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Park Prescriptions Are Gaining Steam as A Mainstream Medical Treatment


As a freelance writer, I’m one of the growing number of women who spends her day hunched in a near-constant state of anxiety over her desk. My life centers around deadlines, often breathlessly tight ones, and the constant hustle to keep myself afloat is taxing. It started to wear on me.

Wired and with an increasingly painful tension in my neck and shoulders, I recently found myself unable to sleep, a problem that triggered a snowball effect of other health issues: decreased attention span and difficulty concentrating, a weakened immune system, increased irritability.

Unsurprisingly, my doctor promptly diagnosed me with chronic stress. But I was surprised by my prescription: spend more time outside.

The Park Ranger Will See You Now

Park prescription programs—the official name for the Rx I was given to help treat my debilitating stress—may sound like the latest woo-woo wellness trend but they’re actually gaining steam among mainstream medical providers.

Here’s how it works: in lieu of a more traditional method of treating stress and anxiety, like meditation or therapy, a doctor might give you a referral to a local green space. “In the ideal clinical setting, doctors talk with patients about how far to walk, help them find a space to walk”—sometimes using a specific local trails program—“and set small goals, like going outside three times per week for a half hour per session,” says Kristin Anderson, M.D., a family physician in Missoula, Montana, and a member of the state’s Trails Rx program. That prescription goes right into your electronic medical record so your doctor can track your progress—just as you’d book a follow up appointment after being prescribed a new medication, your doctor would check in on how things are going, how you’re feeling, and whether your prescription needed any adjustment. “It’s really similar to how you prescribe medicine,” Anderson says. At follow-up appointments, doctors might measure things like BMI, blood pressure, or mental health outcomes in order to quantify results.

It’s important to note that nature prescriptions don’t mean medications are becoming irrelevant. “Medications and other therapies have very important roles in disease management,” Anderson says. Many conditions from depression to diabetes can’t be cured with self-care alone—if you need meds, you should take them. Prescribing time in nature is often about working in tandem with traditional drugs, Anderson says. “Nature prescriptions highlight the cross between the importance of medical management and behavior change. When that synergy occurs, patients are more likely to see lasting benefits and meaningful results.”

The science behind a park prescription is legit. Hundreds of studies link time outside to better health outcomes: lower blood pressure and heart rate, better immune system function, lower stress. Two hours spent outside a week is all you need to reap the benefits, according to a 2019 study from Scientific Reports. Doctors are so convinced by the healing power of Mother Nature that park prescriptions are gaining traction as recognized medical treatments for a range of conditions: heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol, diabetes, chronic stress, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and even PTSD.

While a growing body of research (and number of#forestbathing posts on Instagram) suggests simply going for a walk in the park can do your brain and body good, many nature Rx programs are more structured. “There’s a vast array of different types of programming across the country, but they all have one thing in common: a referral from the health care side, and a partner on the public lands system side that can connect with the patient and provide the actual prescription,” says Diane Medley, director of the Institute at the Golden Gate. One program in California, Stay Healthy in Nature Everyday (SHINE) busses groups of patients, doctors and naturalists to local parks each month for a dose of nature and social connection. Other programs include guided walks with a park ranger, trailhead displays, or a tie-in to the national Walk with a Doc program where people can ask questions and learn about health from a local physician.





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L'Oréal Model Amena Khan Is the First to Wear a Hijab in a Mainstream Hair Ad


From banning Photoshop to casting diverse faces and launching inclusive shade ranges, beauty brands are shifting the way they speak to shoppers. They’re finally trying to speak to all of us. While some folks have questioned the motivation behind the diversification of beauty campaigns—especially after brands tried capitalizing on the success of what’s being called “The Fenty Effect”—this latest ad gets it right. For its new Elvive campaign, L’Oréal Paris UK brought on British beauty blogger Amena Khan as one of its new faces.

Even in a time when exciting, unique women are scoring beauty contracts left and right—shout-out to Maye Musk and Ayesha Curry—the decision to cast Khan, who wears a headscarf, isn’t only history-making (she’s the first hijab-wearing woman to be featured in a major mainstream hair ad), it’s also a step toward correcting a common misconception.

“How many brands are doing things like this? Not many. They’re literally putting a girl in a headscarf—whose hair you can’t see—in a hair campaign. Because what they’re really valuing through the campaign is the voices that we have,” Khan told British Vogue this week. “You have to wonder—why is it presumed that women who don’t show their hair don’t look after it? The opposite of that would be that everyone that does show their hair only looks after it for the sake of showing it to others. And that mind-set strips us of our autonomy and our sense of independence. Hair is a big part of self-care.”

