that she is extraordinarily pretty, prettier even than Kayden. Like Kayden she is very smart, she knows what she wants and how to get there, she is educated, all natural no ink and when we walked into the eatery every eye in the place turned to her, she knew it too. She was gracious and outgoing.
When I asked why she wanted to get into porn her answer was short and to the point: I want to raise my rates.
She wasn’t talking about feature dancing.
She was talking about escorting. Even though she pulls down top dollar she knew that with the right porn credits she could raise them by an order of magnitude and with her looks and style, she probably isn’t wrong.
What comes of the interview is yet to be seen, I have no problem helping her.
What it did illustrate is how the business has changed. Back when I shot Sana Fey porn girls simply didn’t escort, you could count the ones who did on one hand, now days you can count the girls who don’t on one hand. Feature dancing doesn’t pay as well as it did in those days and magazine shoots are mostly a thing of the past. With work in Porn Valley drying up thanks to piracy, lack of any quality production and an economic downturn it’s harder for performers to make ends meet. A glut of talent is pushing prices down and it is pushing high quality girls out. Camming and website work doesn’t take up enough of the slack, website work based in Porn Valley area is simply an extension of the video business and web porn production isnt centralized enough in any one area to make traveling to shoot lucrative.
As one A list performer told me escorting is much easier… half the time the customer doesnt even want sex, when he does he has to use a condom, he doesn’t have to shoot up his dick to get hard, he doesn’t choke me, spit on me, slap me, abuse me, degrade or berate me and my environment is clean and safe. He has to play by my rules or he doesn’t play. I can choose not to see him, essentially everything is under my control, this is much better than when I was doing porn. The last time I had an STD was the last porn set I was on, I have yet to have an escorting client give me anything, even a cold.
When I asked if she would return to porn ever, her answer was an emphatic no. She said that it had provided her to get to where she is now but that going back would never be an option.
She also pointed out that if you look around, you see a lot more of that, high end girls who left and never returned noting that the overall turnover in the industry makes the easy to forget. She said it doesn’t take much of a fan base among the elite “hobbyists” to set you up to live very very well as a courtesan.
That was then and this is now.
14 Responses
Then and Now http://t.co/YPwCcStytu
Yeah, I’ve seen this trend going on a lot lately. Heck, one gal who shot about 7-8 scenes back in 09 and then quit because she was outed to family.
Welp, she just came back a few months ago with her own “clean” website just to promote her very lucrative escorting gig. She charges 700 bucks an hour, I guess it works as she’s always going on vacations..and making more money escorting while on her vacays lol!
The problem here is that very few girls in our business actually want to be porn stars. There are the rare few who really do have ambition to be pornstars specifically, but most of them are doing it because they 1. either need the money and didn’t have many other options or 2. really just want to have a job where the actual work amount is relatively low and the amount of money they’re paid is high. Easy money essentially.
Back when there was so much shooting going on that every girl in the business could make pretty good money just shooting, escorting likely didn’t even occur to most of them because they were making very good money shooting, and working a lot less than most people would have to to make the same amount of money. Now that shooting has to decreased to the point of not being able to support most girls, they take a look at escorting and think to themselves “Hey, I can make more money in a shorter amount of time, doing even less work”. So why wouldn’t they? They don’t have a specific desire to be an adult film star…they just want to look good and get paid without having to work 60 hours a week to do it. They don’t care if its James Deen’s cock penetrating them to do it, or John Smith from Ohio (or wherever). Frankly John Smith is probably going to cum in about 3 minutes anyway, and she’ll get paid the same amount. What difference does it make to them? It only makes a difference if the girl’s real passion is to be in the adult business, then she might care that its John Smith and not James Deen, but 99% of them don’t care. They have an asset in their looks, and they want to exploit that for as much money as possible while doing the least amount of work in the least amount of time. Simple.
I would also make the point that social media has made escorting so much easier than it previously would have been. I would imagine back in the day, when the internet was in its infancy, most escorting work would have been done by word of mouth or ads in the back pages of a magazine. These days a girl can post her email on twitter and receive many escorting inquiries per day, not to mention many escorting agencies have websites that make it very easy for customers to search them out and contact them. It is no longer a “hidden” sort of back alley thing
It also helps when your “legit” porn agent is the same person booking your ‘porn shoots’ and your ‘private escort encounters.”
There is a famous escort site that adverises most of its models are porn stars. There is a page on this escort site for girls who want to be escorts; You fill out the page, include photos, and lo and behold who gets in contact with you, none other than a member of the agent trade group.
It used to be that escorting was a side job to doing porn. Today the exact opposite is true, escorting is the main job, with a little porn on the side.
Charlie LeDuff reports: According to Ron Jeremy and Larry Flynt American porn is dead.
http://youtu.be/UjINHqQbfwU
There is more than one “escort” site made up of mainly porn chickies. I won’t say what their names are here as I don’t want to cause any prostitution and pandering busts but they are easily found online today. The “escort” sites may not all be “owned” by adult industry talent agents (one of them is rumored to be) but whomever the owners are they have a good business, of three randomly selected porn chickies that have filmed a scene in the last year I bet you find one (or more) on these sites. The sites cover their asses by claiming that sex is not part of the deal but if the “escort” and her “john” mutually decide to have sex that the company will not keep it from happening. However, I bet at least 50% of these “dates” have a “happy ending”. That is way above the rate of non “escort agency” arranged dates having a “happy ending”. Personally I think prostitution should be legal and taxed, unfortunately others disagree with me but let’s call it what it is — prostitution.
The hardest thing for most people to understand is that porn is no longer a product that you really sell. Now it’s a marketing tool for selling something else: dating, cams, escorts, t-shirts, binary options, get rich quick books, and the like. The big companies have gutted porn as a business, literally stepping over the porn dollars to get at the pennies offered by other things.
The only reason it happened was simple: They were willing to rip off the porn producers, use their content for free, and use it to sell other stuff. Now porn is “free”, and few people are willing to pay. The overall business is much smaller, but these few big companies think they did it right because they make more money. Their millions don’t compare well to the hundreds of millions they killed off on the way by, but that doesn’t bother them.
“Then and Now” well said post from Mike South. I think all should read this. #truth http://t.co/yVRXXI9KRR
RT @MikeSouth1226: Then and Now http://t.co/YPwCcStytu
I watch all my porn on the tube sites for free. It is not worth paying for anymore and all you have are hookers/escorts and biker trash performing these days and it just ain’t worth no damn $39.00 dollars.
OK CS, as long as you realize the scumbags that created the tubesites you enjoy are the ones who destroyed the U.S. porn industry. They’re the reason there’s nothing but trash performers nowadays.
As long as those girls stay away from Dubai and private yacht parties by middle east sheikhs and royalty. Look up thedirty.com and search for ‘portapotty’ to find out what those freaks are into. Girls have zero rights there and plenty of escorts end up with a 3mos prison bid. Stick to Nevada, Italy and Germany.
Sana Fey. That’s a name from the past for sure. Strawberry blonde (I think) massive fake rack, built like a brick shithouse.
As much as girls enter the business for the money there’s also a surprising number that care more about fulfilling a fantasy with no real intention of being porn lifers. The mainstreaming of porn has made it more transient, I think.
Harris: Please stop using the term “porn chickies.” It’s beyond lame. You’re over 70, we get it. And great insight on escorts, btw. Lol.