In a flower print skirt down to her ankles and wearing thick glasses that frame big doe eyes, Lori Michaels projects the innocence of a young Midwestern farm wife on her way to a prayer meeting. But appearances are deceptive. She has arrived at an ocean-view estate in Pacific Palisades, where the porn flick she’s starring in is being filmed, to spend the afternoon having sex with near-strangers.

One of her partners, an actress who goes by the name of T.J. Hart, is a pleasant ex-collegiate swimmer fresh out of the University of Colorado. The other is Bobby Vitale, a well-known adult film stud with whom the svelte, auburn-haired Michaels has worked once before. Sprawled on a blanket beside a grotto-like swimming pool with a waterfall, Michaels goes at it, first with Hart, and then with Vitale, in a swirl of amorous acrobatics that lasts for an hour, minus pauses to change film rolls. It is demanding exercise. Afterward, the breathless Vitale scampers for a can of fruit juice and a Power Bar. Michaels calmly retires to a dressing room to freshen up. If they gave Academy Awards for moaning, she’d be a shoe-in as a nominee. “The sex stuff is just a job to me,” she later explains. The movie, called Statues, is an improbable X-rated yarn about statues that come to life and have their way with her. It’s her 10th feature film and her sixth while under contract to San Fernando Valley-based porn juggernaut Vivid Video.

But even though her status as a Vivid Girl has made Michaels a top draw in the adult film world, her screen work isn’t her prime career focus. Her main interest, and what has enabled the once down-and-out Kansan to become a self-made millionaire at age 28, is purveying sex--not on the silver screen--but on the World Wide Web. In business terms, the movie roles are little more than vehicles to drive paying customers to her Internet site. “My Web page is my baby,” she says, her face beaming with excitement. And why not? In two short years her Dreamy.com has hit the online jackpot, attracting her considerable porn film following and others to shop from her online store and pay $9.95 monthly to access adults-only erotica. Panties that she “guarantees” to have personally worn are such hot sellers at $5.95 a pop that she can barely keep up with demand. This may explain why, after the film shoot, she scurries home without so much as a time out. “There aren’t enough hours to do it all,” she says.

From skin-flicks to sleazy backstreet video outlets, the chief marketeers of pornography have long been men who’ve reigned pimplike over an industry infamous for treating women as chattel. Well, move over fellas. As Michaels attests, in the rapidly exploding world of cyberporn, some of the most successful entrepreneurs are women. Not surprisingly, for a city that is the porn film capital of the planet and claims more Internet start-up companies than even Silicon Valley, Los Angeles is also a magnet for some of the leading female sex merchants on the Web.

There’s Danni Ashe, a former stripper whose Culver City-based Danni’s Harddrive receives 5 million hits per day, which by comparison dwarfs the heavily trafficked sites of major corporations such as General Electric and Boeing. She expects to gross $3.6 million this year. There’s retired 25-year-old porn star Asia Carrera (whose film ‘A’ Is For Asia is not to be confused with the popular children’s book of the same name.) She claims to be a physicist’s daughter who as a teenage pianist once performed at Carnegie Hall and who now commands a popular Website from her home in the San Fernando Valley. And, among others, there’s Hollywood’s Hester Nash, 40, whose curatorial RetroRaunch.com has carved a niche in the high-end Internet porn bazaar. It offers an arty, historical collection of sensual materials for download that Nash proudly refers to as “a century of smut.”

They’re among the vanguard of a boom industry if ever there was one. Online sex sites are conservatively estimated to have brought in $500 million last year, says Mark Hardy, an analyst with Forrester Research, which tracks Internet commerce. Interactive Week magazine speculates that the real figure may be twice that. Experts predict that cyberporn revenue will grow five-to-tenfold in the next decade. While Internet glamour stocks, such as Amazon and Yahoo, have become Wall Street darlings despite losing money, hundreds--if not thousands--of online sex businesses across the country are already turning a profit. In fact, except for a handful of mostly sports-oriented sites, sex merchants collectively represent the only industry group as yet not losing money in cyberspace, making them Web commerce’s dirty little secret. Media Metrix, The PC Meter Co., which monitors consumer activity online, says that in nearly one in four households where computers exist, Web surfers visit adult sites at least monthly. Popular sites such as CyberErotica and Ashe’s Danni.com consistently rank among the most frequented destinations on the Net. Industry sources say sex-related Web searches account for up to 20 percent of requests submitted to search engines.

