LAS VEGAS – CNBC, which clearly knows a lot about things businesses try to keep secret, has revealed another stunner: In the oft-maligned porn industry, the real “dirty secret” is how little people are paid to do their jobs.
In providing its breakdown of who in porn gets paid how much for doing what to whom, CNBC ripped the lid off a perverse Pandora’s box. As anybody who knows anything about the business world will tell you it’s almost unheard of for people who do all the work to get paid less than those from whom they take orders and direction.
For example, at software companies it’s obviously the norm to pay coders and developers just as much (if not more!) than sales representatives and senior management, just as we all expect the fry cook at the McDonald’s up the street to earn at least 75 percent to 80 percent as much as Steve Easterbrook.
Knowing it’s traditional, highly American and completely financially sound to pay each worker as much as a company can reasonably afford to pay them, why would companies that create and distribute pornography buck this unarguably sensible approach to business?
The answer is obvious: Porn producers, invariably, are greedy, selfish profiteers who hate the working class and eat human flesh whenever they get the chance. As CNBC’s Chris Morris rightly noted in his extremely objective and meticulously researched piece, porn “is an industry that regularly chews up and spits out performers.”
To most readers, this probably sounds like a colorful turn of phrase, but make no mistake: Morris’s claim about cannibalism in the porn industry is absolutely and literally true, especially in Germany and certain parts of Montreal.
Now, one might reasonably conclude this makes cannibalism the porn industry’s dirtiest secret, but eating people isn’t so much “dirty” as it is culturally taboo — as well as thoroughly dissatisfying from a culinary perspective. Among other things, in the sort of establishments that offer people as a menu item, presentation is almost always an afterthought and the servers tend to be somewhat less than affable. Plus, while the idea of being eaten by one’s boss is far from pleasant, paying someone a measly $400 to handle sound on a porn set is just downright disrespectful.
The truly incredible thing about the porn industry’s big secret concerning compensation is that prior to the CNBC article, it was such a well-kept secret that the only people who knew anything about it prior to the publication of Morris’s piece were studio owners, managers, producers, performers, talent agents, crew members, production assistants, gophers, makeup artists, mopes and porn fans.
Literally everybody else was completely in the dark about the porn industry’s low-compensation secret — except, I suppose, the anti-porn crusaders who regularly decry the industry’s exploitative ways, the IRS, the hundreds of attorneys who represent various elements of the porn industry, owners of certain legal brothels in Nevada and everyone who has ever considered working in porn but decided not to once they learned about the pay scale.
Other than those few people, however, nobody knew how little people working in porn earn, because nobody had ever written an article like Morris’s — well, OK, except maybe this woman, this woman, this dude and various users on a few obscure discussion forums where the subject has been discussed.
No matter how secret it once was, now the porn industry’s wage scale is out there in the open for all to see — and believe me, things are going to change for the better, just as assuredly as you recently made a killing by aggressively investing in FitBit and Alcoa.
