Cover Story: The girl next door

Talk about your Lana Turner fantasies. New to Atlanta, Heidi was waiting tables one day about four years ago — a second job that helped the pretty, 25-year-old, sometimes-blonde divorcee make ends meet — when she was discovered, in the classic sense, by a man who asked if she’d like to be in pictures. She had a certain look, that indefinable something the public is clamoring for, he explained, and would she please consider coming in for an audition?

Flattered, intrigued and gut-wrenchingly nervous, she showed up at the audition, knocked their socks off, signed a contract, shot a string of pictures, learned the ropes, paid her dues, made public appearances, answered fan mail and, a year later, stepped onstage to collect her first people’s choice award.

Ah, a quintessentially American success story, our Heidi.

Mind you, the description of this heart-warming tale has skimped on some details that would disqualify Heidi from ever selling the movie rights to the Lifetime channel. For starters, Heidi didn’t go to Hollywood; she went on the Web. Her adoring fans consisted entirely of guys surfing for smut. And, although she turned in some fine performances, the hundreds of pictures she shot aren’t ones she’s likely to show her mother.

Heidi was — is, actually, for as long as someone cares to keep her image on a server — a webgirl. Specifically, she’s the subject of an “amateur” site, in online porn parlance.

She wasn’t a struggling actress or a professional dancer. She hadn’t appeared in stag films. She was neither rail-thin nor surgically enhanced. And while she wasn’t a babe in the woods, she certainly wasn’t the bisexual libertine that she found herself portraying on her website. But in her, the talent scout saw the essential quality for a successful career as an online amateur: Heidi was the girl next door.

“We don’t want fake boobs or tattoos,” Heidi recalls being told at her audition, moments before she was asked to strip down and provide visual evidence that she had neither. The audition took place in the living room of an otherwise average-seeming, middle-aged Stockbridge couple who own a local Web design firm. We’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. Smith, largely because representatives from their company refused to take our calls.

The couple photographed Heidi’s inaugural striptease and liked what they saw, the unvarnished naturalness and uncertainty that would have been absent in a porn actress or a veteran of burlesque. They signed her up and began work on her website. They chose “Heidi” as her nom de Web; she didn’t — and doesn’t — want her real name used.

“When we started, we agreed that it was only going to be Playboy-style soft-core,” Heidi says. “I shot enough pictures in three weeks to last a year.”

For Heidi, it was a year in which she would earn $30,000 for lending her birthday-suited image to the Internet and learning which end of a sex toy is up. In that same year, she would lose her fiance and her self-esteem while watching her life unravel.

“I’m not here to paint a rosy picture of this business,” she says. “I want out of it.”

Across America, there are thousands of Heidis — teenage girls, thirtysomething women, even grandmothers and, of course, a few men — who are letting it all hang out for all the World Wide Web to see.

Some amateurs drop trou online for the thrill; others, in an apparent semantic contradiction of the word “amateur,” do it for a paycheck. Many sites are strictly PG-13 tease-a-thons, safe outlets for frustrated exhibitionists; many more are candidates to be bookmarked by Larry Flynt. Nearly all support themselves by selling monthly memberships at 10 or 15 bucks a pop to guys who want to see the juicy stuff.

Often produced at home with consumer-grade software on PCs located in a cul-de-sac near you, they are the very definition of cottage-industry smut.

Just as the advent of the video camera has given us The Blair Witch Project and its indie brethren, so has it, paired with Internet technology, put porn — and Heidi — in the hands of the people.

Together, they’ve helped bring about the great democratization of American pornography that, over

the past decade, has overtaken and reshaped an industry whose domestic annual revenues — an estimated $10 billion-plus and growing — quietly outstrip those of pro sports and the Hollywood box office.

Amateur websites — featuring neophyte models of every shape and flavor, frozen in ill-lit, semi-candid poses or documented in real time by never-blinking webcams — are to Penthouse what “Big Brother” is to “Party of Five,” namely, the Net’s version of reality TV. Debbie no longer has ambitions of doing Dallas; her back porch will suffice.

“That’s it? All I have to do is hug it?” Veronica Vincent recalls asking when she got a call from the guy with the balloon fetish site. Yes, he explained, hug it re-e-e-al hard and he’d give her a link. Well, a free link is nothing to turn up your nose at, she explains now with a laugh, shaking her head as she reflects on the surrealism of this and other conversations she’s had during her debut year as a webgirl.

Veronica, a longtime Web junkie and computer autodidact, first thought about launching her own amateur site while dancing in local strip clubs.

