One year. That’s what I told myself. It didn’t matter if I liked it. I didn’t like taking cold showers, eating 25-cent gas station burritos that smelled like vomit, or sleeping on concrete in a sleeping bag either. I survived those things—like other poor kids who find the unimaginable easily imaginable.
Sex with strangers was inconceivable, sure, but so was someone like me going to college. My parents didn’t. My brothers didn’t. I was now enrolled in college and the bills coming in were suddenly overwhelming. You see how this goes: young girl gets offered what seems like mind-boggling sums of money to fuck strangers. Legally.
But if I did the job for one year—one year of fucking, just one fucking year— I could change my life, eradicate my student debt, and never look back. I was the honor roll student who was hard to envision in porn. I’d been with the same high school boyfriend for three years, and he was urging me to show imagination in sex and I just wasn’t sexually adventurous. I didn’t even have the confidence to bare my legs in shorts, and, unless required for basic grooming, hated seeing myself in mirrors.
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But I did not need confidence to enter porn. I wasn’t courageous, either. Yes, I didn’t have a world of options, but also when you think so little of yourself, the judgment of others is rarely worse. And, if porn companies were willing to hire me, I was willing to work. Pride was also a luxury I couldn’t afford. So, I clung to that economic ladder—a desperate attempt at financial stability, with all the foresight of a naïve 18-year-old.
People like me, with purely financial interests and a lack of sexual experience, usually didn’t make it past the first year. It is a predatory business that economized my inexperienced youth; my cut was small to begin with in my “teen” years, and what value you do have goes down quickly for aging women. We had a limited shelf life. Also, we grow up. We find options. We move on. As the money gets smaller in porn, the work, well, it gets harder.
An 18-year-old newbie is a preferred hire over a 23-year-old seasoned pro for slightly less obvious reasons—because by 23 the vocabulary includes learning how to say “no.” But also the work becomes more difficult with each passing month, pushing boundaries and extremes to stay relevant, and it’s harder than any outsider imagines, both physically and mentally.
There have always been performers with longevity and success, but they were often those who sought the industry out—either coming in as strippers, lifestyle swingers, or escorts looking to elevate their profiles and in turn their rate. As it turns out, fans given a choice will keep paying to see their favorite performers do all the sexy things they’re enamored with well past the industry’s sell-by date.
With over two consistent decades in front of the camera, Alana Evans is proud of her career, recalling her early days. For her, this type of work appealed to her natural inclinations. “I was a happy hippie swinger and my love for sex is what brought me here. Porn was exciting. I could have men and I could have women, and we were so like-minded once I started doing scenes that I never looked back,” she recalls.
Despite being chastised as a porn star-mom, discriminated against by banks and stigmatized as a sex worker, Evans says she’s never thought about leaving to do something else; if anything, these hardships inform her determination to stay put.
A founding member and now president of APAG, the adult industry’s first union, Evans has been an instrumental part of legitimizing sex work and advocating for future generations. Though she still enjoys filming videos and spends at least 40 hours a month webcamming, it’s her passion for the adult industry on and off-camera that makes the thought of leaving incomprehensible. “I’m not going to leave the business because people need me, and maybe that’s also why I’m here,” explains Evans. “We’re in the middle of a war on porn and people will use that as ammo. It’s unfair. We’re good people. We’re good moms, and it’s used as a weapon. When someone gets arrested or is a drug addict and they complete jail time or treatment, guess what? They get their kids back, but if you were a porn star years ago, oh no, you don’t deserve to have custody of your kids. It’s things like that that infuriate me and probably why I’ll never go anywhere.”
But for most of us, three to five years was considered a lengthy career for any performer, especially women. However, changes in the industry like social media and monthly fan-donation sites like OnlyFans now mean women have more control over their jobs. This direct contact with their audience has translated into longer-lasting careers, dictated by the women and their fans. It turns out mainstream porn producers were wrong—the money is still there. Maybe 50-year-old pornographers in Van Nuys and Santa Monica think they need new 18-year-olds, but fans will keep paying for the performers they know longer than most ever imagined.
Most of us who entered the industry for money saw it as a capitalization on our youth to be enjoyed or tolerated while pulling in the money. Some of my peers are now among those who have continued to film hardcore sex scenes for decades.
Thirty years after starting out, Brittany Andrews is still cashing in, performing on camera and in high demand from fans that can’t get enough of her—a concept she hadn’t counted on in those early days of her career.
