"Monday and Tuesday were extremely slow.  Not only did the bell not ring a lot (I spent most of my time napping or doing my day job), but I wasn't closing the deal.  Too many Larry the Cable Guy truck-drivers who wanted the world for $100, ideally $20 if they could get it that cheap.

I wasn't being a team player, but I needed to find the balance of feeling good about myself, making money and taking care of the house.  It's not an easy spot to find, especially since the house encourages you to go ahead and have sex at what amounts to street prices.  If I wanted to be sucking dick in a car in an alley, I'd already be doing it.  Yes, this is some of the class issues I was talking about.  For an American in the US, it's easy to spot class (might not matter or be so clear-cut in another country).  And I know what sort of class of man I like best, and who appreciates me properly.

Besides, I grew up with those redneck, trailer-trash, KKK-loving bastards and I really have no intention of giving them pussy if I can help it.  Not mine, at any rate."

-- Amanda Brooks, in the right to say no - days 6 and 7 on texasgoldengirl.com

I recently read and appreciated Amanda's posts about working in a legal brothel in Nevada, which answered a lot of questions I've had about that system.  I especially identified with this bit, since I also grew up amongst racist and ignorant people, and most certainly would never want to fuck any of them for the price of a meal at TGIFriday's.  Hell, if that's what I wanted, I would have stayed in flyover land and married one of those guys.

I am happy to help rational, professionally-minded potential sex workers fill in some of the blanks they've missed in their own research.  (I've stopped bothering to try and hand-hold anyone through the basics they could read online if only they'd ever heard of Google.)  Most people, once they do real research, figure out that sex work is not actually a real-life version of this carnival game, where you jump in the windy box, grab fistfuls of cash, and then exit without having done any real work.

Of all the emails I receive with questions from new and would-be sex workers, I think that every single one of them has failed to ask an extremely important question: where they can find a good lawyer or a good accountant.

This week, I was asked by another sex worker for advice on what amounted to be, I take it, how to commit tax evasion.  She explained that her finances were a mess, she had no idea where to start, had never filed a tax return, and didn't want to pay taxes on what she was earning, and figured there must be some way out of this problem.  (Honey, none of us want to pay taxes.)  I replied with one simple line, "Sorry, you need to hire an accountant and an attorney."  She replied in an angry huff because I wouldn't give her "any quick advice" on what to do.  My second, and final reply on the matter was, "You need serious legal and financial advice FROM PROFESSIONALS, and I will not risk being held legally liable for conspiracy charges for giving you any suggestions on how to avoid paying taxes."  The part that pissed me off the most was her assumption in the first email, "It seems you are in a similar position to me so I was wondering how you do it."  No, I am not in a similar position.  Plenty of sex workers file and pay taxes.  We're not all taking cash under the table and burying it in coffee cans in our yards or whatever.  Asking me for my advice on doing something dodgy because you're assuming I do it myself is extremely rude.

So, here's golden rule number two for new/prospective sex workers:

You absolutely need to hire an attorney who specializes in adult businesses in your area.  Also, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.

Let me say that again, since it obviously needs to be said, and no one listens to me when I implore them of it:

You absolutely need to hire an attorney who specializes in adult businesses in your area.  Also, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.

I value a lot about the sex worker community and people coming together to help one another out, but I am sick of seeing non-lawyers and non-accountants exchange incorrect advice about their legal and tax issues.  How many times have you read one escort advise another that if you ask the client if he's a cop, he has to tell you?  Or if he gets naked (or has sex with you), then it means he's not law enforcement?  If plenty of sex workers still believe in some 1970s-era crime movie idea about the legality of entrapment, who knows what other inadvertent, dangerous untruths they are sharing amongst each other.  Leave the lawyering to the lawyers, folks- and focus on what you do best.

