I auditioned for Playboy magazine a few years ago, posing in peach lingerie in a room at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel. I was a journalist undercover, there to sketch my impressions of wagging my fanny at the bigwigs of mainstream porn. I wanted to know what it would be like to offer up my body and have glamour-scouting photographers yawn and show me the door.

In the audition waiting room, a crowd of women from Ontario and upstate New York milled about in skimpy clothing, waiting for their shot at the bureau pose. One was a grandmother from Buffalo who was sausage-fat yet totally convinced of her sexiness. Others were curveless, flat-chested, scar-faced, knock-kneed. My own breasts were deceptively perky in my push-up bra, as the cameraman discovered when he asked me to slide the bra down a bit more… suggestively.

It was an odd sort of humiliation, because I knew myself to be sexy, knew that sexiness was about vitality and personality as much as anatomical perfection. I also knew that these guys couldn’t see that, or didn’t care. From Playboy’s point of view, we were all deluded chumps. Who were we kidding, hoping to become centrefolds, thinking we could turn on its readers?

If we’d only had access to Webcams back then. These days, it’s Playboy that seems out of touch. With Camcorders and HTML skills coming into easy reach, the last five years have witnessed a veritable explosion of amateur porn on the Net. Smart Bunnies are starting up their own Web sites, while fat grannies and flat-chested girls throw up Webcams in poorly lit bedrooms and register thousands of hits a day.

If the sexual revolution ever aimed to normalize female sexuality, it stalled out in mainstream pornography. The porn industry supplanted post-war prudery with plasticized, air-brushed cartoon women, and tossed out fetish rags celebrating the special charms of plump gals or “hot chocolate lovers.” Women may have burned their bras, but corporate interests upheld the beauty myth. They also upheld a certain standard of personality for erotic models: witless and smiley.

But take a surf through the bobbing breasts and butts on the 28,000 sex sites on the Net (according to the Naughty Linx index), and you begin to see a new picture of porn emerging. One that includes Danni Ashe, an ex–porn-mag model who runs one of the more lucrative porn sites, filled with sex-positive feminist commentary. Or Janey, a 47-year-old California grandmother who posts photos of herself in skimpy clothes astride a Harley and makes close to a million dollars a year. Or Kimi, a 25-year-old Web designer whose chin doubles when she bends down, but who is nonetheless lively and sexy and each night plays host to her avid following in a chatty cyber salon.

To understand how the Web is democratizing porn, start with the economics. Porn sites are ridiculously cheap to set up: you can get yourself up and running for about $10,000, including the computer equipment. And it’s an insanely profitable business. No one knows the exact figures, but sites that charge subscription fees are collectively grossing anywhere from $100 million to $1 billion a year, according to analysts who track Web commerce. In contrast, a site like Amazon.com, the huge virtual bookstore commonly touted as a Net success story, is still struggling to come out of the red.

Sex sells, and because it sells easily yet furtively, pornographers have a history of plunging into new technology with great competitive glee. From the invention of Nicolodean cinema for peep shows to the use of videos, porn has always been a driving force in media innovation. Around 1995, while other business people warily studied the Web’s potential for commerce, pornographers raced ahead, putting finishing touches on “cryptographically authenticated password registration systems” to snag paying subscribers for their sites; jumping all over “video streaming” to bring dirty movies to their lustful viewers; and organizing live, interactive sex shows. The enviable profit margins on such content meant that the first men and women out of the gate could afford to fine-tune the technology. What they learned and innovated quickly spread, giving the proverbial little guy--housewives, strippers, porn models, aspiring entrepreneurs--an affordable entry into the sex industry.

One of the most established adult sites, Persian Kitty’s Adult Links (www.persiankitty.com), for instance, was launched in 1995 by a Tacoma, Wash., accountant worried about being able to pay for her kids’ education. She set up the site (named after her cat) as a gateway to Web pages offering dirty pictures, such as Hoochie Hut, Gals with Big Boobs and Earl’s Pussy Bar. By charging these sites for click-through links from her page, Beth Mansfield soon found herself earning a cool $900,000 annual income. Another top sex site, Babes4U.com, is run by two women from New York City. Madeleine Altmann and Steffani Martin invested $200,000 in the site’s state-of-the-art Web technology. They were in the black within a year.

