Alex Henderson

Rachel Kramer Bussel

The Adult Entertainment Industry 

The Sexperts Weigh In

Barbara Nitke, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals and Wasteland.com Founder Colin Rowntree Discuss Groundbreaking Study on Female Porn Stars 

By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, December 28, 2012

People in the adult entertainment industry have had a lot to say about a new study that sheds a generally positive light on female porn actresses. The study, which researchers at Texas Woman’s University (TWU) and Shippensburg State University in Pennsylvania conducted with former adult film actress Sharon Mitchell, takes a close look at the “psychological characteristics” of women who get in front of the camera in adult films. And in late November and early December, RealmNoir contacted several prominent sexperts to discuss the study’s conclusions.

The study, which surveyed a total of 117 women who had performed in adult films and was published in The Journal of Sex Research, challenges the notion that female porn actresses in general are “damaged goods” who suffer from low self-esteem and deep emotional problems. The study found that as a rule, women who appear in adult films are “not less psychologically healthy” than women who don’t and that “in terms of psychological characteristics, porn actresses had higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, sexual satisfaction and spirituality.” While critics of the adult entertainment industry equate female porn actresses with low self-esteem and even self-hatred, the TWU/Shippensburg/Mitchell study found that if anything, being able to appear naked in front of a camera may indicate “an elevated self-esteem.”

One of the sexperts who SeXXXandPolitics.com contacted was New York City-based erotic photographer Barbara Nitke, who worked with vanilla porn stars extensively back in the 1980s but has been concentrating on BDSM/fetish photography since the early 1990s. Nitke’s recently published photo book American Ecstasy looks back on the years she spent documenting New York City’s contributions to vanilla adult films and contains stills of Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley, Vanessa del Rio, Damian Cashmere, Jerry Butler (not to be confused with the famous R&B singer and Chicago politician Jerry “The Ice Man” Butler), Damian Cashmere and other adult stars who worked in NYC in the 1980s. In fact, one of the people who appears in the book is Sharon Mitchell herself. 

Looking back, Nitke remembered that before she got into the adult entertainment industry in 1982, she agreed with the “damaged goods” view of female porn actresses. But Nitke’s thinking changed after she worked with and got to know many of them, and she said that the TWU/Shippensburg/Mitchell study demonstrates that female adult performers generally aren’t the dysfunctional people she once thought they were.

“I spent a number of years in the 1980s working as a photographer on porn movies and trying to understand why porn stars chose their profession,” Nitke recalled. “I knew I would eventually publish a book about my experiences, and initially, I assumed that porn stars had traumatic experiences in their youth that caused their fall from grace. But after years of observation and hours of interviews, I had to admit that my premise was wrong. They simply weren't very different from the mainstream women I knew. Some had been abused as children, but most had not. They were more comfortable with themselves sexually—and I could understand why that might be intimidating, but that couldn't be considered pathological. I realized I had been making a judgment that what they did for a living was bad, so they must have been damaged. Opening my mind to them and trying to understand them over so many years altered my perception of sex and sex work forever. I salute Sharon Mitchell and her university partners for this important study.”

The fact that the study is receiving a generally positive response from people in the adult entertainment industry doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for some constructive criticism of the study from industry allies, and some of that constructive criticism has come from Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals. The Los Angeles-based sociologist/adult industry expert, who publishes the industry-oriented website Porn Valley Vantage (PVVonline.com), has spent ten years studying the adult entertainment industry—and she said that while she is glad the study took place, she takes issue with some of the research methods that were used.

“In my view—though it is far from perfect—this study accomplishes some significant, positive things,” Tibbals explained. “This work provides evidence that some women who work as adult performers are more well-adjusted in some respects relative to some ‘typical’ women. It also contributes to a greater, more nuanced understanding of the adult industry by authenticating what is essentially common-sense knowledge: just like not all firefighters are X and not all college professors are Y, not everyone from a population as large and diverse as women adult performers are ‘damaged goods.’ But this study is also very disconnected.”

