Years ago, I was eating with a friend and a few of his enlightened lefty activist buddies.

I was aware that a number of his self-righteous feminist pals had a problem with what I do, so I generally stayed away from them, choosing to socialize with my friend one-on-one, when we'd make vegan cookies and watch scifi.  (An associate of his once tried to pick a fight with me inside an upscale restaurant, loudly accusing me in public that I "think it's a good thing to rape children".)

On this particular awkward occasion, I don't recall a certain woman at our table saying anything to me during the meal, nor had she and I ever met before.  I ordered something small, like an appetizer or a milkshake.  When the bill came, I tipped the waitress something like 50% of the cost of what I ate.

The previously-quiet woman gave me the stink eye and snottily said, "You know, for the kind of money you make, you really should be tipping more.  These woman actually have to work for their money."

Remind me that part again about how the left is sexually liberated at right-wingers are my enemy?  I prefer my old-school Republican father who supports my right to sell sexuality over these "enlightened" feminist asses any day of the week.

In the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about how, at 25, I ought to think a bit more about long-term financial planning.  I already accomplished buying my first condo, which is a great investment, but I'd like to get better at money in general.  Part of it is getting older, and part of it is that the recession has carved a good chunk out of my normal sales.  (One's porno subscriptions tend to be first on the chopping block if you're looking to save money.  Condom, lube, and toy sales, though- doing just fine!)  I'd been thinking about taking my savings and investing in a mainstream-ish business venture.  I met with a guy at my bank to ask about some options, which was terribly dull, and anything not very risky would make me a grand total of enough to buy a decent bottle of wine once a year.

There's also one more porn site I've been wanting to start for a while, and after a lot of thought about what to do with my money, I've decided to take the plunge and go for it.  Ultimately, it's a gamble in a country with its economy in the toilet, but making pornography fulfills me better than other options.  It's a very reassuring and exciting thing to look at my career of the last 7 years and say, "Yes, this is the right path for me.  I want to keep on going further!"

The project?  A pansexual strapon site!  I don't think there's any truly great strapon web content that caters to everyone, and I want to fill that niche.  (With my cock!  Ba-dum-cha!)

Most straight strapon porn is femdom/BDSM/humilation-themed, like Men In Pain - which is hot, of course, but not everyone who likes seeing men get pegged is also into domination and pain.  There's some other hetero strapon porn out there, but it generally has that cheesy mainstream jizz biz vibe that I find decidedly unsexual.  Now, dyke-for-dyke porn, like Crash Pad stuff?  They understand hot fucking with non-biological cocks!

I want to make a site that is enjoyable by all sorts of people- whether you're straight, queer, or in-between.  Enjoyable by people like me.  I just love seeing women with their cocks, and I also love the potential for playing with typical images of masculinity and gender.

I had originally been thinking about how I wanted to find a couple of photographers to shoot photos for the site.  I admit, I'm nothing that special behind the camera, and I was thinking that farming out that part of the job would get both the best shots and save me time.  But, after more thought, I'll actually save money traveling to shoot the photos myself, and I will become a better photographer myself in the process.  (My father once asked me about some other project, in an exasperated tone, "Why do you always have to go about doing everything in the most difficult way possible?!"  Because that's just how I roll, pops.)

I'm slating my tentative launch date for February 2010.  I'll be making visits to 3 different major US cities in November and December to shoot content - DC, New York City, and San Francisco -  so if you're near one of those places and interested, check out the site's casting call page.  I will also be accepting submissions from remote models who are capable of producing high-quality images- so if you're having with a decent camera and want to show me your sexy self, I encourage you to apply as well.

I've always worked hard to operate an ethical adult business.  I'm not claiming to be perfect, but I do my best.  Which, of course, is why it's so awesome that countless people yell at me for exploiting women, causing children to be raped, destroying relationships, and generally being responsible for a hateful, sexist world full of misery, degradation, and imperfectly-decorated cupcakes.  Today, I've been thinking a lot about the ethics of how models are be paid and the general lack of openness about how pay rates are determined.

