It seems like every couple of months, there's a new fear-mongering book being hawked by one of the professional feminists about the vileness of sexual commerce.  A core component of their actual Serious Face critique of the jizz biz is insinuating that we have the totally unique atrociousness of possessing a financial motivation with our jobs.  We in the sex industry work to earn a profit.  We make money.  We get paid to do stuff.  We sell things and services.  Gasp!

This line of attack would be hilarious, if it weren't also so disgusting to see that these types make their living off the backs of sex workers - meaning they are literally nothing more than the most disrespectful and exploitative of pimps.  They spread panic about us to get interviewed on TV.  They use naked photographs of us without permission (in flagrant violation of federal porn statues) during their paid speaking appearances.  They twist our words and purposefully misrepresent our stories in their books.  They draw salaries as the heads of nonprofits who exist to take away our rights.  They make up statistics out of thin air about how awful we are in in order to get donations for their projects.  They receive tenure at fancy universities by lying about us to impressionable students.

They have a financial motivation.  They are out to earn a profit.  They get paid with their book deals and public appearances.  And they're probably better at profiting off the exploitation of sex workers than any pimp or trafficker out there.

There's 10 seconds - a single line of dialog - from Wayne's World that always plays in my head whenever I see professional feminists soliciting for their latest cash-grab.  Now it can can be what plays in your head, too.  This clip is from the middle of a scene of Wayne and Garth ranting about the importance of not selling out, while engaging in product placement.

Last week, I had a pushy customer on cam who went from a "cute begging little boy" routine trying to sweet-talk me into fingering my ass (after I already told him that I don't do anal cam shows), to insulting me and textually yelling at me that I have to finger my ass for him.  While I don't enjoy dealing with people like that, spending time with that dumbass netted me $28 in profit.  I could have kicked him out or insulted him back, but I actually wanted to see how long he'd last so as to extract as much money from him as possible.

I've never gotten so much as 28 cents when regular people (feminists, conservatives, and other irritants) insult and degrade me.  At least when a customer is a rude and obnoxious person, they have the decency to pay me for putting up with them.

In one week, I can now make as much money camming as I'll make in an entire month of operating my small porn sites.  This makes me quite sad in many ways, and I feel like I'm staring down a precipice and deciding which way forward and how to channel my energy into the most productive outlets.  A theme I noticed during this summer's Desiree Alliance conference in both casual discussion and formal talks was that a lot of sex workers are looking to branch out and diversify right now.  We're all asking where the good money is these days, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer.  Here's my piece of the puzzle when it comes to the indie porn and camming worlds.

First, for those unfamiliar, camming is like being an online peepshow performer.  I log in whenever I like, and on the network I use - iFriends - I set my own per-minute rate.  I get half of the $4-a-minute that I charge, so a 10-minute cam show nets me $20 in profit.  I don't make $120 per hour, though - more than half of my time is spent just waiting around for customers.  I have the option to either a) engage in free chat and beg illiterate, pushy cheapskates to buy private shows from me, or b) only let people see me who are already paying customers.  That latter option is the way to go.  So, I sit there, logged in, looking cute, waiting for someone to decide they like my profile image and description, ready to spring to life when someone picks me.  I've been using the in-between time to keep up on sex worker's rights blogs as I wait around for customers, which strikes me as an excellent system of double-dipping.

As someone who started into porn in 2002, camming has never been a huge thing for me until these last few months.  I began occasionally working on iFriends back in 2005, but found that my time was better spent (in the profit-per-hour sense) maintaining my subscription porn sites.  This summer, I've had a lot of expenses, which made me give iFriends a try again.  I wasn't expecting much, but figured, "What the hell?  I'll log in while I'm sitting here reading my RSS feeds anyway."  With the recession in full swing, and the porn industry practically circling the drain, I was surprised to discover that private, pay-per-minute cam shows are selling well.  I'm making as much or more (per hour logged in) as I was before the recession.

What's the explanation for this?  I emailed five other cam performers who also have experience in the porn side of the adult industry.