The very first thing I did when I decided to get into porn was to hire one of the best adult industry attorneys to advise me on how to incorporate, and the laws that impacted me.  In the first couple of years, I hired him for an hour here and there to give me advice on my business and how to keep things above-board.  I will never see that as money poorly spent, even though I was eating ramen noodles and buying my work clothes from Ross Dress For Less.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to talk to a lawyer, and it probably costs less than you'd think.  (I spent $1000 initially, and that was before I ever had a single paying subscriber.)  The law is complicated and changes all the time, on local, state, and federal levels, and your sister sex workers, no matter how smart, are not qualified to dispense legal advice on your problems.  In fact, it's illegal to dispense legal advice if you're not a lawyer.  Lawyers possess specialized knowledge that can keep your cute ass out of jail.  (My first attorney has since retired, and he sold his business to JD Obenberger, who you might recognize from Red Light District Chicago's video series.)  Sex workers can be great for helping each other understand their basic universal rights, like the right to not incriminate yourself if you've been arrested, but for anything beyond that, please, pay a lawyer.

Secondly, hire an accountant who specializes in adult entertainers.  I didn't do this soon enough myself, and I wish I had.  Back in 2003, I think, I hired someone I knew only as "TaxGrrrl" in Michigan off an adult industry message board to do my taxes, and she screwed up, leaving me with a fine for almost $1000.  Now?  I am thrilled to have Lori of TaxDomme.com keeping my financial life in working order.  (And believe me, I am the world's sloppiest housekeeper when it comes to financial organization and orderly creation of spreadsheets, so if she can make my business tidy, she can make your life tidy, too.)

Sex work is about being a responsible professional, and sometimes, that means knowing when you need to turn to other professionals.

Things have been changing in the last year or two.  All the decent sex shops now have a section of "earth-friendly" products - which may or may not actually be any more "natural" than their other items.  There have been tons of articles on "eco-sexuality", appearing everywhere from the New York Times to tiny sex blogs, trotting out the same non-insightful suggestions on how to "green your sex life".  Plus, there's the press releases from large adult novelty companies boasting to the world how great they are because they did some barely-consequential thing they should have been doing in the first place, like recycling at their office, or making sure their China-made "jelly" products do not contain arsenic.

With all the "eco-sex" flying around everywhere, I can't help but notice that, like the rest of the greenwashing movement, it's mostly one big push for why you need to buy more stuff.

Now, before we go any further, I should tell you a bit about me.  I'm not some kind of silly leftist who refuses to shower and thinks you have to re-use everything until it disintegrates, and I'm not here to lecture you with elitist greener-than-thou dogma.  I'm a pragmatist - stuck between the mainstream world that thinks I'm a weird hippie for being vegan and not owning a car, and the hardcore greenies who recoil in horror that I take several long-distance flights a year and own electronic things made of toxic components.

In 2004, I started two pretty unique projects, which are rarely mentioned in the endless ocean of articles about "eco-sexuality".  It's my own fault for not working harder at self-promotion over the years, but I've always been better at actually putting my nose to the grindstone and doing things than hyping up publicity for myself.

VegPorn.com is a small indie porn site devoted to cute vegetarian and vegan models, and from the start, was inclusive of a variety of body types and gender identities.  Not only do I operate the only porn site aimed at herbivores, but I was also producing queer-friendly alt porn years before it grew to be the hip genre that it is today.  (As a side, before the term "vegansexual" hit the internet, I was trying to invent a good term.  The best I came up with was herbivoramorous, which is only slightly more awkward and silly-sounding than vegansexual.)

After getting that off the ground, I began work on its offshot, what would become TheSensualVegan.com.  I sell a collection of vegan and natural products, almost all of which are made by other small businesses.  (Supporting other DIY sexual entrepreneurs is important to me)  Rather than having a "staff picks" or "recommended" section, everything in my store is awesome - it's not padded out with a bunch of filler stuff that isn't very good.  I try to provide my customers with as much product information as I can get, so they can make choices based on their own values, such as letting them know if a company is owned by a woman, or where the product is made.  My best-selling lube is Hathor Aprodisia, made by a mother-and-daughter team in Vancouver.  Most of the sex toys I stock are from Tantus Silicone, a small, woman-owned company in Southern California.

