Daniel sent us this one — and it's a two-parter, really. First, he's asking about the actual prevalence of coercion and abuse in the pornography industry, behind the scenes. Not the moral argument against porn as a category, but the labor conditions. How bad is it really? And second, the regulatory question — is a properly regulated, viable pornography industry even possible, or is that a fantasy? And specifically, how have legislators, especially in California where so much of this is concentrated, actually tried to engage with an industry where the whole idea of a back office maintaining paperwork seems almost absurd. It's a serious question dressed as a curious one.
And the first thing to say is that the numbers problem is real — the sense that there must be hundreds of thousands of performers. The actual figure, depending on how you count, is likely somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand active performers in the U.at any given time, and that's probably generous. The concentration effect is enormous. A tiny number of people produce a vast amount of content.
Which itself creates a kind of pressure. If you're one of a few thousand people generating what millions consume, the economics of churn are brutal.
And that churn is where a lot of the coercion stories start. Not always the overt kind — the gun-to-the-head trafficking scenario — but the structural kind. The contract that turns out to be different from what was discussed. The scene that expands beyond what was agreed to. The payment that never arrives. The producer who controls the only distribution channel you have access to.
The soft coercion of having no good options.
There was a major piece in the Guardian a few years back — early twenty twenty-three — where they interviewed a number of former performers, and the through-line was striking. Multiple people described showing up for what they thought was a solo scene and finding a male performer there, or being told mid-shoot that the terms had changed. One performer, and I'm paraphrasing here, said the choice becomes: either you do it, or you don't get paid, and you may not get booked again, and you still had to get there and you still have rent.
The coercion is built into the power asymmetry. And that's before you get to the truly criminal end of things.
And the criminal end is not trivial. The New York Times had extensive reporting in early twenty twenty-four on the lawsuits against Pornhub's parent company, Aylo — formerly MindGeek — specifically around trafficking and non-consensual content. The lawsuits alleged that the company knowingly profited from videos depicting trafficking victims, including minors, and that the moderation systems were essentially performative.
There's a phrase that does a lot of work — "essentially performative.
The plaintiffs included women who had been trafficked by the production company GirlsDoPorn, which was a landmark criminal case — the operators were convicted on federal sex trafficking charges in twenty nineteen and twenty-twenty. But the lawsuits argued that the platform continued to host and monetize those videos even after the convictions, and that the verification systems were inadequate for years.
Let's put a pin in the scale of the problem. We're not talking about a few bad actors at the fringe. We're talking about systematic issues that reached the largest platform in the world.
And I think this is where the thoughtful ex-performer accounts Daniel mentioned become relevant. Because a number of the people who've spoken out — and they are often surprisingly articulate about the structural problems — don't describe themselves as victims in a simple sense. They describe an industry that takes people who are often young, often financially precarious, and places them in situations where the boundary between consent and compliance gets blurry fast.
The "surprisingly thoughtful" thing is interesting. I think there's a stereotype that people who work in porn are somehow not reflective about it. But if you've been through a system that extracts value from your body and image, you tend to develop a pretty sharp analysis of how power works in that system.
And some of the most cogent critiques of the industry come from people who don't oppose pornography morally — they oppose how it's currently produced. They're making a labor argument, not a moral one.
Which brings us to the second part of the prompt. Is a properly regulated industry possible? Or is the nature of the thing such that regulation will always be a kind of theater?
This is the core tension. And I want to approach it by looking at what's actually been tried, particularly in California, because that's where the policy rubber meets the road.
California's the obvious laboratory. Los Angeles County alone accounts for something like ninety percent of U.adult film production, at least traditionally. Before the OnlyFans decentralization, anyway.
And the most notable regulatory attempt was Measure B in twenty twelve — Los Angeles County's ballot initiative requiring condom use on adult film sets. It passed with about fifty-seven percent of the vote. And then in twenty sixteen, there was Proposition Sixty, a statewide measure that also mandated condoms and added provisions allowing any California resident to sue producers for violations.
Which failed, fifty-four percent to forty-six. And that's where the story gets interesting. Proposition Sixty was opposed by both major political parties, by the state Democratic and Republican parties, and — crucially — by a coalition of adult performers themselves.
The people it was supposedly protecting.