Isobel Wren (on CamWorld.com) - new to doing cam shows, but involved in nude/alt modeling since 2005 - said that camming is now 60% of her income. "Honestly I wish I'd discovered it earlier, I enjoy the heck out of camming and I really enjoy that I can make a comparable amount of money without traveling across the country, hell, without traveling from my HOUSE!"  She had used to travel for modeling gigs, but "the majority of the people who booked traveling models were hobbiest photographers.  When the recession hit these guys couldn't afford to pay $100 an hour for a model any more."

Mistress Roxxie (on CamModels.com) said, "I previously made more than enough with my websites, but business hasn't been so good and I need to make up that extra income somewhere.  Modeling isn't worth the time and energy I would need to put into it.  I tried doing more pro-domme work, but that industry is saturated."  A sex worker since 2001, she told me that camming is "100% crucial" to making ends meet now.

Adorable Audrey (on NiteFlirt.com) has been involved in amateur porn sites for around ten years.  "Camming was a little less than half my income before the recession, and about 65% of it since the beginning of this year," when she went back to working a straight full-time job on top of operating her porn sites.

Tasty Trixie (on CamModels.com) got her start with camming in 2000 before going onto starting her first porn site.  She observed that camming might be good because rather than in spite of the economy.  "During a recession or when news in the world is bad, people crave a personal, service-oriented touch to everything, especially something as intimate as sexual pleasure. We saw that with 9/11 - there was never a better time to cam that whole year than in the aftermath of of the towers falling."

Delia DeLions (on CamModels.com) has been in the industry since the early 2000s with her partner Trixie.  "It has been really nice to have the extra income coming in at a time when things have been pretty tight.  With the slumping revenue from our websites it does end up being a larger portion of our overall income."

Everyone was in solid agreement on the growing importance of interactivity with online erotic entertainment.  As Delia said, "With the massive amounts of free porn that are out there on illegal tube sites, bit torrents, forums, etc., I think the value of live entertainment with potential for interaction like cam shows does increase."  Trixie noted, "Once you've established your customer account on a camsite, paying for shows becomes far less intrusive than having to put on a condom for meatworld sex.  You don't even feel or see the money coming out of your pocket; there's no physical exchange of money, you just grab your dick and start jerking."

Trixie suggests an important angle I hadn't thought of: "There might also be less competition from camgirls who aren't serious about making money because of the visibility of naughty-cams all over; it might be more obvious to them that you aren't going to be able to retain any privacy or keep your webwhoring a secret...  In the old days of camming there was more of an illusion of safety/freedom from discovery - maybe people don't have that anymore."  (Although, Audrey suspects the opposite.  "The sites are definitely more competitive these days... and more camgirls than ever, possibly a result of more unemployment overall.")

Keep in mind, the people I spoke with have experience in amateur, niche, fetish, and independent porn, so if they are finding that customers are in search of more personal connections, I can't imagine how the mainstream cookie-cutter porn industry must be feeling.

I understand the strong appeal of interactive entertainment, but I've wondered why clients pick cam shows over other forms of erotic fun.  If you're looking for conversation and personal interaction, why spend $200-400 for an hour for private cam shows when you can find a dominatrix or escort to see you in the flesh?  For my tastes and comfort level, if I had $20 to spend, I'd buy porn, and if I had hundreds to spend, I'd buy an in-person session with a sex worker.  Maybe for most of our cam show customers, though, the first option is too impersonal, and the latter is too personal -  potentially crossing some kind of arbitrary line into "seediness" or "cheating".  I suspect that camming is the ideal neutral zone for clients not yet ready (or who will never be ready) to take the plunge and see sex workers in person, but who still crave individualized experiences.

So, what should small-time pornographers like me do?  What are the pros and cons that I'm looking at right now?  It comes down to both money and my personal satisfaction.

Porn has become an unreliable source of full-time income for me, even though it's still great to have that recurring revenue stream, however much it dwindles.  I'm not going to close my sites and declare failure or anything, but I need to seriously think about how my time and energies are best spent, and make decisive cutbacks to the porn site part of my work.  (I can't help but notice the perfect harmony in the fact that my time spent porning versus camming is now about 1:4 on the profit-per-hour-spent-working ratio, and 1:4 weeks of the month I'm bleeding and can't be on cam anyway.)

