TWENTYSOMETHING Heidi Stern likes masturbating again. Last week, Stern
quit her independent contracting job with Mirage Marketing, a Seattle-based Internet
porn company that paid her $1,500 a month to set up a video camera in her house
for the pleasure of horny voyeurs. The daily grind — as it were — could involve
up to two uninterrupted hours of masturbating for chat-room clients.
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.
