The popular porn actress August Ames died by suicide a little over a year ago. She’d been a target of online attacks after suggesting that male performers who work in the gay industry are at an increased risk of getting HIV. Her death shocked the porn and larger sex work industry and sparked a conversation about mental health and cyberbullying.

Now Ames’s death is the subject of a podcast series released earlier this month by journalist Jon Ronson, who’d previously profiled the porn industry in his limited-series podcast The Butterfly Effect. This new series, The Last Day of August, unpacks Ames’s story, including the narrative that cyberbullying is what triggered her suicide. Instead, Ronson suggests, her story was far more complex, “something mysterious and unexpected and terrible.”

Ames was vocal about her battles with mental health and the stigma she faced trying to seek care as a sex worker. “I would get in contact with [therapists] and then I would feel badly because they’d be like, ‘What’s your profession,’ and I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m in the adult industry,’ and then I’d feel like they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the whole reason that you are the way you are,’ and then I’d get turned off,” she said in a podcast interview from 2017.

And she was not a unique outlier. Ames was one of five porn performers to die by suicide or drug overdose in just three months in the winter of 2017-’18. She has become the very public face of a crisis within the porn industry that’s often overlooked and rarely taken seriously. But the podcast, which spends six episodes exploring the specific details of Ames’s death, misses the opportunity to examine the larger story of suicide in the porn industry — and the steps the community is taking to ensure that porn performers and other sex workers are getting access to the mental health care they need.

Sex work and mental health can be thorny topics to navigate. Research has repeatedly shown a higher incidence of depression and other mental illness among sex workers when compared to other populations. A 2011 study that compared the mental health of female porn performers with that of other young women in California found that porn performers were significantly more likely to meet the criteria for depression than their peers who were not involved in sex work; a 2010 study of sex workers in Zurich found that “sex workers displayed high rates of mental disorders.”

To those outside the industry, these elevated rates of mental illness are presumed to signify an inherent problem with the sex industry. Porn performers and other sex workers come to the work with significant issues, the theory goes, because only “broken dolls” would even consider pursuing sex as a career. Furthermore, the industry itself is assumed to be so exploitative and abusive that anyone involved is just setting themselves up for trauma and PTSD. “Sex work is a major public health problem,” explains a study from Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, concluding that the “ill mental health of sex workers is primarily related to different forms of violence.”

Yet the sex workers I’ve spoken with challenge that read as overly simplistic. Yes, researchers may be finding elevated rates of mental illness within these industries, but part of that stems from the fact that the high pay and flexible hours of porn and sex work make these jobs appealing to people whose mental health issues make committing to a 9-to-5 office job difficult.

“I started out with doing online sex work as a camgirl in 2016,” says Jane, who requested to be identified by first name only and notes that between her depression and her schoolwork, she didn’t have the energy for most of the jobs that were available to her. “With sex work, I was able to spend my energy much more carefully,” setting a schedule that allowed to her to take time off on days when she felt overwhelmed, a luxury she wouldn’t have had in most jobs.

Another woman, who’s worked as a porn performer, stripper, and full-service sex worker in addition to more mainstream work in the health care industry, told me that “since returning solely to sex work, I am able to pay attention to what my body and my brain needs, in terms of sleep and kindness, and then give that to myself” — an essential tool for managing mental illness.

While working in the industry can exacerbate mental health issues, the many conversations I’ve had with sex workers suggest that it’s less because sex work itself is inherently traumatic, and more because the stigma of being a sex worker isolates people and prevents them from finding competent mental health care. “I’ve heard some horrendous stories about therapists refusing to treat sex workers,” says Leya Tanit, the founder of Pineapple Support, an organization that helps connect sex workers to mental health care services.

According to Tanit, many sex workers who seek out mental health care find that disclosing their line of work often provokes unwanted and unsolicited opinions — “[Your mental illness is] because you’re in the industry, you shouldn’t be doing this, it’s contributing to your illness,” Tanit sums up. Yet staying mum about work can compromise their care in other ways: If you can’t tell your therapist about the struggles you’re dealing with on the job, or how sex work stigma exacerbates your stress, your therapy might feel somewhat superficial.

Tanit hopes that Pineapple Support can help bridge the gap between sex workers and mental health care. The organization, which launched in April, offers porn performers access to a database of vetted, sex worker–friendly therapists; for those in immediate crisis, there’s a 24/7 online emotional support service staffed by volunteers who’ve been trained to address the needs of members in the porn industry. At this week’s Adult Entertainment Expo, Pineapple Support will run a booth staffed by therapists, offering trade show attendees the opportunity to engage in some drop-in therapy sessions.