The sites typically offer photographs, videos, real-time video sex, or a combination of all three. Depending on where you look, from strange toe fetishes to Japanese girls who’ve just-turned-18, little is excluded. “You see it all, and after a while it all starts to look the same,” says Beth Mansfield, a onetime struggling accountant from Tacoma, Washington, who struck it rich with Persiankitty.com an online index of about 2,000 Web porn sites. She refuses to list ones that feature bestiality or child porn, although that doesn’t mean either are difficult to find elsewhere. In June, much ado was made in the media over the announced intention of two teenagers to have sex for the first time in front of a video camera hooked up to the Internet. It turned out to be a hoax. But had it happened, the event would have been a yawner for any regular partaker of online smut who, by means of live video streaming technology, can see couples engage in live sex acts day or night from locations in The Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe outside the reach of U.S. obscenity laws.

In this country, the growing number of sex mavens equipped for live video must be more circumspect. But that hasn’t prevented video streaming from emerging as the hottest ticket item among the pornicopia of online products available. For a price, of course. At Internet Entertainment Group in Seattle, which provides live video feeds to scores of Websites that charge their customers up to $49.95 for a 20-minute show, owner Seth Warshavsky has converted a warehouse into a studio crammed with tiny rooms in which women (and some men) make naughty in front of cameras linked via the Net to the PCs of customers sitting at home. As part of a striptease, the women bump and grind and play with themselves. Computer operators in a nearby control room use an intercom to relay special requests straight from customers’ keyboards. “The most common thing,” says a Web mistress who subscribes to IEG’s service, “is for the girls to be asked to wave so that the guys know it’s really live.”

As with much else in Web porn, size is no barrier to offering such services. Porn actress-cum-Web mistress Lauren Montgomery (like nearly everyone else in porn, not her real name) does the same thing from her home in the Santa Clarita Valley. That is, when she’s not shooting a movie or stripping at bachelor parties. “The technology is at a level where the screen resolution isn’t the greatest yet, but no one seems to mind,” says the 30-year-old former junior executive with the Walt Disney Co. She entered adult entertainment four years ago after becoming bored with corporate life. Her next project: installing a 900 phone number in her home to give video patrons the option--at a per-minute premium--to call in and talk while they watch her.

Big enterprises such as Playboy and Penthouse, as well as film and video producers like Vivid, have revved up sizzling sites of their own to capture a share of the lucrative market. But the nature of the product leaves a wide berth for aggressive business types like Janey Huntington, a 46-year-old grandmother from Diamond Bar. She began posting pictures of herself on the Web two years ago and now features amateur models from around the world. Huntington declines to reveal figures, but her site has generated enough ad revenue to prompt her husband, Steph, to quit his executive job with a large company and help run Janey.com. Indeed, industry insiders say that of the estimated 45,000 Websites devoted to sex, many are managed by coeds and others who started the same way. While most may not approach Huntington’s success--let alone Ashe’s--many do well enough to help their owners earn a few hundred dollars a month in their spare time. “Sometimes I think everyone with a Website, a scanner, and a hundred bucks to buy a domain name has piled into the business,” says Mark Tiarra, who heads United Adult Services, a fledgling group that advocates self-policing of Internet porn sites.

In selling their wares, cyber-sex merchants have helped push the envelope of technology. Earlier pornographers gave a critical boost to the VCR in the early ’80s and later helped institutionalize video-on-demand in hotel rooms. Online purveyors pioneered the Web bulletin board, were the first to embrace credit cards for online payments, and the first to make commercial use of live video. That they’ve been able to rack up profits while many mainstream Websites continue to struggle may be summed up in two words: Sex sells. But there is more to it than that. Until a few years ago, buying porn meant taking the risk of being seen walking into a seedy sex emporium. Interactive porn meant hanging out at a strip club. With the Internet, adult fare is delivered directly to the desktop, at home or at the office. “It may not yet be socially respectable,” says Forrester’s Hardy. “But it’s universally accessible, and it’s private.”

