The Charlatan (TC): How did you get started?
Stoya: Well, gosh – I was like 18, I was living in Philadelphia, I had this roommate who was a part-time photographer. He had a day job but it wasn’t nearly as fun and creative as taking pictures of girls, and these websites got girls and contacted him and wanted to have him shoot nude sets. And he was like “Sweet!” And they said “Cool, you find the girls.”
So he walks out of the living room and I’m sitting there, half of my costume from the previous night on which basically involves tiny little shorts that are really technically underwear, and I may have had a shirt that was made out of a pair of fishnets on, and he goes, “Hey! You don’t mind being naked,” which really freaked me out, man.
“Nope, why do you ask?” “Well, how do you feel about being naked on the internet?” “I don’t know!”
So the deal was take the pictures, let it sit for a couple of weeks on his hard drive. If I woke up in the middle of the night like “Oh my god, what have I done,” then we were friends, he would wipe the card and get rid of the files, and it would be like it never happened. But we waited a couple of weeks, and I was like “This is awesome! No! Sell the pictures! Let’s do this!” And then basically more offers would come in, and it became – I was making enough that I didn’t need to have another job, so that was my whole life.
TC: How did things progress from there?
Stoya: I don’t know how DP (Digital Playground) heard about me, but they had someone ask me if I would come in to the office and have a meeting about having sex with Sophia Santi, and I was like, “Well, I don’t know, is she into girls, because I did this once before, and it didn’t really work out so great.”
And they were like, “Yeah, she’s totally into girls,” and in the office they asked, “How about boys,” and I said, “Boys are great.” “How about sex with boys?” “Sex with boys is great, sex with men is great. Penises are totally awesome.”“How do you feel about doing that on camera?” That’s kind of a whole new ball game.
Like, given our culture and how our culture was in 2005, 2006, how our culture is now, it’s, I mean, you still might have a little bit of an issue, but it’s easy to explain nude pictures and maybe a pretty softcore girl-girl scene here and there as, “Oh, I was having fun, I was young, whatever it was art, get over it.”
But once you start having sex with men on camera, you’ve made a career choice. You will probably never be working with children.
So I thought for about a week, and I thought OK what are the ramifications of this going to be, what are the health risks, and I thought I’m OK with this, and I said let’s do it. I signed a contract, and they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to make you a star, blah blah,” and I said “Yeah cool, I just think this will be a fun adventure,” and I’ve been in L.A. for about a year, everybody here tells me that they’ll make me a star, including the man I purchase my cigarettes from in the morning.
So I totally didn’t believe them and then i got to my first year at AVN (Adult Video News), and I realized I had possibly bitten off more than I should and I better learn how to chew quickly.
TC: At what point did you realize you were a big deal?
Stoya: My first year at AVN, I had one movie out, and already judging by the digital owners and their PR person, judging by their PR person, my numbers were good, the consumer was reacting positively. And then first day of the convention just sitting there and doing all that press, literally every 15 minutes, you have another interview, and that goes on from like 9 in the morning until 5 or 6 p.m. I believe the exact words were: “Why are you selling so well?” but I take that to mean that they didn’t expect me to take off as quickly as I did.
TC: Why do you think you’re so popular?
Stoya: A lot of it has to do with timing. There’s this saying, fashion of the moment, and that really applies across the board. If you’re too early, too ahead of the curve, then you don’t catch, and if you’re too later then you’re lost in a sea of similiar things so it just happened to have been a really good time, and to not look like what people think of as your stereotypical adult star.
Also alt porn was a thing at the time — alt stars were hitting their peak of mass interest, but the thing is I was able to stand out, I’m thin and I’m pale and I’m small-breasted and I had the short black hair, I looked alternative enough to catch the trend, the nipple piercing, but at the same time I look enough like the girl next door for people in the rest of Oregon, not just Portland, the rest of New York, not just the city.
TC: What does your workday look like?
Stoya: Most of my work has nothing to do with the actual porn. At most two days a month on average I spend in Southern California on a porn set for DP, and the rest of my life I’m running around the country doing signings, sometimes running around outside of the country doing signings. I’m shooting for magazines like Club and Penthouse and Fox, or I’m doing like fashion stuff and art stuff which is pretty cool and not something I expected to end up in through adult entertainment.