The screening and training that Pineapple Support provides its clients is a much-needed resource, as the majority of therapists either aren’t aware of the particular issues faced by sex workers or come to these sessions with inaccurate, stereotypical ideas about sex workers. “Amidst a nationwide campaign about human trafficking, many therapists grow concerned that a patient involved in sex work has been subjected to human trafficking,” therapist Dr. David Ley writes in an essay on therapy and sex work, noting that this assumption can alienate sex-working clients and damage their relationship with their therapist. When reached for comment for this piece, a representative of the American Psychological Association noted that “we do not have any written guidance for treatment of sex workers or porn performers.”

Pineapple Support isn’t the only project hoping to help porn performers in crisis. This month, porn performer and producer Trenton Ducati will launch a collaboration with the Desert AIDS Project (DAP) — one he hopes will help connect performers to therapy, suicide prevention services, and substance abuse counseling, as well as HIV pre- and post-exposure prophylaxis (also known as PEP and PrEP).

Like Pineapple Support, Ducati’s program connects porn performers to sex worker–friendly mental health care services; the primary difference is that rather than waiting for performers to reach out for help, Ducati will encourage producers to broach the topic first with the help of a questionnaire designed by DAP. “The producer is a very important point of contact,” he tells me. “We can really check in with the models” — and, if they need help, connect them to resources that’ll keep them healthy.

Getting quality mental health care is never a simple endeavor, and dismantling the barriers to access faced by porn performers and other sex workers will be a long-term project. But if we want to build a world where sex workers are getting support when they need it the most, we have to spend more time dismantling the stigmas associated with mental illness and sex work — and less time analyzing the grisly details of individual sex workers’ deaths.

Lux Alptraum is a writer whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Men’s Health, Cosmopolitan, Hustler, and more. Her first book, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal, is out.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

“These should be boom times for sex,” Kate Julian muses in the opener to the cover story for the Atlantic’s December 2018 issue. And yet she notes, with a nod to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, General Social Survey, and Match.com, as well as other sources, the reverse seems to be true. People — and particularly young people — are having less sex than in previous generations.

It’s a state of affairs that Julian likens to a “sex recession,” one she sees as having potentially dire consequences. “A fulfilling sex life is not necessary for a good life, of course, but lots of research confirms that it contributes to one,” she argues after running through the many reasons, both positive and negative, why sex might be on the decline. “Having sex is associated not only with happiness, but with a slew of other health benefits” — and if sex is on the decline, our health and happiness could be too, she suggests.

The “sex recession” quickly became part of the popular discourse, with Julian appearing on the Today show to discuss her findings, and publications around the globe penning a wide variety of responses to the assertion that young people are more anxious, more detached, and far less likely to fall into bed with one another. Atlantic contributor Caitlin Flanagan summed up the general reaction to the article with a pithy tweet declaring, “As I suspected. They’re doing it wrong.”

On paper, the world that Julian describes — one where people in their early 20s are two and a half times more likely to be abstinent than Gen X-ers were at that age, and where a full 15 percent haven’t had any sex at all by the time they reach adulthood — does sound like a bit of a drab, sexless wasteland.

But as I — a young woman seemingly the right age to be affected by this recession — read through the essay, I found myself wondering what exactly this “recession” had to do with me.

We are bombarded with messaging that we are doing sex wrong and it’s making us unhappy

As mediocre as American sex education continues to be, there’s one message about sex we are all imbued with from a very early age: Sex is incredibly important. More than that, it’s especially important to do “correctly.”

Whether we’re reading trend stories like Julian’s or breathy tips that fill the pages of lad and lady mags, letters penned by advice columnists, or sexual self-help manuals, the message we get is that with the “right” sexual experiences, we’ll be set up for a healthy, happy, and better life — and without it, we’ll be doomed to a depressing and meaningless existence, a point driven home by articles like this from WebMD that insist sex is the key to unlocking happiness.

Yet for all the importance we place on sex, we’re rather reticent to be honest with one another about what our own experiences are. As individuals, we’re certainly aware of what goes on in our bedrooms, but we’re left wondering about those of our friends, colleagues, and crushes — people who, we inevitably assume, are almost definitely doing it more or who’ve figured out the secret to being 100 percent satisfied with their sex life, a secret that still manages to elude us. Studies have shown we routinely overestimate how much sex other people are having; we likely overestimate how much fun they’re having doing it, too.

