Where do Pornstars Put Their Money?

Suppose you’re a pornstar. Go ahead, take some time to picture it. (If it helps, and if you’re a hot female, you can make your dream real by taking a video of yourself doing something naughty and sending it to me. It would have nothing to do with this post, but I’d still be happy to receive it.) Are you picturing it? Good. Now ask yourself: “Why did I become a pornstar?”

You might be imagining lots of reasons, but one of them probably involves rolling around naked in a pile of money. We all know that’s a nasty idea – paper money has all kinds of germs on it so you shouldn’t do this in real life – but we’re just using our imaginations for the moment and you can do all kinds of unsafe shit in your fantasies. (When I imagine myself having sex I’m never wearing a condom, even if I’m imagining myself fucking someone really nasty.) (Yes, I sometimes imagine myself fucking someone nasty. I don’t usually imagine myself enjoying it, but sometimes my mind has a mind of its own.)

So if you were to become a pornstar and start making all of that crazy pornstar money what would you do with it? Maybe you’re thinking of a lavish 24/7 party lifestyle fueled by cocaine and Grey Goose, where the only time you stop partying is to take a couple of hours to have wild, raucous sex for which you get paid scads of cash, spurring on another cycle of partying.

I don’t know any pornstars but I doubt this is actually what their lifestyle is like. For instance, occasionally you’d have to take a break from all of that partying to do the laundry. And clean the bathrooms. And fill out the paperwork for the domain name for your porn website. But even if your lifestyle was like this – even if your entire life was one big party, going straight from porn set to party and back to porn set, and the only time you ever slept was in the back of your producer’s car for 3 hours to prepare yourself for the next round of partying – my guess is that you probably wouldn’t carry around a big bag with a dollar sign on it to keep your money in, you need to put that money somewhere safe. Between the time the porn studio gives it to you and the time you spend it, where will it go? For most of us that’s not even a question, it would go into a bank account. Maybe we’d supplement that with some kind of retirement savings plan, or invest some in stocks, or do other things to make our money work for us, but at the very least we all have bank accounts, and anything else is in addition to that.

And now we get to the point of this post: What if you couldn’t get a bank account because banks didn’t want to give accounts to pornstars anymore? Which is exactly what’s happening. According to an article on HuffPo – and then another one – some American banks have started cancelling accounts for pornstars (and trying to use laws about terrorism as their excuse).

This should come as no surprise to us because we all know that American bankers are fine, upstanding citizens with great regard for the law and high moral fibre, so the real question is not why they’re cancelling the accounts but how they let them get created in the first place!

(Warning: The previous paragraph contains enough irony to seriously harm a child.)

Regardless of the reasoning, the result is that pornstars are having their bank accounts closed. I hope that I’m overstating the problem; I hope that only certain banks are doing this and the pornstars are able to move their money to other institutions. That would still be a major disruption to their financial security, to be sure, but at least they’d have somewhere to put their money. (Want another reason why mega-mergers of banks are a bad idea? The less banks that exist the less likelihood that pornstars will be able to find a place to park their money. But do politicians take pornstars into account when approving these mergers? Probably not. Bastards.)

And if you think getting a bank account is difficult for a pornstar, try getting funding in the first place if you want to start an adult-oriented venture. Take the Make Love Not Porn site, for example, which is, strictly speaking, not even porn. In fact, let me remove the “strictly speaking” caveat: It’s not porn. And yet Cindy Gallop had a very difficult time getting the site funded because it was sort of, though not quite, kind of porn-esque. It deals with sex, basically, and anything to do with sex makes funders nervous.

I wish I had a point to make with this post, but really all I have to say is: bankers are hypocritical assholes, and funders are pussies.