In an industry where the definition of what it means to be beautiful has been markedly thin, this is a huge deal. Not only is L’Oréal saying to women and girls who wear hijab that they’re seen—the theme of the campaign is self-worth over self-doubt—but that how they are seen doesn’t define who they are. As Khan pointed out to Vogue, whether or not her hair is visible in public, how it looks and feels still matters to her: “For me, my hair is an extension of my femininity. I love styling my hair, I love putting products in it, and I love it to smell nice. It’s an expression of who I am.”

Related Stories:
–The Rise of the Plus-Size Face
–Sephora Cast Its Own Employees for Its Most Diverse Campaign Yet
–Glossier’s Inclusive New Campaign Is About More Than Soap and Lotion



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How Mainstream Porn Is Finally Making Room for Trans Performers


Grooby is one of the largest and most popular producers of transgender porn in the world. Since 1996, it’s been creating and marketing adult entertainment featuring trans women, starting with its flagship site, Shemale Yum, and followed by Ladyboy-Ladyboy, Black Shemale Hardcore, Shemale Pornstar, and over two dozen others. Since 1996, the company owned by Steven Grooby has been creating and marketing adult entertainment featuring trans women. It began with flagship site Shemale Yum, which was followed by Ladyboy-Ladyboy, Black Shemale Hardcore, Shemale Pornstar, and over two dozen others. But as awareness of trans issues has gained traction broadly, and small producers and outspoken activists within the porn industry have advocated for more respectful and realistic representation, Grooby was faced with a problem: Should it change its successful branding to reflect less derogatory terminology? If it took terms like “shemale” and “tranny” out of its site names, search terms, and film titles, would it lose its market share to other companies that were willing to keep using words that upset performers, but beckoned consumers?

“In terms of SEO, words like ‘shemale’ and ‘tranny’ are searched exponentially higher than other terms” for transgender content in porn, says Kristel Penn, Marketing and Editorial Director at Grooby. “Our product was reaching those looking for it without diluting the results of those looking for non-adult services.” But sensibilities were changing, and the pressure to abandon outdated and damaging terminology for transgender people was growing everywhere—but especially in the porn community.

And it was about time.

PHOTO: Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Trans activist and performer Venus Lux

Trans pornography has always been a small segment of the overall porn industry in America—Penn says “it has a minute market share in the adult industry overall”—but it’s always been popular within that niche. Viewership for the genre has increased steadily since the 1990s, and exploded in the past half decade. Searches for the word “transgender” have gone up by nearly 300 percent over the past three years on Pornhub alone, according to research the company compiled specifically for this article. And trans porn is bankable. In 2015, Adam Grayson of production company Evil Empire told IBT that trans porn was his most popular genre. “In terms of revenue per scene or movie? Hands down, without a question,” he said. “Nothing even touches it. And we sell it at a price premium…because we can get it.” Fans of trans erotica are extremely loyal, as there’s relatively little content available to them that fills their needs.

But despite the money that trans performers have made for producers, their work has been mired in cringe-worthy epithets, reductive stereotypes, and predictable (and often offensively non-representative) scenes for decades. Models had long been at the mercy of producers and marketers more concerned with making a buck than representing performers with dignity—part of the reason it’s been such a long, slow climb to respectability.

Transsexual performers were named on the so-called “Cambria List,” which discouraged the creation of pornography the included elements considered obscene by federal prosecutors back in 2001 (in anticipation of the conservative George W. Bush years). Also on the list? Bondage, interracial sex, and facial cumshots. But where most of these elements have become common in porn over the past sixteen years, trans porn remained somewhat sequestered in its own corner of the industry. There weren’t many producers who were willing to take the chance, and those who did were worried about pushing the envelope too far.

“There was this centralized model, where there’s [a few] porn companies that hire trans people, and they’re each run by one guy who decides how it’s supposed to look,” says Tobi Hill-Meyer, a trans-positive porn director and the editor of Nerve Endings, a collection of trans-centric erotic comics. “Everything becomes really cookie-cutter, because they make something and it works, and then they don’t want to do anything else.”