And this is why Americans are so drawn to pieces like Julian’s examination of the “sex recession,” which promises to untangle some of our confusion with the help of exhaustive research, data, and scientific analysis. Although much of the piece is focused on determining why sex today looks the way it does, there’s an underlying promise that this analysis might be used to help us get back on the right track.

“In time, maybe, we will rethink some things,” Julian muses, going on to offer a list of social factors that are potentially contributing to young people having less sex, ranging from bad sex education to an overdependence on technology and, of course, overprotective parents.

It’s a proposition that, while tempting, is ultimately damaging. The truth is, however much information we may collect about broad patterns of American, or even global, sexual behavior, the only expert who can offer an accurate assessment of whether we, personally, are doing sex “right” is us.

Throughout the article, Julian nods to the past, a time during which, she seems to suggest, sex and dating were better. “I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. … I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way,” she writes, as if to suggest that, however happy we might think ourselves, we have no sense of how good things used to be. “Sex seems more fraught now,” Julian concludes.

She does acknowledge potentially positive explanations for the downturn in sex. But she quickly pivots them toward a more negative narrative. Masturbation is on the rise, yet Julian paints it as a nasty side effect of online pornography, ignoring young women for whom masturbation might offer a welcome alternative to an act historically associated with ignoring female pleasure.

When sex researcher Debby Herbenick offers that the downturn in sex might be the result of women becoming empowered to say no to unwanted sex, Julian transitions into talking about how porn has presumably made sex scarier and more necessary to refuse — as though women were more enthusiastic about the sex on offer in a pre-internet period (an assertion feminists like Andrea Dworkin, who declared in her 1987 book Intercourse that “violation is a synonym for intercourse,” could easily put the lie to).

The most likely culprit for the so-called “sex recession” — the fact that people are getting married and cohabiting at older ages than in the past — has some obvious positives, including giving people (and, in particular, straight women) more time to focus on their careers and decreasing the frequency of divorce. But Julian chooses to end the article by casting the millennial generation as lonely rather than focusing on the upside of this trend.

There is no “right” way to have sex

The Atlantic is not alone in promoting this narrative about sex and dating, of suggesting that the key to unlocking our sexual happiness (or at least better identifying our sexual failures) lies in other people’s experiences, desires, and ideas of health and happiness rather than our own.

While writing my book, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal, I encountered numerous examples of sex research used not to enlighten us about the broad and beautiful diversity of human sexual experience, but instead to codify a limited idea of “normal,” one that few of us, if any, can actually live up to.

Whether that’s sex therapist Ian Kerner insisting that in the ideal heterosexual experience, “she comes first,” or whether that’s research that purports to determine the number of sexual partners that’ll maximize our happiness, the idea that there is a universal way to do sex “right” primarily serves to instill a permanent sense of anxiety among us all — especially among women, whose sex lives are most often the objects of discussion (and policing).

However happy you may feel about what you’re getting up to, there is always some “expert” ready to sow the seeds of doubt. They insist that, however fulfilled we may feel, we could be so much happier if only we tried this position or popped this pill or had more sex or tamped down the promiscuity or just, some way, ceased to be ourselves.

Yet external experts will never be able to offer the path to pleasure that we can achieve by just sitting down, getting to know our own bodies, and having a nonjudgmental, honest conversation with ourselves or our partners about our needs, desires, and vision of a satisfying sex life. And yes, maybe that means less sex for some — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Because whatever the data says about broad trends and patterns — about who is having more sex than whom, about how many orgasms are being had when and where, about what sexual activity is the most popular of all — the only reliable source of answers we have for what our sex life “should” look like is our own libido, desire, and fantasies, and the honest conversations we have with our partners about what feels good for all of us.

A sex “recession” does not matter if your own sex life feels rich and fulfilling. And that fulfillment isn’t something you can measure by comparing yourself to historical statistics or information about what your friends and neighbors are or aren’t doing in their bedrooms. It’s something you have to figure out for yourself, by yourself — which may explain why so many of us are so scared to do it.

Lux Alptraum is the author of Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And the Truths They Reveal. Find her on Twitter @LuxAlptraum. 

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

In 1998, the cast of Sex and the City went vibrator shopping. The scene — shot at New York City’s Pleasure Chest — gave viewers a window into the experience of visiting one of New York’s women-friendly sex shops, a nice, brightly lit alternative to the scuzzy porn shops where many vibrators were sold.

