Stern (not her real name), who was born and raised in a lovely section of Capitol Hill and went to a fancy, private Washington college, is an eight-year sex industry veteran. She's worked as everything from a stripper to a dominatrix to a hardcore model -- exploiting her brightly scrubbed, dark-haired, Bettie Page looks.
Until her gig with Mirage, Stern's experience in the porn industry had been charmed. She loves the work; she's got an accountant and an IRA; and she feels empowered. Working at Mirage for nearly a year, however, Stern started to lose touch with her porn-to-power Camille Paglia feminism and started to agree with hard-liner Andrea Dworkin, feeling "enslaved" in her own home. "I was under house arrest 30 hours a week," she says.
And while she's still happy to work in the industry, Stern says she's now seen "the dark side."
Mirage Marketing, located on Eastlake Avenue East, runs several porn websites, including "amateur" sites like Stern's, where customers pay $34.95 a month to spy on "real" girls just hanging out at home.
The Stranger: What's something a panting man doesn't want to know about Mirage Marketing?
Heidi Stern: We are never ever remotely aroused, and we are never actually having orgasms. Some of us are excellent Academy Award-winning performers. The second thing is that when you see a close-up of a woman's cunt, and she's rubbing her clit or sticking a dildo in or something like that, um, and it's a close-up, she's probably reading. Either that or she's watching TV or eating.
What did your contract with Mirage require you to do?
When I originally signed the contract it was for 15 hours a week on camera, but after I'd been working at Mirage for maybe two or three months, they sent out an e-mail and a follow-up letter saying that our hours would be increased to 30 hours a week with no pay raise. All told, between the 30 hours a week we were contracted to be on camera plus all the support work we were asked to do -- maintaining our sites, including modeling, writing text, and doing HTML updating -- it ended up being about 50 hours a week.
And these pictures that they would make us do every week... they said they would post them on our site to enrich our site, but in reality, I'd say half the photos they took made it to our site. God knows where the rest of the photos went.
If you wanted to warn a fellow industry worker about the Mirage Marketing contract, what would you warn her about specifically?
They are now asking girls to sign contracts saying the girls cannot terminate their contracts with Mirage for six months, or Mirage will bill them for the set-up of their site.
And how much would that cost?
Whatever astronomical cost they want to charge you. So I understand that girls coming in now are basically enslaved, unless they can find the money to buy themselves out of slavery. I think that when you are in a job you can no longer quit, then that job is no longer a choice. Meanwhile, they can terminate you at any time.
Is this kind of stuff common in the industry? I mean, is Mirage following porn industry standards?
Absolutely not. At Mirage, we were forced to change in the middle of the office, with no enclosures, like animals. People were walking in and out. Whoever wanted to walk in and watch us change, could. There were male and female employees there. I can't even say how humiliating that was. I did a shoot where I was expected to do hardcore action with another model. We were expected to be sexual and penetrating each other in a completely open office area, with people coming in and out, and male computer techs sitting at their desks less than three feet away.
How does sex work affect your sex life?
I can tell you specifically that I stopped masturbating for pleasure when I started working at Mirage.
That's a bummer.
Luckily it's back now! We're back in business.
THE COMPANY SAYS
Stern's manager acknowledged that Mirage doubled employees' weekly working hours from 15 to 30 without a pay raise. However, she said the Mirage contract doesn't threaten workers with footing the bill for website costs if they quit. She also denied that any hardcore photo shoots took place, and said the shoots that did happen were staged in a closed conference room with a sign saying, "Photo shoot in progress." An eyewitness, however, confirmed Stern's report about the photo shoot.
If you or someone you know would like to do a Stranger Exit Interview concerning a recent, um, parting of ways with your employer, e-mail josh@thestranger.com or call 323-7101.
