I Shot Myself is definitely one of the adult companies I'd suggest to other people- whether you're an experienced sex worker or totally new to the idea.  They're polite, professional, feature genuinely artistic erotic content, don't pitch their content in degrading or irritating ways, and I'm happy with the $200 I promptly received in return for my efforts.  So far as my personal tastes go, I like that the site has a good number of unshaved women, and they generally aren't wearing much, if any, makeup.  I'm a very fussy creature, and I have to feel confident about a company if I'm going to give them not only the rights to use my images, but all my personal information, too.

My only criticism is that the site is almost entirely cisgender women, with a few butches and FTM-looking models, and some couples shoots.  I don't know if they're only looking for more feminine/cis women, or if they just don't get applications from butch women, genderqueer, and trans models- but if you are one of the above, why not email/apply and see?

My photos just went live, and you can catch some freebies for the next 24 hours.  Here's a taste of what you'll see if you join:

As always, I appreciate joins via my links, because not only do I get a kickback, but you get a discount, too- so everyone wins.  And, if you'd like to shoot photos for them, I also get a kickback if you list me as your referrer.

To balance that out a bit and make me seem less like an insane bag lady always yelling at buildings and statues, here's a more harmonious post on my life as a pornographer.

The time: 6 months ago.  The setting: a Russian boat doing a cruise of the Antarctic peninsula.  The goal: editing a lot of porn and seeing a lot of cute animals.  (The resulting non-pornographic photos?  Here.)  The following are a few thoughts I wrote during my voyage and have had hidden away in my drafts folder.  Now that it's oppressively hot outside, it's time to remember getting cold.

To start, here's a snapshot of me in my small top bunk, editing a scene for Cocksexual.com with Bella Vendetta, Jiz Lee, and Syd Blakovich:

On our first day of sailing in open seas, passengers didn't have much to do besides attend lectures on things like different types of seabirds and why global warming is bad, which I mostly skipped so I could do some work.  I was in the middle of editing some photos of Calico when an announcement came on that a group of three female humpback whales was off the side of the boat.  I closed my computer, put on my fuzzy boots, and joining dozens of other people racing up the stairs to get a quick glimpse at the whales as they moved into the distance.  It's a strange and wonderful thing to be interrupted from editing pornography by whale sightings.

It had been my intention from long before my cruise was booked that I make strapon porn in Antarctica.  I had wanted to do it actually out on the ice, but during our off-ship excursions, we ended up being much more supervised than I thought we would.  (Which is a good thing- I'm glad staff told people to not try to harass penguins or scramble around on delicate areas.  Though, it was amusing to watch the Japanese couple repeatedly pretend they didn't understand English only when they were told to not try and pet the penguins.)  As the days went on, I also couldn't sniff out any real perverts or oddballs on the ship to help me out behind the camera with shooting some naked or strapon photos.  I asked the cute Australian guy I'd been chatting up and he got all blushy and said that would be too "awkward" for him - despite my repeatedly asking him.  Poor normal boys - scared of my cock.

With a number of people around all the time, I accepted that getting naked off the ship would mean exposing myself to them.  Not a worry - I'm not shy.  So, on a "warm" day, I asked the nicest guy on the cruise, "Can I borrow you for a minute?"  We tourists were always doing this - flagging someone down to take our pictures in front of something.  He knew the drill and trudged over as I handed him my camera, asking, "You're not offended by nudity, are you?"  He was not.  I quickly stripped off my many layers , including my boots and two layers of socks, and ran out into the snow.  He quickly shot some photos of me as a staff member looked amused but slightly uncomfortable, and then I raced to put my clothing back on.  My feet hurt for the rest of the day - not officially frostbite or anything, but I felt like I was walking on pins.  But look at the glory that resulted:

I think I became the gossip of the trip after this.  I even had one woman pull me aside excitedly a few days later and ask ,"Is it true what they're saying - that you got naked?!"

So, my first pornographic mission was accomplished, but I was running out of time and desperate to make use of my pretty new white Joque harness.  While it's one thing to ask a person to shoot some nudes of you, it's another to ask him to shoot photos of you jerking off a big strapon.  I ended up taking those photos myself, aboard the ship.  These were shot off the coast of Deception Island, which is off the northern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.  I returned on an early boat from that morning's outing so I could make use of the side decks while people wouldn't be milling around on them.  I don't know if anyone saw me, but it would have amused me greatly if one of the elderly couples decided to go for a stroll on the deck at that moment.

Success!

(See more of the nudes by joining FurryGirl.com, and the rest of the strapon set by joining Cocksexual.com)

I enjoy interactive aspects of my work.  I like meeting people with strange fetishes, or who I find engaging in some way.  Getting paid to talk about things that interest me or turn me on is awesome.  I'm also a curious person by nature, and I like knowing intimate and "strange" secrets about people.  I like the trust of being informed about things a client hasn't told many other people, or maybe even no one.  It's that kind of intimacy many people can only share with strangers.  I take derive a sense of conspiratorial excitement in knowing things about a man that even his wife doesn't know, even though I wish people had kink-friendly relationships where they could freely share their fantasies with their partners.

Most people are polite, though that anonymity that brings stark honesty also brings about some inevitable rudeness and assholery.  Worse than that, however, are the viewers who don't give me any idea what they want me to do.  These are the guys who sit there quietly waiting for me to - I don't know - put on a Vegas-style stage show for them.  Or finger my ass.  Or recite the periodic table of the elements.  Or something.  These guys are the extreme version of the ones who merely type "do something sexy" or "do whatever you want."  Maybe I'm just a shitty entertainer, but I need something to work with.

I had a perfect example of this type tonight.  He paid $111 for a 37-minute cam show, which is much longer than these types usually stay.  (I keep half of that money, by the way - the cam network gets the other half.)  I don't know if he enjoyed himself.  I don't even know if he spoke English, although his IP address placed him on the east coast of the United States.  I spent most of the cam show fully clothed, smiling at the computer because I thought maybe not getting naked would force him to tell me to do something.  I'm not one of those sex workers who engages in client-bashing often, but I just have to share this example of what not to do if you're paying for a sex worker's time.