The performers argued it would make their work more dangerous, not less. Their logic was: if you create a private right of action where anyone can sue, you're essentially inviting harassment. Performers would have their legal names exposed. Producers would go further underground. And the condom mandate, they argued, ignored the reality that the industry already had a testing protocol — PASS, the Performer Availability Screening Services system — which required STI testing every fourteen days.
The performers were saying: we have a system, it's not perfect, but this law would break it without replacing it with anything workable.
That was the view that won. The ACLU opposed Proposition Sixty. The California Medical Association opposed it. It was a rare case where the ostensibly pro-regulation position lost because the regulated population said, essentially, this is worse.
Which is a pattern you see in sex work regulation more broadly. The people who do the work often oppose the laws that are supposedly designed to help them.
That pattern is worth examining, because it gets at what "proper regulation" would actually require. If you talk to performers and advocates who want reform, they tend to name a few specific things. One, enforceable contracts with clear scope-of-work provisions. Two, a real labor board or ombudsman that can adjudicate disputes without requiring performers to out themselves publicly. Three, age verification and consent verification that's actually robust, with real auditing. Four, anti-trafficking enforcement that targets producers and platforms, not performers.
Five, I assume, some kind of portability of reputation or credits — so that a performer isn't tied to one producer or one platform.
The economic coercion piece. If you can't take your body of work and your reputation to another studio or platform, you have no leverage.
You've described a fairly standard labor regulatory framework. Contracts, dispute resolution, safety standards, portability. These are not exotic ideas. They exist in construction, in food service, in nursing.
Yet almost none of them exist in adult film production in the United States. And the question is why.
I suspect the answer starts with the obvious: nobody wants to be the senator who wrote the Porn Workplace Safety Act.
The political toxicity is real. But there's a deeper problem. The industry itself has been shaped by legal ambiguity in ways that make regulation genuinely difficult. For decades, the core legal question was whether making pornography was even a lawful activity — obscenity laws, the Miller test, all of that. The industry grew up in the shadows of that ambiguity.
An industry that grows in the shadows develops shadow-shaped institutions.
When the law might declare your entire business model illegal, you don't invest in compliance infrastructure. You don't build HR departments. You don't create paper trails. You build an industry that can disappear and reappear.
The back office maintaining paperwork that Daniel mentioned — it seems absurd precisely because the industry was built to not have one.
And that's the legacy that any regulatory effort has to contend with. You're not regulating a normal industry that just needs some safety standards. You're trying to formalize something that was structurally informal for generations.
Let's talk about what formalization has actually happened. The paperwork that does exist.
The main one is the twenty-two fifty-seven regulations — the federal record-keeping requirements under Section twenty-two fifty-seven of Title eighteen. Producers are required to maintain records verifying the age and identity of every performer, and those records have to be available for inspection. This has been law since nineteen eighty-eight, but enforcement has been sporadic at best.
The records are supposed to include what, exactly?
Government-issued photo ID, a record of the date and location of production, and a depiction of the performer that allows comparison. The idea is that if there's ever a question about whether someone was underage or coerced, there's a paper trail.
In practice, the system relies on third-party custodians who maintain the records on behalf of producers. The largest is a company called TMS, which stands for something I won't try to pronounce. But the problem is that these custodians are paid by the producers they're supposed to be holding accountable. And there have been multiple documented cases where records were missing, incomplete, or falsified.
It's self-regulation with a government stamp.
And the inspection mechanism is the FBI or other federal agencies, who have to physically go to the custodian's office. There's no real-time verification. There's no audit system. It's a filing cabinet that sometimes contains what it's supposed to contain.
This is the system that's supposed to prevent trafficking and underage performers.
It's better than nothing, which is a very low bar. The California state-level efforts have been more creative in some ways. AB fifteen seventy-six, which was proposed in twenty nineteen, would have required condoms and regular STI testing, and would have established a state-mandated training program for producers on workplace safety. It also would have required producers to post a bond or pay into a fund to cover potential health and safety violations.
What happened to it?
It didn't pass. Opposition from industry groups, free speech organizations, and again, a split among performers themselves. Some supported it, some opposed it fiercely. The bill's author, Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, framed it as basic workplace safety — "a workplace is a workplace" was her line. The opposition framed it as government overreach into consensual adult activity.
