“I don’t even know how other girls do it,” Eva Lovia said. By any standard, Lovia’s career in the porn industry is a success. Both the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards and XBIZ Awards showered her with nominations for 2018, notably Female Performer of the Year. She commands a rate “significantly higher than the majority of the industry.”

Yet the 28-year-old lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and no longer travels to L.A. for two weeks each month when she’d “shoot every single day, sometimes twice a day.” She has decided it makes more sense to “do everything on my own.”

“I think right now, unless the industry makes a bunch of changes, you’ll see more girls leaving and doing it on their own,” Lovia said.

Lovia isn’t suddenly opposed to porn—after all, she still produces it. But the days when she worked for various established companies and generally had an “awesome time” are over. Gradually, she observed things changing for the worse from a financial and even a safety standpoint. She concluded it was time to “make some changes” and ultimately headed for the exit.

This is what working in porn today entails and why Lovia is troubled by what it’s become. To start, there are challenges that simply go with the territory:

The Youth Factor. Lovia got her start at “roughly 22,” initially working only with other women. (She began doing scenes with men three years ago.) By porn standards, this makes her a late bloomer. Performers can legally enter the industry at 18. Lovia disagrees with this: “I am a firm believer it should be 21 and up.” She doesn’t think people at that age understand how shooting only a single scene for a small company under an assumed name will still invariably wind up “forever attached to you,” thanks to the power of the Internet. “At 18, making these life-changing decisions is kind of ridiculous, particularly since there’s no onboarding process.”

In particular, she finds the youngest members of the industry aren’t ready for grown-up financial responsibilities. “There are plenty of adults who can’t balance checkbooks, let alone an 18-year-old,” Lovia said. It makes sense someone might struggle with money when they’re going from “making $1,000 bucks a month to $1,000 a day.” (It should be noted earning that sum is increasingly unlikely—more on that momentarily.) Young performers are often particularly ill-equipped for dealing with the IRS: “I can’t tell you how many times a girl will shoot for six months, twelve months and then tax season comes around: ‘Hey, you owe us 20, 30 grand.’ She says, ‘I don’t even have that in my bank account.’”....

...Not Getting Paid What You’re Supposed to Earn.

There is a much longer article to be written about the financial struggles of the porn industry, particularly thanks to the rise of tube sites and online piracy. “A lot of girls are doing scenes for about 600 bucks,” Lovia said. (This may be for girl-girl or even boy-girl, which has traditionally commanded a higher rate.)

Of course, that $600 isn’t all hers: “Take $180 for taxes, take 50 for your wardrobe and maybe your tanning, 10 percent for your agent, maybe 20.” Then throw in travel expenses, even feeding yourself: “You very often have to buy your own food nowadays.”

“You can very quickly lose money,” Lovia concluded.

Which doesn’t stop companies from looking to undercut wages. Here’s one way. Porn tends to define interracial sex as “white girl, black guy.” This commands higher rates for female performers.

“I don’t like the fact that are different rates for interracial, but at the end of the day it’s business,” Lovia said.

(Lovia noted the definition is particularly strange in her case: “I’m mixed. I’m Japanese and Spanish and a little bit of white mixed in there. Technically, every scene I do is interracial.”)

Before doing a shoot with Bang Bros, she informed them that due to another company “I had a pretty strict restriction on IR.” (Indeed, she noted that she was forbidden to work with people who looked black, even if they weren’t: “Even if someone was dark-skinned, it could be marketed towards an interracial demographic.”)

Making it all the more bizarre when Bang Bros only offered her dark-skinned partners, with the director—a man she’d never met—ultimately insisting he would personally perform with her. Lovia was concerned about this—“I do not shoot with directors”—but had already extended her trip and, facing the costs of the flight change and additional hotel nights, considered it.

Until she discovered the director was also too dark-skinned for her contract. Upon reminding him that she was contractually forbidden to do this, “He canceled the rest of my week with him.”

Lovia felt as if she were being pressured into doing a scene that could be sold as interracial … without them having to pay her rate. “If this company is going to be marketing it in such a niche way and they’re going to be profiting 30-fold because of that, I need to get my cut of that as well.” She believes companies exploit the good intentions of female performers determined to show that race doesn’t matter: “The girls who refuse to charge more for interracial, the fact that you’re letting them market it as interracial is the issue.”

Women in porn being underpaid can lead to them seeking new sources of income, with dangerous consequences.

The Disease Factor. With rare exceptions, heterosexual porn is free of condoms. “The companies say it will hurt their sales,” Lovia said. “If you were to show up to set and say, ‘I’m only doing it with condoms today,’ they’d send you home.” Heterosexual porn instead tries to keep itself safe by requiring performers test for a variety of STDs every two weeks.

Lovia finds this “super risky, particularly with how much sex we’re all having.” She did the math: “Very popular girls are probably working 14 days of those two weeks. That’s 14 partners minimum. Not even considering threesomes, gangbangs, orgies, that kind of thing. On top of whatever you’re doing in your personal life. Some girls are escorts. Two weeks is a very long time.”

Which is why Lovia requires “people to a have test one or two days before they work with me.”

Rising numbers of performers sidelining as escorts ups the danger significantly. Lovia specifically cited Adriana Chechik. Chechik was the AVN Female Performer of the Year in 2017. She is known for extreme sex acts, such as triple anal. (Yes, this does mean three men simultaneously.) That testing of the limits apparently extends to her life off the set: “She has been on different radio stations and she has admitted to seeing so many johns bareback that she and one of her girlfriends, they were getting Z-Paks every single day. She’s doing that while she’s still shooting. She’s known for giving people chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, that’s kind of her thing. That’s her reputation. What happens when she gets HIV?”

http://www.realclearlife.com/women/eva-lovia-what-it-takes-to-be-porn-star-today/