Keep in mind, this entire chat log represents 37 minutes of time, as shown by the time stamps:

[23:18] MRQUIETMAN Entered Room
FURRY-GIRL [23:18]: Hello there. How are you doing?
MRQUIETMAN [23:18]: h9
FURRY-GIRL [23:19]: So, what brought you to my chat room?
MRQUIETMAN [23:20]: cut
FURRY-GIRL [23:20]: I need a little bit of help from you so I know what you're into.  :)
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: Can you tell me something that turns you on?
MRQUIETMAN [23:21]: age
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: I'm 26. Or, is "age" your turn-on?
MRQUIETMAN [23:21]: usa
FURRY-GIRL [23:21]: I live in Seattle.
FURRY-GIRL [23:23]: I don't know if you're new to cam shows, but you need to give me some kind of hint about what you like, so we can go from there.
MRQUIETMAN [23:23]: ru pretty
FURRY-GIRL [23:23]: Yes, I think so.  :)
FURRY-GIRL [23:24]: What would you like to watch me do?  Or, what would you like to talk about?
FURRY-GIRL [23:26]: Don't be shy, I won't bite.
FURRY-GIRL [23:27]: Do you like hairy girls?
MRQUIETMAN [23:28]: me nietgher\
FURRY-GIRL [23:28]: What sorts of things turn you on? Name your pleasure.
FURRY-GIRL [23:30]: You're paying by the minute, and I'm happy to just sit here and smile, but is there anything you'd like me to do?
MRQUIETMAN [23:32]: hot
FURRY-GIRL [23:32]: Okay, I'll sit here in smile if that's what you'd like to see.
FURRY-GIRL [23:34]: Are you sure there's nothing I can do for you, or show you, or talk to you about?
MRQUIETMAN [23:34]: nice beeties
FURRY-GIRL [23:35]: Thank you. By chance, is English not your native language?  Habla Espanol?
MRQUIETMAN [23:36]: nowwwwwwwwww mew ur pussy
FURRY-GIRL [23:36]: Yes, that, I can do.
MRQUIETMAN [23:37]: nice
FURRY-GIRL [23:37]: Thank you.
MRQUIETMAN [23:39]: can talk
FURRY-GIRL [23:40]: I can't hear you speak aloud, if that's what you're asking. And I don't broadcast audio. We type things into the text box at the top of the chat window.
FURRY-GIRL [23:43]: Anything I can show you in particular?
MRQUIETMAN [23:45]: ur face
FURRY-GIRL [23:46]: Got any fantasies or dirty thoughts you want to chat about?
MRQUIETMAN [23:46]: ur sexy
FURRY-GIRL [23:46]: Thank you.
MRQUIETMAN [23:48]: yes
FURRY-GIRL [23:48]: Are you a boob man?
MRQUIETMAN [23:50]: and a coch nan
FURRY-GIRL [23:50]: "Coch"?  Cock, or cooch?
MRQUIETMAN [23:50]: cock
FURRY-GIRL [23:51]: What kinds of cock do you like?
[23:52] MRQUIETMAN Has left

I did eventually end up naked, but who knows if my client had a nice evening.  I wonder why he picked my chat room - was he a fan of hairy pussy, a fan of strapons, or simply a fan of clicking randomly on things on the internet until a naked girl appeared?

Sex work is filled with mysteries.

A little background: I grew up as the freakish nonreligious kid in a conservative part of the country.  I'm not one of those people who was raised in a big liberal city or whose parents taught them college-level concepts before the other kids could even read.  I grew up around people who told me that dinosaur bones were put in the ground by Satan to trick us.  I've always been drawn to nature and science, and have spent almost 14 years paying attention to the evolution wars - ever since the subject came up in biology class in seventh grade.  Sexuality activists can learn from the contemporary creationist movement's most successful strategy, and how to not play into it.  I've touched on this topic before, but wanted to write about it in more depth after watching not just anti-sex worker activists, but also supposedly "pro-porn" feminists, using this tactic over the course of this month's re-hashing of the porn wars.

To get a two-hour crash course in the modern creationist movement, I recommend watching Expelled, courtesy of The Pirate Bay, whose motto should be For When You Don't Want Your Money Supporting Something™.  The movie is a "documentary" narrated by conservative actor Ben Stein, aimed at "exposing" the horrifying "bias" within American schools to not teach Christian myths often enough in science classes.  (Unlike other countries with indoor plumbing and electricity, Americans already do have so much creationism in their schools and public life that most of them don't believe in evolution.)  The film clumsily pushes the idea that atheist radicals like biologist Richard Dawkins are taking over science and shutting down any "debate" about creationism.  Stein gives the topic the full loony treatment - which, of course, includes a stroll around Dachau to sensitively remind viewers that a belief in evolution and science invariably leads to Nazi death camps.  Stein never plainly states in the movie that he's a creationist who doesn't believe in evolution.  He argues that anyone who definitively supports evolution is trying to "silence debate about these important issues", playing like he's just a doe-eyed and confused Joe Everyman who thinks we the people have a right to hear "all opinions" on an unresolved matter.

Creationists might be intellectually-stunted to the point of hilarity when it comes to their interpretations of the world around them, but they are a very clever and well-funded bunch when it comes to getting their ideas wedged into American society.  Their most important and successful tactic is a propaganda campaign that they call amongst themselves "teaching the controversy": to not deny evolution outright, but to drum up "debate" and make the public think that the jury's still out about whether or not the world is 6000 years old.  In reality, no credible institution or researcher lends any believability to the idea that there's a "controversy" in the scientific community over whether or not Christian mythology negates everything we know about biology, geology, and physics - but that's just a minor unmentioned pesky detail, like there being no credible studies to suggest any harm in viewing porn or decriminalizing prostitution.

Creationist nutters aren't the only special interest group that is hell-bent on "teaching the controversy".  You see this sort of thing all the time with other areas where a person knows their own religious/moral beliefs have no factual basis, and that there's likely lots of solid evidence against their position, so their only hope is to cloud the issue to make their own position look more tenable.  Such as:

"Oh, I'm not against abortion!  But I do think young women should know that a lot of people have been asking questions about whether women who get abortions are more likely to end up with cancer later in life."

"Oh, I don't hate the gays!  But I think the public should know that there's all sorts of conflicting information about how unhealthy it is for children to be raised by homosexuals."

It's a sort of malicious argument from ignorance - someone posits, "I can't possibly make sense of this terribly confusing issue," - when, of course, they perfectly well do have a side - "so, we all really need to think more about what a grey area we're looking at and not make up our minds so hastily."

In the world of internet debates, this shoddy debate tactic is called concern trolling.  The concern troll is never for or against anything, they've just got "concerns" they need to keep raising.  No matter how many times you keep countering these people, they can keep popping up with some other "concern" that adds further confusion to the issue and makes it harder to discuss using facts.

"I think it's a classic hallmark of psuedoscience - which is that you just keep shifting the goalpost until you get to a hypothesis that's, frankly, untestable".

- Dr. Paul Offit, in Point of Inquiry's "The Costs of Vaccine Denialism" podcast

Lately, I've seen more sex-positive types adding to this problem by reminding everyone that "we" ought to be more respectful of anti-sex worker activist's arguments, and that the sex worker and pornographer community is failing to address these "concerns", such as:

"What about the women who feel insecure about themselves when they see sexy skinny women in porn?" The feminist answer to this is to sell a woman a book telling her that yes, she really ought to feel oppressed and ugly when she sees women's bodies in advertising and entertainment, and to whine a lot about such images being displayed.  My solution is to tell people to own up to their insecurities, and develop positive self-esteem that's not based on comparing themselves to idealized images in the media.  We all choose how we react to the world around us, and a large-chested size two model in a porno isn't forcing any woman to hate her own body.