I'm considering starting a fourth porn site.  It could take some time for me to earn back my investment if the economy keeps on tanking, so I need to be a good perverted entrepreneur and nail down a figure for the initial outlay before going any further with the project.

I'm a small business, and I currently pay models $100 each per photo set, regardless of whether they are posing nude or having sex.  I prefer to let models choose the level of overt/graphic sexuality they want to display.  For me, it seems the fairest to pay everyone for their time, rather than for specific acts or penetrated orifices.

I'm curious what other small porn companies are paying these days, so I sent an email out to a lot of industry friends asking about pay rates.  One of the responses was that I should be paying more for well-known performers.  While I appreciate my porno comrade's work and her opinion on the matter, the idea of paying some people more than others really makes me bristle, even though I know it's not uncommon.  I've always aimed to be as egalitarian as possible in both my work and personal life, and I will not start paying models different rates based on how well-known they are within a given niche.

It would be an absolute nightmare to try and guess how famous each model is and pay them based on my perception.  How does one determine fame?  Is a certain performer famous enough that I should pay her $300 for a photo set, or $350?  What about someone who's at the top of the foot fetish scene, but a total unknown in the pissing scene?  Is she $200 worth of famous, or $400?

And, "famous" to whom, exactly?  Syd Blakovich is an amazing queer porn star, but when she was at the AVN awards with Madison Young, pretty much no one at the mainstream event had any idea who she was.  On the flip side, I can't name a single Vivid contract girl, so they're not "famous" in my own bubble.  I can't think of a more confusing and unfair way to determine a worker's pay than "fame".

Apart from what I view as unfairness, it seems like a recipe for disaster and potential hurt feelings if my models found out what each of them were being paid and disagreed with my personal assessment of which of them was worth the most.  Transparency has always been a major value to me, whether as a business owner or navigator of my open relationships.

When surfing the alt/indie/queer/artsy porn I mainly enjoy, I usually click over to model pages to see how other businesses go about their recruiting and what they pay.  When I see a company mention nothing about payment, it makes me think one of two things: they pay based on arbitrary/subjective standards like "fame" or "hotness", or they're trying to discourage interest from models for whom getting paid for their work is a top concern.

I'd like to call out my sister/fellow pornographers and ask why so few small porn companies publish their payment rates on their model recruitment pages.  What's the argument for not making it easy for talent to see how much money they would make if they work with you?  If you choose to pay according to more vague standards like fame or hotness, why not be open about that, too, and note something like "$100-300 an hour, at our discretion"?

Over the years, I've seen many alt/indie/queer/artsy pornographers make statements about how they want their models to be in it for the self-expression more than the money, or even that models need to prove themselves with free/low-paying work before getting more or better-paid work.

While I, too, aim to produce porn with models who love what they're doing, I'm not going to pretend that they are completely indifferent to being compensated for their time and sexual energy.  I've seen this so frequently from alt/indie/queer/artsy adult companies - the whole "the models should provide my company with free/cheap labor to show how liberated they are" thing - but I've never seen a Horrible Mainstream Porn Company do this.  Feminists throw around complaints about "the Playboy body ideal", but I bet you Playboy doesn't try to make their models think they should just be in it to empower and express themselves.

I will always take issue with the fact that most criticism of the adult industry is about the supposed evils of sexualizing women's sexual parts, and not about boring labor issues like workers being treated well by management or compensated fairly.

Is it too much to dream of a day where discussion about the politics and ethics around sex work is not confined to moralistic fluff issues juxtaposed with imagery of women undulating in darkened rooms?

And is it too much to hope for that we independent and sex-positive porn companies could be among the most transparent in the adult industry about how much we pay our workers?

"Sex workers may be 'in right' on major purchases and thus well-positioned to weather the storm because they typically pay cash for everything – their homes, cars and household goods. Having no W-2, 1099 gig, sex workers weren't invited to the easy-credit orgy of the last five years.

'My income was somewhat unpredictable and the job had the same kind of limits that modeling and playing sports have in terms of making more when you're younger and then there's the risk of getting arrested, so I was always conservative about my overhead. I just wanted to be in a place where when and if I stopped making $300/hr, I'd still be able to maintain my lifestyle,' explained M, a retired sex worker.

