The porn industry has a long history of spotlighting women with Barbie-like figures and impossible proportions. But just as pop culture began to feature women with more natural figures in TV, movies and advertising, the adult industry began to realize that its stars don’t all have to be a size 0, either.
In the past year, Wicked Pictures produced a sex education video for plus-size people, which went on to become one of the fastest-selling titles in the line. Another studio, New Sensations, saw success with its plus-size feature films.
“Back up 20 or 30 years ago and the mindset or the cultural perception was that porn is all pretty blonde people,” says Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, a sociologist who studies the adult entertainment industry. “Now, with body positivity getting into our cultural lexicon, a lot of different women are coming to the industry and saying, ‘I’m here to be a performer and I look like this.'”
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The focus on plus-size women hasn’t been contained to adult film studios, either. Several sex toy manufacturers, including Rapture Novelties and Pipedream Products, have begun manufacturing products for larger customers, as well. And adult toy company Sportsheets (which in 2013 was named one of the country’s fastest-growing private companies by Inc.) rolled out a line of products for plus-size patrons last year.
“We’ve always known it has been an unaddressed consumer in our industry, but it’s half the population,” says Julie Stewart, president of Sportsheets. “So we decided to take a look at that and see what we could develop. … The response was great. I think people were excited that someone in the industry was recognizing that there was a plus-size market and they have the right to healthy sex lives, too.”
Plus-size porn is nothing new in the industry. It has been a fetish genre for many years. But in 2007, around the same time that the societal focus on body image came to the forefront of the national conversation, the genre began to move away from fetish and more toward the mainstream porn world.
Still, there’s inequality for the performers. Plus-size stars are paid less per scene than traditional porn stars, says Jessica Drake, a performer for Wicked Pictures and creator/director of the “Jessica Drake’s Guide to Wicked Sex” line of sex education films.
And many plus-size films use titles like “Whale Watchers” or “Scale Bustin’ Babes.”