Seska and James are a happy couple, or at least they come off that way. Certainly they are familiar, comfortable, and respectful of one another. This is important, considering that they maintain a marriage and jointly own adult entertainment business.

The web site Seska4lovers.com is the couple's bread and butter; it has enabled them to maintain a comfortable middle-class existence for the past eight years. Through a persistent trial-and-error process the couple has learned to navigate the difficult terrain of the online business world. They have learned to negotiate with credit card billing companies, forge mutually-advantageous advertising links with other amateur sites, customize their written content so that it appears prominently in Google searches, and – most importantly – to cultivate an online persona that retains their clients' interests.

Seska and James are old-time entrepreneurs; they've jointly built a viable independent business out of their homes. And they claim to derive fulfillment from their endeavours.

In many ways, internet porn is a late-Capitalist anomaly: in an era of mergers, chain-stores, and corporatization, the porn industry has actually seen an increase, over the last five years, in independent home-grown projects. James firmly connects this trend to the growing culture of online niche consumerism.

According to James, “The really cool thing about the internet is that you can find whatever you're interested in.” His web site's appeal lies in its homegrown, domestic quality.

For James, the expanding diversity of the porn industry represents a growing acceptance of sexual diversity more generally. Once people had to explore their fetishes through subterranean fringe communities, or by appropriating mainstream pop-cultural iconography (in the early nineties, Batman's Cat Woman became a sexual icon among North American leather fans). Today, however, the proliferation of fetish-oriented, same-sex, and “alternative” porn has enabled a more public acknowledgement of diverse desires.

Even so, the couple still has reservations, which manifest themselves more through rhetorical asides than through actual conversational substance. Seska frequently alludes to anxiety over aging. Currently, she is 36 years old and undeniably good-looking, and while she is confident that the industry will maintain a place for her as she approaches the “housewife demographic,” she seems anxious about the profitability of her changing appearance.

Seska plans to re-appraise things when she hits 40 – to assess her satisfaction level and decide where to go to next. While she has tentative plans to move into adult sex education or sex journalism, she acknowledges that it would be hard to leave the sex industry altogether.

There's something positively indelible about online porn. While she has high hopes for an exciting future, her vocational options are heavily constrained by her career choices thus far.

Despite these concerns, it seems that Seska and James have avoided many of the industry's pitfalls. They have a dynamic web site that they've created without the pesky interference of bosses or middlemen. They're able to run an adult entertainment company without ever being told when and how to have sex.

With technological advances constantly redesigning the pornscape, it can at times be difficult to adopt a strong ideological stance vis-à-vis the wide range of sexually explicit material available for mass consumption. Porn's strongest detractors emerged as part of the second-wave feminist movement in the sixties and seventies. Their perspective is bluntly articulated in the 1981 CBC documentary Not a Love Story.

The film provides a largely Montreal-centred exploration of the pornography industry in the early eighties. One can't watch the film without being struck by the array of changes the industry has undergone since the film's release. Erotic bookstores, cinemas, and peep shows have given way to DVDs, internet sites, and webcams; heteronormativity is surrendering to diversity and niche marketing; and the industry's alleged connections to organized crime are being undermined by producers who fervently defend their businesses' ethical legitimacy.

Not surprisingly, these industry changes have accompanied vast ideological shifts. A new generation of theorists are challenging the reductive “porn is violence” mantra of the old-guard feminists. Moreover, porn is no longer the sole domain of heterosexual males; increasingly, women's groups, porn collectives, and queer organizations are working to revitalize the medium in exciting new ways.

But as adult entertainment inches into a more visible realm, the anxieties that surround it persist. The fact is, many people are still creeped out by porn. Does this cultural reticence indicate a persistence of moral-majority conservatism? Or are people justified in their disdain for an industry that is still, in many ways, exploitative and bigoted?

It's easy to dismiss films like Not a Love Story as exercises in irritating, second-wave feminist reductivism. Recent porn theory, like so many other trends in intellectual feminism, has worked hard to discredit the “blind simplicity” of anti-porn militancy that led to uneasy coalitions between anti-porn feminists and pro-censorship neo-conservative types in the 1970s.

But then again, this partnership is not entirely senseless. After all, there is something surprisingly conservative about the anti-porn movements of the seventies and eighties.

While Not a Love Story sets up the pretense of documentary objectivism, it quickly descends into anti-porn's attendant clichés. We are introduced to a group of male anti-porn advocates who explain that “pornography is one more way of taking our feelings away, of continuing the process of a death-oriented culture.” We meet a research psychologist who equates the use of “aggressive pornography” with male insensitivity to rape. And again and again, interview after interview, the viewer is bombarded with the same word: objectification.

McGill professor Berkeley Kaite provides another perspective on the notion of objectification. While she takes issue with the more demeaning types of pornographic representation, Kaite argues that objectification, in and of itself, isn't necessarily bad.

In one of Not a Love Story's more syrupy moments, the interviewer, Laura Tracey, confronts the manager of an adult video-store. “Don't you have any films where they're really making love?” she asks rhetorically.

This is one of the film's most unpalatable moments. Maybe it's her use of the phrase “making love” – perhaps one of the most saccharine and meaningless phrases in current use. Maybe it's Tracey's restrictive ideology that's so frustrating: her notion that “virtuous sex” must always be passionate, emotional, and spiritually “genuine.” Is casual fucking necessarily wrong? If so, Tracey is issuing a striking condemnation of the way many human beings achieve sexual satisfaction.

