Porn Industry Will Beat the Coronavirus!
By the end of this year, the whole world recognized that the coronavirus had become a real threat to humanity. If at the beginning of the year it seemed that the epidemic would affect only Asian countries, now it has spread to the whole world.
The porn industry responded more quickly than other areas to the main challenge of the 21st century. Firstly, most studios stopped production and sent the actors and actresses home. Secondly, the largest sites have launched promotions to support those who are in quarantine. Thirdly, platforms for sex workers have increased payments to stimulate in a challenging economic environment. And, finally, there are many more videos with the tag “Covid-19” on all porn sites.
Promotions, premiums, and discounts
For almost the entire March, Italy was the second epicenter of the coronavirus in the world after China. As of early April, it accounts for more than 105 thousand cases and a record number of deaths ‒ more than 12.4 thousand people. There are many reasons for this result ‒ from the social adaptation of elderly people at risk to the high year-round flow of tourists. Also, the Italians did not respond quickly enough to the developing epidemic: they closed air flights, introduced full quarantine, and refused all measures.
But soon residents were forbidden to leave their homes without a good reason, under the threat of a large fine. Now the same measures are in force in other European countries, but Italians were the first among Europeans who completely lost the opportunity to go out for a walk, go on a date or meet friends.
For this, they received a gift from Pornhub ‒ free premium access until the end of the quarantine, that is, the opportunity to watch porn in high quality and without ads. And this is a pretty serious step, given that Italy is the fourth in terms of content consumption on the site in 2019 after the USA, Japan, and the UK. Similarly, xHamster did the same, giving Italians, as well as Chinese and Koreans, free premium access.
It went beyond porn. Where is Netflix? Where is HBO? Where is Disney +? We must get together and help people ‒xHamster statement.
But not everyone was happy with the help of porn sites for Italian citizens. Vatican priest Federico Lombardi said that Pornhub “trapped” people in quarantine: in his opinion, the company “uses one terrible evil to exacerbate another.” Similar criticism was made by actor Terry Crews, known as the fighter against porn addiction.
“No porn quarantine! The virus and quarantine are indeed exploited by porn corporations that give you content and hope to hook you. Let’s talk about it!” — Terry Crews.
By the end of March, more than half a million people had been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, and the epidemic could no longer be divided into countries. After that, Pornhub opened premium access to absolutely everyone: you need to register and enter your credit card details, which will not be charged until April 23rd. xHamster also did not stand aside: the company gave one date on its platform xHamsterLive webcam for each new user. This has paid off: judging by the updated statistics on the demand for porn, by March 25, the demand for videos from Pornhub has grown by 19%.
During the pandemic, other areas of porn and webcam were also involved in support measures for users. YouPorn, owned by the same company as Pornhub, offered to help the Festival de Cannes with an online broadcast of the event, which was postponed due to the risk of infection. Paper Street Media, which owns projects Team Skeet and MYLF, has opened up free access to all of its content for medical workers ‒ you just need to contact them by special mail and show your documents.
The ManyVids webcam platform has launched a competition to diversify content in a period of high demand: they offer to shoot motivating video blogs, talk about their life at a distance, and give advice on disinfection. Their main competitor ‒ the OnlyFans sex video chat platform ‒ has not yet launched promotions, but, judging by the reports, they have encountered a significant increase in traffic. For example, in a couple of weeks, 25 thousand people signed up for one of the popular Austrian actresses Jem Wolfie.
Trends and stories
Where demand grows, so does supply. Coronavirus is the main topic in all the news around the world: from the Internet and TV to social networks and instant messengers. Judging by the statistics from Google Trends, the search query “coronavirus recommendations” increased by 3500% over the week. Marketers, medical mask sellers, pharmaceutical companies, and others picked up the trend at the end of January when the epidemic covered only China. In early February, the query “coronavirus” climbed to the top of the Pornhub search. The emergence of themed porn was only a matter of time.
In early March, on Pornhub and xHamster, in total, it was possible to find hundreds of videos, one way or another touching on the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic. As VICE found out, the main plots revolved around stories with headlines such as “Patients with coronavirus having sex in a quarantined ward” and Asian actresses. For example, a couple of video bloggers Spicy x Rice filmed a video about a girl attacking an orderly in a protective suit, but only sneaking through its lower part. “People love things that make them feel fear for their lives,” told the author of this video to reporters. Other videos were titled “Footage on behalf of a disease control and prevention agent examining abandoned Wuhan,” and exploited images of infected Asians since Europe was not yet in such a panic.
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, porn porn industry producers with a large audience began to join the trend for it in porn. The Little Squirtles actress straddled two trends at once: she played an adopted daughter who comes to a quarantined adult father. Although most of the dialogues are quite informative and tell viewers how to protect themselves from infection, the main goal of the video is to get on the wave of popularity. The video blogger Discover Davina went a little further: she shot a video about how she was allegedly lost in the Texas desert during an epidemic, and she was discovered by a military man in a disinfection suit who was dissatisfied with the violation of a quarantine. The author of Dollscult used a similar plot; only she risked her health even more: she and her boyfriend had sex right next to a busy freeway and in the title played on the fact that “risks health for the sake of good sex.”
