03.08.11
Cures for the vulture economy: Undiscovered market for elder porn and need for workers
Best story of the day from the news wires, easy, is the LA Times piece on the 76-year old Japanese porn star, Shigeo Tokuda.
John Glionna tells the story of how Tokuda stumbled into his new career. Which took off because of the emerging market for elderly porn in Japan, which has an aging population.
A light bulb went off over your host’s head. As it must have with many others in the stricken US economy.
We have lots and lots of old people, too. With more coming everyday. And a lot of them either need work outright or need supplemental income.
Put this together with the unsurprising idea that a constant diet of bionic young porn actors and actresses, whose clips you can steal anyway on the Internet, gets old. As you grow old.
Some choice moments from the LA Times piece:
Tokuda has emerged as a major player in Japan’s emerging adult movie genre known as “elder porn.” He says he has appeared in more than 350 films such as “Prohibited Nursing” and “Maniac Training of Lolitas.” In these scripts, Tokuda always gets the girl.
The films play upon well-documented Japanese male fantasies. In each, Tokuda plays a gray-haired master of sex who teaches his ways to an assortment of young nurses and secretaries. Whips and sex aides often factor in the plotlines.
“I’m a role model for a lot of men,” he says. “I do my best.”
And:
But after a 2005 stroke (not on the set, he says), he was moved to a desk job by his travel agency.
With no opportunity to slip out unnoticed, he retired — not from porn but from the travel industry. The rest, as they say, is Japanese porn history.
Tokuda earns $500/day on a shoot.
The elder porn business “is a burgeoning industry in a nation that features the world’s oldest population and ranks second (behind the U.S.) in the personal consumption of pornography,” the Times informs. It makes up a fifth of the Japanese porn industry, earning $200 million dollars a year.
Undiscovered territory in the US, I tell ya. Ways to make people feel useful again, something this place sorely lacks.
Again, the LA Times piece is here.