“I wanted to start building a fan base for when I went on the road as a feature dancer,” she says. The site would serve as cheap promotion, putting her name, image and impressive measurements out there in cyberspace to help reel in guys who would pay to gawk at her in person in nudie bars across the country.

She taught herself HTML, learned to design Web pages with Dreamweaver, became educated in the intricacies of online billing. Finally, last September, she bought a digital camera, picked a Web host and Voila! — www.veronicavincent.com was born.

Around the same time, she landed a good job at Turner that she hoped would lead to a programming career at AOL. Then her day job collided with her online moonlighting.

“I didn’t think people would find it so quickly, but it was barely up three months before guys at work were coming to my desk to tell me they’d seen my site and was I free for lunch,” Veronica says. “A lot of people told me not to quit, but I couldn’t go to work and deal with that.”

She could have dumped the website, of course, but she reasoned that her downloaded photos were already being passed around to men she hadn’t even met. She was fine with pseudononymous club dancing, but the prospect of being the infotech harlot at work didn’t appeal to her. “I could just see it avalanching after that.”

Besides, by then Veronica had discovered her calling as a webmistress. She gets embarrassed estimating the time she pours into maintaining and updating her site. It’s become something of a full-time job.

“I like being the master of my own little universe and being on the cutting edge of technology,” she says. “I’m not your typical geek, but I’m really into computers.”

And, as one of the few African-American amateurs on the Net, she found that her customers were really into her. In short order, 100 guys had sprung for $13 monthly memberships to view what Veronica describes as her “soft-core glamour nudes” — all taken, incidentally, by her live-in boyfriend.

Trying to define the term “amateur” is a little like attempting to nail down what qualifies an image as pornographic, except that you don’t necessarily — as a judge once famously said — know it when you see it.

That’s because even pre-fab sites that re-package off-the-shelf J-pegs attempt to make themselves look as if they were posted by a horny housewife somewhere in Kansas who just happens to have preternaturally symmetrical, gravity-defiant breasts; a bevy of hot, leggy, bisexual friends; and a bedroom that looks suspiciously like a soundstage.

The key is the illusion of accessibility for the guy sitting at home, says Dirty Bob, a veteran writer for Adult Video News, the porn industry’s version of Variety and Premiere rolled into one highly influential magazine.

“Some guys prefer women who look absolutely perfect, but others like to think that the naked girl they’re looking at is someone that — although it will never happen — they could eventually get to meet,” he explains.

The amateur market has become so popular that many big-name porn stars and nude models are launching their own sites, the most successful of whom is Danni Ashe, a top-heavy blonde former stripper. The popularity of her slickly rendered nudie site has earned her the Guinness-bestowed title of most-downloaded woman on the Internet, edging out the more modest Cindy Margolis.

The other major appeal of amateur sites is the prospect of getting to know a girl — albeit through a long-distance modem connection — and sharing in her adventures, travails, semi-private confessions and new hairstyles.

Of course, there’s also the danger of seeing more than you might want, as in the case of Jan B., a 44-year-old Indianapolis grand-mother of three who prefers to couple with, as she puts it, “black studs,” and offers visual testimony in the form of more than 250 self-produced videos that she sells on her site.

She recently posted a message explaining that, in sympathy for Americans troubled by the onset of war and an uncertain economy, for every three videos you buy, she’ll throw in a fourth for free.

It didn’t take long for the weirdos, perverts and con artists to come out of the webwork and find Veronica. One guy paid her $200 to send him two worn-out pairs of shoes; others beg her to pose while pretending to smoke a cigar. Then there are the balloon fetishists.

“They want to see you sit on a balloon until it looks like it’s going to pop,” Veronica explains with an air of whatever-floats-your-dirigible bemusement.

“Then ... ” She pauses to let the absurdity sink in. “They want to see you pop it.”

For that small, if seriously bizarre, request, she was rewarded with a Web link from a balloon fetish site to her own. Since links help bring in new members, webgirls often make deals among their ranks to swap links and photo scans. But Veronica concedes she’s become disillusioned by hucksters who request photos in exchange for a link, then pad their own site with her image without making good on the quid pro quo.

She also quit posting a schedule of her local strip club appearances after being creeped out when members began confessing they had watched her all night in silence. She has yet to join the feature dancing circuit.

To earn extra money, Veronica recently signed on with a phone-sex service that has links scattered across the Internet. She fields several calls a week and remains amazed that she can earn nearly $3 a minute without any personal contact or heavy lifting: “Some of them are very polite and ask, ‘Do you mind if I masturbate?’”