I do my best to investigate products.  I ask manufacturers questions.  I wouldn't carry Glyde's vegan condoms until the company sent me signed letters from both itself and its latex processor in Malaysia assuring me no animal products were being used.  (Latex companies are tight-lipped about their production process and whether they utilize milk-derived proteins.)  There's another brand of condoms out there that I'd like to carry as soon as they meet my personal fussy assurances - I don't want to sell anything to vegans that might not be vegan.  I've publicly criticized a lube company called Good Clean Love, which is plugged regularly in "eco-sex" articles and incorrectly sold in many quality sex shops as vegan.  When I inquired with Good Clean Love about carrying it, the owner admitted that the product isn't actually vegan as the label stated, and contains a milk-derived ingredient, but she lied on the packaging.  (I've heard that the labels have now been changed to reflect the real ingredients.  Too little, too late - I think this company should be blacklisted for using outright lies to profit off conscientious buyers.)

I know what you're thinking- such a capitalistic brat I am, telling you why my company is great and why other companies practice greenwashing and only care about money.  I'm not saying that I am the only business owner who genuinely cares about social and environmental issues, but I do think an increasing number are just scrambling to cash in on a market, and not even offering very good products.  People like myself built this "eco-sex" world because we wanted to make and sell products for buyers like us.  (And I know that this is nothing new - I can imagine for how natural foods stores started in the 1970s must feel about Whole Foods.)

In my 6 years of pioneering the niche, I've read dozens of articles about "greening" sex, which are lists of vaguely sex-related things you should buy, such as organic sheets and fair-trade chocolate, interspersed with suggestions like feeding fruit to your naked lover or having sex outdoors.  There's only one real "eco sex" tip I want to give you this Earth Day - because you don't need another shopping list of food and housewares.

Buy high-quality.  Junk breaks and goes to landfills.

I understand that not everyone has much money to spend on sex products, but I promise you that a nice $80 sex toy will last you more than twice as long as a $40 knockoff made of some weird chemical "jelly" from a factory in China.  When I was younger, I had a bunch of "jelly" toys, and they simply don't last.  They chemically melted into each other, picked up stains, smelled weird, and leaked strange oily substances.  With sex toys, buy medical-grade silicone, metal, or glass.  Buy products you can sterilize and keep and enjoy for decades, and share amongst partners without fear of passing cooties.  Buy less stuff, spend less money in the long run, and decrease your carbon footprint, by buying better stuff. Purchasing a new low-end jelly toy every year, which leaks chemicals into your body, and then into a landfill, is not where you should be putting your money.  Whatever other gear you use to enhance your sex life, buy the good stuff.  Hopefully, you'll also support independent businesses who care about their work, rather than giving your money to multinational conglomerates riding the wave of a popular gimmick.

I often feel very removed from "normal people".  This got me wondering, would everyone really cross the big scary line into escorting, given the right set of circumstances?  I'm not talking about fantasy hypotheticals like, "Would you fuck a stranger for a million dollars?"  I mean down-to-earth circumstances, with realistic compensation, and, most importantly, a certain degree of safety.  If I walked into a room of people with a screened client, with good referrals from other providers, and the compensation appropriate for a mid-range escort in their location, how many people in that room would really jump at the chance?

Personally, I think most people would not, but I could be wrong.

I have a number in my head for what I would want to be compensated for an evening with me.  It is, I now realize, the same rate that an established friend of mine charges for an evening.  I asked my naked boy what his rate would be, and it was more than mine.  (Understandably, of course - he is a fantastic top, and he puts oh-so-much energy into things.  Much obliged, Sir.)

So, what say you, non-escorts?  Given the right circumstances of a polite, screened client, and a fair mid-range hourly rate ($300-500), would you go for it?

[Edited to emphasize: Someone on Twitter replied to me and said they might if the client had an "excellent bod" and paid "tons o' money".  NO, NO, NO.  That is not what I'm asking.  It's hardly an interesting social survey to quiz people if they'd like to become rich by having sex with someone gorgeous that they're horny for anyway.  Duh.]