It's almost a biblical reversal – allegorical – the meek shall inherit the earth. Imagine all the sex workers earning six figures buying up forclosures in the right neighborhoods with their ready cash and pristine credit while the corporate bucaneers turn in their bmws and start over."

- Juliana Piccillo, in Stimulus for your package on julianapiccillo.wordpress.com

I don't make six figures, but I bought my first condo during the recession.  My landlord was kicking me out of my rental house because he bought a posh place on credit and then lost it when his 2-year ARM came up.  My new place is nothing fancy, and I had to get a cosigner- but real estate agents were practically begging me to look at their listings, and I think I got a good deal on the home I ended up choosing.

If you follow any indie pornographer blog, you'll find at least one rant about douchebaggy viewers demanding the world of them for a small subscription fee.  This is mine, in response to a post I deleted from the message board in the members area of FurryGirl.com.  (Because it's my house, folks- of course I'll eject you for urinating on my carpet.)

One of the frustrations of being a pornographer are the men (yes, it's always men) who think that in exchange for their subscription fee ($20 for my main site), they are entitled to getting tons of personal attention and for me to cater to all of their fantasies immediately.  Hell, some of them even assume that I will pay to fly to their city so they can have sex with me, for free.  (In almost 7 years of running my own site, no one has ever offered me money for sex.  I have, however, been told by countless men that they would be "willing" to have sex with me in exchange for some form of compensation.  I wonder if other types of sex workers ever get this, or is it just a porn chick thing?)

I often refer to this type of guys as "the projectors".  (Which is also a title I could use for anti-porn/sexuality activists, since the two groups are surprisingly identical.)  The projectors are looking at porn because they're lonely, frustrated, unattractive, and paying for it is the only way they can get any women to be polite to them.  Because they come to porn out of desperation, and often anger at women, they project onto me that I run a porn site because I am painfully lonely, insecure, miserable, and begging to find anyone to tolerate my existence.  I must be just like them!  (Note- these types only make up only a tiny minority of porn viewers, but they can certainly be an annoying minority.)

For $20, they expect you to basically be their internet mistress- and one who they can treat poorly.  Because, obviously, attractive women are so desperate for the chance to make a whole $20 that they would devote massive amounts of time and energy towards the privilege of being able to earn such a magnificent sum of riches.

I hate to break it to them, but $20 is not a lot of money in a country that has running water and electricity.  It's certainly less than one would spend at a strip club, and you couldn't take a girl on a date for that amount.  $20 will barely even buy you a low-end 90-minute porn movie.  For $20 spent with me, you get a month of access to independently-produced porno that will keep you busy masturbating for hours and hours.  (I happen to think that a membership to my site should cost more, but I want keep it competitive and so I continue to charge less than lots of similar amateur-run porn sites.)

Using recent comments from a customer I'll call Captain Dumbass, let's look at the sorts of things these guys have to whine about.

some of us do not have the luxury of being frivolous enough to throw money away on a $180 an hour cam show

People like Captain Dumbass love pointing to the price tag of my cam shows, as though I charge an absurd amount of money for my time, an amount no mere mortal could ever afford to spend on sexual entertainment.  They slot me into the "billionaire bimbo" role to further justify being upset with me.

I charge $3 a minute when I work on my cam network.  The network gets half of that.  Most of my time spent logged in is me waiting around for customers, catching up on blogs or important television shows.  There are plenty of nights where I've spent several hours sitting in front of the computer smiling at the camera and made zero dollars.  But, when people see $180 an hour, they do idiot-math and figure I'm clearing $30,000 a month if it's my full-time job.  Ha!  I have a "good night" on iFriends if I can keep my hourly average above $20 an hour.  That's not even a middle-class annual wage in America.  Hardly the sort of extravagant cash flow Captain Dumbass assumes is had by people like me.

Lots of people look at hourly rates for sex workers and immediately multiply that number by 160 hours to assume what they must make in a month working full-time.  If the escort charges $500 an hour, that's a million dollars tax-free a year(!!!), they figure.  And then they hate us all the more for not only being sexually desirable, but for making what they assume is an insane amount of money.  (Doing, what they consider, is not even "work", anyway.)  People tend to resent anyone who's prettier or more successful than them, and here, sex workers are slighted as both.