The most prominent female Web-porn entrepreneur is 30-years-old Danni Ashe, a gorgeous, highly articulate model and stripper who until 1995 was regularly appearing in magazines like Hustler and Juggs. “I burned out early on the dance circuit,” says Ashe. “I was looking for something to do, and I got interested in computer programming [because] I had heard about the Net but I couldn’t conceptualize it.” Ashe was initially underwhelmed by the Web, but became a huge Usenet fan. “It was a real community then,” she says. When she decided to teach herself HTML and design a site, the news was leaked on Usenet. “I was, like, the only woman in a gold-rush town.” She launched Danni’s Hard Drive with $8,000 of her savings; it took off instantly. Based on $14.95 U.S. monthly membership fees, it now grosses an estimated $3.5 million a year.

Visit Hard Drive and what you will see, first of all, is Ashe herself: a merry-eyed blonde with Drew Barrymore bangs kneeling on white sheets in a pink negligée. Click on a giant pink nipple and you enter the site, where you can read commentary on sex and gender issues by former L.A. Weekly columnist Taylor Marsh, or peruse Ashe’s satirical take on the Clinton sex scandals. Some visitors, of course, will choose to go straight to the soft-core pics of models like Penelope Pumpkins.

In the early ’90s, when Ashe was running a mail-order fan club, “I used to get letters from men, saying, ‘I loved seeing you with your clothes off, but now I want to see you with your clothes on, now I want to know who you are.’” The correspondence planted in her mind the idea that erotica could present fully dimensional women and be as successful as extreme close-ups of vaginal tissue. She recruited an all-female staff to run her site, offered RealAudio interviews with her featured models, and linked the pictures to the women’s own Web pages. “With my site,” she says, “I’m trying to live out a vision, which is to project the fact that this is coming from women, that it hasn’t been packaged by middlemen, that we are real.”

As a former model herself, she is careful not to perpetuate the industry’s exploitative practices. Typically, when women pose for nude pictures, they have to sign a release in exchange for a modelling fee. The photographer can then sell the photos a million times over, and the buyers are free to change the model’s name to Adolf Hitler in the pictorial if they feel like it. When Ashe buys pictures, she calls the models and offers to promote them. If they want her to post their fan-club addresses, she does. If they want her to link their snapshots to their own Web sites, she does that, too.

This is porn for geeks, a strange unsynchronized dance between technology and lust. Men don’t have enough hands to talk on the phone, click a mouse and wank, so why not just lie down on the couch and flick on the VCR? “There is the gee-whiz factor,” offers Ashe. “And some guys don’t want to go to the corner store. The computer grants them anonymity.”

But the computer permits something else which no magazine or video can offer: an opportunity to interact personally with real women. “Not every guy cares who the girl is,” says Ashe, “but there are a great many men out there who do, and I think that is a positive reflection on humanity.”

Among the women Playboy rejected in recent years is a Southern California grandmother named Janey Huntington, who is now turning a healthy profit by posting pictures of herself on the Net. Janey is a dead ringer for the TV actress Meredith Baxter, only her eyes are a touch baggier, her hair a greyer blonde. She looks like what she is: an attractive, personable, middle-aged woman--who happens to have become a minor porn star. I first saw Janey sitting semi-nude on a Harley in front of her suburban garage, grinning sweetly as she peers over a pair of sunglasses. The picture, a regular feature on her soft-core porn site (www.janey.com), was taken by her husband Steve. It has a captivating air of intimacy about it, as if Janey is not expecting anyone but Steve to see her. She is comfortable under his gaze. I was not surprised to learn that her husband had been photographing her for their private photo collection for years.

“Janey.com came about by accident,” Steve tells me. “I wanted to start a Web site for my environmental consulting business. So, as a kind of rehearsal, I designed a site and put up pictures of Janey.” Since she was an IRC buff, word of their site spread. They got 20,000 hits in a matter of days.

Amazed at the response, Janey and Steve expanded the site. They designed a FAQ--Janey’s favourite food, music, sports--and she answered her fans’ email, emerging as a gracious, tactful and rather maternal woman who was interested in people’s personal dilemmas but decidedly uninterested in prurience. “I think your question was quite crude and rude and therefore doesn’t deserve an answer,” she scolded an anonymous surfer who asked how often Steve gave her oral sex. Men who seek her advice, on the other hand, receive warm replies. “I’m very sorry to hear of the trouble that you’re having,” she recently wrote in reply to a fellow bemoaning his lover’s lack of interest in sex. “Hopefully you have discussed this with her in a very gentle and understanding manner. If not, then shame on you.”

