These kind of jobs don't usually involve actual sex, writes Tracy Quan (a former call girl) for The Daily Beast. "The sector is poised for expansion as more unemployed and underemployed women begin looking for extra cash." And it doesn't matter if you're not really "into" the scene. Writes Quan:

Because many of these freelance pro-dommes are just supplementing their incomes and don’t plan on staying in sex work forever, they may not be as erotically hardcore in their outside lives. “I wasn't really that interested” in S&M, says Chloe. “I got involved because it was easy money. The strap-on? I'm OK with it, but it's not really a personal interest of mine.”

Maybe you're thinking, why spank a businessman or let some dude suck your toes if you're not even into it? But the same could be said of answering phones, making a latte or cleaning someone's house. (In Mumbai, profesional men are finding that sex work on the side helps them earn a decent living.)

On the other hand, unlike being a receptionist or a barista, working in the sex industry is an occupation some women might be reluctant to talk to friends and family about. Chloe, the art student Quan interviewed for her piece, says her mother "would probably cry" and be "very upset" about her fetish gigs, although Quan speculates: "some parents would be secretly proud of a daughter resourceful enough to hack the increasingly rigid class system that permeates New York life."

Still: Do you believe a job is a job? Do you believe extra money is extra money? If there's no kissing, no sex, just spanking or foot worship, is there any harm in freelance fetish work? Quan puts it this way: "Even if you’re bossing your client around in a pair of thigh-high boots, you’re still working in a service industry. And after an hour, your feet hurt."

Kinkonomics [The Daily Beast]
Male Professionals Double As Sex Workers For Extra Income [Hindustan Times]

While for some women like Jenna Jameson, Candida Royalle, Nina Hartley or Danni Ashe the way up the executive ladder started in front of the camera, many other women went into the business like any other executive — through the front door and way behind the camera. Samantha Lewis, who co-owns Digital Playground, started out in real estate and invested in a profitable business; Joy King, vice president of special projects at Wicked Pictures, started out working in film distribution for children's movies; and Susan Colvin, who owns California Exotic Novelties, planned to go into public administration. Diane Duke, the executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, which advocates for adult companies' rights, was an executive at Planned Parenthood. They might not like porn — many of them don't even watch it — but they think it should exist and that it can be made better for the women in front of the camera.

One of the problems in the porn industry that everyone identifies — and that some female executives are trying to fight — is the problem of using inexperienced and ill-prepared actresses.

[The Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation's Sharon] Mitchell, herself a former actress, told the authors said that agents “are now recruiting people from, literally, the middle of the country [who] are 18 years old who haven’t remotely had any type of sex, let alone the type of sex they’re probably going to have tomorrow.” Too often, she said, “agents run them into the ground” signing them to make too many sex scenes, and that can lead to STDs.

Female directors, producers and owners know all this and say they work to fight it, partly by turning away young women they think are ill prepared. A few have suggested that producers should hire women who are at least 21, rather than 18.

The women in the business are less inclined to see women mistreated, partly because they are women and partly, as performer Lorelai Lee pointed out to Violet Blue earlier this year, it's simply not sexy to watch someone doing something they don't like.

What none of the women — in front of or behind the camera — like is being stereotyped as anti-woman, or anti-feminist. They point out that while some women are being taken advantage of, others are freely choosing to show their bodies and perform sex acts for money and the pleasure of others. They tend to think it's pretty narrow-minded (and un-feminist) of scholars to assume that the women who perform sex acts on camera could only do so because they are fucked-up women who have somehow been coerced.

University of California Santa Barbara film studies professor Constance Penley, who studies the adult industry, agreed. Name an industry that’s different, she said. Because porn involves sex it is subject to what Penley calls “exceptionalism.” It is not judged in the bigger cultural context. But it should be. “You have to ask: Does it have more drug abuse or more suicides, more incidents of girls being sexually abused as children, more cosmetic surgery than Hollywood, TV, the recording industry?” she said. The answer, she pointed out, is probably not. So why pick on sex movies?

Feminists talk a lot about owning our bodies and making our own sexual choices, but when it comes to women who choose to work in the sex industry, we tend to get a lot more narrow-minded about it. Just ask Joy King, the Wicked Pictures exec — when she was featured talking about her company on the local news, her son's best friend's mother refused to let him come over to play anymore because King was one of "those" women.

Women On Top: Female Execs Rise In Porn Biz [MSNBC]
An Inside Look At A Female Porn Executive’s Life [MSNBC]

Related: Sex For Money, Not For Love [San Francisco Chronicle]

In the 1970s porn stars didn't even use their real names — the discovery that an actor had done porn was usually career-ending. In 1972, Ivory Snow poster girl Marilyn Chambers was dumped from the ad campaign immediately when it was discovered that she had starred in an X-rated film. But the widespread availability of pornography online has led to more relaxed attitude about sex and the adult industry. Today, adult film stars in Hollywood are valued for their acting skills and "uninhibitedness." "There's no sort of, 'Gee, shucks, can you take your top off?'" says Zach and Miri director Kevin Smith. His film stars two actual porn stars in minor roles: Traci Lords and Katie Morgan. Morgan, a 28-year-old who has made dozens of porn films, says part of her motivation in pursuing mainstream roles is that there are fewer adult feature roles since the rise of amateur sex sites on the Internet.

Steven Soderbergh cast Sasha Grey, a 20-year-old former porn star in the upcoming film The Girlfriend Experience, about a $10,000-a-night call girl. When asked why adult stars had become more acceptable in Hollywood, Soderburgh pointed to Paris Hilton's sex tape as the moment that "confirmed that everything had changed." Rather than ruining her reputation, the tape actually boosted her career. Of course, Paris Hilton's sex tape was stolen from her, as were Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's and Colin Farrell's. Part of the appeal of these videos is the glimpse into the "real" lives of the stars: un-Photoshopped, at their most intimate moments.

In Esquire, Stephen Marche writes that Kim Kardashian's sex tape "changed the rules of DIY pornography almost before they came into existence." Unlike the other celebrity sex tapes, Kardashian appears to know that her video is intended for mass consumption; she often uses the word "everyone," as in, "for everyone who thinks my boobs are fake, they're real." Kardashian transferred her sex tape's success into higher profile roles on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Dancing With the Stars.

With so much low-budget amateur porn on the Internet, the traditional porn star seems all the more legitimate, making the transition to Hollywood easier than in the past. However, while Esquire claims that the amateurs fueling the explosion of Internet porn, or the "ugly people" "setting up poor-quality cameras to film themselves in unimaginative positions," are driven by promise of fame, they ignore one huge motivating factor. Even in the film, Zach and Miri don't make a porno to fulfill their celebrity aspirations, but to pay the rent. The fact that porn is becoming more mainstream and celebrities go on to have successful post-sex tape careers may make people less hesitant to turn to porn. But the idea that most of the women who turn up in low budget amateur films are just hoping to be the next Kim Kardashian is as much a fantasy as the idea that all porn stars just love sex. It may make that grainy video easier to watch, but in reality the 18-year-old amateur is probably just trying to make a few hundred dollars to pay her bills.

Porn Stars Are the New Crossover Artists[The Los Angeles Times]
What's With All The Ugly People Having Sex? [Esquire]