Chicks with Clicks
Sex sells in the online economy but this time it's women who are profiting.

by Sean Plummer

Julie Strain holds her website, www.juliestrain.com, in pretty high regard. Especially compared to the 'for women, by women' sex sites which eschew nudity in favour of talk. "Fuck the words," Strain writes. "Celluloid speaks for itself." The statuesque pin-up, B-movie queen and budding online entrepreneur has made a living showing off her 6' 1" body. She is a tough, healthy, sexual woman in control of her life and career. And for an annual fee of US$139.00, eager fans of the former Penthouse Pet of the Year can interact with their idol (she answers much of her own e-mail), buy "official" bras and panties, magazines and videos, and gain access to hundreds of photos of Strain and her models getting up (and down) to all kinds of naked badness. Just don't accuse her of selling soulless sex for a profit. "Men are visual, women are more auditory," Strain admits. "[But] I think I make up for any missing emotions on my site by being such a strong, aggressive role model for women. I'm not a victim - I'm a victor, and if they can be stronger by wearing a pair of black boots that they saw in my photos, well, then I've done my job. She will act sexier in those boots. Her man will throw her down and give her lovin' like she never knew. She will become empowered. She will become my warrior and together we will conquer the world. All that from one tiny picture on the Internet." Welcome to the new online economy, where the webmaster tending your favourite porno site is just as likely to be a webmistress. The advent of the Internet has had an almost Marxist effect on the adult entertainment industry, giving over the means of production (HTML code) to the workers (the models). Armed with little more than the fruits of Silicon Valley and their own silicon peaks, female porn stars and adult models alike are rewiring the typically male-run adult entertainment industry by becoming their own bosses in an industry estimated to have grossed over $1 billion last year. Anyone doubting the size of the audience for online porn need only check out the counters on some of the more popular sites. More than fourteen million fans, for instance, have visited Asia Carrera's Buttkicking Homepage (www.asiacarrera.com) since 1996. As the self-sufficient hardcore porn star - and MENSA member - readily admits: "I'm a 100% self-taught computer geek, and I take pride in running my whole site myself, from start to finish - because that's the way dictators do things!" Combining the usual nude photo "galleries" with an amusing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section (samples: "How can I get into porno movies?" "Do porn guys really have bigger dicks?"), Carrera offers paid members over 1,000 explicit photos of herself. The techno-savvy actress's reasoning for going online is refreshingly simple. "You give me money," she offers, "and I give you nudie pics to wank to!" The greatest online sex pioneer, though, is Danni Ashe. The proprietress of Danni's Hard Drive (www.danni.com), Ashe is a former stripper and nude model who founded her ever-expanding empire with an initial investment of just $8,000 of her own savings. In 1999, her online empire grossed US$5.2 million; projected revenues in 2000 could top $7 million. Having retired from stripping after some bad experiences on the road, Ashe was looking for a new challenge when she discovered the Usenet. "I just started poking around," she says of her first forays into the online community in early '95, "and there were these incredible conversations going on. It was really before the Web started to happen in a real way." Soon she started posting nude photos of herself, building up a worldwide fanbase which would later flock to Danni's Hard Drive. A systems upgrade to a faster modem introduced her to the potential of the Internet. "And it was like the proverbial lightbulb goes off," Ashe says of the moment when she saw her first website. "Then it all sort of came together in an instant, and I went 'Oh my God! This is what I have to do. I have to have one of these.'" Danni's Hard Drive now receives over 7 million hits per day and boasts 27,000 paid members. For US$19.95 per month, members access galleries for over 200 models, as well as specialty e-zines like "Nippleodeon," "Global Girls" and "Naughty Newbies." Ashe herself hosts a show called In Bed With Danni which she claims is "the Web's first fully interactive, totally live and completely uncensored TV show." Fans can also purchase videos,magazines, DVDs and autographed photos. It's a profitable business model, one Ashe gladly shares with the models who appear on her site by offering them the means to build their own websites. "I want to encourage the women in this industry to take the name that they've built and use it to build something of their own. I really encourage them to build their own businesses." And it is business for these new female entrepreneurs. "I've always approached my career in adult entertainment as a business," Ashe stresses. "Even when I was eighteen and I was stripping in bars in Seattle, I had my way I worked the room. I was there for a purpose, I wasn't there to fool around or make friends." What distinguishes many of these women-run sites from the countless male-run adult sites on the Internet is their approach to sexuality. Rather than treating sex as strictly a commodity