"What about that study that shows sexually aggressive men look at a lot of pornography?" What about it?  Non-scientific and anti-porn minds take the study to mean looking at porn causes men to behave aggressively, even though such a conclusion is a classic logical fallacy.  I'd respond by telling people to read about the difference between causation and correlation, and to know that there are many more studies from all over the world that show a correlation between increased access to porn and a decrease in sex crimes.  If we're playing the correlation game, there's much more research to suggest that porn makes the world safer and less dangerous.  (Three I have bookmarked are Anthony D'Amato's 2006 study "Porn Up, Rape Down" about porn and rape in the United States, Dr. Milton Diamond's 1999 experience with studying porn and sex crimes in the US and Asia, and economist Todd Kendall's work, including "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.")

"What about porn companies that don't treat their performers well?" None of us have any real statistics about what percentage of performers feel abused or unhappy with their jobs, and I'm not going to waste my time debating my guesses with other people who are also making guesses.  (My guess, though, is that the porn industry has a higher level of job satisfaction than most other occupations.)  Are some workers in the porn industry mistreated or miserable?  Of course, sadly, but that doesn't make the jiz biz especially evil.  There are exploited workers in every sector in every country in the world.  Further, it is pornographers and performers who are the most likely to know about adult companies that have had complaints from talent.  If you want the real scoop on a given porn company and how well they treat their workers, you don't email a women's studies academic on the other side of the country to ask for a referral.  You ask people in the porn industry.  Sex workers are pretty damn protective of each other and will gladly share if they've ever heard of a company engaging in bad business practices.

It annoys me to live in an age of public discourse where people are coddled and told that every idea is valid and just as likely to be correct as any other idea.  Ideas are not lottery tickets - each with an equal and random chance of winning.  When it's almost unheard of to unapologetically state that a given idea or person is flat-out wrong, the intellectually-lazy public believes that the truth always lies in the middle.  Not everything is a compromise.  Not everything is a debate.  Not everyone's opinion is a beautiful and unique snowflake - sometimes, it's just yellow piss-filled slush.

The sex-positive scene, and the world at large, needs to stop giving concern trolls and those who "teach the controversy" an equal platform with equal consideration.  Their goal is to dump impenetrable grey area paint all over everything so that the well-reasoned text beneath becomes unreadable.  It only encourages them to acknowledge and give legitimacy to their every little whimper and fuss.

As a younger person, I wasted a lot of time and energy line-by-line debating anti-sex worker loonies in front of small internet audiences, and I won't make that mistake again.  I'd rather just make good ethical porn, and occasionally blog about sex work politics to a wider audience.  One of the most powerful political slogans I've ever seen was a Bobby Sands quote on a mural in Belfast that read, "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children."  Well, my revenge in the porn wars will be the laughter of the performers I hire to make awesome smut with me - and there have been a lot of genuine smiles and laughs on my shoots.

A running theme I saw in the conversation about Stop Porn Culture, as well as at other times, was people commenting that we need to prove to anti-porn activists that feminist porn exists.  These people's hearts are in the right place, but I don't think that tactic has any chance of swaying feminists who hate pornography.

Some sex workers and pornographers identify as feminists, some of us don't.  As I complained once in a room full of people shooting daggers out of their eyes at me, I'm sick of seeing the word "feminist" being used as the sole or primary qualifier of whether or not a given idea/product/person is good or evil.  It's sloppy, reductionist thinking.  While I'm not at all against anyone calling what they do "feminist porn", and indeed love what comes out of the feminist porn scene, it's awfully tiring to see people act as though the only ethical porn out there is the stuff being made by a handful of small producers in San Francisco.

When people fixate on the importance of spotlighting and praising feminist porn, I, and others like me, are tacitly being slighted.  Why is the label of "feminist" more important than the actual production of what's been discussed?  How about rather than squealing endlessly about feminist porn, we use the term ethical porn instead?  It makes more sense and actually explains, in simple English, what you're talking about.  It would be nice to see inclusiveness towards all the awesome and ethical non-feminist pornographers (ahem - like me), and you'll also avoid the endless semantic debates with anti-porn activists over what feminist "really" means.  Sidestep that bullshit - it's a useless distraction, and you'll never win an argument with it.  Believe me, I spent years trying.

When we get lazy and use the word "feminist" as an all-purpose stand-in for "ethical", we create a false dichotomy by inferring all porn not marketed specifically as "feminist" is not produced ethically.  This helps our enemies fracture us, and it hardly fosters productive dialog about the real politics and ethics of porn production.  If we want to have open discussions about labor and production issues - rather than endlessly rebutting baseless accusations that watching porn turns men into rapists - we need to drop the loaded terminology and use proper descriptive words.

It's also irksome to see the way in which many people in the pro-porn community rush to decry anti-porner's highlighting of BDSM porn in their materials.  While the anti-porners cherry-pick presenting the most graphic and kinky porn they can get their hands on - images of women being degraded, humiliated, and beaten - the pro-porn retorts to this emotionally-manipulative tactic annoy me just as much.  It completely plays into the divide-and-conquer efforts of anti-porners.  "Hey, most porn isn't violent and degrading!  You're just using horrible examples!  Most mass-market porn is wholesome, not abusive!"  This only serves to further enforce the sex-negative overall social norm that kinky sex is defacto unethical and nonconsensual sex.

Excuse me, but since when did either side research the porn in question and figure out if the examples used by anti-porn nutters were produced under conditions that were agreeable to the performers?  Whether the women in the images are doing artistic soft-focus implied nudes or having their faces rubbed into a puddle of piss on the floor, there's no way to tell by looking at an photo how the performers really felt about being a part of the production.  When you're only looking at and talking about images of a pre-negotiated scene, you're glossing over everything that actually matters.  It would be like asserting that a war movie is an illegal snuff film because you, as an audience member, are certain from the "evidence" you were given that you saw people get shot and bleed to death.  Or, that since you found Hollywood's latest romantic comedy to be light-hearted and fun, you're absolutely certain that everyone involved with its production was treated fairly and loved working on the movie.

Guess what?  I've met a lot of women who work in front of the camera doing "violent", "degrading", and "humiliating" porn, and they consistently gush about how amazing their work is and how happy they are with their jobs.  I actually think I hear more kinky porn performers express happiness about their work, and more often, than I see even other happy sex workers glow about their jobs.  Is that anecdotal evidence?  Sure, but it's a lot of anecdotes - more anecdotes than the anti-porners can trot out in the form of a few ex-performers who later decided they regret their jobs and felt abused by having worked in porn.

To channel my inner Christian Bale: hey, it's fucking distracting when people chase the red herrings of "feminist porn" and "violent porn".  Let's stop that, and focus on the comparatively boring issues of discussing labor politics within sex work.