In my 7+ years of being naked online, I've interacted with a whole lot of men.  Tens of thousands?  I don't know the number.  The men who subscribe to my web sites and buy cam show time with me are almost invariably polite.  (And, if not polite in the most traditional sense, they are blessedly blunt and to the point - typing "finger pussy" in my chat window, or emailing simply "more butt pics".)  I am usually treated as they would treat any other person they seek to have positive interactions with, rather than unleashing the spew of anti-woman vitriol that prudery activists assume.  Sure, I do get some assholes here and there - almost all of them angry at me for not providing them a service I never said I'd provide, like lots of facial videos and anal sex on my softcore porn site, or cam customers who didn't bother to read my description and get all grossed out that I'm not shaved.

When someone is overtly a douchebag to me, I can either berate them back, or most commonly, ignore them, content in knowing at least they're paying for the privilege of being rude to me, which is better than I get from, say, people who step on my feet or spill their drinks on me in bars.

You know who does unload on me and embody woman-hating stereotypes, though?  The dudes who refuse to pay for what I'm selling.  Nope, it's not those horrible misogynist men who pay cash for sexual entertainment, it's the upstanding wholesome men who think they're too good to do so.

Web cam networks are a hotbed of this.  A guy pops into my chat room, says he has a 10 inch dick, tries to butter me up with cliche "flattery", and demands a free show on account of his own sexiness.  When I politely refuse, he immediately types a barrage of insults about how I'm a fat ugly stupid whore, and lets me know he wouldn't even touch my diseased cunt if I paid him.  I adore these flowcharts - as soon as I reject him, his fragile ego gets bruised, and he makes a stink about how he's actually the one rejecting me.  (This is why I tell anyone considering web cam work to never, ever do free chat in hopes of getting a customer.  Free chat is pretty much entirely a bunch of semi-literate dudes trying to talk a free show out of you, and then insulting you for not giving them what they want.)  It's the men who refuse to buy my time that are most likely to act like they own me.

It's amazing how many emails I get from dudes who have the nerve to plainly state that they would never pay for porn, and wear it like a badge of honor, like a pick-up line, like it's something I'll praise them for.  These men seem totally unaware that I might find it insulting that they've virtually walked into my business and told me they're too good to buy my crummy wares, but want to know where the restroom is so they can do their laundry in my sink.  Or perhaps, these clueless men are assuming that I'll reply, "Oh cool, you're better than those icky guys who want to pay me to take my clothes off.  You want to get to know The Real Me without this money thing getting in our way.  Why don't you come over and let me suck your dick this weekend, seeing as how I now know you're not one of those creeps who buy porn."

Anti-sex work activists argue that it's malice against women that motivates a man to patronize sex workers or watch porn.  Why is paying for a service or product proof that someone pathologically hates the person they're buying it from?  Do the moralizers think that about any other occupations?  Do all paying customers intrinsically revile the workers who prepare their meals, teach their children, paint their houses, fly their airplanes, pick up their recycling bins, or fill their prescriptions?

The men who get my blood boiling are the ones who demand that it's their "right" to have women sexually entertain them for free, not the customers who appreciate my time and energy by compensating me for it.  Funny how the anti-sex feminists are so busy demonizing sexual commerce that they end up tacitly on the side of the real misogynists.

* My customers are almost invariably men.  And, since feminists/anti-sex activists exclusively take issue with heterosexual men who pay for women sexual entertainment, I write about men-as-consumers in this post.  No disrespect meant to the wonderful ladies and transfolk who buy porn and patronize sex workers!

The responses to Sinclair's question were the same companies we've all heard of a thousand times.  The Crash Pad Series, Madison Young's films, Courtney Trouble's films, Carlos Batts, Comstock Films, Tristan Taormino's work, and so on.  There's this relatively short list of producers that comes up every time anyone wants to talk about "independent porn", "feminist porn", "porn for women", or "porn for couples".  Now, I'm not knocking any of these companies - not one bit.  They are rightfully mentioned when people talk about where to get good hot smut.

