Geographic distributions II : Effects of distance, the Ripple effect vs the Strauss-Lévy effect

What impact does the geography of porn have on the aspiring pornstars? Is a woman more likely to become a pornstar if she grows up near a city where porn is produced? Or on the contrary, does the distance enhance her will to embrace that specific career and sort out only the most motivated? 

What has emerged from the statistics are two distinct models, or patterns, that modelise the attractivity of porn-producing cities on aspiring pornstars.

a) The Ripple effect

The ripple effect works like a drop of water in a lake. At the contact of the drop, the strong impact is going to create tiny waves that slowly die out in the water. The closer to the place of the impact, the stronger the wave, the further from the impact, the weaker the wave. Applied to porn statistics, this gives us a structure where the centre is going to have a very high pornstar density, the neighbouring areas are going to have a slightly less strong pornstar density and the pornstar density is going to decline progressively as the centre gets further away. To put it shortly, pornstar density is strongly negatively correlated with distance.

This phenomenon can be schematised in the following way, the red being the centre and the darkness of colour representing the pornstar density.

This model is dominant in the Americas, it applies to Canada, the USA and Brazil, notably. In the case of the USA, considering Los Angeles as the ultimate centre of porn-production, the model applies almost perfectly. It even resists a correlation test with proven results. Taking the distance between the capitals of the 9 states surrounding California and the pornstar densities of these 9 states, the negative correlation stands out clearly at -0.72, scoring 0.53 on the Pearson test. To put it in other terms, the further the states' capitals were from Los Angeles, the lower was the pornstar density. With the same exercice applied to Miami and 6 neighbouring states, the correlation results were quite close to the LA results: -0.73 (R²) and 0.19 (Pearson).

b) The Lévy-Strauss effect

This model is predominant in Europe and in Japan. It stipulates that the main centre of porn will have a high pornstar density, while its immediate hinterland will display a relatively low pornstar density. The pornstar density then gets higher and higher before reaching a density close or even higher than the one in the centre in the ultra-peripherical regions. In its most extreme form, this model is directly opposed to the Ripple effect, in the sense that distance will be positively correlated with pornstar density and not negatively correlated, like in the Ripple effect.

                                       

I gave the name of French anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss to this model, as he the first discovered and codified a similar pattern within the coupling models of exogamous primitive societies. In his model, the very centre (the enlarged family) and the furthest periphery ("foreign" tribes) were the two areas in which nobody was allowed to search for spouses. Partners could only be found in a sufficiently close, but yet not too close, groups of people. The opposite model is true for endogamous societies: they will in priority look for partners in the family (cousins notably) and then in foreign tribes, but not amongst other members of the same tribe. The porn industry works in the exact same way in countries where the Lévy-Strauss effect is prevalent: pornstars are to be found "close-up" in the very centre and "far away" in the furthest peripherical regions, but not in the space in between.  

This pattern, in its initial or its reverse form, has also been noticed in a number of other human behaviours and attitudes, such as racism. It was found indeed in France that racist voters were neither those who were in close-up contact with foreigners (typically big cities) nor those who almost never encountered foreigners (deeply rural areas), but typically the ones in between.

The Lévy-Strauss model is most perfectly represented in Japan. There, the centre of porn is Tokyo, in the Kanto region, displaying a pornstar density of 22.6. The immediate neighbouring regions to Kanto, Kansai and Chubu score respectively 5 and 3.2. The pornstar density then increases correlatively with the distance from Tokyo to reach the extremes of 24.8 for Okinawa (South) and 16.9 for Hokkaido (North). The correlation between the distance to the centre (excluding the centre itself) and the pornstar density amounted to an impressive R²=0.88 with a Pearson coefficient of 0.77.

France is another country that follows the Lévy-Strauss model, with a R²=0.54 (Pearson = 0.29) correlation between distance from the centre (Paris) and pornstar density.

