Arnold Zwicky's Blog

For my Sunday morning recreational viewing, a Vivid Video compilation tape entitled Nutrageous (the titles of these things are, well, outrageous), an assortment of man-man porn encounters involving mouths on balls (which scarcely narrows down the field of eligible scenes at all). One of them paired veteran pornstar Peter Wilder with cute dark-haired twink Brad Weber, who was new to me but caught my fancy, so I googled on him, to discover that he has almost no track record in porn, at least under that name. (Pornstars often run through several names in their careers, and occasionally even act under different names according to their film personas.)

But I did find another Vivid compilation, called A Bronco Named Brad — a title that seemed to promise hours of guys riding Brad Weber, but turned out to be something much more peculiar: hours of porn scenes involving pornstars named Brad. Brad Hunter, Brad Chase, Brad Michaels, Brad Weber, Brad Carlton, Brad Phillips, Brad King, and Brad Davis, plus of course a considerable assortment of non-Brad partners for them.

These 8 Brads are just the tip of the porn-Brad iceberg. Some others: Star, Armstrong, Stone, McGuire, Patton, Baldwin, Mason, Rioux, Williams, Hunt, Benton, Thunders, Jarek, Boy. (Brad Boy was inevitable, I suppose.) It’s hard to remember pornstar names, when so many of them are so whitebread. We should be thankful for Brad Rioux, Brad Thunders, Brad Jarek, and of course bad-boy Brad Boy.

But Brad is far from the top porn name; indeed, it’s well down in the pack, way behind Mark/Marc. From my 2005 “Name that porn star handout” (here):

2.  Source of data: cast lists in Adam Gay Video directories for 1993, 1997.
Removed: specifically Black, Hispanic, French, Thai, or Eastern European films.  (Some of the actors nevertheless belong to these groups.)
Raw data: 2,622 tokens.  Analysis of FNs only.
Removed: 27 initialisms (J.D., K.C., J.T., T.J., J.R., J.W, B.J., P.C., etc.), 3 nicknames (Papa Bear, Bat Boy, Angel Boy)…
Remaining: 456 types, counting homophones as a single type.

3.  Distribution by # of tokens:

65        Mark/Marc

56        Steve
54        Mike, John/Jon
51        Tony

49        Sean/Shawn/Shaun
48        Chris/Kris
47        Eric/Erik/Erick/Erich
46        Rick
44        Jeff, Michael, Scott/Scot
43        David
42        Tom/Thom

34        Joe
33        Brian/Bryan/Bryon, Kevin
30        Jim, Nick/Nic/Nik

29        Paul
27        Brad
26        Peter
23        Matt
22        Bill, Jason/Jayson
20        Dan, Greg/Gregg

(At this point, the number of names with a given frequency shoots up.)

In fact, there were 202 unique first names in my data, 44% of the sample.

Still, there are plenty of Brads to go around. And Brad Pitt’s popularity — and his role as an icon of masculinity, a crucial commodity in the pornstar world  — might well have moved Brad up the list in the 14 years since my sources were published.

This entry was posted on March 20, 2011 at 9:27 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Names, Puns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.