My annoyance and confusion comes from wondering why talking about "good porn" means talking about who makes good porn that is available as a feature-length physical DVD.  It's this glass ceiling of sorts in the indie/alt porn world, and I can't understand why it exists.  ("Glass ceiling" isn't even quite accurate- it would have cost me less money and time to make a physical DVD than produce the web content to start my latest site, so it's not a financial barrier.)  While the lumbering dinosaur of the mainstream porn industry is slowly realizing that selling DVDs for $30-40 a pop is an outdated business model, the indie/alt/queer porn world is still in love with the format.

Sex-positive porn fans and bloggers generally only mention quality content that's available as feature-length DVDs, skipping over the vast plethora of independent porn that's available online, which actually gives people much more bang for their buck in terms of amount of material.  While a $30+ movie has 60-120 minutes of action, a subscription to an established adult site would have much more video content, plus photography, writing, and in many cases, interactions with performers.  And, more material keeps getting added- it's an evolving and dynamic piece of work.  Plus, you can usually download all the web content and keep it for future enjoyment- just like that porn DVD.  (Of course, I'm totally bias here, because I've been producing web porn for over 7 years, so I obviously like the format both as a creator and a consumer.)

I'm genuinely curious, why is good porn only worth mentioning - in 2010 - if it comes as a physical product in the mail?  While tech-forward people increasingly shun CDs and DVDs and store all their media on hard drives (or just use Netflix/Hulu streaming), why is indie porn still about the DVD?  Why is what I do any less real/interesting than if I burned it onto a shiny round disc and put it in a plastic box?  Even the mainstream jizz biz seems to be slowly starting to offer scenes on demand and instantly viewable online.

Asking on Twitter, two women suggested the love affair with the DVD is because they're easier to pirate, but I don't think that's the case.  Maybe with mainstream porn, but I think that fans of indie/alt/queer porn are much happier to support their favorite directors and performers by purchasing our work.  Plus, a scan of The Pirate Bay doesn't seem to suggest indie porn is massively pirated.  See here, here, here, or here, or here.  So, maybe people have made copies for their friends, but people certainly aren't able to just go easily download something they've heard about rather than pay for it.

Another person suggested bloggers and web folk talk about DVDs because there's more money to be made selling them through affiliate links.  I can't believe that one is true, either.  Standard DVD/physical product commissions (such as what I get linking to Babeland) is 20%.  Standard porn site commission for affiliates is 50%.  So, if I sell a $30 porn DVD through a link from my site, I make $6, but on a $20 porn site membership, I get $10.  Plus, if that person stays a member of the porn site, I keep getting $10 every month.  So, it couldn't be that people talk up DVDs because there's more cash it for them.

So, tell me, internet, why do you usually only talk about feature-length physical DVDs when you talk about quality independent porn?

Note: none of this is to say that DVDs and feature-length porn movies are bad, just that I think they get a massively imbalanced amount of attention compared to web porn.

PS: Hugs and kisses to my sister/fellow independent/alt/amateur web smut conspirators, like Cyber-Dyke, Tasty Trixie, Seska, Joy of Spex, Hippie Goddess, Burning Angel, Bella Vendetta, Anna the Nerd, Adorable Audrey, AmberLily, Fuck for Forest, Masturbation Impossible, and DeliaTS.  (Apologies to everyone I'm forgetting at the moment.)

"During the day I work as a writer at a prestigious international institution. I interview diplomats and promote myself as a thought leader. I write about women’s issues, and work for the promotion of women’s empowerment. But I’m entry level so I’m not paid.

[...]

I worked on an article about sex work during the World Cup in South Africa, which my editor had many qualms about. She did not like my inclusion of a quote about the potential for economic opportunity through sex work during the event. She worried that I was not problematizing the fact that women can be economically forced into sex work. She was stuck on a victimized view of sex workers. And eventually she said that really it was part of her discomfort with the broader trend in society that women make more and get ahead more easily by using their sexuality, femininity and sensuality than by using their intellect.

Well. I thought. Then perhaps you should pay me so I can sustain myself through my intellect, not through my body."

