If you don't Want to do it, They'll Find Someone Who Will: Male Sex Work, Risk, and Protection in the Adult Film Industry

Drawing from ethnographic interviews, policy, and discourse analysis, this paper explores male adult film performers’ experiences of their labor in view of gendered workplace policy. Male performers encounter an increasingly casualized labor market and are paid less than half of standard rates their female counterparts command. Workers seeking improved pay and conditions confront the perception from both management and policy makers that their labor is unskilled, dispensable, and, from management’s perspective, a privilege for which many would pay to have access. Meanwhile, their workplace health concerns escape the attention of a regulatory state concerned primarily with sex work as violence against women.

The paper argues that the models of feminine vulnerability undergirding the scant workplace protections that exist for porn workers make risks that fall outside the rubric of violence against women illegible. Sex work stigma advocates a view of labor exploitation understood exclusively through the lens of feminized vulnerability, while protective legislation governing mainstream workplaces is grounded in gendered ideas of bodily vulnerability that render men’s sexual labor illegible. Gendered norms assuming men’s sexual access obscure the emotional, relational, and physical labor of men’s sex work. Together, these regimes make male porn workers precarious. This paper explores porn work as one site in which gendered experiences shape and are shaped by the policies of the capitalist state.