Interesting topic to disguss. I think I will share a couple thoughts of my own.
Relationships as meaning might not be obvious for a pornographer or P-star, since they might be from broken homes or have personalities that constantly clashed with people around them. But ofc that doesn't mean they have exhausted all opportunities to achieve meaningfull relationships. But if turning to P is turning away from meaningful relationships, then going into the P industry does seems to be a type of nihilistic, anti-societal act.
There seems to be a trade-off involved in going into P in terms of rewards and losses. On the one hand they can achieve fame and a significant amount of money for few hours work. On the other hand they risk getting a sense of alienation in society, where P-work is sacreligious and dirty. One pushes them up the societal hierarchy (fame and wealth) and the other down (stepping out of the norm and the sacred).
If we look at the personality of a pornographer in terms of the "Big 5 dimensions" which is discussed a lot these days, pornographers might be in "high openness, low conscientiousness and low orderliness" domain. That would make them dismissal of traditional societal values and prone to look for an "easy living", which P-work is in terms of hours of work. (Ofc you need a special psyche to go into that type of work, but if we ignore that for now)
For a p-worker the downward consequences might seem less important, since they are not very sensitive to them, whereas the benefits seem extra attracive.
If they are from troubled background, it might make them even more inclined to reject societal norms and thereby also the societal hierarchies. It might work for them for a while, stepping outside society and mainly frequent in social circles tied to the P-industry. But P-workers age too, and at some point they probably need to reintegrate in society. The financial benefit will be gone, the fame will quickly be lost (the good parts of it anyways, if there are some), and they will be left with the taint of having been a P-worker.
One question these people might ask is, "why should we be tainted by being P-stars?" A truely post-modernist question. Even some branches of feminism push the idea that profiting from their sexuality is liberating for women. Ofc they place the blame on the oppressive, patriarchal views of women throughout history, but ofc it is peculiar, that more or less strict norms about sexuality has risen in so many independent cultures.
A perhaps more pursuasive answer can be found through an evolutionary lense, where sex meant production of offsprings, so sleeping around would mean unsurity about fatherhood. For males who has to invest a lot in bringing up the children, it would be a very sub-optimal strategy for reproduction of your genes to partner a promiscuous female.
But then what about now? We have the birth-control after all, we can control all that stuff. So why can't we get rid of all the restrictive sex norms? The issue seems to be, that these things are build into our phenomenology, the fundamental way we relate to the world. Realising birth-control will stop pregnancies are on the level of conscious thought, whereas feelings about meaning and the sacred are on a deeper, more subconscious level, sort of at the level of impulse. You can easily rationalise why something should be meaningful, but if you don't feel it, it's difficult to hold it up as something personally meaningful to you.
So what is the issue with being a pornographer? If they don't see meaning in society, why can't they turn their backs and do p? It seems that they have based their "meaning" on a kind of hedonistic pleasure. Sex = pleasure, I can get money for sex = I can get money for pleasure. Ofc sex in P often seem far from pleasureable, but taking that aside, pleasure as meaning can itself be seen as an answer to a nihilistic (post-modern) worldview. Nothing matters, so I'm gonna seek out as much pleasure as possible, independent of the costs.
So yes! I agree, P-workers are a kind of enaction of a post-modern mindset. And fucking dumb, lets be honest....