How Porn Stars Who Built Careers on Having Big Tits Are Surviving in Our Ass-Centric Culture

From getting it, to eating it, to having it, welcome to Ass Week, MEL’s weeklong exploration of the body part du jour.

Brittany Andrews, one of the most critically acclaimed pornstars of all time, doesn’t want to get ass injections. At 45, after a breast augmentation in the mid-1990s that took her to a DD, she’s simply too wary of pushing her body too far in the twilight years. And besides: She already has an AVN Hall of Fame induction.

“We can’t be playing with my collagen,” she says. “I’m thinking about being in hospice, with my Playboy magazine on my chest and a cute male nurse taking care of me, and I just can’t imagine having implants in both my ass and my tits, it feels like too much to handle.”

That doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought about it. In fact, it’s a constant internal debate. “I’ve almost gotten it done so many times, because it looks so good,” she laments. Andrews did once book herself an appointment for the Brazilian Butt Lift, a professional lipoinjection that juices up your posterior, but the consultancy left her cold. The plastic surgeon needed to find fat somewhere to redirect to her butt, but Andrews has always struck the silhouette of a classic thin American blonde, ripped, with large-produce-sized boobs — or you know, what was once the be-all, end-all of the mainstream masculine sexual experience.

“When did it become a bad thing to be a skinny bitch?!?!” Andrews asks, with a laugh. She now represents an unfashionable generation in the porn business; the matriarch of the 1990s and 2000s, when boobs reigned supreme. That was part of the application back then: She broke into the industry as a stripper in 1995, at a time when the job offer and a free pair of tits was a package deal.

As someone who graduated high school in 2009, the vast majority of my pubescent porn consumption was spent looking at women like Andrews. But you probably know what happened next — namely, butt culture went mainstream at the beginning of the decade. The true crossover moment is debatable, but the consensus nominations are clear: Kim Kardashian’s infamous Paper Magazine cover, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video and the ubiquity of athleisure and yoga pants. Regardless, the ramifications are clear: The term “ass man” has almost immediately disappeared from the cultural lexicon. (Now, we just call them men.)

Case in point: Americans typed the word “anal” into the Pornbub search bar more than twice as much in 2015 as they did in 2009, and booty-eating is barely even a kink anymore. This is all forward progress. There is more body and racial diversity than ever in the adult industry, and the spectrum of who and what we’re allowed to sexualize has never been wider. (The “bimbo” form was popularized in the glossy pages of Playboy, and seemed uniquely tuned to Hugh Hefner’s own sexual inclinations; in other words, it’s a good thing the culture is pushing back.)

Still, you have to feel for someone like Andrews. She worked her whole life to be the buxom feminine ideal she was told men wanted. Now, men want something else, and it’s far too late for her to change course. Andrews chalks it up to Instagram, and her logic is sound. At the turn of the millennium, the primary incubator for digital thirst was internet porn. Now, though? So many men flock to a feed that generates them an infinite supply of butts and curves, from people inside and outside the porn industry, all presented poolside at every SoHo House in the country. “Visually, [Instagram] is what’s affecting men’s sexuality,” she explains. Her theory? Young men are looking for the Instagram aesthetic in porn. Andrews notes that in January she had the top scene on adult mega-studio Brazzers, and yet, she can’t crack 150,000 followers Instagram. On the other hand, booty model Jen Selter lapped 12.5 million without breaking a sweat.

Andrews does have a good sense of humor about big butts. She’s going to be fine, having one of the most successful careers in the business. After all, legacy brands always make it, regardless of whether or not their body type is en vogue. In fact, pretty much everyone I spoke to who has made a career out of their boobs is optimistic about the future. Twenty-three-year-old Annabelle Rogers wears a 36H, and says she first considered a path in smut after her boobs became something of an urban legend on her college campus.

Rogers now almost exclusively shoots for Scoreland and YesBoobs — two studios that celebrate miraculous, mind-boggling tits. “I do see how it is all about having that Brazilian booty, twerking and having perfect doll tits. However, there are some pretty hardcore boob lovers out there. I do notice, though, that the ‘tit lovers’ tend to be older in age then the ass lovers,” she says. “Personally, I don’t see the love of boobs going completely out of style anytime soon.”

Alex Hawkins, vice president of porn browser xHamster, tells me that there will always be certain niches where tits reign supreme. For instance, you can’t shoot a MILF scene without a big pair of boobs — that would be a desecration of the genre. And by xHamster’s internal metrics, MILF searches continue to skyrocket, ticking up nine percent again last year. In other words: There’s a role for everyone in porn, even as big boobs have been edged out of the public consciousness.

The one thing that is changing, says Andrews, is that the women entering the industry now prioritize ass augmentation, regardless of the fact that the surgery can be both illegal and dangerous, especially on the black market. Today, she says a butt lift is treated like a necessary threshold to get booked, which means if she was 22 again, she’d absolutely have “a big ass.”

“Girls are getting their butts done first and foremost when they get in the business, and then boobs are like an afterthought,” Andrews explains. “If you’re a new girl, you can still put a lot of penises in your ass and you can still get work, but really, it’s like how boobs always were. If you put tits on the bitch, that’s definitely going to make a huge difference in her bottom line.”

I throw that same question to 41-year-old Alura Jenson, another porn veteran who’s repping the 1998 blonde ‘n’ boobs standard. If a girl showed up in Vegas today, looking to make her mark in the business, would she spring for butt work rather than the boob implants? “If she was joining for the sexual attention, then probably yes. If she was joining for the money, then probably yes,” Jenson answers. “But if she’s joining because she’s a sick, twisted pervert like me, then no.” (The lesson: Follow your heart, especially when your heart asks for big boobs.)

Andrews provides some perspective, too, by reminding me that she has seen many different movements and regressions in the decades she’s been shooting porn. For example, there was a time, not long ago, when tattoos could immediately sequester a performer on the outside looking in. (Today, ink is a given, if not preferred.) And so, tastes are going to change again, and we have to be hitting some sort of chilling effect with ass. After a decade of Kardashians, there’s no way we’re not getting desensitized.

We already have bits and pieces of evidence. “In the short term, after a long period of ass growth, our data actually shows a shift back toward breasts,” says Hawkins. “In the U.S., the search term ‘big ass’ dropped 17.95 percent in the past year, while searches for ‘big tits’ grew 20.57 percent. Worldwide, we saw ‘big ass’ drop 5.82 percent, and ‘big tits’ grow 4.31 percent.”

Human horniness is entropy. You never know where it’s going to take you next. Andrews, at least, is banking on a boob renaissance. “I do think it’s coming, because men love boobs. Let’s keep it simple: Men do love tits. I love ass myself. Being able to grab onto it, move it around when you’re fucking it, all of it is fabulous. But since the trend hasn’t happened before, we’re super fixated on it at the moment,” she concludes. “Everything that goes up must come down. And what are we going to be into next? Ankles? No.”

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Luke Winkie

Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego. In addition to MEL, he's written for Rolling Stone, Vice, the New York Times, Gizmodo, Vox and anywhere else good content can be found.