Hill-Meyer remembers the first time she got hired by a mainstream trans porn studio as a performer. She was to shoot a 30-minute masturbation scene. “They literally had me scripted out by the minute,” she recalls. “I didn’t get to make decisions about what would be erotic. Someone else made the decisions and told me what I should be doing. And of course, that someone else making the decision was following the direction of one of those twelve rich, white, cisgender guys who ran everything.”

These same decision-makers wanted to film what their viewers—other cisgender men—wanted to see trans women do. It may come as a surprise to some that the majority of pornography featuring trans women is consumed by cisgender men who identify as heterosexual. But it’s a truth well-known among porn industry insiders. Pornhub reports that men are 63 percent more likely to search for transgender-related pornography, and xHamster says a full 87.5 percent of their searches for the word “shemale” are from men. “There’s the basic general rule that mainstream porn is always marketed to men,” says Tobi Hill-Meyer. And what those male viewers have learned to expect from trans porn, it seems, is trans women with erect penises who penetrate their partners—whether that’s what most trans women want to do in their real lives or not.

In most mainstream trans porn, says RS, a queer, nonbinary, trans, femme porn performer, “It’s clear that the sex is not for [the performers]; it’s for someone else. It’s for the male gaze, it’s for that viewer who just wants to see these things.” Though viewership for trans female porn has been diversifying—Kristel Penn of Grooby reports that they’ve seen an influx of trans-identifying viewers, and Kelly Pierce says that she’s been gaining female cam viewers recently—most trans porn is still made by male directors or producers, with other men in mind.

Kelly Piece_transporn

PHOTO: @mrskellypierce

Kelly Pierce

“Men, when they see a beautiful trans woman and like what she’s got downstairs, they think that the trans woman thinks just like they do,” says Kelly Pierce, a former porn performer who now performs via webcam. “A lot of porn viewership likes trans women on top [penetrating a partner]. So they’re putting trans women into sexual activities that they might not normally do. You have to use your penis, for instance. But the majority of trans women don’t want their penises touched. The majority don’t want to do anything with their penis.”

And while it may be lucrative to make porn that plays into viewers’ fantasies, it can be detrimental for performers whose gender identity is tied up with body dysmorphia. Many trans women in the porn industry—and sex work more generally—enter the industry to fund their physical transitions. They plan to purchase breast implants, facial surgery, or sexual reassignment surgery—often referred to as “bottom surgery”—with their earnings. But that puts trans female performers into a bind: “I know a lot of trans women who are stuck with the duality of wanting to have bottom surgery,” says RS, “but not being able to because their source of income depends on them having [a penis].”

A lot of trans porn used to (and still does) revolve around the element of surprise. In many cases, the “downstairs,” as Kelly Pierce calls it, is revealed partway through the scene, and treated at first with horror…then as a taboo turn-on. “It’s erotic for everyone because there’s so much taboo,” says RS, “but that kind of situation can be extremely unfair for a trans feminine person. It often is. A lot of assault comes from that kind of setting.”

Violent assault isn’t just a scary campfire story for trans women, either. Although recent strides in transgender acceptance, like Laverne Cox’s advocacy, Caitlin Jenner’s headline-grabbing comments, and Amazon’s barrier-breaking drama Transparent have drawn public attention to transgender issues, they’ve also increased trans exposure to violence. Crimes against trans people—especially trans women of color—are at an all-time high in America. There were 22 reported homicides against transgender individuals in the United States in 2016—a record high. And so far 2017 has seen 18.

In such dire circumstances, some proponents of transgender rights hope that more responsible representation in adult entertainment could serve an educational purpose for the general public. “People are naturally ignorant when it comes to sexuality and gender identity, because there is a lack of education,” says Venus Lux, an outspoken trans activist and winner of the 2016 AVN Award for Transgender Performer of the Year. “It’s not like they encounter transgender people on the streets to be able to ask them questions.” That leaves many cisgender individuals with few options when they’re curious about transgenderism. If they search for the word “trans” online, they’re likely to find porn, which may be their first and sometimes only experience with trans people.

Performer and director Dana Vespoli, who works with TransSensual, a trans-positive production company, says that it’s not just about educating cisgender people: Many trans people are learning about themselves through porn, too. “I think about young people in parts of the United States like the South, the Midwest, that are realizing they’re trans,” says Vespoli. “If they’re going and accessing [porn], I want them to see themselves represented in a way that’s nuanced and shown in a positive light.”

