How Young is Too Young to Become a Pornstar?

Before I even begin, let me just say that I universally use the term “pornstar” for anyone who acts in porn; I don’t differentiate between the really popular actors and the lesser known ones. If you take your clothes off and/or fuck for the camera, you’re a star to me.

I’ve written before that I hate child porn, so obviously I think that a person can be too young to get into porn. But the obvious question then follows: How young is too young? What should be the cutoff age?

In this case I’m not speaking from a legal standpoint; more from a practical one. Maybe it’s legal in your state to get into porn at 18 or 19 or 21, but is it a good idea? (There are states where you can be old enough to legally work as a pornstar but not drink alcohol. You can fuck, but you can’t get fucked up.) Or should you wait until you get older? And, again, how old should you be?

The arguments for and against are obvious ones. I’m not going to be breaking any new ground here. If you become a pornstar too young will you regret it later? But if you wait too long will you be too old, and will the audience prefer to see the younger girls instead of you? (I do think this applies more to females than to males, though the same concerns probably exist for dudes.)

That last point is especially problematic because we (the audience) typically want our female pornstars to be as young as legally possible – if not younger. I recently saw a video that supposedly involved the “babysitter,” and the actress playing the babysitter was definitely playing it up and pretending to be younger than she was. If I had to guess I’d say she was probably trying to play a 16 year old; I hope she was a 20-something year old in real life. But you know what? She was fucking hot. Sure the whole thing about acting too young was off-putting, but she had a slammin body and it was a pleasure to watch her getting pleasured. In another 5 years that actress might have trouble getting work in porn, because there’ll be some other 20-something cutie out there to take her place; if you do want to get into porn, especially if you’re female, there’s only a certain window of opportunity for you.

Lux Alptraum wrote a post about this on Boinkology which is worth a read, but I think it only scratches the surface, and leaves more questions than answers. (That’s not intended to be a point against her post; I imagine she’d probably say the same thing. I definitely won’t have any answers.) In fact, I don’t expect that there is a clean, simple answer: “Don’t do porn before the age of 23,” or whatever. I think the legal age is a good starting point, and maybe in some states it should be raised or maybe not, but some kids are going to be too young to get into porn at the age of 21 and some kids are going to be too young to get into porn at 25. There are so many factors that go into it.

At the very least it’s a question that needs to be asked; kids getting into porn do at least need to give serious consideration to whether they should or not. Even if they do, even if they seriously sit down and contemplate it, they still might make the wrong choice, they still might not have the proper tools to make the decision that age and experience would bring, but giving it consideration in the first place can only be a good thing.

As for me, I’m not in the industry, I’m just a consumer. This is a purely theoretical post for me, with very few personal consequences. I’m looking at pictures or watching a video of a hot young thing being brought to a screaming orgasm; when that video was made, and the consequences it had on the actors’ lives after it was made (or the consequences yet to come) have no bearing on me. It’s a few minutes of stimulation, prompting a small amount of semen, and then it’s all but forgotten.