It has been said that a sociologist is someone who, in a striptease club, studies the audience and not the stage. I have no means of studying those who look at porn sites, let alone studying the whole stage. The number of porn sites, according to Internet surveys, seems impossible to gauge. According to a 2003 Web survey, the number of such sites was said to be 260,000,000, but that seems an exaggeration—perhaps they’ve counted sites where Carroll Baker appears en déshabillé as being pornography. Choosing just one of them, perhaps the most visited, I saw 71 categories, each containing on average thousands of videos. Considering that the site is updated daily, though it’s possible to view previous material, we can reckon it contains 170,000 videos. From here we can gain access to another 21 sites, so I arrived at a figure of 3,570,000, taking into account repetitions, and that some sites are not large. This doesn’t get me to 260,000,000, and perhaps 3,000,000 is on the low side, but this is presumably the extent of the phenomenon.
Not having had the opportunity to visit 3,000,000 sites—ars longa, vita brevis—I went by an almost random sample and have made an observation that I cannot claim has scientific validity but which I myself find persuasive. Making it clear that I lingered only on the female faces—those of the men are irrelevant, since with men the camera tends to dwell on their reproductive equipment—I noted that most of the girls involved in these erotic games display a poor set of teeth when they open their mouth, which they do often, and not just to smile or groan with satisfaction. Generally the incisors are all right, but the canines are crooked and small, not to mention the irregular molars and the unsightly fillings on display.
The first thing Hollywood does when it launches a new actress is to get her teeth fixed. But the work costs a lot of money, as anyone going to a dentist in Bucharest is also aware. So a large proportion of the girls taking part in porn videos, who are often beautiful or at least attractive, come from a poor social background and don’t have the money for a dentist. I think they have little hope of making much from their services, since the statistics tell us that supply is high, so the money they earn cannot be astronomical: the Web tells me once again that the more popular girls can make up to $10,000 a month, though the season isn’t long and the real stars can be counted on the fingers of two hands. Perhaps they hope that by appearing on the computer screen some Hollywood magnate will notice them and take the trouble to fix their teeth. Or do they perhaps realize they won’t get to Hollywood with bad teeth and are resigned to playing erotic games in the minor leagues.
This tells us that the immense army of full-time fornicators comes from the sexual proletariat, and therefore the business of porn production is nothing other than a form of white slavery and an exploitation of casual labor without hope.
It’s important that this be said, since visitors to porn sites often get aroused at the thought that the girls taking part do what they do out of brazenness, impudence, enjoyment, or shamelessness, making them seem more desirable. Instead, they do it out of desperation, knowing that with those teeth there is no future, only an underpaid now.
2015