so when I was in LA I knew people in the porn industry, this was back in the mid-late 00s when the industry was still a valley thing you could make money off shoots, before it became a loss-leader for escorts and then dispersed to so many semipro bedrooms
anyway one of the guys was a casting agent, which I got to talking about what that involved, which totally he admitted that it was the Backroom Casting Couch thing where he\u2019d take the 19-year-old UNLV girls coming in and fuck them on camera and it was a dream job
(the actual Backroom Casting Couch is totally set-up, which means it\u2019s a fantasy that only someone already in the industry would know to think up. it also means it\u2019s a premise that\u2019s not much of an acting stretch for any given girl)
and it\u2019s not even that that was a corruption per se because \u201chow you look and act while having sex in a variety of positions\u201d really was the basis on which you were being evaluated for roles
but the thing that threw me was he was like \u201chonestly, my biggest value-add was giving her a chance to say no\u201d, like he\u2019d do the preliminaries and get the camera and drop trou and be like \u201ctime to put you through your paces\u201d
and she\u2019d freak out or hesitate like \u201cwell, I wanted to be a porn star, not have unprompted sex with someone I just met, filmed for people to see\u201d, this was like the 2000s height of \u201craunch culture\u201d, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey and Stoya as mainstream C-list
and he\u2019d be like \u201choney, if you have something to realize, this is the time to realize it rather than the first day on set when we\u2019ve got a house rental and a permit and a director and equipment rental and makeup people and male talent waiting on you\u201d
which is to say as skeezy as it sounds \u201cthe guy you have to fuck in his office\u201d was a replacement for \u201cthe producer there to abuse/manipulate/coke you up with $20,000 on the line\u201d and I think it might have been an improvement