Thousands of videos exploit the same stereotypes about COVID-19: a girl agrees to a blowjob because she is bored in isolation, a guy exchanges some food for sex, or a nurse comes to a patient to do something else along with a coronavirus test. The last plot point was used by the video blogger Kisankanna: the guy discovers his temperature, calls the nurse, and then everything is as usual. German blogger Fiona Fuchs filmed a video of a girl agreeing to have sex with the first person she meets because he has a lot of toilet paper. But he pre-treats himself with a sanitizer and also puts on medical gloves.
Few of the professional studios were in a hurry. In the fake incest porn project SisLovesMe, actress Spencer Bradley is locked in a quarantine room with her stepbrother, but can’t live without her smartphone, which she forgot to take with her. She agrees to have sex with him to sit on social networks. And FakeTaxi took advantage of the high interest in Italy and shot a video about a girl who persuades a taxi driver to take her to the north of the country, although he is very afraid because of the infection.
Solidarity and the suspension of filming
The likely reason for the small number of professional videos about coronavirus is that the industry has been quarantined. The measures are comparable to Hollywood cinematography, where the filming of even large-scale blockbusters was suspended.
In early March, the industrial magazine XBIZ released a detailed analysis of what measures the studios had already taken to save themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Free Speech Coalition urged studios to cut back on filming as much as possible until at least the end of April. “At this time, no one should shoot content with partners who are not relatives to them. The pandemic poses a threat to the health of you, your partners, your team, and the entire community,” says the appeal.
Evil Angel, Girlfriends Films, Brazzers, Kink.com were the first to take this step and put actors and actresses on home mode, followed by Erika Lust Films, Team Skeet, and MYLF. The Talent Testing Services clinic, primarily working with sex workers, promised to test everyone for the coronavirus soon, and also issued a large-scale instruction on prevention and disinfection during a pandemic. Adult Time, one of the largest studios in the US, filmed all of its stars in one video, where it encouraged fans to stay at home, keep their distance from each other and monitor their health.
The porn industry is better prepared for infection than the movie business, or perhaps any other industry in the world. Sex workers are used to what they call filming moratoriums. When an actor or actress tests positive for HIV, thanks to the close communication of the community, filming instantly stops at all productions that may have been involved. When Spanish director and actor Nacho Vidal was diagnosed with HIV, dozens of studios around the world were suspended in a week. For several weeks all his partners, their partners, and so on took tests.
“When your body is your business, you take care of cleanliness, hygiene, and health much more thoroughly than an ordinary person, and you are definitely well versed in everything related to other people’s touches and liquids next to you.” — Actress and director Ashley Wex
Companies actively meet sex workers halfway: the Stripchat webcam platform offers users free dates, and models ‒ an increased percentage of donations; CamSoda has launched a parallel platform where not only sex workers but also musicians, artists, and actors can stream their streams. Another similar service generally went further ‒ called all the employees of the quarantined McDonald’s (and this is thousands of employees in the UK alone) to the webcams.
Sex workers are also scared and trying to find a way out of this situation. Actors and actresses do not receive compensation during quarantine and cannot work until they receive permission from doctors. “When there was the first moratorium in my career, I was in a panic. I was worried about my savings,” told an actress Stoya about her quarantine experience. The only way out for them is to make money on such sites as CamSoda, FanCentro, Stripchat, and in social networks, so as not to contact people and not travel to film sets. Superstars have already been doing this: Jia Lissa poses for a masked photo and encourages them to follow her at FanCentro, Mia Malkova invites fans to broadcast live on Instagram, Riley Reid takes masked shots and builds an audience on YouTube, Eva Elfie asks everyone to stay home and follow her on Snapchat, and Mia Khalifa just complains that she hasn’t bathed in a long time.
Unlike many other industries, pornographic actors and actresses do not have insurance, reduced rates for loans to banks, and corporate subsidies in case of a crisis, so in such situations, they can only rely on their strength. If the international quarantine drags on, then the industry will have to decide how to keep sex workers afloat — donations from fans alone will not be enough.
And sex workers indeed have a lot to say about complying with virus safety measures.
COVID-19 has hit the entertainment industry especially hard, in particular the film industry. And although in some places, for example in Europe, the processes are slowly recovering, globally the industry has only to go through all the stages of accepting the fact that now it will always be necessary to live and work side by side with a dangerous virus ‒ or so. In the United States, as you know, things are even worse, and even a fresh initiative from the Governor of California does not help much.
