Today, I stumbled across writer Susannah Breslin’s sensitive portrait of LA’s recession-ravaged porn industry. In its ten thought-provoking pages, the site “They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They” explores the experiences of those working in the San Fernando Valley, the previously-thriving home of mainstream commercial porn production. It’s a subject that Breslin tackles with refreshing honesty.

An infinite range of accessible pornography has manifested on the internet over the last decade and, as a result, LA’s monopoly is crumbling. In their struggle to maintain the profits they once enjoyed, many of the mainstream studios have resorted to creating the kind of extreme, exploitative, misogynistic nonsense that has dominated the DVD market so far this century. Laws are notoriously clumsy and inept at regulating the porn industry, judging erotica in terms of the obscenity of its content (the Miller Test) and not the ethics of its production.

However, there is a light at the end of this murky, spunk-spattered tunnel. The internet has recently seen the rise of Fair Trade Porn – sites run by the performers themselves, on a far more ethical basis, and with a more interesting and varied spectrum of kinks, sexual dynamics and appearances than consumers ever had before. Despite the desperate death-throes of those stumbling LA dinosaurs who pay a pittance to the actresses they treat like shit, I’m hopeful that this positive trend will continue.

Anyway, click here to read “They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They” by Susannah Breslin.