When was the best time to do sex work? Talk to the old timers, the Golden Age of porn was the 1970’s when it was the freest and the most fun (and pre-AIDS, the safest.) In the 80’s, a handful of stars could make tons of money at it. The 1990’s saw normalization eroding stigma, lowering the barriers to entry. But as porn became both less risky and more widespread, rates went down, making it much more competitive and harder to make a decent living. The Great Recession in the late Aughts steered countless new people into all corners of the sex industry as a way to make ends meet, driving rates down further still.

Online interactive porn means we can work out of our homes and captivate a worldwide audience. As for prostitution, the rise in screening culture and dirty client lists are attempts to make us safer than before; but, of course, laws that drive that work underground are still on the books nearly everywhere. Enormous creativity means the biz is always diversifying. Innovation and disruption create new niches, new markets, new modalities, while making older ways of doing things obsolete.

Which is all just my way of saying we live in the best of times and the worst of times. It’s easy to feel nostalgic for earlier eras in the biz, but it’s no use clinging to the past. There’s never been a time when the competition wasn’t fierce. There will always be stories about how things used to be easier, more lucrative, less competitive. Who knows what changes the next five, ten, twenty years will bring, and how we’ll look back on where we are right now?