Tibbals asserted that the female adult stars who participated in the survey could have been “vetted” more thoroughly by the researchers; for example, Tibbals would have liked to know an average number of scenes in which the adult film actresses surveyed had participated when the data was gathered. The study, Tibbals said, didn’t adequately take into account the female adult stars’ level of involvement in the adult industry. And Tibbals believes that the TWU and Shippensburg researchers had “a lack of in-depth understanding of the adult community and individuals therein.”

Tibbals said: “Though what we have on paper is a solid team of psychology researchers, a high-profile industry insider, and access to members of the community, what we get are methodological flaws that stem from researchers not knowing enough about the adult community and representatives from the adult industry not knowing enough about research. In spite of some missteps, the researchers clearly know how to conduct a rigorous social science-situated study.”

Tibbals added: “Ultimately, this study is a positive thing. It brings a ‘healthy’ performer voice into scholarship via a useful comparative framework. But some of the finer points, including how the data was analyzed and reported, should have been done very differently. Many of these issues could have been reconciled with a more in-depth understanding of the industry going in.”

Rachel Kramer Bussel, a widely published sex writer whose books have included Please Sir: Erotic Stories of Female Submission, Anything for You, Erotica for Kinky Couples; Passion: Erotic Romance for Women, and Orgasmic: Erotica for Women, said that the very fact that the study surveyed 117 female porn performers made it historic. Bussel (who also co-publishes/co-edits the non-sex-related Cupcakes Take the Cake, a blog on cupcakes), asserted: “We live in a culture that very much wants to demonize both porn stars and any woman who steps out of the boundaries of acceptable sexuality as ‘other.’ So I think this is a step in the right direction in terms of making it clear that porn star is a job, not some immutable part of a person's identity or a reason to discriminate against them—though I would say the same thing even if the study had found the opposite results. Just the fact that this study involved speaking with actual porn stars, rather than people simply opining about porn stars, is a huge step in the right direction toward understanding what motivates performers and making the public realize that like any other industry, not everyone involved in it has the same backgrounds, beliefs or experiences.”

Angie Rowntree, publisher and producer of the adult website Sssh.com, said that sweeping generalizations about women who perform in adult videos are problematic because women appear in a wide range of adult videos. The heterosexual erotica that Sssh.com provides is aimed at female consumers specifically; Rowntree has described 86% of Sssh’s audience as “hetero-female.”

Reflecting on the TWU/Shippensburg/Mitchell survey, Angie Rowntree observed: “As for the motivation for women to work as performers in adult, we have an interesting viewpoint from ten years of producing films for our erotica-for-women/by-women site, Sssh.com. As the films we produce are for the women's audience, it requires a bit more plotline and acting than some
 other forms of adult content. What we have found is, overwhelmingly, the women we cast in these films are delighted to have larger projects where they can hone their acting abilities and bring home solid acting
performances. Part of the motivation there is simply being happy to have some work with substance. The other part is that this sort of genre opens
 doors for women to cross over into mainstream film careers.”

Angie Rowntree’s husband Colin Rowntree, founder of the well-known BDSM website Wasteland.com, has worked with countless female adult performers over the years. He founded Wasteland back in 1995, and he said that when the TWU/Shippensburg/Mitchell study was published in the Journal of Sex Research, he was glad to see some scientific research that countered the anti-porn hysteria of the Christian Right.

“As the director and producer at Wasteland.com, I was very pleased with the results of this study—which effectively, knock the wind out of the sails of adult industry critics that have based their commentary on outdated, flawed data,” Colin Rowntree explained. “Having worked with hundreds of performers over the past 18 years, it was always quite obvious that the ‘damaged goods’ myth was simply conservative, anti-porn hype to further denigrate the adult industry. In my experience, adult performers are some of the brightest, most motivated and hard-working folks around—and being a BDSM and fetish studio, our performer pool also attracts a great number of performance artists and extremely well-educated women that enjoy the creative process of making films in our niche. Hats off to the publishers of this research for helping bring to light the positive reality of women in the adult industry.”

Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, Skin Two, The Pasadena Weekly, JazzTimes, Cash Box and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson. 



Barbara Nitke

Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals

Colin Rowntree