On the other hand, it's necessary to underline that there is a difference between the fragmentation of the body that occurs in a portrait hanging on a museum wall versus something along the lines of College Sluts On Spring Break playing on pay-per-view in your hotel room. As far as we know, there aren't many guys jacking off to the Mona Lisa. Most porn isn't nearly as interactive as the material that Seska and James broadcast online, either.

The final irony is that intellectuals such as Kaite sometimes push the counter-arguments to objectification so far that they end up in the enemy camp.

Although it's rather simplistic to say that porn featuring rape scenes actually causes men to perpetrate sexual crimes, it doesn't discourage men from doing so either. Though the actresses in a porn scene may not necessarily feel like a sexual object, it's true that if she spends all her time on screen giving oral sex and never receiving it, men who already feel like women's sexual needs are secondary or even non-existent certainly aren't going to be enlightened after watching the DVD.

The ultimate problem with porn-advocates who claim that it's all just good ol' sexual fantasizing forget that all the jizz being squirted onto the girl's face is real and demeaning. Moreover, she really is getting gang-banged.

Dorsey admits to having initial feelings of aversion toward the industry. Significantly, his experiences as a director mirror our own as writers.

His initial encounters with porn industry people were, like ours, somewhat akin to a soldier conversing with a member of the enemy camp for the first time: it was an exercise in humanization, a discovery that these men and women are – duh – just regular people.

In the show, Dorsey wants “to capture the idea that [porn] is a business,” that its participants are merely everyday “business people at work.” One of the show's main characters, an adult entertainment business owner named Vid Vicious, captures the business-centred nature of the industry.

What Dorsey doesn't concede, however, is that businessmen are not philanthropists. Their primary concern is turning a profit. Without a steady cash flow, Vid Vicious would have none of his employees' jobs to safeguard in the first place. And when there's pressure to increase a company's – any company's – revenue, the welfare of its employees is often jeopardized.

Violet works as a webcam girl for 2Much Crew, a Montreal-based company that operates a web site featuring live chats and webcam sessions with girls who will get naked in “private chat” for a whopping $5 per minute. It may be because taking your clothes off and masturbating – or, at the very least, simulating this act – in the privacy of one of the company's four studios is significantly less hardcore than doing a double-penetration scene, but she doesn't seem to suffer from any stigma as a result of her career choice.

The way she mimics her critic, raising a mock-admonitory finger as she recalls his statement, makes it clear that she didn't take the comment too literally.

It's evident that Violet is a girl with serious attitude. She radiates sexual confidence; you can't help but desire her, or desire to be her, or both. But this hasn't always been the case.

Her take on her job operates as a foil to the assumption that porn is inherently degrading toward women. She genuinely relishes coming into work, and she's sufficiently sure-footed to set her own boundaries with the men that she interacts with online.

“There are times that people ask you to do things that you aren't into, but you just politely say no. I like a lot of the weird fantasies, though,” she muses.

“It gives me a chance to dress up, and I love dressing up. I went out of my way for my mannequin guy [a client who has a thing for women who look and act like inanimate dolls]. I curled my hair overnight, I bought a big pouffy dress with a crinoline, I got some gloves, and I made my face all white with cherry lips. I loved making that fantasy come true for him. Getting ready for work is fun!” she asserts exuberantly.

Prince is charming, relaxed, stylish. Like Violet, he disarms the staunch moralist who refuses to see the adult entertainment as anything other than a dirty business. In fact, his office alone shows that this man isn't running a greasy brothel out of his basement: picture something along the lines of the Vogue editorial offices in downtown Manhattan and you'll get the idea. It helps that he is not embarrassed about the source of his income.

And yet, Prince's vision is subtly misleading: he encourages the girls to use their “real” personalities on the webcam not so much because he's an ardent feminist who wants to see women taking control of their sexuality, but because that's what gets customers hooked.

Both Prince and Violet mention that several customers actually fall in love with the girls. It's not uncommon for them to receive lavish gifts from admirers.

But love doesn't seem to be the correct term for a relationship that is limited to virtual reality and involves a Paypal transaction. The emotional connection is the catch that keeps customers paying their five bucks per minute, rather than a concerted attempt to debunk the porn-star-as-sex-object myth.

You could argue that we pay therapists to feel loved as well, but only a bad therapist would try to keep you in therapy indefinitely; after all, the goal of such mental treatment is precisely to get the client to a point where he doesn't depend on it anymore. Meanwhile, we dare you to try getting Blue Cross Blue Shield to reimburse you for all your online “therapy” sessions.

Although Violet evidently enjoys her work, her claims to sexual emancipation are perhaps shakier than she admits. She has wisely taken her own advice.

Does her willingness to please present an ingrained acceptance of female subservience? Or is subservience a general and necessary demand of any service-oriented job? Also, is sexual subservience necessarily wrong if one knows one's limits and achieves a measure of personal satisfaction from the encounter?

Perhaps, these questions are too complicated for an outsider to answer. What's clear, however, is that financial exchange tends to complicate easy human relationships, and the tenability of Violet's career essentially rests on her ability to please others over herself.

Still, Violet's got it a lot better than the average actresses in the porn world; for them, work can be significantly more hazardous on both an emotional and physical level. Condoms, for example, are discouraged on most porn sets because men – who still make up the majority of porn's target audience – don't like to see other men wearing rubbers.

STELLA also provides general emotional support for women working in the porn industry, “like how to deal with all the stigma. We built a sort of ‘coming-out' workshop,” explains Thiboutot.

While there is still ample validity to the claim that women are often placed in situations where their comfort levels are compromised, technology has been instrumental in cutting out the middlemen that might coerce them into degrading situations.

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