^ Oh, I agree; most social scientists specializing in suicide would impatiently wave away the idea that that's even a useful or enlightening stat to track anyway. It was just a tangent.
Just to throw this out there, I remember reading several years ago in one of
Susie Bright's books an interview with some longterm porn director, don't recall his name, who brought up the topic of, There are some people (actors) in this business whom you can see right away don't belong there, and basically these are people who've gotten into it because they crave attention and physical appreciation, which is fine as far as it goes, but at the end of the day you do also have to be very enthusiastic about sex, sexuality and sexual experiences, because otherwise no amount of hand-holding from on-set friends is going to keep you from getting deeply worn down. I'm in no position to evaluate how insightful or accurate his assessment really was, but it
sounded like an observation we hear about entertainers in other fields all the time--that yes, we all know rock stars/movie stars/etc. tend to be people who intensely crave being looked at and listened to, but if you aren't also genuinely enthusiastic about constant immersion in the nitty-gritties of music/film/etc. production, you can easily wind up deeply depressed, alienated, emotionally ravaged by the inevitably sizeable trained-dog-performing-on-command component of it, and liable to flame out pretty spectacularly, not least because that attention turns out to be far more of a double-edged sword than you initially imagined. And the reality is most people, however pleasurable the emotional associations we might have with consuming erotica/music/thrillers etc., don't at all have the kind of relentless drive needed to produce it commercially.
That's a separate issue, of course, from working conditions which are genuinely abusive by the standards of any worker employed in the business. Entertainers in general are vulnerable partly because outside resistance to knowing (as Irvine put it) 'how the sausages are made' is exceptionally high, and when you're talking about a heavily stigmatized form of entertainment like porn, with its aura of sleaze, uncontrollability, and the hypocritical mixture of titillation and revulsion that so many of us reflexively ascribe to it, that only heightens that vulnerability. What I am skeptical of is the temptation to pounce on that result as "proof" that the whole enterprise is an inherent affront to humanity remediable only by criminalizing (or cultivating internalized contempt and disgust for) its use and practice in any form whatsoever.