Yet upscale as it was, the excursion clearly took place in a sex shop. In the background of the opening shot are stacks of boxes decorated with scantily clad porn actors’ bodies; another wall of the store is covered in floggers and bondage gear. For many real-life Charlottes, that kind of shopping trip still seemed a bit threatening; something destined to remain fantasy rather than become a part of real life.

Twenty years later, anxious women eager to acquire their first sex toy don’t have to venture to a porn shop, or even a brightly lit feminist sex toy boutique in a fashionable area of town. For the past decade, sex toys have been popping up in more and more venues. The endless shelf space and discretion provided by online shopping made big retail brands like Amazon and Walmart more comfortable stocking adult products on their sites, and over the past decade, cheap, battery-operated cock rings have started popping up in drugstore condom aisles.

And in a major development, we’ve reached a point where mainstream retailers feel completely comfortable stocking quality vibrators, not just in their digital warehouses but on the shelves of their brick-and-mortar stores. Just this month, PlusOne, a new line of premium sex toys, debuted at Walmart stores around the country, marking the first time that the retailer has carried high quality, rechargeable vibrators on the shelves of its brick-and-mortar stores. (Walmart did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)

How did sex toys get from the Pleasure Chest to the shelves of Walmart, a store so conservative it banned Cosmopolitan from its checkout aisles for being too risqué? That Sex and the City trip certainly helped push sex toys out of the shadows and into the mainstream, kicking off a run of media appearances for pleasure products, with not just 50 Shades of Grey but also shows like Girls, Transparent, and Sense8 all featuring sex toys within their storylines. Broad City, in some ways a quirky, millennial successor to Sex and the City, even has its very own line of sex toys.

Feminist activism, improved sex education, and the liberalizing effect that internet has had on discourse have also helped — it’s all a part of what Carol Queen, a staff sexologist at the sex toy boutique Good Vibrations, refers to as “an increasingly sex-comfortable environment that let sexual diversity, pleasure, and toys take their place in the discourse.”

And as the culture has warmed to sex toys, mainstream stores have responded to that demand. Initially, online retailers and drugstores were the major entry points for sex toys. Amazon began stocking erotic products in 2005; that same year, Scotland’s Superdrug began carrying the Durex Play vibrating ring (or, to be more straightforward, cock ring). Sainsbury, Tesco, Duane Reade, and Walgreens soon followed Superdrug’s lead, while online, major retailers like Target.com and, yes, Walmart.com got a little more open-minded in order to compete with Amazon.

Online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores displayed wildly different attitudes toward what sorts of products their clientele might be comfortable with. Online, pretty much anything was allowed: Many major retailers opened their platforms to third-party distributors, allowing a wide variety of risqué products to be sold under a mainstream brand name — Walmart’s website currently stocks a penis extender, a hyperrealistic dildo (complete with balls) capable of suctioning to whatever surface you wish, and a vibrating butt plug designed to look like a puppy tail, all products that will, presumably, never see the inside of a Walmart brick-and-mortar store.

In brick-and-mortar stores, where staff feared alienating customers who didn’t want to be surprised by a dildo while doing their shopping, things were much more chaste. Trojan and Durex have long been the favored sex toy brands of mainstream retailers, with the sexual health connection lending the products an air of respectability. And the products themselves tended not to get too creative. Vibrating cock rings were often the first item to appear on store shelves.

“One of the reasons that was socially acceptable, I think, was that it was still a device worn by a man to pleasure a woman,” says Hallie Lieberman, author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, explaining that a device that could be packaged as a “couples toy” was far less scandalous than something explicitly sold for masturbation.

PlusOne offers customers an entirely different option. A dedicated pleasure brand, it makes no bones about the purpose of its products — yet its design is far classier than, say, that suction cup dildo on Walmart’s website. And with waterproof silicone exteriors and rechargeable batteries, it’s a step up in quality from the Trojan products currently stocked in store, all while been sold at a significantly lower price point than either the Trojan products or the more luxe offerings available at a store like Babeland. PlusOne’s rechargeable bullet offering retails for less than $10; in contrast, a battery-powered Trojan bullet vibrator for a little over $30, and the NYTC rechargeable bullet vibe is available at Babeland for just shy of $25.

PlusOne’s origin story is, in some ways, the natural endpoint of our increasing comfort with erotic products. The brand is a subsidiary of Clio, a Massachusetts-based personal care company known for devices like the beautytrim hair trimmer and Palmperfect electric shaver.