For an animal lover who once thought she wanted to be a veterinarian, Ashe seems an unlikely Web-porn mistress. Shy and retiring as a teenager growing up in suburban Seattle, she didn’t relate well to kids in school, her mother says, partly because of self-consciousness about her unusually large breasts. (Ashe volunteers that hers are 32 FFs, which seem all the more hefty on her 5’2” frame.) A voracious reader, she dropped out of high school (she got her diploma by means of a GED course) and enrolled in a community college at age 16. “She’s always done things her way,” says her mom, who identifies herself only by her first name, Rhonda, for a couple of reasons: She runs an online business selling religious novelties to a mostly Christian crowd, and her husband, and Danni’s stepfather, a Seattle-area firefighter, “lives in mortal fear” that his fellow firemen might discover what his daughter does for a living. “On occasion the guys have brought in videos and magazines with her in it,” says Rhonda, “and it makes him extremely uncomfortable. He still thinks of her as his little girl.”

Ashe was working behind the counter of an Orange Julius at a local mall when a friend coaxed her into auditioning at a local strip bar in downtown Seattle. She quickly became a hot draw, without her parents knowing about it. They might not have learned if one of Ashe’s former boyfriends hadn’t spilled the beans while trying to blackmail her into getting back together with him. The boyfriend’s legacy: giving her a professional name derived from his own, Danny. “We drove down there (to the club) but could never muster the courage to go in,” Rhonda recalls.

But they long ago became resigned to their daughter’s career path. “Actually, we’re very proud of the success she’s having.”

Unlike Ashe, whose dalliance with porn video came after she had established herself as a cyberporn maven, Michaels is the ultimate example of an adult film queen’s parlaying her screen exposure into a thriving Web business. While other porn actresses have Websites, mostly as repositories for their fan clubs, few among her peers have milked the Internet’s commercial potential as efficiently. With nearly 5,000 men on an e-mail news list, Michaels receives 150 messages a day from fans, all of whom she claims to answer. And while the 40,000 unique hits the site receives daily (which exclude multiple visits from the same person) pale compared to Ashe’s, net profits are high. Unlike bigger sites which must share revenue with vendors whose products and services they offer, nearly all of Michaels’ offerings relate exclusively to her. Plus, she keeps overhead low by doing much of the work herself. (She began doing her own credit card record-keeping last year, she says, after the firm that had been doing it skimmed $80,000.)

In an industry with a seemingly endless supply of starry-eyed women willing to perform sex acts on queue, Michaels--like Ashe--seems an unlikely entrepreneurial pioneer. Abandoned by an abusive father and an alcoholic mother at age 13, and with only a seventh-grade education, she fended for herself growing up in Amarillo, Texas. Placed in a foster home, she ran away after her foster father raped her the second day there. During much of her teens, she lived alone in a spare room behind a motel, lying about her age to hold down jobs at McDonald’s and Burger King.

As an 18-year-old clerk in a Lubbock, Texas, lingerie shop, she took a friend’s advice and sent snapshots of herself to several men’s magazines. Six months later--her first airplane flight--she was en route to L.A. to pose for the first of several layouts in Penthouse. She didn’t start to make porn flicks until a few years later, and the notion of doing business on the Internet had not entered her mind. But the woman who determined as a teenager never to be poor while eating Dominoes Pizza alone in her room one Christmas quickly figured out how to leverage herself for maximum profit. She hit the road as a feature dancer, raking in thousands of dollars per week in house fees from places like P.T.’s in East St. Louis, Illinois, and Sugar’s in Austin, Texas. And, not least of all, collecting scads more from men who’d seen her in Penthouse and Hustler and were eager to stuff wads of bills inside her G-string.

When Internet porn took off, Michaels knew just what to do. “It’s all about how you market your business,” she says, during some downtime on the movie set. “I see [porn films] as something I’ll do for another few years, and then I’ll be out. I do it because it’s a means to an end, not the end itself.”