Now, let's get back to our initial question "What variables explain that a woman becomes a pornstar ?". Geographic factors seem to be quite strong indeed, but not always in the ways you would expect. 

• One rather obvious observation that has been confirmed by our porn statistics is that if you're born in a porn production centre, you will be more prone to become a pornstar. This is universally true. Regardless of the country and the region of the world, the places where porn production is prevalent will also display high pornstar ratios: Paris, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, California are all examples of this.  
• In the Americas, it appears clearly that being born closer to a major porn production centre (such as Los Angeles or Miami) will indeed make you more likely to embrace the porn career. 
• In Europe and Japan, on the other hand, the correlation is somehow reversed, excepting the porn-producing centres. In these regions of the world, the further you are from the centre, the higher are your chances that you will become a pornstar. 
• This effect that I have named after Lévy-Strauss is particularly strong in centralised states, such as Japan, the United Kingdom and France, where the purely geographical factor adds up with economic factors to explain the prevalence of pornstars. In these countries indeed, economic development and prosperity are also lower the further you get away from the centre. In federal countries, such as Germany or Spain, this effect is less operational.

Netherlands

Number of pornstars: 73

Currently active : 48 (66%)

Population: 16.8M

Ratio: 4.3

Pornography legalised in: 1975

Geography and economics

The centre of Dutch porn is Rotterdam, located in the South-West (South Holland) of the country. The Netherlands seem to follow, once again, the Lévy-Strauss model : a centre with a relatively high pornstar density (Rotterdam,), surrounded by a circle of areas with a much lower pornstar density, with the the peripheries of the country displaying densities somewhere intermediate between the centre and its first circle. The Netherlands could however be considered an acentred country in the sense that the pornstar density is not that much higher in the centre than in the most peripherical regions, leading to a certain dispersion of the Dutch pornstars all over the territory. 

As for economic determinants, none of the usual variables seem to have any operational value in the Dutch case. Unemployment is by no means correlated (negatively nor positively) with the pornstar density. Neither is regional GDP/capita and median revenues. The explanation for the distribution of the Dutch pornstars thus seems to be solely geographical, even though there is slight positive correlation with the rate of urbanisation. 

Ethnic distribution

The Netherlands dominant model for pornstars is a white brunette, even though the number of blondes is relatively high. The redhead part of pornstars (6%) is, like in most other western countries, much higher than in the population and it is also the only ethnic type, like in many other countries, to have been in constant progress over the last years. The main ethnic minority represented in Dutch porn is the Latin minority (6%), followed by smaller contingents of Black (2%) and Asian (2%) sex performers.

The overall diversity index (chance that two pornstars of different ethnicities perform together) for the Netherlands is 0,13, but amounts to a sturdy 0.61 if white actresses of different hair colours are considered separate ethnicities.

Practices

The Dutch pornstars are #3 in Western Europe, after their Spanish and British counterparts, with an overall score of 16,7, which ranks them #17 out of 26 in the world. The Dutch present a very classic West-European, old-school profile in terms of practices. With the notable exception of Bondage, category in which the Dutch rank #7, the Dutch pornstars are more proeminent in rather classic categories such as Vintage (#6) and Lesbian (#11). In spite of a relatively good ranking in Anal (#11), the Dutch pornstars tend in general not to engage in other "hard" scenes, scoring very low both in Extreme and Hardcore, as well as in number-intense practices such as orgies or gangbangs.

Porn stars

Dutch pornstars are, bodily speaking, somewhere close to the world average, both in terms of boobs and asses. Somewhere just between the big tits and small asses of the Anglo-Saxon pornstars and the voluptous, curvy Southern European pornstars, the Dutch display however a slight preference for bigger tits, where they overseed both the French and the German. 28% of the Dutch pornstars have fake breasts, a relatively low percentage in Western Europe. 

40% of the Dutch pornstars have tatoos, ranking the country a respectable #9 worldwide.

Dutch pornstars go all the way from girl-next-door looks to the siliconed stereotype of a blonde bombshell of a slutty pornstar.