-- Ami, in Sex Work, Human Rights, & Feminism Series Part 1: Musings of a nude model on sex work, feminism and empowerment, on paradigmshiftnyc.com

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.

When I started out, I wasn't sure how my father would react when he eventually found out about the porn thing, and I had no immediate plans to tell him.  He has post-it notes on his coffee table to help him figure out how to work his television remote control, so I wasn't worried that my luddite dad was going to stumble across my web site.

A year or two in, a teenaged cousin found my web site.  I'm not sure how this worked in his head, but he apparently decided that there was more satisfaction to be had in tattling on me to the family than there was in not telling the family a story that started out, "I was looking at porn, and..."

So, I got The Call from my father.

"Is this true- that you're naked on some kind of internet sites?"

He sounded a touch angry, but not ragingly so.  I considered whether I should just lie.  I could get away with lying because he had no means of disproving me.

"Yes, it's true."

There was a pause on his end.  Sure, my father always had Playboys not-so-well-hidden around the house, but the idea of men jerking off to his own daughter might be a very different issue.

(It's an interesting test of how screwed people are about sex- the way they react to the idea that I get naked for money.  In general, something I find fascinating about being a sex worker is the way so many people project all their fears, insecurities, and neuroses on me and criticize me for their own issues.  If a person tells me how degrading and disgusting my job is, it's because they view their own sexuality with revulsion.  And this goes for misogynist men as well as the liberal feminists whose eyes - and mouths - shoot jealous hate-daggers at any woman more attractive than them.)

My father posed his next question: "Are you making money doing this?"

"Yes.  People pay a subscription fee every month to see new photos."

He exhaled a massive sigh of relief into the phone. "Oh, THANK GOD, I thought you were doing it for FREE!  Never do that for free."

We both sort of awkwardly laughed about the whole thing.

Later, he let me shoot porn in his beautifully-decorated living room.  Here's a favorite photo of myself from that day, and the one I use on my business card:

(I was prompted to put this story in writing by the Coming Out post on $pread's blog.)

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'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 some 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 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.

Sex work exists in the consciousness of almost everyone as the last refuge of the stupid, the lazy, and the desperate. This dismissive viewpoint takes many forms, but the one that often irks me the most is when it's coming from people who express interest in being sex workers.

I get questions (on Myspace, Twitter, and email) all the time from people who want to start their own porn sites.  Most of them including wording such as, "Quick question...", or "If I could have just a few minutes of your time..."

Asking me to explain how to run an independent porn company in such a manner is insulting, and it means you assume that everything I've worked for and learned in the last 7 years can be taught in a couple of sentences.  I basically have a master's degree in making internet porn.  Would you contact an engineer or any other (non-sex) professional and assume they can teach you what they do in a handful of off-hand remarks?

Running a porn site is not a get-rich quick scheme where you click a few buttons on your computer and hundred dollar bills start shooting out of your DVD drive.  It's a job - a skilled job - and it takes plenty of time to get good at it.  You're going to need to pour a lot of energy in it, and it can be quite some time before it's profitable.  You're going to need some capital for investing in equipment and consulting with a local attorney.  You're going to need to learn new skills and hone your existing ones.  Plenty of people fail at operating porn sites - even those who have good content and a love for their work.

Jobs that involve sexuality aren't magical zero-effort high-yield professions, and by assuming they are, you're showing me that you haven't thought this through before contacting me.  It's not that I don't ever dispense helpful advice, but you have to demonstrate that you're not expecting me to try and spoon-feed you information when it's obvious you haven't spent any of your own time researching this new career path for yourself.  If you don't care enough to try and learn about it independently, why should I care about it for you?  And if you're unwilling to take the initiative to seek out information on your own, do you really think you'll be good at running a business?

Perfectly acceptable questions to send me:

"Do you use a content management system?"
"Merchant account or third party billing?"
"Do you encode to multiple video formats?"

Unacceptable questions:

"How do you make a website?"
"Are there any laws or anything I need to know about?"
"How much does a digital camera cost?"