Despite its mishmash of incongruous 1997/2010-looking interfaces, animated sparkling GIFs, and truly embrassing insistence on always referring to us chat hosts as "stars" ("I am a star!  A big bright shining star!"), iFriends has never been late paying me.  CCBill, the renowned "most stable" porn site billing processor, has flat-out not sent my checks three times this year.  They claim these checks must have gotten lost in the mail, but in this economy, I'm simply not swallowing it.  CCBill has paid like clockwork for years and never once has a check ever been "lost in the mail" before, nor am I missing any other pieces of mail from other senders.  (And, of course, when these checks mysteriously go "missing in the mail", I have to pay  a $30 fee to re-issue the "lost" check.)

There's also the issue of my enjoyment with what I'm doing.  The vast majority of the work associated with running porn sites is boring.  95% of the job is staring at a computer, not all that different on the surface from what the rest of my white collar friends do.  I love that other 5%, though.  I love the creative process, even if I'm not the most creative person in the world.  I love still photography, and challenging myself to get better at shooting other people as well as myself.

But, I also love interaction with clients on cam - especially submissives and the ones with interesting kinks.  I love getting into a good session with someone who clicks with me, I love the immediate feedback, I love the variety of human sexuality, I love how glowingly happy people often look (when they have their own cam I can watch) when they have a great experience with me.  At the end of 8 hours of camming, I tend to come away feeling more accomplished than I do after 8 hours of resizing photos or trying to explain to technophobic site members to how watch my videos on their WebTV.  (Of course, the price I pay for the ease of camming is giving 50% of my income to iFriends.  In comparison, with my adult sites, between credit card processing, hosting, and affiliates, I'm losing at least 25%, maybe as much as 35%, of my sales price.)

I don't have any grand solutions or "take home point", I'm mostly scheming out loud and hoping to see what other people have to say on the subject.  I like being a pornographer and I like being a cam whore - they each have their ups and downs.  I'm working on finding my own balance in the current financial climate.

In the comments, I'd love to hear from other sex workers who do camming and porn.  I'd also love to see more sex workers in any sector writing on their own blogs about how the recession has changed their business so we can have a conversation about how we're adapting to the economy.  It feels like the elephant in the room, and I'd love to see if we can all help each other by sharing ideas and experiences.  (Let me know if this prompts you to write something, I'll link to it from here.)

"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.

Welcome to the second installment of my series of advice that's for would-be sex workers.  (The first one is here.)

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.

The term "eco-sexpert" has escaped into the wild, and it makes me fear for the future of civilization.

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 was lolling about in bed the other day with a naked man, and we got to talking about my long-standing lukewarm interest in escorting.  (I don't want to change careers and become an escort, I don't have the time to devote to marketing a new business, but I'd be keen on dipping my toes into that pool under the right conditions.)  I was saying to him that I wish I could just magically have one or two regular, stable, polite clients, men I could see maybe once or twice a month.  He sort of laughed at me and said everyone would love something like that.

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.]

Some people assume nothing but the worst about "the kind of men" who look at porn or go to strip clubs or see escorts.  (As though it's just a rare and dangerous "type", and not actually almost every breathing guy on earth.)  There's a caricature of a seedy, unwashed man* in a trenchcoat who is so pathetic and ugly and fucked up that no "real woman" would want him.  A profound loser, and a serious misogynist who acts out his hatred of women by paying them for sex or watching them get naked for his amusement.  He's probably a rapist and a child molester, or on the brink of becoming one.  He is all that is wrong with the world.  As much as I could say that sex workers are historically the most reviled people in the world, I think that title really has to go to our customers.

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!

This afternoon, I was clogging up your Twitter feeds trying to start a conversation about a topic that has long irked me.  The current iteration of my annoyance started with Sinclair Sexsmith asking people for suggestions for feminist porn for men.  (Which is a totally interesting conversation in itself- one I don't think I've seen anyone else bring up before.  "Smart porn" is for women, and men are tacitly dismissed as testosterone-fueled cavemen who will rub one out to anything.)

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

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