What's hilarious is that throughout the "golden age" of porn from the 70s to early 80s, it was literally treated as such by authorities. Plenty of interviews with golden age porn stars talk about the endless harassment by police. How many times sets were raided, or they spent nights in jail, or were dragged into court cases. How set locations were kept secret, many only finding out hours before shooting where they were actually filming. They would book spaces and abandon them at the last minute. It started to become common to film at private spaces instead of sets, and much further away. LA porn films went from being shot in warehouses and sound stages to instead being filmed at a friend's apartment in San Francisco hours away. All to stay ahead of police and detectives who were constantly trying to bust porn film sets for prostitution.
Meanwhile back then it was a lot less like prostitution and more like an actual film when you had film costs, equipment rentals, development costs, editing costs, sound costs, costumes, a script, a soundtrack written by a dedicated composer (some porn music actually broke into mainstream and won awards), crew costs, etc.
Nowadays over half the porn on pornhub is some dude paying a "porn chick" to come over his house and do nothing but give him a blowjob while he films it with a gopro stuck to his forehead, which literally is prostitution but with a digital camera involved and police have never been more disinterested. Strange times.