Vespoli is far from the only pornographer who feels that way. After decades of being treated as little more than a sideshow, the trans porn genre is starting to demand more recognition and dignity—and making its own internal changes to get the ball rolling. A great example is the evolution of the Tranny Awards, an online competition that Grooby began in 2007. “At the time, there was a lack of trans representation at the major adult award shows,” says Penn. “It was meant to be an informal online competition,” but it was so well received that it quickly evolved into a one-night event at a nightclub, then into its current iteration as a three-day convention and stage show. But as the Tranny Awards gained renown, so did their unfortunate choice of monikers.

Miran_TEA_AltomicVisuals.jpg

PHOTO: Alan Tom/Altomic Visuals

Miran, accepting an award

PHOTO: Alan Tom/Altomic Visuals

Natalie Chen (R)

Potential sponsors were leery of attaching themselves to the word “tranny,” and activists vocally denounced the name. Performers from both the mainstream and indie sides of the porn industry agitated for the awards show that ostensibly was made to “honor” them to change its name to something that sounded honorable, rather than derogatory. In 2014, Grooby, at last, made the switch to “the Transgender Erotica Awards.”

By the time the TEAs were rebranded, the company had already been promoting properties with the words “shemale” and “ladyboy” for nearly two decades. But Grooby had seen the writing on the wall: Trans activists, porn performers, and even lots of people in the general public wanted change. So Grooby decided to start a rebranding process across many of its properties. “We do understand why this terminology has been an issue with folks and ultimately we want to do right by our performers and fans. Our intention has always been to show respect to our performers,” says Penn.

After years of careful planning, Grooby officially renamed its flagship site—formerly Shemale Yum—GroobyGirls.com on August 15, 2017. “The site has been around for twenty years and is our most established brand,” says Penn. It’s a huge move, and Grooby isn’t going to stop. “Our remaining sites and future DVDs will be rebranded in the months ahead,” Penn declares.

This dramatic move is only a part of a trend in adult entertainment toward treating transgender performers with more respect on camera, in marketing, and on red carpets. Back in 2013, for instance, the “Oscars of Porn”—the AVN Awards—first allowed trans performers to present and receive awards onstage during the annual awards ceremony, and to walk the red carpet beforehand.

Part of presenting trans performers with dignity means partnering them with more diverse scene partners. Trans people have just as many sexual orientations as cisgender people, but until the past few years, trans feminine performers were almost always paired with men in their scenes. There’s a growing body of trans porn content from a number of studios with similar pairings. “It’s blowing people’s minds,” says Lux, “because lesbian porn in that capacity is changing.”

Later this month, one of the industry’s leading production companies, Wicked Pictures, will release its star performer jessica drake’s showcase film, jessica drake Is Wicked, which will feature drake in a fourway all-female orgy with three trans partners. “We had a level of integration of trans [performers] within Wicked Pictures productions, which has never been done in its twenty-five-year history of operation,” says Venus Lux, who is one of the women in the scene. This film follows on the heels of Real Fucking Girls, a Grooby film about trans women in lesbian relationships from 2016. “The movie swept all three major adult award shows,” says Kristel Penn—a first for a transgender film.

PHOTO: Alan Tom/Altomic Visuals

The cast of ‘Real F*cking Girls’ (from left: Aubrey Kate, Mona Wales, Natassia Dreams, Kelli Lox) accepting the Best DVD Award at the Transgender Erotic Awards show.

Of course, trans women aren’t the only transgender folks that the general public could stand to learn more about through porn—there’s a growing field of trans male performers in the wings. Buck Angel, a trans advocate who rose to fame in the early 2000s has made porn for over a decade, pioneered sex toys for trans men, and traveled the world as an advocate for trans acceptance. His latest pornographic outing, Buck Angel Superstar, is a big-budget, dramatic feature film based on his life. Dana Vespoli, who directed it, is hopeful that Buck Angel Superstar will do well with female audiences—or any audience. “I want to shoot more and have more representation of FTM performers,” she says.

“Pornography reaches many people,” Angel says via e-mail. “[Trans people] have become more visible in porn, but I would say that this is more with trans women. Trans men still seem to be under-represented.”

Finding the audience for trans men in porn has been a sticking point for decades, but experimentation is finally starting to get under way. “Sometimes you have to see something visually before you imagine it as an option for yourself—and how better to do that than show big-name gay porn stars having sex with trans men and loving it?” says Cyd St. Vincent, founder of the company Bonus Hole Boys, which St. Vincent describes as “the first gay porn website featuring trans guys.” The formula seems to be working. “Hundreds of people write to me telling me they didn’t even know trans men existed, and that our porn was their first exposure!”