She recently shot a photo spread for Hustler’s Busty Beauties, but doesn’t yet know when it’s scheduled to run.

A transplanted Midwesterner with a political science degree from the University of Louisville, Veronica comes across as thoughtful, articulate and equipped with the understated self-confidence of a woman accustomed to male attention. It’s hard to imagine her fitting the porn-model “type,” with its implicit vulgarity.

And yet, there are hints that she may long ago have been seduced by the easy path that such DDD-cup fineness as hers is able to carve through life.

There also are hints that, deep down, she knows this.

“I’m educated and mature,” she says in anticipation of the uncomfortable question she must have asked herself many times. “Most people would say I’m wasting myself doing what I do, but I enjoy it. There’s a freedom that comes with it.”

No one truly knows how much porn-related commerce takes place online. Or the volume of Internet traffic that cruises through smut sites. Or the number of amateur website memberships sold each month. The best estimates in each of these categories, experts agree, is: a lot.

That’s because nobody pays Internet analysts to keep tabs on such statistics, says Mark Evans, co-author of Investrends: The High-Tech Economy and a columnist with Canoe, Canada’s version of Yahoo! Nor are porn sites or individual amateurs particularly interested in reporting such figures. But their influence and ability to wring profits out of an inhospitable sales medium should not be underestimated.

“Online book retailers generate billions in revenues, but no one’s actually making any real money, yet porn is profitable,” Evans says. “While people pooh-pooh the porn industry, it’s really the untold success story of the Internet.”

In fact, he explains, just as porn is credited with the rapid ascendancy of the VCR as a fixture in the American home, so has it been the driving force behind such Web staples as streaming video and online credit-card processing. “The porn sites have been the technological innovators,” he says.

However, Evans asserts, porn’s easy-money party is over. A late-comers stampede to cash in on the big money being made online has resulted in a glut of virtual poontang. In such an over-saturated, fragmented marketplace, cyber-sluts have become a dime a dozen and the growing legions of interchangeable sleaze sites will have to settle for ever-shrinking shares of the audience.

“The mainstream has woken up to online porn,” Evans says. “The outlook is that the established sites will continue to make money and the smaller ones will continue to do it for fun or be swallowed up in mass consolidations.”

“You’ve got to love doing it or you’re wasting your time,” explains Amy, whose amateur site went up in March as a high-tech extension of an odyssey of sexual self-discovery that began last year when she was introduced to swinging.

“I’ve always been really shy and quiet and having my picture taken was something I shied away from,” recalls the former Catholic schoolgirl, who readily acknowledges the disconnect between her repressed past and the full-on shag-a-rama that her life has become. “Shy” is certainly not a word that leaps to mind when navigating her www.babysplayhouse.com.

Amy’s site is similar in format to, say, a precocious teenager’s personal website, except with hard-core sex photos in place of snapshots from summer camp, and a diary that reads like Penthouse Forum. A typical entry from last month describes in first-person a baby shower that devolves into an all-girl living-room orgy, complete with rugburns. You won’t find that on www.oprah.com.

Because she actually lives the swinging lifestyle that most webgirls can only suggest they lead, Amy spikes her site only with the occasional exaggeration and purple prose, rather than the utterly fabricated male-fantasy malarkey found on such sites as Heidi’s. Not surprisingly, however, she leaves out the detail that most of the pictures were shot by her husband.

A petite brunette who juggles two jobs in addition to her busy night life, Amy is dedicated to — to invoke the current cliche — keeping it real. Rather than recruiting carefully coifed sex partners for staged romps, she says, she simply makes sure that some of her spontaneous rolls in the hay are captured on film or video.

If the lighting and camera angles aren’t up to Spice Channel standards, or a cat strolls in front of the camera, or someone cracks up while trying to negotiate an uncooperative orifice, so much the better to conform with Amy’s goal of maintaining a self-described “extremely amateur” website.

“When I was researching amateur sites before I launched mine, so many of them looked phony,” she says. “At first, I worried that I wasn’t pretty enough to post my photos on the Web, but then I realized guys are more interested in girls who look real.”

At one point, she had a professional photographer shoot pictures for her site, then decided not to post them because they turned out “too good.” Likewise, she prefers to keep the graphics for Baby’s Playhouse fairly rudimentary and flash-free, all in the interest of giving her the aura of the girl next door — which, of course, for several unknowing suburbanites, she quite literally is.

“I want people to be able to tell my pictures are snapshots,” she says. “The general public wants to think of you as obtainable and, if you come across that way, they’ll stay with you to see what you’ll do next.”

