It’s hard to deny it: Sex is everywhere you look nowadays. Scantily clad models beckon to you from the cover of Cosmopolitan in the checkout line at the grocery store. Terri Hatcher and her harem of Desperate Housewives are still going strong on ABC. Heck, there’s even a Porn Star clothing line worn proudly by men and women alike.
“Generally in the media, there seems to be more of an acceptance and willingness to talk about sexual behavior,” said Jennifer Bass, media representative for the Kinsey Institute (yes, that Kinsey) in Indiana. “Sex doesn’t seem to be as taboo anymore, and it’s so accessible, so it doesn’t seem to be as much of a hot topic anymore.”
And the more exposure the public has to it, Bass said, the “more acceptance there is of a variety of sexualities and sexual behaviors.”
One such behavior is exotic dancing and other adult entertainment.
Whatever people may think of the field—that it’s a legitimate line of work or the downfall of modern society—the truth is that it’s becoming more prominent, according to people who work in or research the adult entertainment industry.
There are plenty of reasons being thrown around as to why this is the case. Some are to be expected, such as the increased popularity of the semi-anonymous Internet and social networking. Some are more surprising, such as the recession.
“The economy has pushed it to become more mainstream,” said Amber Smith, owner of Coming Attractions, a Central Coast-based adult entertainment agency.
Smith manages dozens of female and male exotic dancers in the tri-counties area. The dancers go out to bachelor parties, birthday parties, and other functions at private homes.
“For a lot of girls who are waitresses or work in minimum-wage jobs, the jobs just aren’t there anymore,” she explained.
Smith also employs college students whose parents don’t have the money to pay for tuition or rent.
“And why would you work 40 hours a week making minimum wage at places where guys make the same comments when you drop a fork if you could make more money working for an agency like mine?” she said.
However, many people don’t feel the same way.
Ann McCarty, associate director for the North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center, said over the years her organization has counseled many women who have worked or are working in the adult entertainment industry.
“Our view on it—on stripping and other adult entertainment—is that it’s just another way to objectify women,” McCarty said. “It’s basically a form of abuse.”
She explained one of the center’s goals is to help society, especially men, move away from the need for adult entertainment.
“Unfortunately, we’re taking baby steps,” she said.
And what does she have to say to women who view stripping as a means of financial independence?
“As advocates, we understand people need to do what they need to do to make money,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure there are other ways to make money.”
McCarty called getting into stripping and other sexualized jobs a “recipe for disaster” because of the prostitution and drug and alcohol abuse that sometimes come with them.
“We want women to value themselves more than they do when they enter the adult entertainment industry,” she said.
With more people moving into adult entertainment, the Sun decided to talk to some of them about what life is like in the industry, as well as what happens when they get out. Here are three local women’s stories.
A mother and a businesswoman
When the Sun met up with Central Coast resident Smith to interview her about Coming Attractions, she’d just come back from volunteering at her son’s preschool.
“It’s so amazing to watch your child interact with other kids his age in an environment that isn’t your own home,” Smith said.
Along with caring for her son and 12-year-old daughter, Smith books events for her employees. She also helps organize events hosted by her company at local bars, provides models and dancers for photo shoots, and offers pole dancing classes for women interested in “releasing their inner vixens,” she said.
Dancing through an agency is usually very different from dancing at a strip club, Smith said, because “you can make more money in a shorter amount of time and you don’t have to hustle … the guys are happy you’re there because they’ve already paid for it and it’s their buddy’s bachelor party.”
Smith started her business in 2008 with the goal of creating a safe place for women to make a legitimate income through stripping.
“For many years, women have been mistreated in this industry, and they’ve been used, and have, themselves, learned some bad habits. I want to change that,” she said. “I tell every girl I meet who wants a job: I am your stepping stone to that better education, better job you want to achieve.”
Smith started stripping at the age of 19, when she was a voice major at Cal Poly in SLO.
“I had two female roommates who talked about stripping and had dabbled in that world, I guess you could say,” she said. “I wanted to be financially independent, and I thought realistically it was a way I could do that.”
So Smith dropped out of school and started traveling back and forth to Ventura to work.
“Every single time I went to go do a show, I would be nervous because I didn’t realize my own beauty and power at that time in my life,” she recalled. “I would just think about how disappointed my parents were of me and that would ruin it.”
After working in what Smith called some “not so legitimate” clubs, she ended up in the Hollywood circuit. As a trained jazz and ballet dancer, Smith said she really liked getting the chance to perform on stage.