What these guys fail to take into account is that sex workers spend plenty of time doing "invisible" work.  That $500-an-hour escort might spend 10 hours in business-running and personal maintenance for every hour she sees clients, which puts her at a middle-class annual salary, not that of a Fortune 500 CEO.  The 3-minute $50 lapdance from a stripper might seem like pretty good money, too- unless you factor in all the time she spends in the gym, the tanning booth, the nail salon, getting her hair done, selecting music, and buying her own props and costumes.  Oh, and if accidents happen to us?  Almost all sex workers are independent contractors without health insurance.  If we're injured and have to take time off to recover, not only do we foot our own medical bills (or go into debt/collections for them), we can't work.

Ummm....ONE facial video in a 7 year span....are you kidding?? If your wondering why your cam show was such a small venue..well..maybe this post will give you some insight as to why this website is not a high traffic area.

Ummm... could it be because I run a softcore nudie site, not a hardcore porn site?  Captain Dumbass might as well fault me for having no centaur fetish content, seeing as how I promised him no centaur fetish content.  I've never understood this complaint.  It's like ordering pizza at a restaurant and then yelling at the waiter for not bringing you sushi.

I love how these guys usually include insults about how my business is be failing because I don't cater to their tastes.  (Even though, of course, I am filthy rich.)  And I have a good amount of traffic, actually - several hundred thousand unique visitors look at my site every month - which is more than many sites like mine.  But thanks for assuming that because you didn't get the facial videos that you weren't promised, my site isn't successful.

Despite this though,you seem to be doing very well for yourself,as you have the means to pick up & travel to Europe & Argentina whenever the urge strikes you.

Oh wait, I'm back in a billionaire bimbo role again.  I have so much extra money, I visit foreign countries "whenever the urge strikes me" - about once a year.  Wow, how fancy-pants-high-fallutin'-big-city-girl is that?  Goes on vacation every year!  Ain't never heard of no one who could afford to do that! (By the way: if you look at what your average American spends every year on their kids - which I don't have - I bet it's significantly more than what I spend on travel.  It's all about how we each choose to budget our money and live our lives.)

That being said,it would be nice if you gave back & shared the wealth a bit,by investing more into your website-as after all,it's people like me that help fund your lavish lifestyle.

"Shared the wealth"?  "Lavish lifestyle"?

Oh, you mean that vault I had built inside my mansion that's filled with shiny gold coins?  Sure, I'll let you have as many as you can grab in one hand.

What am I, some kind of cartoon villain?

I guarantee that if you make a substantial investment in your website and upgrade your videos,take special requests without charging $200,increase your photo sets and the overall content,you'll make a lot more folks happy and you'll have of the internet traffic you could ever want. Adding some more lady friends to your site couldn't hurt either. I suppose this post was a wasted effort on my part,but I thought I would give it a shot.

Oh, now you're offering me helpful business advice?  You want me to be more successful?  And here I thought I was a greedy person who lives in opulence?  These guys who bitch and moan about how $20 a month is too much to spend on my site often couch their anger at me in some kind of half-baked "business advice".  It's hilarious.

And, yes, I charge a minimum of $200 for custom work.  To fulfill your private pornographic fantasy, I'll consider doing it for the bargain price of only 5x what you pay for a generic mass-market porn DVD.  Know any movie-makers who will charge you only 5x the price of a DVD to make a special movie for you?  I'd love a custom Rolland Emmerich film for $75, please.

Speaking of business advice, here's my recommendation to sex workers, as someone who's stayed in my particular business for longer than most: don't ever try to please guys like Captain Dumbass.  Most of your customers and viewers are nice people.  Don't let the 1% of angry dimwits make you think they represent more of your customer base than they really do.  There is never any sense in bargaining or trying to please the cheapskates.  It's actually a good thing to alienate them.  They're not your (long-term) customers, or even capable of polite discussion.

Never try to please the people who have nothing to offer you.  That's what the delete function is for.