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.