Being in the Adult Industry: Behind the Scenes
From TGPs to fan platforms: learning the business, discovering that behind the scenes does not mean anonymous, and dealing with the assumptions.
When I started in the adult industry, there was one thing I was sure of: I was in it for the money.
I was a struggling webmaster when I saw an advertisement about promoting adult websites. It explained how much more money you could make per click, and that was enough to get my attention. There was no grand plan to change the industry. I wanted to make a living, and this looked like an opportunity.
The advertisement did a better job of explaining the money than the work involved in earning it. Funny how that happens.
A career behind the screen
I started with TGPs, then moved through MGPs, blogs, tubes, clip sites, and eventually fan platforms. If you recognize that entire list, you've probably been around a while too.
That list makes it sound like an orderly career progression. At the time, I was mostly figuring things out as I went along.
Throughout all of it, I worked behind the scenes. I wasn't the person in front of the camera. I was working on the websites and the business around them.
Which, in my younger mind, also meant I could keep the whole thing separate from the rest of my life. Behind the scenes. Out of sight. No one could trace me.
Ha. That was optimistic.
The work was still work
There was a lot to learn, and some of it wasn't particularly easy to understand. Building webpages was one part of it. Understanding how to promote them, what made someone click, and whether any of that effort would actually pay off was another.
I was also young and easily distracted by the women I was putting on those pages. Probably not the most efficient approach to running a business, but I'm not going to rewrite my history to make myself sound more sophisticated than I was.
Staring at the material doesn't count as market research just because you have a browser open. Eventually, I had to pay more attention to whether the page worked than to who was on it.
Over time, I became more interested in understanding the business. What made someone click? What were they looking for? Why did something appeal to them when it did nothing for me?
That curiosity stayed with me. It's part of why I started FetishHouse. Some interests made immediate sense to me; others required me to stop assuming and start asking questions.
You still have to run a business
Unfortunately, some people never seem to move beyond the quick-cash stage. The platform changes, the pitch changes, but they're still looking for whatever they can get before moving on.
I understand wanting to make money. That's how I started. I still think a business should make money; otherwise, you've found yourself a fairly demanding hobby.
But you also have to deliver what you promised and deal with problems after you've been paid. That's the less exciting part. Nobody puts “answer difficult emails and fix your mistakes” in the advertisement, but it belongs there.
Experience taught me to take that work seriously. What took longer to understand was how little some people outside the industry cared about that distinction.
Behind the scenes doesn't mean anonymous
It was only a matter of time before I discovered that working out of view didn't make the job invisible.
The first time you cash a check from an adult platform that hasn't had the common sense to use a normal-sounding business name, the distinction becomes fairly clear. There you are, trying to go about your ordinary business, while the name on the check is doing its own little promotional campaign.
Then there are friends. Someone asks what you do for a living, you tell them the truth, and you notice the way they look at you change.
You haven't changed. You've given them one piece of information about your work. But suddenly that information seems to be doing a lot of work in their imagination.
And then there were relationships. Oh dear.
When your work becomes something to use against you
One girlfriend told me that if we ever had children and later separated, she would use my work in the adult industry against me.
We were talking about hypothetical children and a hypothetical separation, and my job was already being put aside as ammunition.
She became my ex not long afterwards.
I was still the same guy she'd chosen to be with. I could understand questions about my work. I could talk about concerns. But I wasn't interested in building a family with someone who was already considering how my job could be used against me.
Eventually, I ended up with someone who also worked behind the scenes in the industry. Part of the appeal was having that shared understanding. After having my work used against me, it mattered to be with someone who could recognize it as work.
Sorry, this isn't Fifty Shades of Grey
The assumptions weren't always disapproving. Sometimes they went enthusiastically in the other direction.
In my dating experience, there were women who seemed to think working in adult entertainment meant I must be a pervert, and others who appeared to be expecting their own Fifty Shades of Grey experience.
Unfortunately for the second group, I'm pretty vanilla.
I wasn't personally doing a tenth of the things I worked with professionally. Knowing how to promote something didn't mean I wanted to recreate it when I got home.
I suspect that left a few people rather bored. You could almost hear the question: “So... this is the adult industry?”
Well, this was me. Apparently, the promotional material had created some expectations I wasn't going to meet.
You still have to get to know the person
In my experience, people in the adult industry are often far more ordinary than outsiders expect. That includes the people in front of the camera. We have relationships, worries, preferences, and boundaries that you aren't going to discover by looking at the websites we work on.
And being vanilla isn't what makes me deserving of respect. Someone whose private interests are more adventurous deserves the same consideration. My point is that you can't know either way just from their job.
I've spent decades learning this business, and I'm still interested in the people and questions around it. I can talk about the work honestly now without pretending it's something else. That doesn't mean I've stopped noticing when someone hears “adult industry” and fills in the rest for themselves.
The irony is that learning about fetishes pushed me to ask more questions and make fewer assumptions. I'd appreciate the same curiosity from someone trying to understand me.
Ask me what I do. Ask me how I got into it. I'll tell you the truth, including the less impressive parts.
Just give me a chance to tell you who I am before you decide the job has already answered that.