What The Average American Porn Star Looks Like [Infographic]

Average porn actress face A mashup of the most popular female faces in porn. Jon Millward, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Your average American porn star, it turns out, is likely to be a brown-haired California-born woman named Nikki Lee. That's the conclusion from writer and researcher Jon Millward's study of 10,000 actors' entries in the Internet Adult Film Database.

Overall, Millward's number-crunching offers a profile of an industry that's much like Joe and Jane America, except blonder and thinner:

• The racial breakdown of people in porn closely matches that of people all over the U.S.
• American porn actors have the same average height as the general American population, but they weigh much less. Male actors weigh 14 percent less than the average American man, while actresses weigh a whopping 29 percent less than the average American woman.
• The most common stated actress bra size is 34B, while American women now average something in the D-cup range.
• The greatest number of porn actresses have brown hair, followed by blonde, then black, then red. Blondes, though not the majority, still seem greatly overrepresented, as 32.7 percent of actresses in porn have blonde hair.
• A third of porn actresses say they were born in California. (3,000 of the actors Millward included in his analysis were men, but he talks a lot more about the women in his blog post.)
• Millward's listing of the 10 most common actors' first and last names is mostly unremarkable. Women do seem to use some more uncommon last names, such as Love, Star/Starr, Fox/Foxx and Sweet. The ninth most common male last name is Steel/Steele.
• Millward covers what sex acts and roles, such as "MILF" or "coed," are most common in films, but we'll leave that for you to explore on your own.

A breakdown of female porn stars' race, according to their headshots :  Jon Millward, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The accuracy of all this depends on two things: 1. Whether the information in the Internet Adult Film Database is accurate and 2. The strength of Millward's statistical analysis. Millward doesn't offer many details about his methods in his blog post about his study. He says he will publish a more detailed report in the future.

As for the accuracy of the database, the site says it's maintained by volunteer editors. Readers and those representing actors may send in corrections, about which the editors have final say. Considering that much porn--and indeed many Hollywood movies--trade on skewed body types, we'd guess there's a significant amount of lying about people's ages and weights--among other things.

Where porn stars come from:  Jon Millward, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0