“These days anyone can set up a website and become a porn star. With the internet fundamentally changing the industry, could pornography be becoming mainstream?… Francesca, 59, lives in rural Oxfordshire and is one of the UK’s most popular internet porn stars. She has her own website and is known as a BBW — a big, beautiful woman. She charges £15 a month for access to erotic photos and film footage of herself having sex with subscribers. Married for 33 years, she got into the industry when her husband and son died in quick succession seven years ago. While it was a painful period for her, being a widow gave her a new-found freedom. ‘For the last 15 years of my marriage I wasn’t happy. No one thought I was sexy or attractive or even worth bothering about,’ she says. ‘A boyfriend suggested I get into pornography. He loved me the way I was and showed me other men did to. I didn’t believe anyone else would find me attractive. We took six glamour shots, put them on an internet site and the next day I had 250 e-mails offering me work and from admirers.’ A month later she made her first porn movie and started her website 18 months after that… Changes in how porn is produced also means the consumer is no longer restricted to being a passive recipient. Jo, who is in her 30s, meets subscribers for sex and puts the pictures on her site. She travels round the country, having group sessions with up to 20 men a week. Her partner Phil take the pictures. The former marketing rep from the North East gave up her job recently to concentrate on her site fulltime. She says her new career is just an extension of a lifestyle she and her partner have chosen, which includes swinging with other couples and group sex.” —BBC (UK)

When you read the story of Francesca, the self-made BBW porn star, it’s hard to decide whether she’s an example of net porn liberation or just a pathetic broad whose personal tragedies pushed her into the gutter. She speaks as though it’s the former — as though the possibilities of internet pornography opened up an exciting new life for her, and that may well be true. But at the same time, when people make major life decisions following such awful tragedies as the deaths of a husband and son, it’s hard to trust the decisions. You could easily see her on some slobbery talk show, crying about how her inability to cope with mourning caused her to prostitute herself.

And that’s another fascinating thing. Jo, the other self-made porn star profiled in the story, travels around the country sleeping with her “subscribers.” Does that amount to a form of prostitution? It’s certainly a fine line she’s treading. On one hand, she’s taking money from people that she probably wouldn’t be screwing if they weren’t paying, so you’d think that qualifies as prostitution. On the other hand, she could make the very valid argument that her clients are paying for her web services. If, as an individual, she decides to sleep with these clients, then it’s no more prostitution than if you pay a waitress for lunch and afterward she decides to sleep with you for dessert. You paid the waitress for food, not for sex. You paid Jo for porn, not for sex.

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