Both framings have some truth to them, which is what makes this hard.
That's what makes it hard. If you treat adult film sets exactly like construction sites, you ignore the specific privacy and stigma concerns that make performers vulnerable in ways construction workers aren't. If you treat them as a special category that can't be regulated, you abandon performers to whatever the market does to them.
Where does the middle path lead? What would a viable regulatory framework actually look like if someone had the political will to build it?
I think you start with the performer-led reform proposals. A few years ago, there was a group of current and former performers who put together something they called the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee framework. It's not law, it's a set of principles. But it's the closest thing to a performer-written regulatory proposal that exists.
What's in it?
First, a third-party consent verification system — meaning before any shoot, an independent entity confirms that the performer has consented to the specific acts, the specific partners, the specific distribution channels, and the compensation. That verification happens separately from the producer, so there's no pressure.
Like a notary for consent.
That's not a bad way to put it. Second, a dispute resolution mechanism that doesn't require going to court. Arbitration, essentially, but with teeth — binding decisions, the ability to levy fines, and crucially, anonymity protections for the performer. Third, standardized contracts with plain-language summaries. Fourth, a producer licensing system — if you want to produce adult content commercially, you need a license, and the license is revocable.
The objection to all of this, I assume, is that it would create a two-tier system. The licensed producers would follow the rules, and the unlicensed ones would just go underground or offshore, and the performers who are most vulnerable would end up in the unregulated tier.
That is the central problem with any licensing regime in an industry where the barriers to entry are essentially zero now. Anyone with a phone can produce content. The old studio system, for all its problems, was at least a system — there were physical locations, known producers, distribution channels you could monitor. The decentralization has made the worst actors harder to find, not easier.
OnlyFans and similar platforms have been pitched as a solution to this — performers control their own content, set their own boundaries, keep the money. But I assume the reality is more complicated.
On paper, the platform model solves several problems. No producer middleman, no set you have to show up to, no coercion from a director. The performer is the producer. And for many people, especially those with established audiences, it's empowering. They make more money, they have more control, they don't have to do anything they don't want to do.
The platform model introduces new problems. The algorithmic pressure to produce more, to go further, to compete with an endless feed of content — that's a different kind of coercion, but it's still coercion. The platforms take a cut, typically twenty percent, and they can change their terms at any time. And the verification problems don't go away — they just get pushed onto the platform, which has its own incentives to verify as little as possible.
Because every verified user is a revenue stream.
And if you make verification too burdensome, creators go to a different platform. So there's a race to the bottom on compliance.
The platform model redistributes power but doesn't necessarily solve the structural problems. It just changes who holds the leverage.
Which brings us back to the fundamental question: is a properly regulated industry possible? I think the honest answer is that it's possible in theory but faces obstacles that no other industry faces. The stigma, the legal ambiguity, the decentralization, the political toxicity — each of these alone would be a challenge. Together, they're close to insurmountable.
And I think the reason for optimism, if there is any, is that the conversation has shifted. Ten years ago, the mainstream position was basically: porn exists, nobody wants to talk about it, don't regulate it, don't acknowledge it, just pretend it's not there. Now, you have actual policy debates, you have performer advocacy organizations, you have journalists doing serious investigations into labor conditions, you have lawsuits that are forcing platforms to change their practices.
The Pornhub lawsuits resulted in actual changes, didn't they?
After the New York Times investigation and the lawsuits, Visa and Mastercard cut ties with Pornhub for a period. The site removed millions of unverified videos — something like eighty percent of its content — and implemented a more stringent verification system. Now, whether that system is adequate is a separate question, but the fact that the pressure produced changes is significant.
The fact that the pressure came from outside the political system is also significant. It wasn't Congress. It was civil lawsuits and payment processors.
Which is a pattern you see when formal regulation fails. Private actors — banks, payment processors, hosting companies — become the de facto regulators. And that has its own problems, because those actors aren't accountable to anyone. Mastercard doesn't have to hold hearings or publish findings. They just cut you off.
The unaccountable regulator is better than no regulator, but not by much.
It's fragile. A change in corporate policy, a new CEO, a shift in public attention — and the enforcement vanishes.
What would durable regulation look like? If you could design it from scratch, without worrying about political feasibility?