And, though the focus on gay men as an audience is gaining traction, trans male performer Viktor Belmont reports, “I’m a gay porn performer, but my fan base is women.” St. Vincent, too, says, “The majority of our fans are gay men…but we have a huge following of women, as well.”

It seems that trans men in porn appeal to multiple demographics, many of whom aren’t even being marketed to yet. According to Pornhub, there’s a wide-open audience that’s just starting to consider the possibilities, particularly when it comes to trans men.

BuckAngel_Getty

PHOTO: Chris Weeks/Getty Images

Buck Angel

“The number one [transgender]-related search is ‘FTM’ (female to male)” by a large margin, according to Pornhub’s findings. The site hosts a vast amount of content featuring trans women (much of it labeled “shemale,” unfortunately), but there’s simply less trans male content to go around, and it seems that people are hungry to find more.

But porn featuring trans men is susceptible to the same tropes and stagnation as the trans female porn that’s been on the market for decades. “People really like to cast trans men in a sort of ‘genital reveal’ sort of way that can feel sort of trope-y,” says Viktor Belmont. “I would never yuck anyone’s yum, but in a porn if that’s the only storyline going on, it can feel a little repetitive and stale.”

Luckily, there’s a robust group of small, independent porn companies creating work that depicts trans people in myriad ways that reflect their authentic desires and sexualities—and they’ve been doing it for a while. The inclusivity and authenticity of indie, queer, feminist porn has long been an incubator for change within the more mainstream side of the industry, especially when it comes to trans representation. Tobi Hill-Meyer, for instance, gained traction nearly a decade ago as the first visibly transgender woman to perform for Crash Pad Series, Pink & White Productions’ flagship series, which hires performers of many gender identities. Trouble Films, a company launched by Courtney Trouble in 2003 as NoFauxxx.com, was giving trans men screen time before Buck Angel even landed his first major performing contract.

And the contemporary landscape of indie porn is more diverse than ever. Performer RS has worked with a number of small independent companies, including AORTA Films, which allows performers to explore their various trans, nonbinary, and other gender nonconforming identities.

Foxhouse Films, created by performance artist and adult performer Alyx Fox, allows its “multigendered and polysexual” performers to explore their sexualities regardless of their gender identities, and encourages trans, nonbinary, cisgender, and genderqueer performers alike to enact their desires on camera. “We try to capture authentic sex,” says Fox. “It’s easier for us to work from performer desires and what they want to do…It has to be something they are excited about.”

And performers themselves are starting to also create porn, thus taking the means of production into their own hands. In these days of online piracy, says Tobi Hill-Meyer, “The big companies are making less money, and the tools of being able to produce your own porn are getting super accessible.” Hill-Meyer has created several documentary porn films about trans women herself, to much acclaim, and she’s seeing more trans individuals create their own work all the time. “That additional accessibility is radically shifting the possibilities for people who don’t want to do what the twelve wealthy, cis, white guys want them to do.”

PHOTO: @viktorbelmont

Viktor Belmont

Webcamming, too, is offering an outlet for trans performers to express themselves sexually on camera—on their own terms. Kelly Pierce has been performing exclusively on cam (sometimes with her husband) for the past six years, and she loves it. “I’m just really thrilled that I can control my career, finally. And I can be myself!…My cam fans get to see me on a more regular basis, whereas in porn, they just see you as a fantasy, and they don’t see you as a person.”

As trans visibility increases—for better or worse, under the Trump administration’s conservative policies—the general public is growing more aware and more curious. “What’s happening,” says Alyx Fox, “is there are a lot of people who are having an evolving moment of consciousness. I think people are starting to have sexual desires that are more fluid and identities that are more fluid.”

The porn industry, from the biggest and most established companies down to individual cam performers, is finally getting ready to meet these viewers’ needs. And the best way for consumers to ensure this evolution keeps going?

Kristel Penn at Grooby—who’s creating a safe and respectful place for trans women to perform in mainstream pornography—pleads: “To those reading this, please, please, please pay for your porn.”

“By paying us and supporting our projects,” says Viktor Belmont, “we can keep creating media for you to enjoy!”

Lynsey G. is a veteran porn journalist and author of the book Watching Porn: And Other Confessions of an Adult Entertainment Journalist. As part of our Summer of Sex, she’ll be taking a look at the ways pornography informs and subverts social issues. Her installments on mainstream porn and race, can be found here, and her installment on ageism can be found here.

