So, you’re thinking about becoming a porn star. Your name in magazines and across websites with fans around the world jerking off to the thought of your face, or rather your whole naked body. It sounds simple enough, right? You fuck or get fucked and make a paycheck! If only that was everything!

Being a porn star isn’t just making the occasional sex tape and then making enough money to live in a mansion. If that were the case, the Kardashians wouldn’t need their daddy’s money to be rich. Being a successful performer is difficult and requires different things for males versus females. Each gender has their own challenges and it’s not always what you might think. Regardless of the gender, a lot of a performer’s success relies on marketing themselves, creating a constant stream of new content, and having a good level of chemistry with their onscreen partners.

For females, there are challenges with being enough, as a whole. Adventurous enough, sexy enough, likeable or friendly enough, and marketable enough. The sexiest woman in the world might be a total bitch, so no one wants to work with her or create content with her. It ends up being about creating an on-stage persona that is likeable with both fans and other performers.

With men, you need to be even more marketable than women. You also need to make your partners feel comfortable and sexy to create that chemistry without being overbearing. While the market for sex and porn is becoming more widely enjoyed by women, the biggest market of people that pay to watch porn is still men, and most men don’t care about seeing other men in porn. When they do see other men, they want to see the average male. They don’t want unrealistically attractive men, then want someone who seems average to make them feel like they have a change with the female performers, while still being handsome enough to not detract from the scene.

The physical challenges for male pornstars are also very different to female performers. Female performers often do extremely athletic things with their body and orifices; for men, the challenge lies less in the athleticism (although they must be extremely fit in order to hold the positions expected of them) and moreso lies in keeping extreme control of their erection and orgasm. This is why there are such a small number of men in the porn industry - it's one thing to maintain and control an orgasm, and a whole other thing to do this in front of a room of total strangers. If a male performer struggles to maintain an erection then they may choose to inject viagra into their penis to create a reliable performance, and many people are too squeamish to do this!

It's a fine line to walk and it takes a very particular type of personality, especially for men, to be successful in the porn industry. It’s not impossible and you should absolutely try it, if that’s what you want to do, but it is never just smash and dash. Be prepared to work your ass off if you plan to make a career out of it.