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thesiridahl · 1 year

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What do you miss about traditional porn production after the rise of Onlyfans???

There’s way more that I don’t miss. The widespread popularity & success of OnlyFans has democratized the adult industry in ways that I couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago.

As a performer, having the ability to sell my content directly to my fans (with a 20% cut of the pre-tax total going to OF to run the site and process payments) has made a massive difference in my ability to make a life and a future for myself in the adult industry.

In some ways, the industry has been turned on its head. In 2013, things were relatively top-down: I’d wait for the phone to ring, or a text from a director who wanted to hire me for a scene. The rates I could reasonably charge for my work were lower. I didn’t have a talent agent, but if I did, it would've been the same, except the agent would have arranged those bookings and taken a 10-25% cut of my scene rate.

Scene rates were lower for performers 10 years ago. A high-end average would be $600-800 for a girl/girl (non-penetrative sex scene, if you don’t count fingers or dildos 😉) and $800-1000 for a boy/girl (penetrative sex) scene. All of that income is pre-tax, since models in our industry are almost exclusively paid as 1099 contractors. (If you’re unfamiliar, that means Federal, State, and local taxes are not collected when we’re paid out by the companies we contract with, so we have to keep accurate records of our income throughout the year and then pay a huge chunk of money in taxes at the end of the year. Or quarterly, if you’re fancy.)

Scene rates never changed much with inflation. Rates were determined by what studios were willing to pay performers, not by what performers wanted to actually be paid. The only way to increase your rate was to just become more famous. But after OF came along and models started seeing their true worth — how much more they can make selling their own content directly — it started to change the industry in some very big, positive ways.

For example: If a model with a relatively large following on OF films a sex scene that costs $1000 to produce (wardrobe, makeup, hiring a photographer/videographer, editing), sells it for $15 and 400 fans buy it on OF within the first month it’s released, after OF takes their cut of 20%, she just netted $4000 on that scene before taxes. And she owns the content and can continue selling it basically forever. $4000 is a scene rate that no studio would pay a performer for a sex scene, unless it’s something kinda nuts, like an 8-guy gang bang with double anal.

If you wanted to net $16k of pre-tax income per month, what would you rather do? Film a double anal gang bang every week, and have to do that every month for reliable income — or film four regular ass sex scenes (regular-ass sex, not regular ass-sex, although I do highly recommend both) with your real-life partner every month, that you can resell infinitely, while in the comfort of your home, living in a city that's way more affordable than Los Angeles?

These days, I know of performers who've never worked on a studio set, but took years building a loyal audience on OnlyFans and similar sites, and when they’re approached by a studio like Brazzers to shoot a boy/girl scene, they can truthfully declare that it’s not worth their time to even set foot on a studio set for less than a $4000 scene rate. Yes, this is an extreme example and not at all indicative of what the average model earns on OnlyFans, but it’s an important example to illustrate the impact of sites like OF on the power structures of the industry. Models being less dependent on studio work is very good for us, the models.

Since I came out of retirement in 2020 and started depending on my own content sales to make a living, I’ve raised my rates for studio performances, as most of us have. That’s the biggest positive change for me, personally — not having to depend on studio work anymore. When you see my face in an AdultTime or Brazzers scene, it’s because I have happily chosen to work with that company, I’m being paid the rate I asked for, and I’m thrilled to grow my fan base by appearing on a studio site with a wider reach than my own.

That’s how a lot of us treat studio work these days: It’s not a primary source of income. It’s a way for us to advertise our own brand as creators, and hopefully gain some new fans who are interested in subscribing on OF and supporting us directly.

To get to your actual question, yes, there are downsides. While OF and similar sites have democratized (one might even say… SOCIALIZED! ☭ ) the industry, it’s also caused a certain degree of decentralization, and that’s not always great.

One component of the adult industry in particular (specifically the American, mostly LA-and-Las-Vegas-based industry, because to be honest IDK what the heck goes on in other countries) requires at least some centralization to function properly.

I'm referring to our STI testing protocol: Industry testing clinics report to a common database called PASS, operated by our industry’s nonprofit trade association, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC). The database obscures personal details like legal names, but shows a cleared-to-work or not-cleared-to-work status, verifying that the performer has a valid test which is less than 14 days old and shows a negative result for all STIs.

These testing clinics aren’t just any old Quest Diagnostics location — they’re operated by private companies which exclusively service the adult industry, and use the most sensitive tests possible for early and accurate detection of STIs.