Although Michaels declines to get specific about the site’s finances, she acknowledges that it is a veritable gold mine, raking in cash from memberships to her X-rated V.I.P. Room as well as selling underwear, vibrators, and even rubber vaginas. Her most expensive products are self-produced 20-minute erotic videos taped live in her home in which she talks and performs directly for the customer based on naughty scripts they send her. The price tag: $350. “Sometimes when I’m restless or just tired of watching TV, I’ll get up and go to the video room to make a few,” she says, explaining how she easily earns $1,000 in the time it takes to watch the 10 o’clock news. “It’s almost like having a money machine in the house,” says the porn star’s longtime companion, a 51-year-old retired Kansas businessman, who identifies himself only as Frank.

Working on her Website at least six hours a day, Michaels lives an otherwise unorthodox life for a porn star/cybersex mistress. She lives on a 20-acre ranch outside Lawrence, Kansas, with horses in a pasture and dogs and cats running around the yard. Parked out back is a super-fancy motorhome--of the $300,000 variety--which she describes as her “diesel pusher” for touring the feature dance circuit across the United States and Canada. Only these days, in contrast to the thousands of dollars per week she used to command, she garners up to $15,000 a night, thanks to the double-whammy of her films and Web presence. She’s scheduled to go to France later in the year for some traditional fashion modeling, and last year turned down a shoot for a Turkish retailer.

Still, when she drives her ’64 Chevrolet Impala SS--which she proudly points out has only 34,000 original miles--into town, nobody knows who she is, which is the way she wants to keep it. “God, I sound so boring,” she laughs. Even a bit prudish, to hear Frank tell it. “Despite what she does for a living, nothing gets her steamed more than a lot of filthy talk and selling sex to kids,” he says. She chooses to remain in Kansas despite repeated coaxing from Vivid that she move to L.A. so that the studio can promote her better. But, says Frank, “This whole scene [in L.A.] is just not for Lori.” Last year, at the AVN Awards (porn’s equivalent of the Oscars) Michaels was so upset by the foul language emanating from the victory platform, Frank says, that “she fumed all the way back to the hotel. She said she never wanted to go to another one unless they clean up their act.”

Compared to Michaels’ ordinary down-home style, some other leading Web-porn mavens come across as wildly eccentric.

At age 25, the gymnastically gifted Carrera (in one film she managed the difficult trick of having sex with three men at once) has lived a life as colorful and varied as most people triple her age. That would be true even if only half of the biographical experiences she claims before reaching adulthood were real. (Like most everyone in the business, where résumés are commonly invented out of whole-cloth, her true identity is a closely guarded secret.) Carrera reports having performed, not one, but two piano recitals at Carnegie Hall, the first at age 13. She was a New Jersey state spelling champ, taught colloquial English in Japan at 16, ran away from home and lived in the streets, hooked up with a rock band, and did a stint in a foster home before going on to study business and Japanese language at Rutgers University. The college gig, she insists, was not for the purpose of becoming educated, but in order to have a warm place to sleep and three meals a day.

But if a few of her life’s details are enough to give skeptics pause, she is uncharacteristically open (for a porn queen) about professional matters. She readily describes on her Website having had two nose jobs, liposuction on her cheeks (facial), lower abdomen, and inner thighs, plus a boob job. She describes herself as a “homely” kid and posts two photos of herself to prove it. And although describing her marriage to porn director Bud Lee, she says she lives with her boyfriend Clarke. “I suppose Bud and I will get a divorce eventually, but since my boyfriend and Bud’s girlfriend are also both married, there’s no hurry,” she says, in a message to fans.

Painfully shy, according to friends and associates, Carrera declined to be interviewed either in person or over the phone, suggesting instead a series of e-mail exchanges. But the self-described “100 percent self-taught computer geek” quickly loses patience with questions she feels deal with matters she’s already addressed, even vaguely, in her Web pages, and becomes non-responsive. Addicted to the chat-room at her site, which she treats as a separate little world over which she is the “dictator,” she lays down strict rules for the types of questions fans are to avoid, referring them to Web links for information as if her printed words were holy writ. Says one industry insider: “You know how most people will show you pictures of their kids? Well, Asia carries around a picture of her in a fetal position next to her computer.” Adds a porn actress who has known Carrera for years: “She’s a really sweet person....She’s just one of a kind.”

