You Know that the Economy is Bad When...

You know that the economy is bad and that the situation is dire when...porn actresses speak of finding alternate means of earning a living!  Thanks goes to the poster YouGottaBeShittingMe for bringing this article to our attention at the JD Underground forum.  Here are some quotes from the article "Porn Stars: The Death of a Sex-Industry Profession" published at The Daily Beast interspersed with my commentary.

“The market is oversaturated now,” says Brooklyn Lee.  Lee is porn’s latest It girl.  At the AVN Awards, Lee, 22, won five awards, including Best New Starlet.  She says: “There used to be a few hundred girls and now there are thousands.  So porn superstars have fallen by the wayside."

 “A few years ago there were 100 girls in the entire industry, and now 100 girls enter the industry each week.  They used to all be stars; now they all just think they’re stars.”  The result, [Mark] Spiegler says, is that “they’ve become interchangeable.”

The recession may be one reason, again, for the unprecedented number of women who want to shoot sex scenes.  Another reason offered by Spiegler is the change in a porn star’s status from the stigmatized margins. “Ten years ago a girl fell into porn,” Spiegler says.  “Now there are a lot of girls who dream of doing porn.”

The field became glutted.  Who would 'a' thunk it?   The economy is so bad that many young women have been reduced to working as porn actresses.  Another contributing factor might be that student loans have become so onerous at a time of decreasing entry-level career opportunities that sexy graduates really need to "sell" themselves.

Many of these underemployed performers find alternate ways to earn a living, all of which further erase boundaries between porn stars and fans.  “A lot of girls will do movies as publicity,” says [Jesse] Jane.  Then the women monetize that publicity via social media, selling custom DVDs, live cam shows, and, of course, prostitution.

What does it imply about the state of the U.S. economy when people who are working one of the most alternative means of earning a living possible need to find alternative means to earn a living?  It almost sounds as though some of the women are shooting porn scenes for free (almost like an unpaid internship?)  in the hopes of using it to market themselves over the Internet.

In the legal field we speak of Big Law, Mid-Law, and ShitLaw.  Is there a porn industry equivalent in the form of Big Porn, Mid-Porn, and Shit Porn?  (No scatological jokes in the comments, please.)  Is there such a thing as starving solo porn actresses?

Despite the smaller stakes, success in porn now requires all the schmoozing of any competitive career.  Lee says: “I spend most of my time trying to make contacts and do the business side.  The sex is the only part about being a porn star these days that is not hard work.”

So, if you are an unemployed or underemployed porn actress the solution is to...Network!***

On the bright side, these porn actresses are better off than most college graduates.  I suspect that they probably didn't have to take out student loans to enter into the porn industry.  Also, the porn actress job market is probably much better than the legal job market and many other knowledge-based job markets.

***If you are new to the law school scambuster community, the term "Network" has become an inside meme used to denote futility and to humorously mock naive successful people (well-off know-it-alls, mostly from older generations) who mindlessly advise the college educated unemployed and underemployed to "network!".  It's almost like our own "Who is John Galt?"