Casting couch

The term casting couch is a euphemism for the practice of soliciting sexual favors from job applicants in exchange for employment in the entertainment industry, particularly for acting roles. This practice is illegal in the United States. Predominantly male casting directors and film producers exploit the casting couch to obtain sex from aspiring actors in Hollywood, Bollywood, Broadway, and various other segments of the industry. Originally, the term " casting couch " referred to physical couches found in casting offices, but it has since become a metonym for the phenomenon as a whole. Depictions of sexual encounters involving the casting couch have also developed into a distinct genre of pornography.

Legality

The casting couch is illegal under United States law, particularly Californian law. In the United States, most lawsuits related to this practice are settled, leading to a scarcity of case law.

Etymology

In The Atlantic, linguist Ben Zimmer described the casting couch as "a metonym for the distorted sexual politics of show business, " which has become a cliché due to the prevalence of sexually aggressive men in positions of authority within Hollywood cinema and Broadway theatre.

Economics

According to economists Thomas Borcherding and Darren Filson, the high risks and returns in Hollywood cinema encourage the casting couch phenomenon. The potential for high returns incentivizes inexperienced actors to accept minimal wages in exchange for roles. Except for a few exceptionally talented actors, producers often struggle to evaluate the abilities of most qualified actors due to uncertainty. Consequently, some actors resort to providing sexual favors to producers to gain a perceived advantage in casting; the casting couch serves as a counterpayment that effectively diminishes their wages. This situation creates a conflict of interest in which corrupt producers replace aptitude (an unquantifiable variable) with sexual activity in their decision-making.

Actors who submit to the casting couch are not guaranteed roles, as many actors engage in this practice. An actor's decision to offer sex mirrors the prisoner's dilemma, resulting in a tragedy of the commons where sex is necessary to secure film roles from producers who demand it, yet it provides no real advantage compared to actors who also provide sexual favors. This practice is illegal in the United States and likely involves some degree of sexual exploitation or harassment. Actors who abstain from the casting couch face externalities, including decreased employability.

Borcherding and Filson argue that the casting couch became less prominent after the Hollywood studio system, which enforced long-term employment contracts for actors, was dismantled on antitrust grounds in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948). Long-term contracts enhanced producers' bargaining power, which corrupt producers exploited to extract sex from actors more effectively.

Pornography

An actress and a casting director in The Casting Couch (c. 1924) The Casting Couch (c. 1924), a classic title in the stag film genre, was one of the earliest depictions of the casting couch as a pornographic trope, which later became commonplace as its popularity grew. In the sixteen-minute film, a casting director instructs a young actress to wear a swimsuit for an audition, voyeuristically observes her undressing in a separate room, and subsequently enters the room to solicit sex from her. Initially, the actress rebuffs his advances with disdain but later returns to the director after taking advice from a book titled How to Become a Movie Star. She engages in oral sex and vaginal intercourse in exchange for a role in his film, with the latter act occurring on a couch. The Casting Couch concludes with an intertitle stating, "the only way to become a star is to get under a good director and work your way up. " Zimmer credited the film with popularizing the term casting couch.

The trend of casting couch scenarios used on pornography websites began with Backroom Casting Couch in 2007.

The website GirlsDoPorn, which operated between 2009 and 2020, was described as a casting couch site. The depicted women were manipulated, coerced, lied to, given marijuana or other drugs, or physically forced to have sex, according to the accounts of victims and material from a lawsuit against the company. Six people involved in the website were charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion in November 2019.

More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Casting_couch ]

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