“What always bewilders us is that Janey does no hard-core photos,” Steve says. “The market for her is limited, it’s an older crowd. But answering mail [makes] a huge difference in the success of sites.” The couple has begun selling merchandise--T-shirts emblazoned with Janey’s likeness, autographed photos. They have also started hosting other adult sites on their servers. Today, they’re hauling in about $800 million in annual revenue, most of it from the hosting services.

What Janey and Steve have created is known in the cyberporn biz as a “personality site,” which attracts men who want to hear from and about the woman; who compliment her on her pictures but then clamour for her thoughts. “I used to be very concerned about someone stalking me,” Janey says. “But in my three years on the Net, I’ve only had one threat. And I think it’s because I’m real. They can talk to me.” Some of her most hostile mail, she adds, comes from “Bible thumpers,” and it makes her bristle. She “closely supervises” her seven-year-old granddaughter’s Web explorations, she tells me pointedly.

Janey doesn’t come across as a natural-born exhibitionist, which is perhaps why the thumpers make her feel defensive. I asked her if she’d done any amateur video. “I prefer to stay within the realm of still photos,” she says. “When you put in your voice and movement, it changes things. That would be too much of myself out there.” Last year, she and Steve ran out of old pictures and she had to start modelling expressly for her site. I get the sense this makes her uneasy. “I used to find it fun,” she says. “Now it’s hard to be creative. I don’t want to do this much longer. My goal is to work myself out of the picture and feature other models.”

But therein lies a paradox: If she leaves her site, so will her “personality.” And this at a time when competition is exploding. “A year ago we had 18,000 hits a day,” says Janey. “Now it’s 6,000.”

At least some of Janey’s fans are almost certainly defecting to the Web’s most intriguing new phenomenon: cam girls. The Webcam--which projects images that change, or “refresh,” every couple of minutes--was born in 1991, when a computer scientist at Cambridge University aimed a digital camera at the coffee machine in the downstairs coffee shop and wired it to an ATM network, allowing him and his colleagues to see if the coffee pot was full before trundling down to buy a cup. This U.K. pioneer was followed by a doctoral student at the MIT Media Lab, who strapped a wireless camera to his forehead and began streaming live images of everything he saw as he went about his life to millions of people on the Web.

Simon Firth, writing in the online magazine Salon, called Webcams “the art of the publicly lived private life.” The first woman to practise this art was a college student named Jennifer Ringley, who has become justifiably famous for her balls, as opposed to her tits. Ringley placed a digital camera in her dorm room in 1996 and began living her life on the Net. Jennicam (www.jennicam.org) now claims, possibly with some hyperbole, more than 100 million hits a week, which would put the number of people who’ve seen Ringley talking on the phone and having sex with her boyfriend somewhere around the global audience of Titanic. Among her viewers are God-knows-how-many psychopaths, rapists and hackers. One of the last group once replaced pictures of Ringley’s Washington, D.C., apartment with images of mutilated corpses.

The Nose’s HomeCams page (www.homecams.com) now lists 651 personal Webcam sites, with the majority run by women. Scroll down the Nose’s annotated list and you will find performance artists, exotic dancers, porn models, nurses, college girls, a 43-year-old mom with nine kids, New Zealanders, Brits, Aussies, Brazillians. If these women (and men) have anything in common, it’s that they all know a hell of a lot about computers.

Kimi is a Web designer from New Jersey who has been living in front of her Webcam for a year. The main page of Kimi’s site (www.kimiko-dreams.com) features a photo of her with her hands cuffed behind her back and her bum peeking out of a black mini. There is also an aerial shot of her lying on her back, arms behind her head and mouth partially open to reveal a slight overbite. She has a high forehead with a receding hairline, a wide nose, no cheekbones. Clicking in at 10 o’clock one Monday night I found Kimi engaged in what appeared to be gay sex. Her long dark hair was unbrushed. The lighting sucked. You could just make out Kimi caressing someone else’s pimply bottom.

But Kimi can more often be seen in an oversized T-shirt and bike shorts, working at her computer. “I enjoy the reaction when people aren’t expecting me to show off,” she says, “as opposed to saying, “Okay, at 10 tonight I’m gonna take off my shirt.” Kimi is a tease.

When she first started her Web site, she put up a few soft-core pictures of anonymous models, along with brief fantasy write-ups about them, and charged membership fees. “I was getting [the pictures] from the public domain”-- in cyberporn’s early days, Usenet groups were a common source of hot pix--“but eventually I realized I couldn’t do that legally.” As a stopgap measure until she could get more pictures, she installed a Webcam in her apartment. “It never occurred to me to put pictures of myself up [permanently]. I’m not tremendously confident in my appearance. I did not expect it to be this popular. It surprised the hell out of me. I realized I could be my own model.” She began charging visitors a membership fee.

