A qualitative analysis of male actors in amateur pornography: motivations, implications and challenges

Amateur Pornography (AP) is a new phenomenon that emerged a few decades ago and is distinctly different from Professional Pornography (PP). Yet, academic literature that focuses on AP hardly exists. This qualitative study focuses on male AP actors’ lived experience, including their motivations, implications and ways of coping with its challenges. Semi-structured interviews with 27 male AP actors revealed five themes: (1) AP as a unique genre that promotes diverse human body appearance, free choice, and profit as its secondary motive; (2) personal background that includes sexual abuse during childhood and unmet childhood emotional needs; (3) moral reasons for involvement in AP, including challenging sexual misperceptions, preventing sexual harmfulness, and promoting education for healthy sexuality and gender equality; (4) implications of involvement in AP, including positive implications such as increased self-esteem and gaining admiration and appreciation, as well as negative implications, such as impaired interpersonal relationships, social stigmatization, harassments and persecutions, and physical and psychological work injuries; and (5) ways of coping with sex work’s particular difficulties, such as the AP actors’ emotional reliance on their romantic partners, developing an artistic perspective, hiding one’s involvement in AP, and adopting a “work persona”. This research suggests that the participants’ involvement in AP was based on free choice and motivated by ideological reasons. Their strategies for coping with the negative implications of their involvement in AP reflect their sense of potency which is contrary to victimhood that is associated with impotency and helplessness.