Boom Times, Total Burnout: Three Days at Porn’s Self-Help Convention

Thursday, September 11, 2025.

Amsterdam: city of canals, tulips, and recently a thousand folks explaining how to monetize their genitals in the gig economy.

Europe’s largest pornography conference took over a riverside hotel, which is ordinarily the sort of place where German capitalists meet to discuss their supply chains.

Last week, however, it was flooded with roller skates, sequined bras, and the relentless optimism of people who believe burnout can be solved with branding.

Out in the lobby, two buses of American retirees clutched their tickets for the cheese-and-windmill tour.

They looked on in horror as women in diamanté heels rolled past with ring lights.

The Erotics of Punctuality

The first workshop began with a question so depressingly 21st century it deserves a plaque: “Do you shoot for art, or do you plan for profit?”

The correct answer, obviously, is profit.

“Consistency” is the watchword for porn content creators in 2025. Post daily or vanish. Forget allure, charisma, or mystery—the sexiest thing you can be now is to be unwaveringly reliable. Apparently the hottest sex toy in 2025 is a content calendar.

Porn, like Amazon Prime, lives or dies on delivery schedules.

This is intimacy reframed as logistics. We are no longer aroused by each other; we are aroused by the punctual arrival of something sexy and new.

The Robots, Our New Feminist Allies

Enter the tech bros. Every industry conference has them.

They arrive like missionaries, armed with PowerPoints, and the conviction that salvation lies in their newest app.

One particularly chipper programmer promised to free women from burnout by creating AI doubles that never age, never sleep, and never unionize.

To demonstrate, he whipped out his phone, displaying an AI strangulation scene. Nothing says “women’s liberation” like watching your digital twin be throttled for eternity so you can take a cig break..

Another pair of entrepreneurs pitched “career longevity packages”: freeze your image at 23, and your younger self can undress on loop forever while you attend to arthritis. They described this as “ethical.” By which they meant: “profitable.”

It is amazing how often women are liberated at these porn conferences—reliably by men who stand to profit from it.

Porn as Endurance Sport

For those still using their original hardware, the race for virality looks like a medical trial.

One British star made headlines with 100 men in a day. Another claimed 1,000.

An Australian collapsed after 583 and was rushed to the hospital, proving at least that some ceilings are not glass, but biological.

These spectacles are less erotic than they are promotional stunts—competitive eating, but with fewer Good Grief sundaes and more IV drips.

And because human bestowed attention is a jealous god, one creator announced her new niche: widowers. Nothing says “healing from grief” quite like being monetized by someone with a ring light.

Platforms as Wellness Coaches

The platforms, meanwhile, did their best impression of high school guidance counselors.

OnlyFans insists it isn’t a porn site (yoga videos exist somewhere, apparently). Their CEO avoids the “P-word” altogether, as though linguistic gymnastics might change what everyone is clearly paying for.

Executives cooed about “authenticity” and “mental health” while reminding creators never to stop posting.

A rival marketer, refreshingly honest, said her job was “getting random men to buy porn.”

Even she warned against daily uploads: “The algorithm doesn’t care if you die.” This was considered compassionate advice.

This is the new corporate directive porn content creators: work constantly, but make sure to hydrate.

Wellness Panels vs. Home Pages

The conference rooms, decorated with fake palm trees and rope bridges, looked like a Rainforest Café that had been overrun by ring lights. There, executives solemnly discussed their commitment “destigmatizing mental health.”

Meanwhile, Pornhub’s homepage offered incest-by-proxy, violent slapping, and “extreme throat” content.

The gap between what was preached and what was posted could gobble the entire rope bridge whole.

Delegates preferred to talk about “community building” just as their product line leaned heavily on sexual humiliation. Please understand that this is not hypocrisy, per se.

This is just marketing to the algorithm. It wants what it wants.

Empowerment, Extraction, Repeat

Some women at the conference insisted that their sex work is empowering, and perhaps for them it is.

But empowerment for this crowd more often resembles filming through a bout of pneumonia, because horny, fickle subscribers don’t accept sick notes.

A Spanish creator admitted she earns ten times more than she did in IT. And she also admitted she was exhausted and ill. While autonomy and empowerment are delightful; antibiotics and regular STD tests might be more appropriate.

The system’s real genius is that it calls burnout “choice” and exploitation “authenticity.” Everyone is obviously empowered, so long as they never stop their posting.

Exit Through the Cheese Shop

By day three, the sequins sagged, the roller skates stopped flashing, and the rainforest theme looked less whimsical than ironic.

The retirees had left for Edam, no doubt relieved to spend the day with something more decidedly wholesome like cheese or windmills.

Pornography, once about sex, is now about scheduling, scalability, and shareholder dividends. The present tense is exhaustion. The future tense is AI avatars that never complain and satisfy 24/7..

Boom times for porn, yes, no doubt.

But considering this parade of “empowerment,” one thing became clear: capitalism has accomplished what centuries of castigating clergy never could; it has made sex pretty fucking boring.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.