Lead image: Stocksy



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Does Mainstream Porn Have an Age Problem?


Angie Rowntree was looking for aspiring porn stars for her next feature film. Specifically, she was looking for a couple. Even more specifically, a couple over the age of 50. The founder of Sssh.com, one of the Internet’s longest-running porn sites for women, thought that a well-made feature film about real people getting it on later in life was important—and rare.

“For the most part, the porn industry treats older performers like novelty acts,” says Rowntree. “They’re presented as though their sexuality and their desires are something abnormal or unusual, as though older people aren’t supposed to want to have sex…That attitude just bugs the hell out of me.” She also knows that that porn viewers disagree with that idea. At Sssh.com, where she takes suggestions from her site’s members, she says, “I get a huge number of requests for performers over 50.”

So she started writing an as-yet unnamed movie that would include explicit sex, and she put out a casting call for “a couple aged 50+ to star in [Sssh.com’s] newest erotic film.” In a press release about the project, Rowntree elaborated, “Ageism is a problem—not just in adult entertainment, but also in the broader context of film and society in general.”

But in porn, the fetishization of age can be particularly egregious. Recent offerings like Horny Grandmas in Heat #9 (from Channel 69) and Big Tit Anal MILFs #2 (from Evil Angel) don’t exactly set out to break down ageism so much as exploit it—and there are lots of similar titles out there. Porn has never been known for its delicate treatment of marginalized groups—and that clearly includes older performers.

PHOTO: Twitter/@ericalaurenmilf

Erica Lauren, 62

But that doesn’t mean porn isn’t doing important work by providing fantasy scenarios that feature age as a major component. Adult films starring older women—particularly MILFs (That’s “Moms I’d Like to Fuck,” a term popularized by John Cho’s character in 1999’s raunchy comedy American Pie) is perennially popular because, frankly, a lot of people are into the idea.

Erica Lauren, a 62-year-old performer who’s appeared in MILF and Honey, Older and Anal, and Boy Meets Granny (among others), says, “In real life, people tell me that, when they were younger, they had sex with an older woman and it was amazing.” She believes that both the reality and the fantasy of coupling with an older partner hold a certain allure. “Here’s someone who’s experienced, who’s confident, who knows her own body, who knows what she’s doing. And that’s pretty sexy.”

Sexy enough to make MILF porn the second most popular genre of porn worldwide on the biggest porn streaming site in existence, Pornhub. MILF porn is so massively popular that it’s only eclipsed by lesbian porn, and it’s been that way for the entire decade that Pornhub’s been collecting data. In fact, Pornhub reported that search terms referring to moms accounted for four of the top 10 terms men searched for on the site in 2016. That’s a lot of fans of MILFs, moms, stepmoms, and older women in general. Even more illuminating, when men were looking for porn, searches for “teen” came in a distant sixth place, after MILF (#1), stepmom (#2), and mom (#5). (Women’s search terms didn’t show nearly the same interest in their older porn counterparts.)

Nina Hartley, a legendary porn star now in her late fifties, has been performing since the 1980s. She tells me that, in her experience, “all ages” are interested in sexy older porn stars. “Some younger people like older partners, or are just curious,” she says, as well as “age-appropriate partners who feel uneasy watching players who are the same ages as their children.”

As the founder of Evil Angel and an active performer for much of his three and a half decades in the porn industry, John Stagliano has seen it all. “There is a great variety of preferences out there, and some people actually seem to like us old folks,” says the 65-year-old pornographer. “Older women [are appreciated] for their skill and enthusiasm” onscreen—hence the overwhelming popularity of the MILF genre.

But while the term “MILF” originally referred to mothers, these days its popularity has led pornographers to apply it loosely to any female performer who looks like she could have had kids. “You want that more maternal, curvaceous body” in a MILF performer, says writer and director Jacky St. James, whose work includes casting the porn films she makes. “I think it’s more the energy [of the performer], and the more developed body. I’m not going to cast a flat-chested girl as a MILF, probably.”

A quick look through an adult website’s MILF offerings explain her decision: performers cast as MILFs—or labelled that way after the fact by pirates who illegally upload copyrighted content to streaming tube sites like Pornhub—are almost universally well-endowed in the chest area. This gives credence to the idea that they could have, in fact, borne children, and it’s also an indicator of age.

