What Kind of Porn Do Pornstars Watch? The Answer May Surprise You
For most people, porn is an escapist fantasy. It’s a place to live out thrilling sexual scenarios populated by some of the most beautiful people imaginable. It’s a way to relieve sexual tension, erase boredom, and get ideas for one’s own sex life.
But for the people who make and star in these movies, watching porn for entertainment can be a challenge. Close involvement with the process means they often cannot watch it as a consumer would. It’s akin to Otto von Bismarck’s attributed observation that “Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” Put another way, if you work in a hospital, a binge-watch of Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med may not be atop your list of leisure activities.
“It’s the same thing as if you direct like movies, and then you watch an action movie, it’s not going to feel as magical because you know how they did it,” star Chanel Camryn explained. “So porn doesn’t feel as magical because we know how it’s done.”
For some stars, knowledge of on-set realities takes them out of the moment even when they do try to watch porn. “It can be hot, but a lot of times, I’ll put a movie on and I feel like both people look disinterested. So then I feel disinterested,” Karen Fisher said. “But if it’s like a hot theme, where they’re both really into it, and there’s a lot of chemistry, then [it’s] very exciting.”
When star Leana Lovings makes a good-faith effort to watch a porn movie for her own arousal, she sometimes finds herself getting distracted by technical details. “Sometimes I’ll suddenly be masturbating watching the scene, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, I can see why they cut there.’ Or like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s an interesting transition,” she said in 2022. Director Bree Mills watches porn predominantly from this same technical perspective. “If I watch a porn scene, I’m like, where did they get that location? Or like, oh, man, lighting is on point. So I consume a lot of content, but not in the traditional way that our fans do,” she told us.
It can also be distracting or awkward to watch movies that feature people in one’s own social or work circle. Imagine porn that featured random, unexpected appearances by your own co-workers and neighbors. “For some, it could be exciting, but not really for me,” Ana Foxxx joked in a 2022 interview.
“I can’t even watch porn anymore because they’re all my friends,” Chanel Camryn said. Inna Innaki shares in this frustration, noting, “The only thing that drives me crazy is when I find a good scene and then I see someone I know. Fuck, then I’m like, ‘I can’t masturbate to this. I know this person!’”
But pornstars are people, too, who have the urge to masturbate to erotic materials as keenly as anyone. What do stars turn to when the self-love mood strikes? Performers like Christina Sapphire avoid audiovisual porn completely: “I am much more likely to pick up a book and read erotic stories to get off.”
Some stars focus on specific genres and niches that avoid mood-killing pitfalls. Tiffany Watson, Octavia Red, and Jade Venus gravitate toward gay porn, which typically features talent outside their own work orbit. ”If I watch porn, that’s what I’m watching,” Red told us.
Two genres that stand above all others in this regard: amateur and hentai (anime porn). Both conveniently eschew the awkwardness of having to watch fellow pornstars and directors in sexual scenes. “If I’m consuming something that’s visual, I will look at photos or I’ll watch something that’s really amateur where maybe they have their faces cropped out or something so that they can just be about bodies and sex,” star Casey Calvert told us in a podcast interview. Hentai, which forgoes flesh-and-blood actors completely in favor of animated characters, is a favorite genre of several stars, including Leana Lovings and Linzee Ryder.
Noted porn directors opt for amateur content, too, including popular adult filmmaker Maestro Claudio (Perv City). “It may seem weird but I don’t watch porn that’s been shot by other directors. The only porn I like to watch now is the very amateur one that people shoot at home of themselves and their friends,” he said.
Amateur: it’s what the professionals watch! Browse the amateur porn category here.
Featured image: Watching Porn with India