The first set of questions show me that the person has done their own research, and they're looking to fill in the gaps.  They're also not asking me questions that Google could answer for them, which shows that they respect my time.  The second set of questions tells me this person hasn't contemplated the idea of being a pornographer for very long, and probably doesn't know much about the internet or technology in the first place.  (If I reply at all, I tell them to spend at least a hundred hours reading adult webmaster resource sites like YNOT.com before contacting me again.)

Much like the "Sex Workers Are People, Too" PSA, I'd love to see a "Sex Work is Work" PSA.  I think that we're much more accomplished at convincing the world that we're people than we are at getting them to believe that what we do is work.

Whether it's running porn sites, escorting, pro-domming, or phone sex, those of us who are successful at what we do have gotten to that point because of plain old hard work, determination, and smarts.

Just like any other person who's good at their job.

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.

While searching online, I came across a guy-with-camera site where the amateur models were "normal people sexy", rather than "porn star sexy".  (I'm not setting up a false dichotomy between mainstream porn stars and "real people"- what I mean is the difference in beauty standards.)  I hadn't been previously aware, as most people aren't, that porn covers a broad spectrum of sexual interests and truly embodies the concept of the long tail.  Whatever you look like, someone is who is attracted to your body type, and a variety of specialty porn sites exist to cater to all interests.

I emailed a few topless photos of myself sitting at my iBook to the amateur porn guy.  This is my first rejection from pornoland, screen-capped in my archives for posterity:

I was bummed out- not because I wish I had bigger boobs and was going to cry and choose to feel insecure about myself, but because I thought I'd found my fit.

Quickly, though, I discovered that we "hairy" chicks have our very own niche!  I didn't need to shave my cooter to get a job.  With sensitive skin prone to ingrown hairs and irritation when I shaved my pits and legs as a teenager, getting that same rashy pimply look on my ladyparts never appealed to me.

I emailed a few hairy porn sites, and ended up booking a shoot in LA with the one that paid the most in a single chunk.  (I didn't want to travel around the country for $50 here, $100 there.)

The photographer was paid by the porn company $1250 for being awkward at me, and I was paid $750 for being your typical barely-legal model in stupid outfits that middle-aged men think 18-year-olds would wear to be sexy - like cheerleader uniforms or white cotton granny panties with little flowers on them.  (Because, as we all remember about being 18, nothing mattered to us more than trying to be mistaken for being 12.)  On the day of the shoot, the photographer tried to talk me down to less than $600 so he wouldn't have to go through the hassle of sending me a tax form at the end of the year.

The photographer kept telling me that a lot of the girls he shot were just so overwhelmed by horniness that they couldn't help themselves and just had to suck his cock.  (It took all my willpower to refrain from bursting into laughter when he said this.)  He was ugly, fumbly, and so sweaty that his thinning hair got stuck to his head.  If a cheesy movie was portraying the stereotype of an icky pornographer, this dude was exactly what that character would look like.

My LA porn experience was my worst work as a model, which is too bad, because those photos will be out there forever, probably seen by more people than my own site.  I look increasingly tired as the day worse on, (we shot 20 sets in a 12-hour day), and before I was out the door, I'd decided that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.  (Although, I now know that plenty of porn companies are much cooler to work for, and even have the decency to feed their talent and not try to get free blowjobs from them.)  In almost every photo, I have the same distant, slightly annoyed expression on my face, but hey- they got what they paid for.

I later found out that I was paid less than I could have been for softcore/masturbation content.  The company I worked for is a major player in the online porn world, but they pay models less per photo set ($37.50) than the model would make posing for tiny punk/queer/DIY porn sites that don't turn much profit.  I'm not trying to cry about economic exploitation- it was a learning experience on my path to my real career.  But, unlike, say, working at Burger King during college, my embarrassment is still visible to the world and making money for someone over 7 years later.  (Remember kids- porn is forever.)

I'm glad things didn't work out with myself and mainstream pornoland.  I'm sure I've missed out on a lifetime of weird anecdotes, but I like being independent.  So - thank you, WebGuy and creepy LA photographer, for being my first steps on the path to running my own company where no one else keeps most of the money made selling my image.