Eventually, she got married and had her daughter, at which time she said her “stilettos went on the shelf … and I thought I was done.”
But over the years, she ended up returning to the pole again and again to make ends meet.
After divorcing her husband, she danced to pay her bills and support her daughter and stepson. Then she decided to become a real estate agent and the stilettos came off again.
“The real estate market was booming, so of course there was no need for me to be dancing,” she explained.
Also during that time, she met her current boyfriend and started working as a personal trainer. Things seemed to be going very well—and then the housing market crashed.
“We could see our world crumbling around us financially,” she said.
Without many moneymaking options, she and her boyfriend decided to start an adult entertainment business.
“My boyfriend had an entertainment business in the past, so he was much more open minded and understood that it’s a job, it’s a business,” she explained, “and it’s not quite as complicated as people make it.”
This time around, however, she entered the business a little older and a little wiser, and “something just clicked,” she said.
“Instead of fighting my build, I worked with it,” she said, adding that giving birth to her daughter taught her “so much about being a woman” and inspired her to own her femininity.
Smith wanted to share that knowledge with younger girls in the business, so she decided to try her hand at managing.
She started posting on MySpace and putting fliers up around town. From there, she said, “It just started to happen like a snowball effect. Here I was being a mom in a small town, but there was something that just kept drawing me back to it.”
Overall, working in the industry, she said, has helped her both personally and as a mother.
“The attitude is that these girls are whores and they’re a commodity, and that’s wrong,” she said. “At the end of the day, I’m deeply grateful that these girls are helping pay for food for my children. So why would I treat them as anything other than great human beings?”
Side business, split personality
When she was about 20 years old, Jordan* decided to enter the amateur stripping circuit in Southern California.
“I was an [Emergency Medical Technician] when I started dancing on the side. It helped me pay for my training,” Jordan told the Sun in a recent interview. “It was a money-making decision, but I ended up liking it.”
Rechristening herself Kade, Jordan started buying costumes and took to the stage. Looking back on the experience, Jordan, who has lived on the Central Coast for six years, said stripping helped her become comfortable in her own skin.
“It makes you self-aware, and you become very conscious of your sexuality,” she said, “which is something as a young woman I don’t think you really pay enough attention to.”
As Kade, Jordan said she got to show a part of herself she usually didn’t get to express.
“I did the whole Catholic school girl thing. I liked dancing to hardcore music like Nine Inch Nails,” she said. “I was into a harder-edge, Goth industrial look.”
But when the sun came up, Kade would disappear and Jordan would climb into an ambulance and go to work as a full-time EMT, responding to 911 calls and providing direct patient care. During that time, she was also studying for her paramedic certification.
Jordan said the money she made dancing “could easily pay for [her] rent,” while the EMT job “paid for everything else.”
Of course, that was after a good night.
“What people don’t understand about stripping, at least in the amateur circuit, is that it can be really expensive when you don’t have a good night,” she explained.
When moonlighting as an exotic dancer, she said, “you have to give a cut to the house. You have to tip the DJ for every song he plays for you. If there’s a bar, you have to tip the bartender. By the end of the night, you end up having to tip practically everyone in the establishment.”
To ensure she has a good night, a dancer has to be able to sell herself to her clients. The money comes from talking to people and giving lap dances for $25 to $30 a pop.
If the dancer plays her cards right, she can walk away with as much as $1,000 a night in a larger metropolitan area, Jordan said.
In that sense, she said, stripping truly is a business transaction—just with a strong dose of sexuality.
“Like a lot of jobs in the sex industry, it is what you make of it,” she explained. “If you go into it as an entrepreneur with a healthy dose of self-respect and behave yourself as a professional, the sex industry is whatever you make of it.”
Unfortunately, for some women in the industry, what they make of it ends up being really dangerous. Jordan recalled a friend of hers who started stripping right after high school.
“She was a brand new baby, and she went from stripping to the porn industry and drugs,” she said, adding that the girl already had a drug habit as a teenager.
“The drugs she had access to through the porn industry were too much for her to handle,” she said. “I lost her to drugs. She was a causality of the industry.”
That happened, Jordan said, “not because she was becoming self-actualized, but because she was living that out-of-control rocker lifestyle” she fantasized about.
By the time Jordan lost her friend to drugs, she had already been off the stripping circuit for some time.