Three sex bloggers also went to the conference of (by one estimate) about 150 attendees.  Violet Blue put up a counter-Stop Porn Culture blog, Our Porn, Ourselves, to raise awareness of the fact that lots of women love porn.  (Anti-porn activists struggle to always frame their argument in terms of men versus women and porn versus women, which is an false dichotomy.  They insist that your only choices are that you support women's rights, or you support the sex industry.  They get major constipation-face if you point out the massive plot holes in this gender-segregation story, such as gay porn, dyke/queer porn, and women who are consumers/clients - let alone the issue of women sex workers themselves who are happy with their work.)  Over on Twitter, a group of people were back-and-forthing about the conference, but it was a discussion that mostly left me shocked as to how obtuse and paternalistic some "allies" can be.

At the outset of the discussion, I was reprimanded by several people and told I'm mustn't even joke about porn being evil since I'll surely get quoted out of context and harm the cause.  I wonder what it's like to feel like to be so smugly self-important that you refrain from all use of sarcasm, finely honing every tweet to make sure that no one could ever misquote you or take offense at what you typed, because surely, your 140 character tweets hold within them the future of discourse on sexuality?  I'm always ruining things for the proper upstanding folks - this time, I was guilty of debasing Twitter to a mere vehicle of amusement and brief exchanges, rather than the erudite academic journal for which everyone else uses it.

The core concern from most sex blogger types commenting on the topic, though, is that apparently, "we" need to respect anti-sex worker activists, "be kind" to them, and seek to engage them politely and find common ground - not be angry or sarcastic like me.  Easy for you to say, folks - they aren't trying to put you in prison or take your business away from you.  How big of you to be cordial to those who are not seeking to make your life more dangerous or difficult.  It's no real skin off your enlightened backs to tut-tut philosophically at people about how they should react to their oppression when you're not the one being oppressed.  It's armchair politics at its most offensive.

This isn't just an annoyance of mine with sexuality issues, it's a problem amongst liberals/lefties and how they discuss all sorts of political issues.  I think the underlying problem is that these sorts of people just can't stand the jarring, ego-deflating idea that their opinion as an Very Concerned Outsider isn't as important or valid as the opinion of an insider.  It isn't.  (As a white chick, I would never harangue a person of color about why my opinion of how to handle racism is better than theirs.)

I absolutely do not aim to build bridges with extremists who hate sex workers and want us penniless and in prison, any more than I aim to do so with people who commit anti-queer hate crimes.  I wouldn't really even want to debate them directly, unless I felt the particular forum was large and neutral enough.  People who have devoted their lives to taking away freedoms from other people are not seeking compromises and rational conversation - they are devout ideologues, not misguided random citizens that just need the real facts.

Ours is an info war of changing attitudes, and then laws, to grant us rights, respect, and dignity.  I'm not going to use my energy trying to cozy up with the group of people who are the least likely to ever change their outlook on the issue.  It's simple strategic thinking - when you waste your limited resources fighting impossible battles, you're neglecting a lot of perfectly winnable battles.  For example, if your goal is to get people to become atheists, you don't have to be terribly bright to realize that an effective way of doing so is not by flying to Saudi Arabia and pestering fanatics who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca.  It's not engaging in a "public debate" that could convince a larger audience of your logically-superior argument, it's ramming your head into a wall in a place where the dialog is controlled and utterly dominated by the most hardcore of your opposition.  (I do, however, fully support spying on your enemies in their native environments so you can understand their agenda better.)

One of the women urging "us" to respect people who put sex workers at risk complained that I was "devaluing other opinions".  Twitter being so succinct, I'm not sure if she meant that I shouldn't devalue the opinions of anti-sex worker activists, or that I shouldn't devalue her opinion that we need to work with them and engage them at their own conference.  As I thought about how to parse it, though, I realized it didn't matter.  Why, yes, actually - I do devalue the opinions of people who aren't sex workers that feed a need to tell me what to do.  Whether you're an anti-porn feminist or a pro-porn feminist.

Oppressing sex workers isn't an opinion.  It's an action.  I could care less if these nutters sat in their cat-filled spinster apartments and didn't like porn - that's an opinion.  But they're not content to just not watch porn themselves, they try to force their world view on the rest of us.  Anti-porn and anti-sex worker activists are political organizations that take actions by lobbying governments to restrict sex workers' access to safe working conditions and to imprison them for being indecent and sinful.  Since we're getting technical here, I do "respect their right to have an opinion", but these people stopped having merely "an opinion" a long time ago.  It makes me think of those who were defending the Mormon church for "just having an opinion about gays" in 2008 when they illegally financed the massive propaganda campaign that took civil rights away from queer couples in California.

Being more "kind" or "respectful" towards people who've built profitable careers creating panic, purposefully lying to the public, pressuring governments to pass bad laws, and bashing sex workers isn't going to make them switch teams.  These are not people who can be engaged with in a reasonable debate using facts, calm voices, and warm handshakes.  Being a smart activist means knowing the difference between those who are distinctly and unabashedly your enemy, and those who are on the fence and could benefit from hearing from you.  Being a smart sex worker ally, I would further contend, includes not spending your time patronizing me about why I ought to respect people who seek to drive me out of business and into jail.

(PS: After I wrote this post, I did more catching up on blogs and found that Audacia Ray had already written something on the chatter and counter-organizing around the Stop Porn Culture conference. Here's her post that also discusses the pointlessness of debating anti-porn radicals.)

That's the confused, am-I-missing-something-here question almost everyone has interrupted me to ask as I explained the first of my two nasty splits from the last two months.

The answer is that yes, he knew exactly what I do.  He knew before our first drunken makeout session at a party last summer, before our first date last fall, before he ever put his dick in me this spring.  In fact, he went on and on, profusely about how much he supported my decision to be a sex worker and how people ought to treat us with more respect.  He told me that my then-boyfriend was "classless" for having asked me to go with him to a work function as a "web designer" rather than a "pornographer".  He once even used the phrase "honored to help" when presented with a way to do something for the sex worker community.

You can tell where this is going, right?  It's like waiting for the punch line in the latest news story that begins with, "One of the nation's most prominent evangelical anti-gay activists was recently caught..."

This guy made himself officially my first split based on my job!  I can't believe it took me 8 years in porn to find - and copulate with - a guy to drop me like toxic waste for no other reason than fear of personal embarrassment about my work.  (I've seen other sex workers cycle through these assholes more regularly.)  I got the full bullshit parade.  "Look at me!  I adore and respect sex workers!  I'm such a good guy!  I can't lie to anyone!  I respect you and think you're wonderful!"  Until, that is, a couple of weeks after our long-distance half-year flirt-fest was sealed with several days holed up in my place fucking.  Ohhh... so that's what it feels to have a guy manipulate and lie his way into your vagina!