About eight months ago, the powers that be at Walmart reached out to the Clio staff to let them know they were interested in investing in a high-quality, low-cost sex toy line that could comfortably fit in on the shelves of Walmart, one that would give them a competitive edge over retailers like Amazon. Clio worked hand in hand with Walmart’s higher-ups to develop a line that would feel sexier and more female-friendly than some of Trojan toys, while still being entry-level products that wouldn’t offend anyone’s sensibilities — and from there, PlusOne was born.

Jamie Leventhal, president and CEO of Clio, envisions a future where Walmart shoppers can stop by the store to do their grocery shopping, grab a PlusOne vibe off the shelf, and go through discreet self-checkout, getting access to quality pleasure products without ever stepping out of your comfort zone. It’s a wildly different mode of buying sex toys than the trip that the Sex and the City girls took 20 years ago — and it’s a future that could bring sexual pleasure to a much broader audience than ever envisioned before.

“It’s amazing how quickly the consumers are saying yes” to PlusOne, Leventhal says, noting that in just a few weeks, the brand’s sales have approached what many of their competitors might sell in a year. It’s taken decades to get to the point where a vibrator at Walmart is met with excitement rather than outrage. But now that we’ve gotten there, big-box stores are excited to cash in.

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In the early aughts, when the internet was still new, pornography was a pretty easy way to make a comfortable living. If you were okay with sacrificing a bit of respectability and dealing with the headaches and stress of working within a stigmatized and confusingly structured industry, it wasn’t that hard to make a comfortable living — or, in many cases, to get rich, and do so pretty quickly.

College kids were able to turn access to a camera and a love of porn into a thriving career, founding companies like Burning Angel and Bang Bros. You didn’t even have to create original content to tap into the flow of cash. Even people who just bought packs of thousands of photos and set up their own curated collection of smut could make a decent salary off of XXX content. Because at the time, people loved paying money for porn.

But a little over a decade after the founding of free porn sites like Pornhub and Youporn, the economics of the adult industry look quite a bit different. Porn consumption may be more popular, and more normalized, than ever, but even the most avid of porn fans are often unwilling to pay for the videos they enjoy — a significant change from an earlier era when people paid a premium for porn DVDs, often shelling out two to four times the cost of a non-porn DVD for the chance to enjoy four or five scenes.

Although porn companies are private and revenues aren’t publicly shared (a reality that makes it difficult to track how hard companies have been hit, financially), the past few decades have seen companies shutter, performer pay rates plummet, and major trade shows shrink in size — all indicators that suggest the money isn’t flowing in like it used to.

Porn isn’t the only media industry that’s suffered from this precipitous drop in revenue. As the internet has transformed consumption habits and enabled easy piracy, other industries have had to adapt to a shift in consumer expectations.

In the early aughts, Napster rocked the music industry by making it possible for consumers to freely share and distribute MP3s with one another, a shift that depressed the market for CDs and left the industry scrambling to figure out ways to attract more consumer dollars.

Film and TV suffered a similar fate once internet connections became fast enough to make pirating video a breeze — and the journalism industry is still in the process of figuring out how to make money if no one’s paying for print. (You are, notably, reading this piece for free on a website.)

Yet even with the monetization challenges they’ve faced, and continue to face, other industries have largely begun to rebound, pushing back against the expectation that their content be free with subscription services like Spotify and Netflix, and paygates for publications like the New York Times and Washington Post.

Yet porn — which, as a pioneer in online commerce, was paygating its content long before the Wall Street Journal decided to — has yet to recover from the expectation that its content should be free. Will the pendulum ever swing back in favor of paying for porn?

When I put out an ask for stories from people who’d gone from regularly pirating music and movies to paying for their content through services like Spotify, Netflix, iTunes, and Google Play, I heard a few common themes. People made the switch from piracy to paid services because legally consuming content suddenly became the easier option: As crackdowns on piracy killed off popular file-sharing services, leaving increasingly sketchy and difficult to navigate services as the primary option, paid services were becoming much simpler and easier to use. Paying a small fee to get access to high-quality content was a more appealing option than sifting through the dreck to illegally download a file of dubious quantity.

Others noted that a sense of responsibility to artists and content creators pushed them to start paying again. Ripping off a faceless corporation might be one thing, but when your theft starts to feel like it’s taking money out of the pockets of artists you adore, it doesn’t feel quite as justified.