2016 XBIZ Awards

PHOTO: Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Nina Hartley, 58

The larger breasts seen on MILFs are often artificially augmented, and breast implants mean something in porn these days. Kayden Kross, a veteran performer and the cofounder of indie porn company TrenchcoatX, says, “Fake boobs make you a MILF, especially now. In the past, everyone had them, but now they’ve gone out of style, which actually helps in terms of hitting the market you’re looking for. Because a lot of performers who have fake boobs have them from back when it was a popular thing to have them.” Those breasts now effectively label the performers they’re attached to, regardless of what role they’re playing.

The topheaviness of MILF performers is mirrored, Kross believes, by the genre’s popularity. The term, she thinks, has become so ubiquitous that it may be losing its meaning. “Because it’s such a popular search term, porn starts attributing that tag to women who are younger and younger and younger, until you see 24-year-old women being called MILFs,” says Kross. “I was called a MILF for the first time at, I think, age 24” by pirates who reposted her work on a tube site. To date, she’s still never been cast as a MILF—nor has she ever had children. But she’s seen herself tagged as a MILF many times, and sometimes as a teen, too. These categories are supposed to be polar opposites in porn, but they’re both so popular that pirates will apply them to nearly anything just to get more clicks.

But the fact that “MILF” labelling scores clicks is a symptom of just how badly consumers want to see older bodies in their smut. You can call performers in their mid-twenties “MILFs” these days, but fans of mature women aren’t interested in younger stand-ins. The proof is in the search terms: Lisa Ann is perhaps the most famous MILF performer of all time and she’s been retired from making porn for over two and a half years—but she was still the most searched-for porn star in the world as of the end of 2016, according to Pornhub.

The pervasiveness of the “MILF” tag could actually be an indication that it’s on its way out. “Sexuality isn’t this necessarily fixed thing,” says Kross. “The things we’re into, in terms of search terms? They come in trends. There are waves.” And the MILF wave may have crested. “‘MILF’ isn’t going to fade because we get over it, because I think people are always looking for women who weren’t portrayed as teenagers. But I think ‘MILF’ is going to fade because, as we keep washing this category out by going younger with the tag, it’s going to eventually be meaningless.”

Perhaps pornographers have seen the end of MILF coming, because they’re now increasingly rebranding MILFs as stepmoms. Porn that plays with incestuous themes—alternately called “fauxcest,” “taboo relations,” and “family films” in the industry—is hugely popular right now. Directors are careful to label the films as stepfamily members, not blood relatives, but the popularity of stepmoms and their younger stepsons and stepdaughters belies the deep-seated draw of such a taboo subject.

Jacky St. James, whose oeuvre includes Sex Is All Relatives and My New Hot Stepmother, says family films are a sure thing from a production standpoint. “With age, it really comes down to the fact that everything is about niches in porn,” she says. “So when you can marry niches—you’re hitting the MILF bracket, you’re hitting the young girl bracket, you’re hitting the family bracket—it increases your odds of selling.”

Fauxcest porn has its ick factor and its detractors, of course, but it’s also providing work for a lot of older porn actors. “I can play the mom, and I can certainly play the grandmother,” says Erica Lauren. “It just opens up more opportunities. There are actresses who I’ve been their mother, and I’ve also been their grandmother. It’s great!”

PHOTO: Getty Images

PHOTO: Getty Images

Nina Hartley agrees. “Now that ‘MILF’ is a fetish of its own, there is more work to be had,” she reports. That’s wonderful for women like her, who have been in the industry since before older women were a popular niche category. “Now, some women are ‘aging in place,’” she says. “Me [and] Julia Ann, to name just a couple.” Performers in this small group, she believes, haven’t just taken advantage of trends like MILF and fauxcest, but have actively driven taste in erotic entertainment by bringing their fans along with them as they’ve aged. “There’s no doubt,” says Hartley, ”that the fact that I’ve never retired and have worked continually helped to raise age acceptance” in porn.

Perhaps due to the work of industry stalwarts like Hartley, there is also a growing number of women who start working in porn later in life, like Erica Lauren. “I got into the business right when I was about to turn 50,” she tells me. She responded to an agency’s casting call and was booked immediately, and she’s been working in porn for thirteen years now. As an older performer, she says, “You do get work! You have less competition doing these things because most think of it as a young person’s game. Once you get older, if you can still rock it and still do it, and there’s not that many people you’re up against!”

Jacky St. James agrees: “There are maybe fifteen or twenty MILF performers working in the industry now that I would hire” for the films she creates. And those performers are in extremely high demand.