Here's the real punch line, though: the guy had his personal assistant do the dirty work rather than tell me himself.  Aspiring yuppie douchebags take note!  A girl will never forget that special first time when a man's personal assistant calls to lecture her about how his career is just too important right now for him to risk being publicly associated with a girl like her.  Kicking a girl in her most sensitive areas via text message is so lower middle class.  A true gentleman has an employee do it.

Or, if you like cruel jokes with two punch lines: he later did bother to tell me himself that he hoped we could still be "good friends" in spite of his decision.  Since we were never "together", I'm taking "good friends" to mean "I'd still like to put my penis in your holes when I'm in Seattle."  Honey, if you want to fuck sex workers, but don't want to be connected to them in broad daylight, that's not referred to as "close friendship".  It's calling being a paying customer.

Sigh.  And I was doing so well.  I'd only had one other asshole in the last three years, which feels closer to 30 in a sex worker dating years.

Split two was with the boyfriend, which was a more complex situation.  It was my longest relationship.  We'd been in this weird grey area for 6 months leading up to the final breakup in May, when I just couldn't handle dealing with his problems any more.  It called to mind an image of a dangerous attempt by a non-pro to rescue a wildly thrashing drowning person.

Both splits hit me hard enough to knocking the proverbial air out of me, but in different ways.  Thinking of suitor number one makes feel me angry and used.  Thinking of suitor number two makes me feel exhausted and sad.  It's resulted in my neglecting work and focusing on tending to myself, which means in an already recession-plagued economy, the last two months have not been too profitable.

One of the things I've heard many sex workers say over the years, as another is going through a breakup, is "invoice him!"  It seems to be one of our fallback jokes.  I've had half a dozen people implore me of that lately.  But, it's not the sex I want to invoice them for.  I wish I could invoice them for the less tangibly quantifiable degrees of emotional distress and subsequent distraction from work they'd both put me though this spring.  I wish I had something to show for it all other than being wiser in mate-selection in the future.  You can't take that consolation-prize sentiment and spoon it at night, or pay your bills with it.

I needed to get some fresh air.

I headed off to Mexico for 8 nights - unfortunately, though, not at the expense of either of the boys.  (I believe that people who drive you to necessitating stress-related vacations should be responsible for at least half of the cost, like an abortion.)  I'm now settling back in at home, but I had a lovely time on the beach in a rural part of the Yucatan.

I still can't really take much comfort in chalking it all up to experience, but at least I got a tan and some time to disconnect.

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.

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.)

For The Girls and other smaller "porn for women" companies feature cheesy soft-focus images, putting forth the idea that in order for women to be aroused, a sexual situation must be framed in terms of love and cuddling.  I love snuggling, too, but it's obscenely offensive to me to suggest that women are such delicate little flowers that we can't handle sex without it being about love.  That, to me, is exactly the sort of mentality that feminism was supposed to be fighting against.  (But, I have that sentiment about a lot of matters when it comes to feminism, which is why I abandoned that sinking ship.)

I don't need saccharine romantic story lines to get wet - I want to see relatable people and fucking.  ("Porn for women" rarely features shots of penetration and other things that supposedly frighten women.)  When I look at porn, I want to see people getting sweaty, aroused, smiling and laughing, being "imperfect", and in realistic locations and situations, not a "fantasy hay loft where the muscular stable boy makes sweet gentle love to me while never ruffling my feathered hair."

For The Girls is just as bad as mainstream "male-centric" porn in the type of body images it promotes- oiled up beefcake guys with muscles, who generally look like they were photographed for some gay porn mag.  The women have flawless thin bodies, just like what you'd see on any mainstream porn production.  The sex - what little of it is shown - is of the extremely staged variety where the focus is on camera angles and keeping the performer's makeup and hair looking perfect.  (Nevermind the fact that most "porn for women" looks like it was shot in the 80s and 90s.)  Apparently, "women" like their porn tacky, contrived, and like something out of a letter to Penthouse Forum from 20 years ago where it's obvious a man is writing his fantasy from the perspective of a woman.

Why is For The Girls' content so similar to mainstream porn, you ask?  Because it is mainstream porn - and I don't mean that just as a personal judgement.  In talking with the site's owner on an industry message board several years ago, she explained how she gets the material she uses on her site.  For The Girls' owner buys cheesey mass-market heterosexual porn content, and removes all the shots of the actual sex, since women don't want to see that sort of thing.  She also buys generic softcore male content and deletes any photos that look too gay.  She then writes flowery introductory text to make the content romancey and (supposedly) appealing to women.  While the site's audience is led to believe that the content is special, "made for women", and focusing on women's pleasure and desires, it's just random porn produced under whoever-knows-what circumstances, with all the icky sex and the icky gay stuff deleted out.  Very feminist and sex-positive, don't you think?

(I've had a number of online conflicts on this topic with the owner of For The Girls, and I wish I had them screencapped for posterity.  Our fights were on a couple of different message boards for women in the porn industry, both of which are now offline.)

For The Girls and the "porn for women" niche is just dripping with the idea that women actually don't like or want sex.  It's deeply misogynistic in ways that aren't obvious on the surface.  (The whole thing reminds me of an Onion article about a woman masturbating to the thought of having a husband, a house in the suburbs, and 2.5 darling children.)  For The Girls' owner wouldn't even bother me if she peddled her product as "softcore romance porn", but don't beat your chest and make a fuss about how your conservative anti-sex "porn" is is what all women - as a blushing hivemind - want.

I've heard that For The Girls does sell well, which is sad, because it's not the only option.  There is a lot of porn out there for vanilla heterosexual women that doesn't belittle them, and is actually directed by women, focused on women's pleasure, and features performers who love their work.  (As well as amazing porn directed by men and transfolk, and porn that's not so vanilla or heterosexual.)  There is just so much kick-ass erotic material out there these days for all women, of all different tastes, and it's a shame to see one site claim a monopoly on knowing what's best for the fairer sex.  It's especially sad to see For The Girls mentioned in the same breath as Buck Angel, Jamye Waxman, Madison Young, Shine Louise Houston, Carlos Batts, Courtney Trouble, and Tristan Taormino - and all the other people who create beautiful erotic material that doesn't condescend to their audience by "protecting" them from sex.

---

I recently got some feedback on my blog that read like an auto-generated essay against porn and sex work, hitting all the key arguments that I've heard a thousand times, just rearranged in a different order.

It got me thinking, hasn't anyone made a bingo card about this yet?  Apparently not, so I made one, with my top 25 most irritating frequently addressed accusations.  (Click here to get a larger version so that you can print it out and play along at home.)

[Edit: Miss Renegade Evolution made a sex work bingo card about a year ago, which I missed.  Go see her version here.]

"Unless you've read _____, you have no idea what you're talking about!  If only you were exposed to the correct ways of thinking, as I have been, you would understand why porn causes men to rape their children, why millions of women die from anorexia because of your industry, and why sexuality is a sacred thing not to be sold."