In her gallery of old Webcam shots, you can see Kimi caressing a largish woman’s bare bum, play-humping a pillow, and lounging absently on her bed wearing only a black T-shirt, a cat snuggling beside her, her chin in her hand. That last shot is remarkable because it’s exactly how 99 percent of women probably look 20 minutes after they’ve had sex, when their lovers have puttered off to the kitchen for a bite to eat or a beer. As Simon Firth observes in Salon, “If Webcams are feeding a desire, then it is a desire not for unreal models, but for people who look like the rest of us.”

Cam girls’ picture galleries are filled with cross-hatched icono-graphy: a woman masturbating with a dildo on white sheets, then the same woman hunched at her desk in a conservative blouse, concentrating on her screen, with her hair in a casual ponytail. “There’s a great demystification going on here,” notes Lynn Crosbie, a Toronto author and editor of women’s erotica. “So much of eros is about the person inside, and that person is never accessible in one-dimensional porn. Sexuality is projected entirely by a person’s vitality.” Kimi’s personality is effervescent, her voice light. She seems by turns brash and self-effacing, candid and awkward, uncertain and shrewd.

Kimi was part of the first wave of cam girls to follow Jennifer Ringley, and for a while, as she watched the phenomenon grow, she says it got heatedly competitive. But then the girls realized that their voyeurs were regulars, loyal to a given girl, and the one-upsmanship died down. Last year, Opal of Opalcam tried to unite the cam girls by linking their sites into a Web ring--a sort of sorority ring for women who’ve boldly gone where no woman had gone before.
The truth-or-dare aspect of the Webcam doesn’t always come easily for Kimi. She frequently forgets that she’s sitting in front of her camera, and will suddenly wince in horror at the thought that thousands of men have just seen her pick her nose or brood about something in her private life. On rare occasions, bullies come into her cyber salon, berating and goading her. But they have no sting in cyberspace, these men, because it’s so easy for her to ignore them. “Eventually,” she says, “they just get bored and go away.”

It’s difficult to threaten women in cyberspace; you can’t watch fear creep across their faces. “There are two types who watch cam girls,” ventures Kimi. “The majority are thrilled to death when they see a real girl naked. It’s a voyeur thing: ‘I’m watching the girl next door,and she doesn’t know.’ But a lot of guys enjoy the fact that it’s a girl they could meet.” Kimi chats with her fans every evening, usually with one hundred or so in attendance. They applaud her, they support her, “they get worried when I’m having a bad day.” That level of solicitous yet controlled male attention is virtually impossible to achieve in ordinary life. “On good days,” says Kimi, “when I feel like showing off, it’s really confidence-building. It’s like driving your car and having a guy whistle. It boosts my self-esteem.”

“My site allows me to work in my pajamas, at my computer and out of my house,” Welles told U.S. District Judge Judith Keep in a San Diego courtroom last April. “This is after all a business venture for me. If I can make a few cents on sending people who desire [hard-core] entertainment to a quality site, some of which [my] friends own, I will…. This whole lawsuit is a matter of control, one that I will not acquiesce to.” Welles won the first round, but Playboy is appealing, and will probably wage a war of attrition to avoid setting a precedent. Other Bunnies, Welles tells me, are already designing Web sites to manage their fan clubs, but for now are holding back on the Playboy label until they see what happens with her case.

This is “the age of pornutopia,” in the words of Penthouse senior editor Gerard Van der Leun. Everyone has a shot at profiting from their virtual alter-egos--cam girls, housewives, Bunnies, computer geeks, gays, exotic dancers--and, in the process, at altering our vision of pornography. “The Web is a very level playing field,” says Danni Ashe. The Internet affords women an unprecedented level of control over the presentation of their sexuality--how they promote and sell it, and the degree to which they shade it with aspects of themselves. “There’s a whole lot of porn out there that’s so much more democratic than Vogue magazine, and less fetishized,” notes Lisa Palac, a former editor of an erotic-fiction magazine and author of The Edge of the Bed: How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life. “Now you have a subcategory of amateur porn called ‘pro am,’ because these amateurs have made so many videos they’re basically professionals. But they still look like ordinary people--fat, thin, young, old--and where else can you see that? Not in Hollywood movies.”