The database also functions as a contact-tracing system. In the event that a performer tests positive for something, the database is an indispensable tool for notifying other performers who were exposed, isolating the incident, and halting production within that group of exposed performers until they can all be treated (for those STIs for which an effective treatment exists) and retest with a negative result.

In fact, our database is so effective that early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held up as an example of an effective contact-tracing system. It’s the reason our industry was better prepared than most to handle our response to the pandemic — we already had a functional, reliable testing system in place.

But the testing system is only effective if all of our industry’s performers respect and participate in it. And of course, you don’t need to live Los Angeles or Las Vegas to be making your own porn and selling it on OnlyFans. During the pandemic, we all saw the news articles about the explosion of new users on OF, many of them content creators.

It’s one thing if you’re a monogamous couple only fucking each other on camera for your OF content, but it’s entirely different if you’re a model who’s never worked in studio porn or even heard of the PASS database, you live 2000 miles from LA, and you’re producing dozens of scenes a month with different sex partners. Then we have a problem. We don’t know how that model is getting tested, or if they are at all, or who they worked with — so if the model or any of their scene partners tests positive, there’s no record of the positive result and no contact tracing. And if they work with another person who travels to LA, and spreads the STI into the performer pool there, now they’ve put the health and livelihoods of hundreds of other porn performers at risk.

I’ve heard enough stories from my peers to know that this does happen. I have seen Twitter rants from amateur OF creators who don’t value the testing protocol and complain that getting tested every 14 days is too expensive. (Currently, the cost of a full performer panel is close to $600/month, if you test every 14 days. We would all love to see more affordable performer panels, and it’s very much an active discussion in the industry. PASS also offers a testing subsidy for performers, funded by many corporate and individual donors, which helps buffer the cost of testing). They’ll say things like “It’s fine, I’m only shooting with my close friends, and we trust each other.”

They're sorely mistaken. Following the testing protocol is not a burden, it's a non-negotiable requirement for being a performer in this industry. Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis don’t give a shit who you "trust," and neither do the folks who want to shut down our entire industry and make us and our jobs nonexistent.

The adult industry is notoriously insular and defensive for good reason. We’re heavily stigmatized and often it feels like we’re hanging onto our legality and legitimacy by a thread, because we are.

Compared to 10 years ago, there are many more vocal opponents of the porn industry now, and a lot of those critics and antis have way, way more money and power and influence than any single person or corporation in the adult industry. So yeah, the last thing we need is some content-creating doofus in Tightsqueeze, Virginia (yes that's a real place look it up*) coming along to compromise the testing system our industry has relied on for 20+ years, and making us all look bad.

It’s Missouri Senator Josh Hawley’s reactionary Christian wet dream to be able to point a finger at a site like OnlyFans and say, “Look at all these young people indiscriminately profiting from their homemade porn, and look at how many of them got an STI from their immoral behavior! They’re spreading disease, and the entire porn industry needs to be made illegal!”

Josh Hawley has never said those exact words, but he could, and he would be more correct than his actual argument against the porn industry, which is that we’re all child groomers. (Do I need to say here that we’re obviously not? My own fans don’t expect me to actually acknowledge that ridiculous argument, right?)

In a perfect world, every content creator who has sex on camera would be working with a valid 14-day test from a clinic that reports to the PASS database. But it’s unrealistic to expect perfect awareness and participation from every single spicy content creator, and if that did suddenly happen overnight, the testing clinics would be flooded with thousands more patients than they’re prepared to handle.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all try to do better. Personally, I think our industry needs to be a little less insular, and more willing to accommodate and educate newcomers about how we keep ourselves safe and legal ‘round here. And we definitely need a wider network of testing clinics, so that people who don't live in LA or Vegas have an easier time participating in the testing protocol.

From an anti-porn outsider’s point of view, the OF model who lives in Bumfuck, Ohio is just as much a part of the porn industry as Riley Reid or Angela White. We’re all just evil, diseased, child-grooming sinners to them. OnlyFans has done a great deal to help democratize the industry, but I think we still need a little more socialism, in the form of workers helping workers, educating each other and standing together to defend our ability to make a living safely and legally.

*Footnote: I don't actually know if there are any OF content creators in Tightsqueeze, VA. I just googled and picked a funny town name. But if a content creator who literally lives there reads this, and you want to get tested and shoot content with me, holler at ya girl, I'm only an 8 hour drive away.

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