But while some of these arguments can also be used to encourage people to pay for their smut, there’s a major factor that separates pornography from all other forms of media — and it’s one that pushes the odds heavily against the possibility of paying for porn becoming de rigeur any time soon.

Unlike listening to Drake or watching Game of Thrones, porn consumption and the porn industry are still heavily stigmatized, a reality that hampers people’s willingness to pay for XXX media. If you already feel uncomfortable with your interest in porn, actually taking out your credit card and paying for it can feel like a bridge too far.

That stigma can be a major deterrent for potential paying customers. In one conversation, a woman who’d once considered (and then decided against) launching a porn site noted this kind of shame as a primary reason that women in particular are reluctant to pay. In her preliminary research, she found that many of the women she’d spoken to dealt with “extreme denial over accessing [porn],” and were likely to keep “porn habits a dirty little secret or something they wanted to access passively” — a habit that’s far easier to uphold when you’re covertly watching porn for free.

Another person cited their discomfort with some of the tropes they find arousing as a reason for not paying, telling me over DM that, “it may get me off but immediately after I’m deeply ashamed of participating in/perpetuating sexist tropes and don’t want to give them my money!”

But stigma also has a broader impact as well: It hampers the porn industry’s ability to fight back against piracy. Paying for music didn’t become more appealing just because of the rise of all-you-can-eat style subscription services like Spotify and Tidal. Piracy also suffered a major hit as the music industry rallied together to get the government to shut down services like Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire, forcing would-be pirates to ever more complicated, and ever more sketchy, services on the fringes of the web.

In contrast, porn has never had a heavy hitting lobbying group like the Recording Industry Association of America to take on the fight against illegally downloaded content. While some pornographers worked hard to fight against the rise of free content, it was always a piecemeal effort, with individual creators or groups like Takedown Piracy sending out DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices to get illegally uploaded content taken down — a strategy akin to attempting to empty the ocean with a single bucket.

Instead of crushing the major players of piracy the way the music industry was able to, porn got coopted by them: Mindgeek, the parent company that owns Pornhub, Youporn, and many other popular free porn sites, now owns Brazzers, Digital Playground, and other properties that were created by its one time competitors. (Mindgeek was reached for comment but did not respond to interview questions by press time.)

And as power within the adult industry has consolidated in the hands of a company that built its name on free, and often pirated, porn, the very people who are most capable of — and should be most motivated to — persuade consumers to pay for their content have, instead, become more invested in promoting free porn.

Jiz Lee, a longtime performer and affiliate manager for Pink and White Productions, is something of an evangelist for affiliate programs, which, in lieu of a royalty system, are one of the best ways for performers to continue to get paid for their content long after their first check has been cashed.

Lee routinely educates other performers about the potential of affiliate commissions, running workshops about affiliate programs and tweeting out screencaps of their own affiliate commissions using the hashtag #PayForYourPorn.

But lately, Lee has noticed that many of their peers have found a different way to make money, preferring instead to get registered with Pornhub and receive a cut of the ad revenue any time someone views one of their scenes for free. In the short term, it’s a strategy that makes sense — why hassle your fans to pay for porn when you can send them to a free scene and still get paid? — but in the long run, it merely reinforces the idea that porn isn’t worth paying for, an attitude that hurts performers in the long run by depressing industry revenues and, as a result, their pay rates.

Lee strongly believes that with enough education, performers can be won back to the side of promoting paid porn; and that, in turn, those performers can educate their fans and impress upon them the importance of shelling out for smut.

And there’s reason to believe that Lee is correct in seeing performer advocacy as one of the best ways to make porn a profitable product again. The 13 people I spoke with about the motivation for paying for porn — a mix of queer women, nonbinary people, and men who mostly leaned heterosexual — offered a number of reasons for paying for porn, including a desire for high-quality content, easy access to content tailored to a specific or niche interest, and a wish to avoid scammy sites full of malware and popup ads.

But the biggest reason people pay for porn? A sense of responsibility to performers and other people involved in the porn creation process as the reason for opening their wallets. “I consider porn to be an art form. I’ve always supported the arts,” said one respondent; another noted that “finding a discussion on Twitter about how nightmarish it can be to remove a stolen video from Pornhub” pushed them toward being a paying customer.

If porn is going to turn back the tide against free content, it’s likely to be because consumers see porn performers as people worth supporting — a shift that will radically change the porn industry’s place in society as well.

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