Taylor Sands

Taylor Sands aka. Heidi (on x-art), was born in Amsterdam in 1992. Her filmographic career began in 2014, at age 22, with the release of Education of a Young Maid by French producer Marc Dorcel. She's since starred in 18 films, mostly for Viv Thomas and Marc Dorcel. She's also done 6 scenes for x-art under the nickname "Heidi". She's a rather glamourous pornstar and the releases she stars in are mainly plot-based and high-budget films, such as her debut title or Gambling (2015) by Viv Thomas. She is an upcoming starlet who hasn't yet had the time to diversify her genres, by she's done a fair share of lesbian, boy/girl and solo performances. More recently, she's also done interracial scenes (Blacked, 2015) and anal (Ride me hard, 2014). Her smile, her perky boobs and her cute face are her main assets. She's probably the most promising newcomer in Dutch porn.

Bobbi Eden

Bobbi Eden aka Vixen de Ville, is still the safest value in Dutch porn and probably the Dutch pornstar who has starred in the highest number of films. She was born in The Hague in 1980 and began a softcore career as soon as she turned 18, in 1998, achieving notable fame as a runner-up for Dutch Penthouse Pet of the Year in 2000. Her hardcore career took off in 2002 with 18 and alone in Cleveland by K-Beech productions. She's since appeared in approximately 150 scenes, in most genres, including a great deal of solo performances, lesbian and anal-themed scenes. She's managed to go through all the stages in the career of a pornstar, starting in teen-themed films such as Sorority Babes 2 (2002) and finishing mainly in MILF-centred releases, such as MILFs In Heat 4 (2009). Her career has considerably slowed down since 2011 and she's been concentrating on her solo website BobbiEdenLive.com. She got mainstream media attention during the 2010 FIFA World Cup, promising blowjobs to the entire Dutch team if they won the competition. She got breast implants after some years in the industry (she's now a 34C). Her career has considerably slowed down since 2011. Bobbi Eden was awarded the Best Actress Award (Benelux) from European X in 2004 and was nominated for an AVN Award for best Solo Site in 2014. 

Chelsey Lanette

Chelsey Lanette was born in Vlissingen in 1991, starting her career in 2012, aged 21 with the film Be My Anal Lover by local DDF production, setting a certaine tone for the rest of her career: she's specialised in anal porn with titles such as DP Chicks 5 (2014) and Rocco's Perfect Slaves 1 (2013) alongside British Samantha Bentley. She's mainly worked for European companies but also appeared for 21 Sextury in 2014 Lipstick Romance and for Reality Kings in My Hot Roommate 11 (2015). Her popularity is due to her height (178 cm), long legs and model-like face. Another young and promising Dutch pornstar.

Dynamic

In spite of a sturdy national porn production, Dutch porn seems to be in decline, like most of the Western European countries. The growth of active pornstars actually showed negative figures last year, with a 2,2% recession. The overall growth of pornstars stagnated at 7,4%, around half of the world average. The percentage of pornstars who are aged 18-22 and therefore represent a chance for the future is the lowest in Western Europe, at 23,4 %, and it looks even worse when compared to the world average (37,7%). The Dutch however have relatively longer careers, which ensures them a correct share of active actresses, at 67%, way above the world average at 48%. Dutch porn is dying out, but dying out slowly.

Production

The Netherlands being one of the countries that legalised porn the first after Denmark, it has a long history with porn, reaching back to the 1970s. In the 1980s, Amsterdam-based Private Media corporation was one of Europe's finest and most dominant porn producers, before moving to Barcelona in 1992. Reminiscent of this era, one of the most popular Dutch porn producers is Club Seventeen, based in Uitgeest in North Holland and who's been producing porn since 1975. They notably do teen-releases, nowadays mostly with girls from Eastern Europe. Classmedia, owner of famous Oldje series is also based in the Netherlands, as well as Your Choice Productions.