It's true.  I don't read those top-selling books from the liberal literati.  I spend most of my waking hours creating and promoting body-positive porn that features people of all shapes and sizes and genders.  (A cornerstone of my overall ethic is my deep loathing of people who prefer to whine about what other people are doing rather than get off their asses and actively create change.)

Sorry to break it to the antis - who have new books to sell and speaking engagements to get paid for - the arguments against sexual expression and sex work haven't changed in the last hundred years.  Sure, a lot of people make a good living convincing women of "new" and convoluted ways in which they ought to feel oppressed, but it's all the same old trope, whether it's coming from people who identify as radical feminists or the Concerned Women for America.  Same logic, same propensity to make up fake statistics, same underlying misogyny, same fear of sluts busting lose and ruining it for all the good girls.  I can pretty much guarantee that the "latest" anti-porn/sex worker thoughts from such-and-such prominent author is not going to bring up anything new we haven't heard before.  (There, I just saved you $19.99!)

Of course, I've been told that even if I disagree with an author's anti-sexuality stance, they still have a lot of other valuable insights on other areas that I could probably benefit from pondering.  It's not as though I seek to insulate myself from the opinions of anyone who disagrees with me, but it's hard to take some people seriously in spite of monumental failures in large areas of their philosophy.  When an author's whole schick is about supposedly advancing women's liberation, and they're anti-sex (worker), to me, that pretty much nullifies everything else they have to say about the topic of women (and the liberation thereof).  It's like being asked to consider the analysis of a brilliant "anti-racist" who, incidentally, just so happens to really hate Asians.  So, no, I don't have a lot of time on hand to concern myself with with philosophies of hypocrites, even if there is some facet of their unifying theory of the world that I could take genuine interest in.

It's not that I outright refuse to ever read these books, but I only have so many hours in my day.

I'm too busy adding positive contributions to the sexual landscape to read about why women should feel depressed and victimized every time they walk by an advertisement with a skinny woman on it.  I'm too busy being a woman who operates my own small business to cry about not having huge boobs like the celebrities who are supposedly my models of attractiveness.  I'm too busy making hot smut that rejects many heteronormative porn stereotypes to sit around reading about ways in which men must be nefariously shaping my definition of "sexy".  (Women can't make up our own minds!  We're secretly controlled by the Illuminati, err, I mean- The Patriarchy!)  I get so occupied trying, via my porn, to tacitly assure everyone that they are capable of great sexiness, that I just don't have any energy left to manufacture "injustices" and argue that women should feel oppressed by them.  Sometimes, I'm even so busy being excited about hiring amazing sex worker's rights activists to make porn for my company that I don't have time to read a single tome by Wendy Shalit, Naomi Wolf, or Ariel Levy.

I've been accused of being just another American anti-intellectual when I explain this to people.  And to such critics, I want to reply with of a piece of contemporary philosophy that even a stupid little twit like me can wrap my head around:

It's time to put down your books written by boring upper-class white ladies and just focus on being awesome.

Emailers want to let me know that they are turned on by exhibitionism, consider themselves quite sex-positive, love performing, and eager for my advice.  They also often let me know that they'd potentially be disowned by their families and "real friends", kicked out of school, lose custody of their children, and/or be fired from their conservative job if anyone found out.  They want to how to not get "caught".

I tell such potential sex workers: imagine the person you'd least want knowing about it.  They'll probably be the ones who find your alter ego first.

My bad outing story?  Over dinner, some loser my mother was dating yelled at my grandmother that I "suck dick for money", jumping to his feet and pompously refusing to spend another minute at the same table as a whore.  So, picture your own elderly grandmother, with an enraged asshole screaming at her that you suck dick for money.  Can you handle that?  (The irony about this situation, however, is that every time in my life that dick-sucking has transpired and money has changed hands, I have never once been the one being paid to suck a dick.  But I didn't want to try and explain that to an upset woman in her late 80s.)

So, here it is, short and concise, for all my would-be sex worker readers:

The first rule of sex work is: you will be caught being a sex worker.
The second rule of sex work is: YOU WILL BE CAUGHT BEING A SEX WORKER.

Accept those rules before you start quizzing myself or others about how to get started in the business.  Sex work can offer great things to those of us with big hearts, abundant sexual energy, creativity, and business-savvy, but those freedoms and rewards do come at a certain price.

My trip to New York City was a whirlwind of amazing, and I've barely had time to wash my clothes and read my email before I'm back to the airport tomorrow- although, this time, for a family visit.

I knew I was going to visit New York this fall to shoot for Cocksexual.com, and the universe was especially kind in putting together a great week of pervert events so I could have fun in the evenings, too.  Alongside a full dance card of taking pictures of cocks, there was also a sex-positive drinkup, the Sex Worker Literati reading series, the 2010 Sex Blogger Calendar release party, and Audacia Ray's second screening of her Pay As You Go collection of shorts.  (Thank you to the organizers of these events!)

I was able to shoot 8 new models for the site, from cute boner-filled posing to an amazing double-penetration scene.  (This was my first time shooting a DP, and I found it challenging to know what to focus on when there's so much hotness happening all at once.  I love meeting new challenges!)  The cheapie light kit has been great to work with- it packs down small enough that I can fit everything in a large backpack.  In spite of some hurdles like missed trains, lost models, and the A and C subways not operating, everything still ended up working out, and 23 gigs of great porn was shot.

I feel as though I was dragged quickly through a massive scrumptious buffet, and barely had a chance to stick my fork in but a few trays of food as I passed.  I met and caught up with many great sexual intellectuals, but it was all so short.  Ten minutes of conversation here, a late-night dinner there, a quick hug and "nice to see you!" shouted in a crowded bar in the middle, and I have found myself back at home, wondering what happened to me.  As a bit of a recluse, that level of constant social interactions dazzles me, and I wonder if that's actually just what every week is like for normal people- the ones who don't work at home, in fleece pants, cat on their lap, with podcasts to keep them apprised of the outside world.

I've officially declared February 1st to be the launch date of Cocksexual.com, so that's when you'll get to see all the great stuff I've been doing.

As always, I am seeking models, but right now, I am most interested in finding cisgender (non-trans) men to work with in the Bay Area or Seattle.  If you are a cisguy, partnered to one, or know one who might be interested in being pegged on camera, check out my casting page.

A parting shot:

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.)

"Saw an 'adult gigs' ad for actresses, unrated movie, sexual contact. Interesting stuff. I wrote my inquiry- and I think I'll decline.

The premise? It's rape, of course, the only type of sex that mainstream movies care to show explicitly. The man gets caught, justice served-

-but it's still rape porn, adding titillation to women's violence in the guise of realism. Fantasy I get but this is mainstream- not fantasy

And thus do I come to understand the difference between fiction & fantasy. Fiction is made up, fantasy consciously imagined knowing limits.

Fantasies are what we imagine knowing they may happen and often probably should never happen. Fiction happens to other people, could happen.

I'm comfortable portraying sexualized rape (trans, male or female, in whatever combinations) as fantasy, but not as fiction."