to be sold, like widgets, the women see it as a source of fun, something that shouldn't provoke shame and disgust in their customers. "I want to feel good about what I'm doing," Ashe says. "I don't want people when they visit my site to feel bad about themselves. I want them to walk in and kind of relax and go 'Oh, this is fun, this is cool! I don't have to feel bad about myself for wanting to look at naked women. This is fun and enjoyable. The models are having a good time, I'm having a good time. This is all okay.'" However comfortable these new entrepreneurs are with their sexuality - and their willingness to use it to make money - their sites are still aimed almost exclusively at men. The autographed pictures, the discounted videos, the frequent "gallery" updates... Not to say that women - gay or straight - don't appreciate the naked female form, but there is little doubt Strain, Carrera and Ashe are getting paid by men, not women. But the Internet is a big place, and several women have taken up the challenge of creating sexual material geared more towards the female surfer. One of the best-known such sites is Nerve.com, whose declared intention is "to be more graphic, forthright, and topical than 'erotica,' but less blockheadedly masculine than 'pornography.'" Leaving aside the 'erotica vs. porn' debate, Nerve does offer its members a more intellectual approach to sex than the traditional porno site. Recent features on Nerve have included an overview of sexuality in Japan, erotic poetry and stories, and contributions from acclaimed writers like the late Quentin Crisp and Village Voice columnist (and author of The Ultimate Guide To Anal Sex For Women) Tristan Taormino. No one denies that women get turned on by sexual images, including Nerve which offers permanent galleries from "serious" artists like Richard Kern, Andres Serrano, Tony Ward, Charles Gatewood and Janine Gordon - artists whose work has appeared in real galleries. Just don't visit expecting airbrushed centerfolds boasting Barbie-esque proportions. Wanking off to their work is an option but it's harder to do when it's art. For her part, Sexilicious.com 'editrix' Renee Racine thinks that words are worth a thousand pictures, at least when it comes to female sexuality. "The thing with using photography as a main attraction," she says, "is that it's not an interactive element. Photographs are visual and don't do anything to open the lines of communication between visitors." Sexilicious.com is a Toronto-based, women-run sex site which, according to their online manifesto, offers "a safe place to discourse with other women on issues of sex, sexuality, and gender." To that end, the site offers visitors advice from Curiosity Cat ("Where are all the bisexual girls in Toronto?," "He wants to be spanked. Should I?"), the Weekly Bitch (a recent diatribe took homophobic American radio host Laura Schlesinger to task), Eye Candy (erotic stories) and the Peep Show Revue (porno reviews). Erotic photos appear infrequently. "I didn't want to add to the alienation of our bodies in favour of lusting after someone else's," Racine says by way of explaining her decision to favour dialogue over nudie pics. "I wanted to smash those walls down. Part of that is enticing my readers to interact, to share ideas, to understand the collective experience. A photograph might make 'em sweat for a few minutes, but the written word is what gets their hands out of their pants and onto the keyboard." But are these 'by women, for women' sites sexy? If you surf one-handed, then they probably won't serve your purpose. But if you are interested in using the Internet as more than simply a means to get off, then both men and women will find their content a lot more stimulating than the vulgarity for sale at Cumdumpster.com. "There's a place for hardcore and there's a place for softcore," says Ashe, whose site is strictly the latter. "Hey, that's the thing that's so cool about the Internet, is that people are so wildly different and it allows you to niche market, to just direct your content towards whatever area that you are most adept at!" For her part, Julie Strain thinks hardcore porn has its place but that it carries a personal toll on the models which her site's clean, bright softcore does not. "I don't do porn but I wish my friends that did it did not. But it's their choice. They get to be a star and make star money and drive a BMW and own a house. They run a business. I think it dulls what a normal relationship feels like and that makes me sad. AIDS also looms heavy for me as a stiff deterrent. But porn has a place for those who love sex, or the handicapped or unattractive. They get to have awesome sex with hot chicks, and if there's a mag or a mouse in a hand, there's no room for a gun or a crackpipe." Whether it's Nerve.com or Danni's Hard Drive, though, there's something about the female approach to online pornography and sexuality which is generally more inviting than the efforts of the masculine imagination. "What's appealing about something that comes from a woman is the fact that it feels more real - because it is," Ashe concludes. "Certainly there are people who just look at pornography as a means to an end, but there are a lot of men out there that think that women are a mystery and they want more depth to their fantasies and they want more knowledge about the opposite sex. They want to know more about the woman behind that glossy image."