A woman navigating the male-dominated porn industry is often placed in a tricky, sometimes dangerous, position.

According to a study done by Covenant Eyes, 2015 pornography statistics show that most pornographic content is written, directed and produced by men. Men decide who to cast, the sexual acts performed and the scenario in which the performance is based.

“This is an industry made by and for a male-oriented gaze,” said Eric Allen, a professor of sociology and gender construction. “Most porn is geared toward fulfilling the male fantasy of what sex should be, because most of the time they are the ones making it.”

Women rarely have a choice in the situations they are placed in. “Hot Girls Wanted,” a 2015 documentary produced in part by Rashida Jones, interviewed women living in Miami, Florida, and working as porn actresses.

The documentary showed the process of the men seeking out actresses, using a Craigslist ad and referring to the need for ‘models,’ especially young-looking actresses.

Riley Reynolds, one of the porn producers interviewed in “Hot Girls Wanted,” stated that it was “easier” when the girls did not know what they were getting themselves into, because it keeps the focus on making money, not on the manipulative nature of the production.

“Coercion works in very subtle ways,” Allen said. “It isn’t someone holding a gun to a girl’s head and forcing her to be a porn actress.”

The women in the documentary are not concerned with establishing specific contracts that will protect them from being manipulated into continuously degrading porn. They operate under the belief they will be allowed to leave whenever they want.

Instead, they are given certain standards under which to operate. Reynolds told the girls what kind of cosmetic surgery to get, even dissuading some from breast augmentation because they had to uphold the “young image” he had chosen them for.

In fact, ‘youth’ and ‘teen’ are the most-searched terms on pornographic websites, according to the Covenant Eyes study. There has also been a spike in porn search engines involving the common schoolgirl fantasy.

Porn companies look to expand upon this sort of ‘supply-and-demand’ mindset involved in many business models, subjecting the women to what they will perform.

In her book “Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality,” Gail Dines explains how the porn industry is first and foremost a business, dependent upon the viewers who engage in pornographic imagery.

Raking in over $3 billion a year in the U.S. alone, the CEOs of pornographic production companies are just as involved in making business decisions as they are in making sexually explicit content.

Part of this revenue goes toward paying its actors. In “Hot Girls Wanted,” the women are revealed to make much more than their male counterparts, but this comes at a cost.

“You see a lot of manipulation of actresses because producers place them into situations they didn’t sign up for,” Allen said, “but they aren’t in a position to back out.”

In “Hot Girls Wanted,” actress Ava Taylor told how she went to a set having agreed to a certain sexual act, and then was told by her director to perform something else.

This can be categorized as a foot-in-the-door phenomenon. This ropes in actresses to agree to degrading sexual acts that increase in intensity overtime. Actresses are placed in a precarious financial situation by their producers, and thus have little choice but to consent to whatever the director wants.

These demeaning acts have consequences. The Covenant Eyes study found that just 25 percent of males with massive exposure to popular pornographic videos believe in women’s rights.

The study also reported that this group was more likely to see women as, “socially non-discriminating, as hysterically euphoric in response to just about any sexual or pseudosexual stimulation, and as eager to accommodate seemingly any and every sexual request.”