ポルノはつらいよ（米国編） - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

Louis Theroux*1 “How the internet killed porn” http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/05/how-internet-killed-porn

最近日本のAV30年史というのを読んで面白く感じたのだが*2、上掲の記事*3で描かれた米国のAV産業の現状は危機的である。

For years the porn industry was dominated by an anarchic anything-goes attitude to sex. Directors competed to see who could stage the more outrageous stunts, pushing the performers to the limit of what their bodies could take. The scenes could be hard to watch, as I discovered for myself when I visited sets for a book I was writing in 2004. The sex acts seemed to owe more to reality shows where people eat live worms and pig vomit than anything conventionally erotic.
But some time around 2007, the "business of X" started going into a commercial tailspin. The arrival of free YouTube-style porn sites meant that consumers could download pirated scenes from the vast backlog of old content for free. The phenomenon of DIY amateur sex – part-timers uploading their videos on sites such as clips4sale – also put a dent in the professionals' pay cheques.
Suddenly an industry that was a byword for easy money, raking in billions by exploiting the anonymity of point-and-click purchasing, was fighting for its life.
Making the problems of "adult" even worse was that where consumers might feel enough loyalty to, say, Radiohead to buy their latest release rather than download it illegally, porn users don't have the same feelings about the Dirty Debutantes series. In essence, as with every other media evolution of the last 30 years, from VHS to DVDs to the birth of the internet, porn was once again leading the way, only this time into obsolescence.
And as goes the industry, so go the performers. It's well known that many of them come into porn looking for validation, fleeing lives of damage and abuse. They then sign up to a lifestyle that inflicts stress and illness, not to mention embarrassment, on its young foot soldiers, while offering nothing in the way of pensions and health insurance. Now they find themselves out of work, looking for a Plan B, when the only experience on their resumé is having sex for cash.
On the business side, the porn industry has been desperately trying to adapt. Partly this has been a simple case of cutting back massively. In the early 2000s, a typical issue of the industry bible, the monthly Adult Video News, might have contained hundreds of reviews of new releases. One recent example had just 14. Numerous companies have gone out of business.

何と言っても、インターネットの発展、特にYouTubeスタイルの映像投稿サイトの出現が決定的だった。これによって、わざわざ金を払ってDVDを買う人がめっきり減ってしまったのだ*4。

It's an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by "hooking on the side". It's also called "doing privates", as in private bookings. The official industry line is that it's dangerous (because clients aren't tested the way performers are) and irresponsible (because the women could then infect the closed community of professional performers). But the women can make far more money having sex behind closed doors than doing it on film and, in fact, the practice is widespread. For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Male performers do not have the same options. For a tiny subsection of top talent, there is still a regular pay cheque, albeit a shrinking one. But work has dried up for many of the journeyman-performers in the lower ranks and there is a great deal of anxiety across the board.

多くのAV女優にとって、AVはオフ･カメラのセックス、つまり「売春」のための「広告」になっている。しかし男優にはそのような途もない。
Theroux氏は（日本での動向とは逆に）ハードコアには殆ど将来性がないという。AV業界の生き残りの戦略のひとつは「「質」への逃避（flight into "quality"）」である。「映画的体験のようなもの（something like a cinematic experience）」を提供すること。つまり生き残るためには映像作品としてのクォリティを目指さなければならないのだ。或いは暴力を抑制した「女性指向（female-oriented）」の作品、或いは人気TV番組やヒット映画のパロディ。
そういえば、ポール・トーマス・アンダーソンの『ブギー・ナイツ』*5は〈ポルノ映画〉からAVへの過渡期を描いた作品だった。