Similarly reclusive, but for security reasons rather than shyness, Beth Mansfield, 38, the originator of Persiankitty.com is the June Cleaver of porn, a single-mother raising two teenage boys, whose Internet use she carefully monitors, lest they go near sexually explicit material of the kind she promotes.

Mansfield, who rarely gives interviews and has never allowed her picture to be published, had just gone through a divorce and was living “paycheck-to-paycheck” as a part-time accountant in 1995 when she went online with a listing of about 60 sex-site links. Before long, and to her amazement, advertisers were beating down her door. Since then, ad revenue has skyrocketed along with her listings. She now makes well in excess of $1 million a year and lives in a big house beside Puget Sound with a view of a lighthouse and countless sailboats. When the work becomes too confining, she scoops up the kids and a trusty laptop with a cellular modem and heads out onto the Sound aboard a yacht she bought last year. In the offing is a print version of Persian Kitty scheduled out this winter. “I’m the last person in the world whom this should have happened to,” she says of her unexpected bonanza as a porn purveyor. “What I’d really like to do someday is open a restaurant.”

Hester Nash is another who at first underestimated the potential for online porn.

After working as a bookkeeper, selling water softeners, and briefly editing an adult magazine focused on older women, Nash didn’t have particularly high expectations for RetroRaunch.com. Still, she thought its sensuality-for-the-thinking-set approach might appeal to those interested in an alternative to the legions of raw sex-sites out there. Hers may be the only porn site frequented by scholars--as part of their work. Among her vast pictorial archive are historical pictures of dildos from the 1880s and rare turn-of-the-century erotic photos of inter-racial couples. She collects the stuff from almost everywhere. A young Michigan couple sent her nude pictures found inside a wall during a home remodeling, for example. She also gets help from her stepmother, LAPD cop-turned-prostitution advocate Norma Jean Almodovar, who was jailed in the ’80s after writing a best-selling book about becoming a hooker. “We do OK,” is all Nash will say about RetroRaunch’s finances. Analysts at Forrester Research expect the site to gross $1 million this year.

Julia Parton, who does use her real name (she’s a distant relative of country singer/actress Dolly Parton) hopes for similar success with another one-of-a-kind product. Her Porn Radio, the first adult radio station on the Internet, expects to air in a few months. “In this business, you have to continually look for what’s new and different,” she says.

Although only 34, the personable and articulate dancer, model, and ex-adult-movie queen qualifies as a senior stateswoman of porn. Unprepared for the adult film world straight out of Granada Hills High School in the early ’80s, she paid a heavy price. After someone slipped a drug into her drink at an all-night party, she didn’t fully regain her senses for a week, coming to in a Marina del Rey penthouse, where she had been raped by a succession of men over a six-day period. She developed, and later kicked, a drug habit. Having sworn off acting in adult movies, she continues to draw on her early screen success to boost her career as a feature dancer and model, even while acknowledging conflict with her chosen profession. From a religious family (her sister is an evangelist in New York City), Parton, like others in porn, keeps a foot in two worlds. When not on the road stripping, she can often be found on Sundays singing in a Methodist church choir near her home in San Diego County--using an assumed name and wearing no makeup.

Such unlikely juxtapositions are more common than one might think, often playing out in peculiar ways.

Back on the set of Statues, for example, where Michaels’ torrid sex scenes have laid bare more fleshy tissue than a gynecologist’s headlamp, she slips behind some shrubs to take a drag from a cigarette bummed off of a crew member. It amounts to deviant behavior for a cybersex maven whose carefully crafted image is that of a non-smoking, non-alcohol drinking, health food nut. When a reporter approaches unexpectedly, Michaels is sheepish for the first--and only--time all day. “Uh-oh,” she says, bringing the cigarette down from her lips. “I really wish you hadn’t seen that.”