- Sabrina Morgan, on her Twitter at Twitter.com/SabrinaMorgan

On the porn end of things, I got a lot done.  I shot my first five models for Cocksexual.com, including this lovely lady:

There was much cuteness to be had, as well as hot cocksucking, fucking, drag and gender play, jerking off, and a certain amazing woman who can suck her own dick.  (You'll have to wait until February 2010 to see who!)

I also had a great time at Arse Elektronika.  Here's Annalee Newitz (currently of io9.com fame) presenting her talk on the history and future of love, with potential scenarios for how we might be having relationships 300 years from now.

Thank you to all of the awesome people with whom I had a chance to re-connect or meet for the first time!  It would take me too long to list you all, but know that you're still my beautiful and unique snowflakes (of frozen sexual secretions).

One of the themes of conversation for the weekend was how We (in the most royal and vague sense) would like to live in a world where They accept our kinks, geekery, genders, and modes of sexual expression.  While I was in that frame of mind for the conference, many San Franciscans were spending their Saturday having a daytime rave.  The BART into the city was besieged by young people in their best "freak" outfits comprised of shiny/neon things from American Apparel.  They were there to have fun and play weirdo dress-up for a day, and then go back to being frat boys and Forever 21 clerks or whatever it is that normal young people do.

It was a contrast that highlighted an important social division for me.  Some of us try to de-stigmatize our communities, while others work to stigmatize themselves (in shallow, temporary ways).  It's interesting to observe which subcultures revolve around which approach.

In an industry where a model applications generally just ask which holes you'll put stuff in and if you're willing to fuck a black guy, how many pornographers would even want to receive model applications with so much passion about rethinking gender or the power dynamics of penetration and cocksucking?

I'm glowing!  Sexy, smart perverts!  And they want to work with me!

I feel lucky to get such flattering and wonderful input just two days into the project.  As with when I started my menstruation site, seeing a strong interest from models really reaffirms that I've made the right choice.  It's also exciting that two of my first interested models are active sex workers' rights advocates.  I'm happy to be able to hire people like that so they can keep on being awesome and making the world better for all of us.

A friend of mine thinks I shouldn't paint too cheery a picture of what I do, since it irritates me when outsiders assume my work is easy and always tons of fun.  But during weeks like this, I can't help but be so braggy about how great everything is.

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 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.

Many civilians probably end up finding someone in porn whom they've known in another context.  Not all of them are as cool about it as my ex-neighbor, though.

Over the years, I've "reconnected" with a lot of people through my site.  I've had emails sent by acquaintances from my youth, former boyfriends, an old employer, people I once met at parties, etc.  (I've received an equal number of emails from people I've never known who insist they've met me, like a guy working in a German hostel who was so excited I was staying there.  I have never been to Germany!)  Honestly, most of these emails get ignored, even if they're not rude.  I just feel as though so much time has passed since I last saw the person, and that there's probably a reason we didn't stay connected in the first place, even if only because we have nothing in common.

A shining failstar came from a boy I knew in grade school.  He was a bully.

"Dear [my name], this is [his name, spelled incorrectly], god you look good if you are ever in town to [hometown] give me a call and maybe we could fuck, i am married to a bisexual chick that would love to watch me fuck your hairy twat.  I know that we were enemies in grade school but we should see each other again, preferiably in our birthday suits, I love your hairy cunt and would love to here from you at [his email address], please write me back.

Yours truely [his name, spelled correctly this time]"

Yeah, I'll get right on that. I totally got into porn so I could fuck the people who picked on me when I was a kid.

Remember, normals: someone is not all of a sudden a radically different person (or a non-person) because you just discovered they're a sex worker.  Finding out that someone is involved in the adult industry does not give you permission to act like an idiot, or assume that they would be thrilled at the chance to give you some freebies.  You'd think this would go without saying, but I've seen too many ungracious oddballs who did not come with this lesson pre-installed.

This advice also counts for meeting new people who reveal that they're sex workers.  Don't suddenly switch out from whatever smalltalk thing you had been chatting about to ask her for a demo of her cock-sucking skills, or nonchallantly ask if she was raped as a child- as though that's any of your business.

As with all things in life: be the good neighbor, not the horny bully.

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.

"One of the things that gives the adult entertainment business so much power over the "real" world is that it is fearless. It utters the unutterable and speaks what has been left unspoken. It names names. It avoids euphemism. It searches for frank language, and it shines light where others have insisted upon shadow, mystery, fear, and confusion. Now that is a truly radical, outlaw path to walk."

-- Darklady, in It's Time for a Mature Industry on Xbiz.com

★★★☆

Recommended: For more serious sexuality bookworms

In an alternate world, Phil Harvey would be a better-known first amendment crusader. Far from the bombastic, abrasive persona of Larry Flynt, Harvey is an adult retailer who seems like he could be your friendly libertarian grandpa. Throughout the book, Harvey maintains a sort of innocent patriotic optimism, and in spite of his own dealings with malicious encroachments on his rights, he seems pretty shocked that the government of the United States of America would ever do anything underhanded.

"The Government vs. Erotica" is a look at the series of coordinated obscenity prosecutions of Philip Harvey, his company, Adam & Eve, and many of his employees. The government's strategy was to indict Harvey and others in multiple districts around the country, bleeding them dry through a series of costly legal battles over bogus obscenity charges. It's the kind of thing that has killed smaller companies with less means to defend themselves.

From the first raid on their North Carolina facility, and along a journey of nearly 8 years and $3 million in legal fees, Harvey covers his cases in detail. He also writes more broadly about porn, class, taste, fear of sexuality, freedom of expression, and the nonsensical nature of American morality laws. I'm sure both areas of the book would be equally interesting to some, but I found Harvey to be a more engaging writer when he's focused on the big picture, rather than the minutiae of his drawn-out battle.

But what a battle it was- Harvey spent from May 1986 to December 1993 fighting off wave after wave of prosecutions around the country. Before we internet pornographers had to wonder if some conservative enclave in Utah or Alabama would find our porn obscene by their "community standards", Harvey was fighting in such places on behalf of his mail-order company. For that, I can't help but respect the guy, even though we disagree on other issues.

My favorite chapter of the book was probably "Pornography and Class", where Harvey muses on what defines the line between that which is considered to have artistic merit, and what which is mere obscenity or trash. Some passages from that section I wanted to highlight:

Judge [Robert] Bork would have us believe that today's popular culture is "more vulgar than at any time in the past." He looks back fondly on the 1930s, when performers sang about "the way you look tonight," with a warm smile, a soft cheek, "nothing for me but to love you." But public lynchings were sometimes popular "entertainment" in the 1930s, too, a phenomenon that strikes me as a lot more coarse than any form of rap.