But it’s not just MILFs and stepmoms accounting for older porn performers, of course. Fauxcest movies are also providing a pronounced niche for older men. There’s no “DILF” category to mirror the ever-popular MILF, but older men in porn now find themselves in demand as stepdads. It’s a novel situation for the men of straight porn who, for decades, largely evaded being typecast.

“Older guys [are appreciated] for their wisdom, experience, and skill. That can work in porn,” says John Stagliano. Mature men have always been able to get work, he reports, “because they can act and reliably perform. It is not just performing, but also charisma with the girls that counts, and older performers have built that reputation over the years.”

PHOTO: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Lisa Ann, 45

Being a male porn star isn’t easy. Before the advent of erectile dysfunction drugs, it was extremely rare for a cisgender man to be able to get or maintain an erection on camera in front of a director and crew, and even rarer for that man to be able to perform up to the standards that porn demands. Kayden Kross tells me tales of male performers getting jobs in porn after beating out literally hundreds of other hopefuls at casting calls. Because there were so few men who could do the job, Kross says, the attitude was always: “If you can get a hard-on and do a scene, I don’t care what you look like. You will have work.”

But today, with erectile dysfunction drugs relatively easy to come by, the playing field has been leveled. And with fauxcest films demanding performances by young men as well as old, the industry has gotten more competitive for guys. “Now, they’re casting based on how the guy looks, then immediately popping him Viagra,” says Kross.

To stay relevant in an industry with so many younger men who can pop a pill to do the job, says Jacky St. James, “Older performer are starting to use Caverject”—an erectile dysfunction drug that’s injected directly into the penis. “What ends up happening is, over time, it creates permanent nerve damage.”

The fauxcest films that have driven performers to such extremes are just another trend (“It’s been done to death,” says Rowntree), but it’s nevertheless creating casting opportunities. With men in straight porn now being typecast as “young guys” and “dads”—like their female counterparts have been for decades—it’s more important than ever for porn stars to know their niche, and get comfortable with it.

Erica Lauren laughs about the wild “granny” titles she’s been featured in. “They do kind of poke fun, and you do have to go along with it,” she says. “And I get it. It’s what sells.”

Not everyone chuckles about being shoved into a niche, though. The terminology can feel limiting, derogatory, and just plain gross. Still, Jacky St. James tells me, “You’ve got to kind of embrace it if you’re going to be in this business, because this business is about categorizing people, unfortunately.” In porn, she says, “You have to really know who you are and just go for it, and market yourself that way. Because ultimately that’s what is going to get you more work.”

But Kayden Kross disagrees with the inevitability of niches. Consumers, she believes, “see something they like, and they generally don’t know what it is until porn gives them a name for it. So porn gives them a name for it, and then they search it. It’s this feedback loop, where porn fans are searching it, so porn makes more of it, but porn created it in the first place.”

The company that Kross co-founded with fellow performer Stoya—Trenchcoatx—is aiming to undermine and possibly dismantle this reductive loop. Their website doesn’t use categories for performers, period. There are no MILFs, no grannies, and no teens. Just porn. “We’re not selling on any of these terms that viewers know to search for in order to find what they’re looking for,” she says. “What I realize I’m really making is an emphasis on intimacy. Intimacy is striking a chord with the people I’m doing it in front of.”

No matter what age the performers might be, that emphasis on intimacy is working and Rowntree, who runs Sssh.com from her studio in New Hampshire, has set out to prove it. Her casting call for aspiring porn stars over 50 ended on July 31st. “The response to the casting call,” she tells me, “has been in line with what we expected—not a tidal wave of responses, but very sincere.”

The erotic film hopefuls over 50 that she heard from, she says, were “from couples looking to broaden their own horizons, as well as challenge society’s expectations.” She’ll now be interviewing each couple and educating them on what it means to be forever labeled a “porn star,” before choosing her couple and beginning the filming process. “I do think [the film] will be a hit with Sssh fans and members,” she says, “just based on the enormous number of requests we’ve received to cast and feature performers in this age bracket.”

The perennial popularity of porn starring older performers, whether it’s labeled that way or not, suggests that she’s probably right.

Lynsey G. is a veteran porn journalist and author of the book Watching Porn: And Other Confessions of an Adult Entertainment Journalist. As part of our Summer of Sex, she’ll be taking a look at the ways pornography informs and subverts social issues. Her first installment, on mainstream porn and race, can be found here.

Lead image: Getty Images



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