Amateur pornography is a category of pornography that includes pornography created by and starring amateurs, commercial pornography produced by professional but starring amateur actors, and professionally produced pornography using professional porn stars that is designed to simulate truly amateur pornography.

Types of amateur pornography

Truly amateur pornography is often created for noncommercial purposes. It often includes pornographic home movies and photographs shot by a couple for their private entertainment as well a amateur movies created for noncommercial distribution among friends. Some celebrities have seen their pornographic home movies stolen and illegally distributed commercially such as those featuring Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee.

Another type of amateur porn is professionally produced amateur pornography often referred to as pro-am porn within the industry. Pro-am porn involves professionals behind the camera but amateurs actors, often either first time performers or relative newcomers to pornography. On some occasions a professional actor or actress may appear with the amateur actors. One popular form of pro-am porn is are porn series that purport to introduce new actors/actresses appearing for the first time in porn. They often feature a format in which a host introduces a model, interviews her/him about their past sex life, sexual interests, why she/he decided to appear in porn, etc. and they have the actress perform various sex acts including masturbation, oral sex, intercourse, and sometimes lesbian or gay sex acts. In some cases the host may engage in sex with the model or a professional pornstar may be used instead. In some cases only amateur actors may be used in a scene such a boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, or same-sex friends.

Some so-called amateur porn is not really amateur in any real sense of the term but actually a professionally produced simulation of amateur porn, using such techniques as poor lighting, varying body types and, in the case film or video, omitting a narrative. They sometimes employ anonymous sex workers as performers. Note that some pornographers label pornography not containing any traditional hallmarks of amateur pornography, even the simulated variety, as "amateur" and thus the designation may not always be useful in determining the actual type of content in such pornography.

Some people argue that it is the intended audience that distinguishes amateur porn from other forms such as nude photography and boudoir photography . As such, some consider the term more useful as a marketing category than as a well-defined subclass of pornography.

Amateur pornography and the web

As the Internet created easy access and distribution for pornography, producers realized that they could earn easy money as users were paying as much for cheap, shoddy work as they were for high quality pornography. But as the Web porn industry matured, the majority of consumers began to demand a certain degree of production quality to the films and videos on offer. For a time, authentic amateur porn dropped off in popularity as casual producers were slowly bumped out of the market. However, a backlash against overly produced pornography created a permanent market for amateur porn as a category of production style and content. This trend has more recently created Reality porn which, for all intents and purposes, is very similar to Amateur porn.

See Also

• Alternaporn