And

Class-based views of pornography take many forms. "Once upon a time," observes a New York Times writer, "obscenity was confined to expensive leather-bound editions available only to gentlemen... One of the questions asked by the crown prosecutor [in the trial of the publisher of _Lady Chatterly's Lover]... was: 'Would you let your servant read this book?'" Indeed, one of the earliest common-law decisions involving obscenity reflected this elitist attitude. The Queen's Bench rules in 1868 that, to be obscene, material must have the power to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Or

In American culture, this phenomenon is exemplified by Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine... As writer and sociologist MG Lord observes, "Hustler's scatological fantasies have less to do with penetrating women than with the rage at having not penetrated the privileged classes." Laura Kipnis adds, "The catalogs of social resentments Hustler trumpets, particularly against class privilege, makes it by fat the most openly class-antagonistic mass-circulation periodical of any genre." [...] Hustler, contrariwise [to Playboy and Penthouse], goes out of its way to harpoon the upper crust, to denigrate those PhD elitists, to fart on the pretensions of the ruling class, or anyone pretending to be holier than thou.

In another strong chapter, "What are We Afraid Of? Sexuality and Censors", he interviews Dr Marty Klein:

There are a lot of people who don't want sexual experimentation going on in the world. It reminds them that they have desire themselves, desires that they are scared by or feel ashamed of or guilty about. Unapologetic sexuality opens up the possibility of a form of freedom - a choice - that sex-fearful people don't want to have. Rather, they try to shut down those sexual activities out there that they're scared of wanting to do themselves.

In the end, after a lot of stubbornness and struggle, Harvey and his legal team accepted a truce deal with the US government, which required that Harvey "throw a bone" tothe state of Alabama. He wouldn't plead guilty to any speech issues, so after much searching, his team found out that they once probably mailed materials into Alabama using 8 or 9 point fonts rather than the 12 point fonts mandated by law on certain mailings. It's a bit of an anti-climactic ending, but one that no doubt saved Harvey many additional years and millions of dollars.

Now, onto my two tangents of criticism that don't really have to do with the quality of the book.

Harvey raises my blood pressure when he repeatedly reminds readers that the porn he was selling featured only mainstream adult content. I'm bothered by the false dichotomy set up in sentences such as "...depictions of positive sexuality between cheerfully consenting adults, without violence or degradation." It's the consenting adults bit that matters, not whether the performers are giggling or sobbing during the scene.

For non-industry readers, I can see how Harvey is trying to make himself look extra "upstanding" by refusing to carry porn that features anything "too dirty", but he does the perv/porn community a disservice by dividing adult entertainment into "good" and "bad" based on whether or not it's kinky, rather than by standards such as the labor conditions under which it was made. Anyone with any sense of sexual sophistication knows that "violence" and "degradation" are not mutually exclusive to "positive sexuality".

Here's the other irksome issue: it takes awfully big balls to sling mud at kinky "degrading" porn because of one's vague personal concern it's possibly unhealthy for viewers, when one can buy from Harvey's company such products as "Adam & Eve Vaginal Tightening Tightener Cream" or "Adam & Eve Anal Easy Lubricant" (which numbs your ass so you have no idea if you're being hurt! fun!), fake breast enlargement pills, fake penis enlargement pills, and of course, a load of toxic mystery jelly sex toys. "Positive healthy sexuality" fail, Harvey.

Adam & Eve doesn't sell anything that's more obnoxious than other mainstream adult retailers, so I'm not trying to single them out too much. I do genuinely respect Phil Harvey for going to bat for everyone's right to enjoy and sell porn, I just wish there was a greater sense of ethical consistency in place of throwing folks under the bus who like their porn (and by extension, their sex lives) with more kink.

This topic is one of my major headdesk issues with anti-porn crusaders. They say, "porn objectifies women!" as though that's some kind of end-all analysis. I address this topic from two directions.

Firstly, as a porn model and cam girl, it's my job description to "be a sex object", (as the anti-sexers would define it), and it's a job with which I'm very happy. My friendlier customers treat me like a multi-dimensional person, too- but it's not required of them, and I don't resent the ones who don't try and get to know me. (Hell, I know it annoys me when I, as a customer, get an overly chatty waiter or cab driver who tries to impose socializing on me when I'm not feeling up to it.) On cam, my customers pay $3 a minute for the expressed purpose of not having to wine and dine me and pretend to care what I'm saying in order to get me to take off my clothes. It's so much more honest than dating.

I have never met a sex worker who was unaware of that their job entailed before taking it. When asked why she got started, not one replied, "I became a stripper because I was looking for the true love of an intellectual partner who appreciates my inner beauty and doesn't oggle my body." Those types of people answer romance ads on eHarmony.com, not ads in weekly papers for "B/G anal scene $500 cash". It's not as though this whole thing is sprung upon random unsuspecting victims- it's the definition of the work.

"Being objectified" by customers is not something that sex workers themselves are railing against as an injustice they seek to overcome. It's a half-baked analysis being imposed upon our work from outsiders- outsiders who presume to tell the world what we experience and how we feel about it, without ever having asked us. That, in and of itself, should tell you a lot about whether or not it's a real problem.

(Sex workers do, however, regularly rail against being objectified by the media, anti-porn crusaders, anti-sex feminists, clueless academics, women, and others. We work as consensually "objectified" people who are and paid for our work, but we hate being nonconsensually objectified by outsiders who neither pay us nor respect us, and use/abuse us to suit their own agendas and make a profit.)

Secondly, everyone at their job is "objectified" in their roles. I don't profoundly care for the cashier at the grocery store, but no one's ranting online about how he's being oppressed and "objectified" because, at work, most people see him as "a cashier". I don't care to delve into the inner intellectual passions of the woman who made me tea at a cafe, but I'm not aware of any college courses being taught on the "objectification" of baristas. I have never fallen into deep romantic love with a nurse who's weighed me and taken my blood pressure at the doctor's office, but if there are protesters outside the clinic that day, their signs don't read, "Stop the exploitation of women! Planned Parenthood objectifies nurses as mere one-dimensional healthcare workers!"

We can't have a genuine connection with everyone we encounter in our lives, whether they are strippers or bus drivers or sales clerks at a shoe store. To say that "being objectified" as a sex worker is somehow so vastly different than "being objectified" in any other role is telling about the accuser's personal issues with the sex, not the work.

Some people try to "take a step back" and use this as a part of a broader critique of capitalism, but I disagree with that, too. So, under socialism, anarchism, or what-have-you-ism, every human will express heartfelt interest in the well-being of every single human they come into contact with over the course of a day? I find that quite silly.

We all choose how we pick some people as our lovers, some as our friends, some as acquaintances we smile at politely once a week. It's not about economic systems or patriarchy or oppression- it's about time and energy. No one has the time and energy to emotionally/intellectually intertwine themselves in everyone they interact with, and it's ludicrous to think that one should or could.

Whether we choose to not invest ourselves in the janitor or to not invest ourselves in the cam girl, it doesn't matter on an ethical level. One is not inherently a Major Social Problem just because it involves sex.