Porn stars share ‘dirty secrets’

WARNING: Graphic content

RAPE, abuse and exploitation are shockingly common in porn and many victims are "stuck in the industry", according to an eye-opening Reddit discussion.

An AskReddit thread on Friday invited porn stars to share the industry's "dirty secrets". But while some of the responses were humorous or stomach-churning, many were surprised at disturbing revelations. 

"Rape is more common than anyone wants to acknowledge and one of the things that made me quit and get intense therapy was the knowledge of how many rape scenes are real," wrote a user going by the handle Deepthroatdisposable.

"I experienced what was packaged as a 'rough sex' scene, I had bruising and tears and it was traumatising. I cried in the scene because my partner (who had his own issues to be fair) was too big for me and not acting his roughness. Our buyers enjoyed it, I was told."

The same user said there was "so much drug abuse" and "so many victims stuck in the industry". "You don't know right away but then you talk, or you watch in between filming and you just know, you hear the rumours," she wrote.

"Buyers don't want to think about it because it ruins the fantasy. But you have no idea what it does to you when you meet a very young guy glazed out of his poor mind on god knows what, needing drugs to get hard, and underneath it all you realise he's scared and ashamed.

"Or the women who do so many scenes but who barely see any money from it, kept poor because keeping them poor keeps them stuck in the industry."

She said a lot of people "work sick" and "fainting isn't uncommon", with "so many scenes where someone is hurling into a bucket off camera or running into the bathroom".

"The trends towards extremer and extremer acts is disturbing and makes me glad I am safe from it," she said. "It's worst in gay male and straight scenes. People have become normalised and desensitised to previous stuff, it's not enough for them, or it gives them the taste for more."

Another user going by the handle 17823908thrway said they weren't a porn star but had worked in the industry for more than 10 years, and the "dirtiest secret" was studios who "film, distribute and profit off of what is legitimately coercion and sexual abuse/exploitation".

"Often a young/relatively inexperienced actress who is new to the biz gets duped by a sleazy agent or books herself under the pretence that she is going to be doing a relatively innocuous straightforward scene," they wrote.

"In reality she gets there and gets absolutely brutalised for content that is very clearly marketed and made for men that f***ing hate women. The industry knows about this obviously but since it is by and large legitimised by consent and creators always have rank over performers, it looks the other way."

A user going by the name Francostacos shared her disturbing experience of working on a "cam" site. "A few times a week the 40-something year old guy who owned the place would pick a girl or two for a 'bonus'," she wrote.

"Basically you'd make 1.5-2X what you'd normally make that night. You just had to have sex with this scrawny, smelly, deformed Burt Reynolds looking guy on the couch in his office after work."

She said if the girls turned it down "management would receive a complaint about you expressing racist views on cam or something, and you'd be let go".

"There were a couple of other really creepy 'top level' guys that hung around, except they didn't offer a bonus, they'd pressure you and threaten cut your hours unless you had sex with them at random," Francostacos wrote.

One guy "was sick", liked to get rough and humiliate women, she added.

A user going by the name Doc-Psycho also had a disturbing cam site experience related to his ex-girlfriend. "One fan of hers' figured out where we lived and we didn't know how he knew until after," he wrote.

"He left her really sick notes on her door. One was the last straw for me. He pretty much promised he'd sneak in her house and make her rape fantasy come true. For two weeks I never left her side. I'd drive her to work and pick her up.

"One night she went out in my car. I'm sitting on the couch when I hear footsteps upstairs. Turns out (the) dude knew I was there and was watching our cars. When my car left he thought she was alone."

He said they got into a fight and the man was arrested.

"At this point I find out how this f**k figured out where my then GF lived," the user wrote. "It was the cam site owner's brother-in-law. Dude would sit in girls' cams he liked and pull up their info and find girls that lived nearby and try to hook up with them."