Entertainment

Sotheby’s for Sex: The Problem with Auctioning Off Sex with A Porn Star

What's Your Fantasy?

An online company - and no, it's not the high-class auction house - is selling off sex with a porn star to the highest bidder. It’s not prostitution, they say. It’s entertainment.

articles/2014/11/15/sotheby-s-for-sex-the-problem-with-auctioning-off-sex-with-a-porn-star/141114-snow-porn-auction-tease-alt_umjskh
Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

Imagine getting all hot and sweaty with your favorite porn star… legally. And I don’t mean at a brothel.

Through Adult Verified Video Chat, an online company that connects porn stars and their fans for paid Skype video chats, a new business model is surfacing. What if you take a video chat one step further and make it personal? You know, like in person. One-on-one, skin-to-skin contact. No more wishing you could feel her hot breath on your neck as she writhes in ecstasy. You get to go all the way, with just one little caveat: the fan won’t be able to keep the experience to himself, no matter how much he pays. Because the fan isn’t just paying for sex; the fan is bidding to star in his very own porno for all the world to see.

It’s not prostitution, ladies and gentlemen: it’s entertainment.

Production values aside, men who pay top dollar for an escort typically want to avoid recognition—something that would be almost impossible to do on this shoot given the paper trail. While the winning bidder has an option to wear a mask in the scene, he must still submit two forms of government-issued identification and fill out the required 2257 paperwork, along with a model release. He will also be tested according to industry standards within days of the production. This is not the anonymity a typical John receives. Nor is the goal sexual satisfaction—that’s just a bonus.

For one day, the winning bidder gets to unleash his inner Charlie Sheen and become a porn star. With cameras trained on his every inch, a director gently guiding him through the moves, and a naked porn star at his fingertips coaxing his best performance from him, what fan wouldn’t want that? Then again, some realities aren’t as good as the fantasy. And some are even better. Regardless, no matter how big your ego is, having sex with a porn star can be intimidating. Scary even. And yet the chance to personally please a porn goddess (with video proof) might be very tempting.

With approximately thirty days left in the auction, the bidding to copulate on screen with adult star Dillion Harper, 23, is already up to $2,600. That’s about three times as much as the average boy/girl rate in the business. But the financial incentives don’t end there. “We stream the scene live to our sister company nookiechat.com, so the performer makes an additional 70% payout for the streaming on that site for that scene,” says Adult Verified Video Chat company spokesman Randy. “We also give the performer access to the footage if she wishes to use it on her own site, so she shares video rights with us and can continue to make a profit.”

For Dillion Harper, it’s about more than the money. She sees this as an opportunity to prove to her fans that she isn’t faking it. “A lot of my fans ask me if I really like it or if I was acting,” says Harper. “They question if it was fake and I’m hoping once I work with a fan, then they’ll know I’m not faking. It’ll show that what I do is real.” And Harper fully intends to go about business as usual. “I am not going to treat it any differently than I would a normal scene.”

For anyone—not just a fan—the first time performing on camera can be nerve wracking. Many of the top male porn stars have experienced the first day jitters themselves. I’ve seen it. And sometimes making things easier is part of female porn star’s job, which is something Harper is prepared for as well. “There are ways to make them feel more comfortable and more relaxed and try to forget about all the cameras that are going to be shoved in our faces and private parts,” says Harper.

While the “fuck-a-fan” trend isn’t a new one, the concept of bidding to be a porn star for a day is. “Now that porn is pushing more mainstream and the taboos are washing off of it, more people are anxious to try,” says Adult Verified Video Chat company spokesman Randy. “It’s like bragging rights.” According to the company’s auction page, “Filming will take place at an upscale residence in Las Vegas Jan 20th exactly one day before the famous AVN convention.”

Even though this is the second auction, it will technically be the first time this has happened. The first porn star to auction a scene off on the site, the infamous squirter Cytherea, never managed to fulfill her fan’s dream. “The auction itself went really well but there were scheduling conflicts with the winning bidder, so it went to the next runner-up and his schedule was a pain in the rump… so the scene never happened and there was never a transaction,” says Randy.

Or maybe he just got nervous?

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