BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

Last week was really busy. Besides heading down to Houston to eat NASA's space food, I also interviewed a pair of porn stars - one is a veritable legend in the business while the other is perhaps the industry's fastest rising star. I'll have snippets of both interviews up this week, starting today with Stoya, the Digital Playground contract star who won the Adult Video News award for "Best New Starlet" back in January. (And check back later this week for a clip of my interview with Tera Patrick.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, Stoya has a reputation for being tech savvy - she blogs, Twitters, plays video games and depends on her BlackBerry - so she seemed like the perfect person with which to discuss the links between porn and technology. Interestingly, she doesn't consider herself any more technologically proficient than anyone her age (she's 22). In the audio slideshow below, she talks about her views on why adult companies have been so quick to embrace technology and the limitations they face, as well as the improbability of having sex while wearing 3D glasses.



One big contrast between Stoya and Tera Patrick that emerged in the interviews was their views on whether or not the porn industry was exploitative of women. Patrick, an industry veteran of 10 years, very much believes the business is dominated by men who rip off the women, which is why she started her own company in 2003. Stoya, on the other hand, takes a hard-line approach and says the porn business isn't more or less exploitative than any other industry, and that it's up to the individual to negotiate the best deal they can:

Any person hiring another person, regardless of industry or gender, wants to get the most work and the highest quality of work for the lowest price. That’s just business. Of course the company I work for tries to get as much out of me as they can without having to pay me extra. Meanwhile, I try to get fairly compensated for every single thing I do because that's business. That's capitalism and the Western world is built on capitalism.