“I knew I wouldn’t be in front of the camera forever but that was before the word MILF existed. I had my studio, my internet company, I was producing, directing, and licensing my own content,” explains Andrews, who was a decade ahead of the times; a content creator before the term had been coined. The money never stopped coming in and though she is now close to 50, she never stopped.
At this stage in her life, Andrews never expected to still be in front of the camera. It was unheard of when she entered the adult industry: “Now you have older women presenting their best selves, showing their sexuality. You have MILFs who are getting older in front of the camera. They have millions of followers on Instagram and that’s not going away just because they turn 52.”
Through her work in the adult industry, Andrews wants to change our perspective about age and women’s sexuality; to push for a more open-minded culture through porn’s latest trends.
“I want to change what it looks like. What happens in the adult industry affects all of my civilian girlfriends as well,” says Andrews, adding, “I’m going to do it for as long as I fucking want to—as long people are willing to pay for what I’m doing and I’m still enjoying it. I own my own business and no one can tell me what to do, so if I want to go out there and shake my granny ass until I’m 70 I’m going to do it.”
Closing in on 15 years as an active performer, Misty Stone’s accomplishments were hard-won. She wasn’t afforded the same privileges her counterparts enjoyed as white women in an industry that more or less embraced racism, toying with ethnic taboos under the guise of “marketing.”
Stone entered the business, like so many others who sought it out. “I don’t want to say I was promiscuous, but I was already stripping and in that type of lifestyle. I didn’t have any other goals. I started dancing and then doing adult movies,” shares Stone.
Her passion was acting—performing for an audience, whether that’s porn, mainstream films, or on a stage. “I was ecstatic the first time I was on a stage; it was an adrenaline high. If I had to pick one thing to do for the rest of my life, it would be acting,” says Stone, who also dabbles in theater. “It’s nice to have a family that you’re working with every day. It’s the same thing as porn—I’m still acting, I’m just acting with a dick in my mouth.”
Stone glosses over some of the constraints she faced in her earlier porn years—challenges that made her continued success more difficult to sustain. “Racism in the industry? Not anymore because I have so much seniority,” says Stone, pointing out that for as much as her work environment has changed, the home front hasn’t. “Back in the day, all the time baby, but now nobody will fuck with me. Even the people who were racist, who didn’t like me, who treated me like shit when I was younger, they kiss my ass now. It’s interesting. I don’t experience it in the industry at all anymore but when I walk outside my door and out of my house sometimes… I don’t even want to go to the dentist out here.”
Interestingly, we have entered an era in porn where—without irony—a woman can consider her age an asset. These women who now make adult entertainment a lifelong career are seen to have started by capitalizing on the MILF fixation popularized by movies like American Pie.
Lisa Ann, arguably the world’s most famous MILF, used her career in porn to transition into pop-culture celebrity, turning fantasy sports and podcasting into her next career. Stripping led her to porn, like anyone following money and wanting more. “When I started dancing with my fake ID at 16 there was no way I was drinking at work, and when I was under 21 working at clubs no one was going to let me drink and it helped me form a really good habit,” recalls Ann. “When I was a young stripper, I knew that by midnight every girl I worked with would be wasted and I would make all the money that was left from midnight to 2 a.m. so I would lollygag from nine to midnight.”
Over the last decade, Lisa Ann’s popularity has soared but so did the chaos—from lawsuits to cyberbullying, and it took a toll both mentally and financially.
“By 2016, I had spent a large part of my savings going to court, trying to protect myself. I was a shut-in in 2016. I took that year and thought about it,” she remembers. “In 2018, I resurfaced and did 15 months straight with no breaks and was able to recoup what took me probably 20 years to save. I wanted to enjoy doing sports. My plan was to leave the business and do sports radio full-time.”
Though Lisa Ann credits her porn career for her growth into a healthier, more balanced person, it wasn’t the lifestyle she wanted. Neither was stripping. Staying in the public eye, maintaining her persona, Lisa Ann hopes to show younger generations of performers what is possible,
“So many people when they first meet me are like, ‘I never expected you to be like this,’ and I’m like, ‘Of course you didn’t. You never saw me interact in anything other than fishnets,’” she says. “People have lives outside of the business that don’t get acknowledged enough and that is what dehumanizes us.”
Yes, grown-up women make porn past their thirties. One more small change in an industry that doesn’t get enough credit in the era of #MeToo, sex-worker rights, consent and so-called “cancel culture” is relearning how to fight back by showing something more realistic: full adult women, aging with grace, high libidos and fat bank accounts, because as it turns out the money is still there too.