“It’s something I wouldn’t have minded doing longer, but I always had to cover my tracks,” she explained. “Firefighters, paramedics, cops—these are all guys who go to strip clubs.”
To protect her daytime job, Jordan said she had to give herself a geographical buffer, working as an EMT in one county and stripping several counties away.
“It became too much of a strain because I had to keep my two lives separate,” she said. “I had to be two different people.”
So Jordan stopped stripping and focused all her energy on her career as a paramedic. Eventually she decided to go back to school at Cal Poly, where she studied psychology and worked at the health center as a sex educator to her peers. She also volunteered at the Sexual Assault Recovery and Prevention (SARP) Center. After graduation, she went on to work in the social services field.
She said stripping didn’t directly impact her decision to pursue these things professionally, but it did help her learn who she was as an individual.
From timidity to prominence
A common saying about stripping is that it’s a “gateway to the porn industry.” And for some women, like Santa Maria native Aurora Snow, it was. But Snow’s story isn’t quite what people might expect.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone this in an interview before, but I tried to be a stripper for about three days in Orange County,” she told the Sun. “I would come back to my dorm room and cry to my roommate, ‘I can’t do this. This is horrible. I’m a terrible stripper!’”
This was back when she was a drama major at U.C. Irvine and hadn’t yet changed her name to Aurora Snow. (The name, by the way, comes from her affection for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and a colleague who said, “You’re so innocent, you’re like snow. … You should be Aurora Snow.”)
“It was hard enough getting on stage and stripping, but I couldn’t hustle lap dances and sell myself to strangers,” she explained. “I admire strippers who can do that—to me, that takes a lot of courage.”
So how does a 20-something woman who can’t handle the demands of stripping end up in porn?
“I started doing nude modeling to pay off my student loans,” Snow said. “I was so overwhelmed with loans, and I didn’t want the rest of my life to be spent paying them back.”
Through her stints as a nude model, Snow got introduced to the porn industry.
“I decided I would do porn for a year to pay off the loans, and then I would run and never look back,” she said.
“I remember driving to the set beforehand and wrestling morally with myself, ‘Can I do this?’” she recalled. “In my mind, it was the worst thing I had ever done.”
Afterward, Snow said, she expected to have a “horrible emotional downpour”—but it never happened.
“I didn’t hate it,” she said. “I ended up really enjoying it. I learned a lot about myself, and I became a more open-minded person.
“Before I did porn, I was very conservative. I saw everything in black and white. It taught me to see more in shades of gray,” she continued. “And it made me a more confident, outgoing person.”
Aurora’s career has also helped her care for her family: When Aurora’s brother became a quadriplegic after a bad motorcycle accident, she was able to take time off to care for him.
“I could do a couple movies and then take a break and go take care of him and my nephew. No other job offers you freedom like that,” she said. “And when he was in the hospital, I was very comfortable dealing with the human body.”
For Aurora, personally, the porn industry—with its contracts and frequent testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases—offers a “safe and professional environment” in which she can explore herself sexually.
“I’ve been very fortunate and very lucky with my career,” she said, admitting that she’s aware not all women in the industry are as lucky. She recounted a horror story she’d heard in which a woman did something she wasn’t comfortable with to please a director and ended up getting hurt.
“When you show up to a set and somebody wants you to do something, it’s your right to say no if you’re not comfortable,” she said. “You have to have a level of trust with your director and the people you’re working with, but you also have to take responsibility for what you’re doing.”
Snow said she’s aware some people don’t feel the same way about the porn industry, but she also thinks the stigma once associated with her career “is slowly being erased” by sex and sexuality becoming more mainstream.
“We all make our own choices in life. People around me don’t have to like my choices as much as I would like theirs, but I do my best not to judge people and I hope they would do the same,” she said. “Plus, I find that the people who are most vocal against [porn] tend to live in glass houses one way or another.”
Of course, one can’t do porn forever. So what does Snow have planned for the future?
“I want to go to law school,” she said.
Through her connections in the industry, Snow got to cover the John Stagliano obscenity trial in Washington, D.C., for Adult Video News. (In 2008, the federal government issued multiple charges of obscenity against Stagliano, owner of Evil Angel porn studio, but the charges were ultimately dismissed due to insufficient evidence.)
Snow said the experience has inspired her to become an entertainment lawyer.
“This has been a very fun career to have in my 20s, but when I get into my 30s I need to grow up and have a real life,” she said.
* “Jordan” is a pseudonym used at the source’s request.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 30 – Oct 7, 2010.