I'd start with the performer-led model and build out. Mandatory third-party consent verification before any commercial shoot, funded by a small levy on distribution platforms. A federal or state licensing system for commercial producers, with real enforcement capacity — inspectors who can show up, fines that hurt, license revocation that sticks. A labor board specifically for adult performers that handles disputes confidentially. And a portability requirement — performers own their likeness rights and can take them anywhere.
The portability piece feels crucial. It's the thing that would break the economic coercion.
If you can't be blacklisted, if you can't have your career ended by one bad interaction with one producer, the power dynamic shifts dramatically.
The objection to all of this, the free speech objection, is that regulation is a back door to prohibition. That the people pushing for workplace safety rules actually just want to make porn illegal, and they'll use any tool they can get.
That objection has a lot of historical evidence behind it. The anti-pornography movement has indeed used workplace safety, trafficking, and public health arguments as vehicles for what is fundamentally a moral crusade. And that history makes performers skeptical of anyone who shows up saying "we're here to help.
The boy who cried wolf, except the wolf is real and the boy is also real and they're different people but hard to tell apart.
That's exactly the problem. The people who care about labor conditions and the people who want to ban pornography entirely sometimes use the same language and support the same bills. Distinguishing between them requires a level of nuance that the political process is not great at.
Has any jurisdiction gotten this right? Anywhere in the world?
There are partial models. New Zealand decriminalized sex work in two thousand three, and while that's not the same as porn production, the regulatory framework has some transferable lessons. The key insight was: treat it as labor, regulate it through the labor ministry, not the criminal code, and have the regulated population at the table when rules are written.
Mixed but generally positive. A study by the University of Otago found that decriminalization improved working conditions and didn't increase the size of the industry. But enforcement is still patchy, and the stigma didn't disappear just because the law changed.
Stigma is the ghost in the machine here. Even if you get the regulations right, the stigma means performers won't report violations, producers can threaten exposure, and politicians won't want to be seen taking the issue seriously.
That's the thing that no regulatory framework can fully solve. You can't legislate stigma away. You can design systems that account for it — anonymous reporting, sealed records, confidentiality protections — but the underlying social fact remains.
Let me push back on the pessimism a little. The stigma around other stigmatized industries has shifted over time. Tattoo artists used to be viewed as disreputable; now tattooing is a regulated, licensed profession in most states, with health inspections and apprenticeship requirements. The stigma didn't vanish, but it became manageable enough to allow regulation.
Tattooing went from counterculture to regulated profession in about thirty years. The difference, I think, is that tattooing doesn't trigger the same moral and religious objections that pornography does. Nobody's church is organizing against tattoo parlors.
Some probably are, but point taken.
The structural parallel holds. Tattooing also had a problem with underground operators, with health risks, with a reputation for exploiting both workers and customers. And the solution was a combination of licensing, inspection, and industry professionalization. The tattoo artists themselves pushed for it, because they wanted to be taken seriously and they wanted the bad actors gone.
Which circles back to the performer advocacy groups. The push for regulation has to come from within, or at least be led by the people affected, or it gets dismissed as external moralizing.
That's happening, slowly. Groups like APAC, the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee, and individual advocates have been making the labor-rights case for years. The problem is that they're under-resourced and face constant harassment. It's hard to build a movement when your members are afraid to be publicly associated with it.
Where does that leave the answer to Daniel's question? Is a properly regulated industry a real possibility or an imaginary dream?
I think it's a real possibility in the long run, but only if several things happen that haven't happened yet. The industry has to professionalize further — and the platform era cuts both ways on that. The stigma has to diminish enough that politicians can engage without being destroyed. And the performer advocacy infrastructure has to get strong enough to be a real counterweight to both the producers and the prohibitionists.
In the meantime, what exists is a patchwork. Some producers follow the twenty-two fifty-seven rules scrupulously. Some platforms have decent verification. Some performers have enough leverage to set their own terms. But the system as a whole is not a system — it's a collection of individual choices made under varying degrees of pressure.
That's the thing the thoughtful ex-performers keep coming back to. The industry isn't monolithic. There are good actors and bad actors, ethical sets and exploitative ones. The problem is that there's no reliable way for a performer to know which one they're walking into, and no reliable recourse if they guess wrong.
The market for lemons, applied to labor conditions.