Meanwhile, it was overseas that there were people who are ready right now to tell everyone what it is like to produce content with the risk of catching a complex and even fatal disease. Moreover, we are not talking about fear: they already had to reduce risk to a minimum by clear and well-functioning actions and a protocol agreed with all participants in the process. Who are these heroes and why they are still not trumpet in all the media, you ask? It’s simple: to do this, you need to put false modesty as far as possible and again take a closer look at the porn industry. Intrigued? Well, then sit back and let’s get started.
Fighting epidemics before it was mainstream
Now it seems that the world has not yet known epidemics of the scale provided by the coronavirus, but this is not so. It is enough to recall the sad story of the genius Freddie Mercury and revise the Dallas Buyers Club to realize that the end of the last millennium will forever remain in world history as an era of global fear of HIV. Now it is practically reduced to naught: over the past 30 years, scientists have thoroughly studied the virus, and pharmacists have figured out how to significantly reduce its lethality. But then, in the 90s, it almost became the reason for stopping the American porn industry (a multi-billion dollar business, by the way), because its representatives were at risk, and right in the workplace.
We will not go into the details of what the industry employees had to go through on the path of the struggle that ended only in the late 90s. Much more interesting and relevant today is its result, which has become the general security protocol PASS. This program protects adult film actors, keeps workplaces safe, and to this day helps keep the epidemiological situation under control on all porn sets in the United States. “I don’t think I could have worked in the industry if it weren’t for PASS. To be honest, that would be real madness! Imagine: you have to have sex with strangers 20 times a month. Without safety precautions, working in the porn industry would be the most dangerous business in the world,” says industry veteran Lance Hart about the importance of PASS.
Experience is more valuable than money
At the same time, there is nothing supernatural in the document, but it prescribes reasonable and even obvious things. For example, according to the procedure, all actors must undergo mandatory testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections before filming, and this must be done every 14 days. If any of the tests turn out to be positive, participation in the filming for the carrier becomes impossible until he gets rid of the disease (in the case of HIV, until he ceases to be a distributor), and all his contacts are carefully traced. Information about specific cases is entered into a special database, content producers have access to it, so it will not work to deceive the system even with a strong desire.
The main value of PASS today is experience: the protocol has existed for more than 20 years, and during this time the system has managed to overcome many challenges that similar developments in COVID-19 have yet to face. And this will happen inevitably ‒ here you need to ensure the security of databases with personal medical information and to prevent falsification of test results, and algorithms for notifying participants in the process that they need to go through certain checks.
“When the COVID-19 threat popped up, we felt very well prepared as we already had a long history of testing, contact tracing, and production stops in the industry,” explains Mike Stabile, porn industry union spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition. “It is obvious that now we are faced with a different virus and, accordingly, a different type of threat, but in general, thanks to PASS, we understood from the very beginning how to act and what to do in order to protect workers.”
A helping hand for Hollywood and beyond
It is logical that, first of all, porn producers want to help their “decent” colleagues, that is, the American film industry. According to the same Stabile, the problems of the porn industry in the late 90s and Hollywood today are similar, albeit they differ in scale. “At least we have something to tell our colleagues about our experience, as well as learn from each other different methods of countering the spread of viral infections,” he assures.
At the same time, Mike notes that the coronavirus, although less lethal, can be more dangerous for the work process than HIV due to the easier transmission from one person to another. In this case, by the way, an important life hack is ready in the porn industry. “Over the years of PASS existence, we have repeatedly convinced of the importance of retesting, and they have already become a standard for us. COVID-19, like HIV, can be asymptomatic, so it is important for the film industry and other industries to take this into account when developing protocols,” says Stabile.
Of course, the porn industry does not offer PASS to other markets as a turnkey solution. Moreover, now its representatives are themselves at the stage of projecting old methods onto new realities: firstly, they need to be corrected taking into account the airborne droplets of the virus, and secondly, they should be extended not only to the actors but also to other participants in the process ‒ operators, lighting technicians, etc.
However, both Stabile and his colleagues are confident that their system can become the foundation for the fight against COVID-19, both in Hollywood and in other non-content industries. And no matter how amazing it may sound, even among doctors, some people are ready to listen to the experience of the creators of porn. “Much of what we have done in the HIV-controlled adult film industry, we are trying to replicate with COVID-19,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Institute of Global Health. “Many years of industry experience have proven that their system works. So to ignore it just because someone thinks the porn business is indecent, silly.”
Now Jha, in a team of medical colleagues, is developing a program for the restoration of all sectors of the economy. According to him, they take many moments from PASS ‒ from retesting, which Stabile spoke about, to contact tracing of those who have already been detected. Of course, one cannot do without scaling, but with the proper approach, new protocols will work in cinema, air transportation, and the food industry.
In general, humanity is one step away from being saved by the porn industry, indirectly. There is a chance that at least this will add points of public approval to its representatives. And even if not, then Pornhub will someday develop another ingenious marketing move on this basis.