Although Amy doesn’t have much time to devote to chat rooms or webcam shows, she remains accessible to her members by posting a schedule of her live sex-show sessions at Atlanta’s Velvet Heaven swingers club.

But she’s also learning to be more cautious, having been burned by an admirer who offered to produce a video for her of a heated girl-on-girl session, then disappeared with the tape.

With the number of her $10 memberships fluctuating between 10 and 60 a month, Amy admits she’s beginning to lose the necessary enthusiasm for updating her site, even though the webmaster duties are performed by a friend from swinging circles.

While she didn’t launch the website for the money, Amy predicts she’ll be compelled to shut down her Playhouse next year if membership continues to dip. Because of the proliferation of general-interest sex sites, she believes the future of online amateurism lies in going after niche markets and ultra-specialized perversions.

“I may end up launching a fetish or S&M site,” she muses. “When people are looking for something they can’t get in the mainstream, they’ll pay whatever it takes to get it.”

In the beginning, Heidi was all about the money.

“I told them I don’t care what they named me or wrote on the site,” as long as she got her 30-percent cut of the membership revenue, she says. From the photo captions to the bio excerpt exclaiming that her fantasy is “to make love in the grass with the wind blowing & the rain pouring down,” every line was bogus, dreamed up by some guy sitting at a keyboard in an office across town.

Even her stated age had two years shaved off to make her seem more appealing.

Her apartment was rigged up with webcams in every room so members could watch her brush her teeth and eat breakfast. She was obligated to answer e-mails, host online chat sessions and perform live webcam shows.

Soon, the Smiths were pushing Heidi to venture beyond cheesecake poses and coy stripteases. “One day, they pulled out all these sex toys and I was like, ‘What are those?’ I had never in my life even held one.”

And she began to be paired — and sometimes tripled — up with fellow webgirls for mock-lesbian canoodling.

“I’m not bisexual by any means and I know it’s all fake,” she says, half-laughing. “But they would say, ‘Put your hand on her there,’ and when the picture was taken, we’d yank our hands away because we were really grossed out.”

After a while, the captions alleging her turn-ons and fantasies got so cheesy (“I am a hair band junkie!”) that she began writing them herself. She must have been doing something right; in 1999, her site was named Best Amateur Webcam by one of the Internet’s porn clearinghouses.

As she got more involved in her site, Heidi’s fiance, fed up with the webcam, the increasingly tawdry photo shoots and the reality that hundreds of anonymous men could describe her identifying marks in detail, moved out for good.

To earn extra money, she took over the job of staff photographer, even though she barely knew her way around a camera, and would scout out strip clubs for new online talent. “I wanted to find the girl who didn’t look like she belonged there,” she explains.

Unlike Heidi, the company’s other webgirls didn’t share in site revenues, instead earning a flat $100 an hour to pose or to be photo-graphed getting busy with their boyfriends — or each other.

“I felt like a voyeur, but you get so involved in setting up shots and camera angles that you forget you’re watching people having sex,” Heidi says, almost convincingly.

But hanging around strippers proved to be a downer. “They were earning all this money and they’d be drinking and snorting coke, but half the time I’d hear them say they didn’t have the rent and couldn’t pay their bills,” she recalls.

Alone and depressed, she turned to her website members for virtual companionship, spending hours in chat sessions and finding a few kindred spirits. “I had so many guys who were so lonely, they’d say, ‘Don’t do the striptease tonight; just sit there and talk to me.’”

However, as time went on, Heidi’s newer customers got increasingly pushy, demanding ever-raunchier poses, complaining that they got more for their money on hard-core sex sites, even doling out insults.

“I’d get e-mails from people who would say, ‘How did you get your own site? You’re overweight.’ Your self-esteem really suffers when you hear that,” she says.

Now, three-and-a-half years after her site’s debut, Heidi has moved back to her small Midwestern hometown, where she’s told no one of her online alter ego, to focus on a career as a travel agent. Although she still collects about $180 in monthly site royalties, she hasn’t shot new photos in more than six months and is hoping to leave her webgirl past behind.

“When I think back on some of the things I’ve seen and the parties I’ve been to, it’s nothing I’d ever imagined growing up in a town of 900 people,” she says. “Once I got my life back together, it wasn’t something I wanted to do anymore.

“I’m not totally ashamed of what I’ve done,” she adds. “The biggest benefit has been that it’s opened me up sexually, but the only way I’d get back into it is if I were down and out. I would love it if everybody who subscribes to my site would cancel.”

scott.henry@creativeloafing.com