When buyers — or in this case, performers — can't distinguish quality before the transaction, the bad drives out the good. Ethical producers can't signal their ethics credibly, so they compete on price with exploitative ones, and the exploitative ones have lower costs.
The regulatory project, at its core, is about creating credible signals. A license that means something. A consent verification that's independent. A dispute process that actually works. The regulation isn't just punishment — it's information.
That's a much better way to frame it than "government oversight." It's about making the market work by making quality visible.
That framing might be more politically viable, too. "We're creating transparency and accountability" lands differently than "we're regulating pornography.
And you can see that framing in some of the more successful efforts. The age verification laws that have passed in several states — Louisiana, Utah, Arkansas — are framed as protecting minors, not regulating adult content per se. The content moderation requirements are framed as anti-trafficking, not anti-porn.
Though those laws have their own problems. The age verification laws in particular raise privacy concerns — you're essentially requiring people to submit government ID to access constitutionally protected speech.
That's the tension. The same tools that could verify consent could also create a registry of porn consumers. And the history of such registries is not great.
No, it's not. So every regulatory tool has to be evaluated for its dual-use potential. Can this be used to harass performers? Can this be used to out consumers? Can this be used to shut down speech that someone finds objectionable?
Which is a high bar. Most regulatory tools fail at least one of those tests. But that doesn't mean the project is hopeless — it means the design has to be careful.
Careful design is not what legislatures are known for.
It is not. Which is why the most promising models are probably not legislative at all, at least not primarily. Industry standards, collective bargaining, certification bodies — the kind of infrastructure that other creative industries built over decades.
The Screen Actors Guild for adult performers.
That's the idea. And there have been attempts. The Adult Performance Artists Guild was formed a few years ago and actually got recognition from the Department of Labor as a union. But organizing is hard when your workforce is dispersed, anonymous, and afraid of being publicly associated with the union.
When the employers can just move to another state or another country.
Or just go online, where there's no employer at all in the traditional sense.
We end up back at the platform problem. The traditional studio model had clear points of intervention — the set, the producer, the distributor. The platform model dissolves all of that, and the regulatory tools we have were designed for the old model.
That's the frontier. Figuring out how to regulate platforms without breaking what's good about them — the independence, the income, the control — while addressing what's bad about them — the algorithmic pressure, the verification gaps, the lack of recourse.
It sounds like the answer to whether a properly regulated industry is possible is "yes, but not with the tools we currently have, and not without a level of political will that doesn't currently exist.
That's about right. The regulatory imagination is there. The performer-led proposals exist. The legal frameworks from analogous industries are available. What's missing is the political coalition to make it happen, and the social conditions that would allow that coalition to form.
Which is a sobering conclusion but not a hopeless one. The conversation is further along than it was a decade ago. The lawsuits have forced real changes. The performer voices are louder and more organized. It's not nothing.
It's not nothing. And I think that's the note to end on. The industry as it exists today is far from what a properly regulated version would look like. The gap is large, and closing it will take decades. But the direction of travel, however slow, is toward more accountability, not less.
The coercion and abuse that Daniel asked about — the honest answer is that we don't have good prevalence data. The nature of the industry makes systematic research almost impossible. But the qualitative evidence, the testimony from people who've left, the court cases, the investigative journalism — it all points to a problem that is real, structural, and not limited to a few bad apples.
The structural nature of it is the key point. It's not that every producer is a predator. It's that the system is set up in a way that makes predation easy and accountability hard. And that's the definition of a regulatory failure.
Which is why the question of regulation isn't academic. It's the difference between an industry where exploitation is a bug and one where it's a feature.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the late Victorian period, a naturalist named John Arthur MacCulloch published a paper claiming that jellyfish in the Outer Hebrides could live indefinitely by reverting to their polyp stage when injured, a discovery he attributed to the German biologist August Weismann. In reality, Weismann had never studied Hebridean jellyfish, MacCulloch had misread a footnote in a translated monograph, and the species he described did not exist — he had been observing a common hydrozoan that had been mislabeled in a shipment from a collector in Oban.
So a man invented an immortal jellyfish because he couldn't read German footnotes.
The Outer Hebrides deserve better.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find us at myweirdprompts dot com. If you've got thoughts on this one, we'd love to hear them. Until next time.
