Fluffer

The person on a porn set who gets a performer hard before the cameras roll: crew, not cast, and the most famous job never shown on screen.

A fluffer is the person on a porn set whose job is to get a performer hard before the camera rolls, by hand or by mouth, so the scene can start without waiting. It is the most famous job in porn that never appears on screen, and the word has escaped into ordinary English as a joke for anyone whose job is to warm somebody else up.

The fluffer is not a performer and not a top or bottom in the scene. He or she is crew, like the lighting guy, only with a more interesting job description.

Where it comes from

The word comes from fluff it up, an old slang phrase for getting an erection by hand. And it comes, as so much slang does, from us. Green's Dictionary of Slang finds its earliest example in the Gay Girl's Guide, an American gay guide from around 1955, where a cartoon of a man being sucked is captioned "The Busy Fluffer!". In 1972 the gay slang dictionary The Queens' Vernacular quoted a hustler explaining that many of his colleagues "fluff it up" before hitting the street.

The porn set meaning is well established by the early 1990s. In March 1992 the filmmaker Derek Jarman wrote in his diary about meeting a fluffer from Colt Studios, a young man employed to keep the stars ready. By 1997 the word was in Viz's glossary of rude words, and from there it went everywhere.

In porn

The fluffer belongs to the age of film, when stock was expensive and every minute of a soft performer cost money. On a gay set the fluffer could be another performer waiting for his own scene, a crew member or a friend of the director. Between takes and before the pop shot, the fluffer kept things going.

By most accounts the job is rarer than its legend. Digital cameras let crews wait, many performers prefer to get ready on their own with porn on a phone, and erection pills changed the timing of everything. Still, the word survives on sets and in jokes, and the job lives on wherever a director needs things to move fast.

Beyond porn

In politics and business a fluffer is the warm-up act, the person who flatters the audience before the star arrives. Gay men use it the same way, with a raised eyebrow: the friend who hypes you up before a date, the opening DJ, the guy who gets the party going and leaves before the hookup.

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