TC: So it’s not like someone like James Deen who says he’s on a set every day?
Stoya: Well, here is the difference. James Deen is one of the top male performers in the industry. Men can work every single day, sometimes twice a day if they choose. They know it’s going to be a short scene in the morning, and someone else needs them that evening, they can do two scenes, every single day for 15 years, and because they’re not, basically because they’re men nobody gets James Deen overload.
There’s an extreme shortage of men who are physically capable, making their penises behave on camera, and then within that the men who the girls want to work with, and to deliver really good scenes, there are so few of them, they work all the time.
Hot chicks, you shake and they fall out of trees in Southern California, so you either have the contract girl model, in which you sign a contract with DP, or Wicked or Vivid, and you do very few scenes, you try to make them the best scenes you possibly can, and then they’re doled out once every month or two, over their career of 10-15 years.
Or you go with an agency, you shoot every day, you make less on your rate, but you’re working every day, and you take your chances that you amass enough star power or whatever you want to call it, enough of a name that people continue to book you after they shot. Like a girl comes in and she shoots girl-girl every day for six months. They go “OK, you’re going to do boys now.” She shoots boy-girl every day for six or twelve months, and then the companies are kind of like, “OK what else you got, because we’ve got twenty boy-girl scenes from you. So are you going to take it in the ass? What are you going to do here?”
And a lot of the time with that system girls get burned out, because really having sex every single day, it sounds like a lot of fun, but it gets boring. Bringing the energy every single day is going to get boring. So they’re burned or they get shot out, and nobody wants any more content from them, and they disappear, they retire, they go back to wherever they came from. Sometimes you get a Sasha Grey or a Tori Black or a Lexi Belle and they have a larger brand recognition than a Riley Steele or a contract girl because consumers are more likely to remember their work.
TC: How much of the pre-conceived notions about the girls in the industry are wrong?
Stoya: Oh boy. I would guess that people in the medical profession went into it because they care about people, or they want to make a lot of money, or because their parents maybe had to work their way up the corporate ladder from an entry-level position, and wanted their kids to do better than they did and pushed them into it.
So people go into porn because they really like sex, or people go into porn because they realize that at 18 you can go into porn and make a few hundred thousand dollars while your peers are in college and then struggling to pay off student loans. Some people go into porn because they are on drugs and need a way to pay for their drugs. Some people go into porn because they have a gaping need for attention and no talents that would make them successful in theatre or music or some other vein of the entertainment industry. They all go into it for different reasons.
TC: How does one get into the industry?
Stoya: First I’d want to know why they want to do it. I have a ton of male friends who want to go into porn, because they think money is going to fall off trees, and they’re going to get to have sex with really attractive women every day. I have to sit them down that in fact they’re totally wrong and being male talent trying to break into the business is like the most difficult thing ever.
If a woman wanted to go into porn I would still want to know why, if they wanted to take the contract route now and they realize what that entails then I would be able to advise them better, but if they just wanted to have a lot of sex every day for a while and get payed for it, then I would turn them over to one of my colleagues that works as an agency girl and is successful at it because I have no clue how that world operates really.
TC: Social media, how important is it?
Stoya: I don’t really know. I think it’s been great for me because you do interviews and sometimes the reporter gets it right, and far more often they get it wrong, and if they get something wrong like one magazine put it down that my dad was Serbian and my mom was Scottish, it’s reverse.
But when they ask you about any number of things and take them out of context and completely miss the point, then it’s really nice to be able to say “Hey, so here’s this blog I wrote about this thing,” and I think that any thinking person realizes that the media has been known to rearrange things to make the story fit better.
Social networking, being able to speak directly to your audience or people that are interested, that’s the best use for it. Otherwise I don’t know, because an argument could be made for, there’s an element of mystery that has been very successful for people in the public eye in the past, like maybe the paparazzi gets a movie start buying groceries and knows what they eat for dinner every night, but they don’t know what they look like naked. So everybody knows what you look like naked, maybe you shouldn’t tell people what you eat for dinner at night, then they know everything. I don’t hide anything and it’s worked out well for me, but you never know when that could bite me in the butt.
TC: Plans for the future?
Stoya: I can literally right now deal with what’s going on in the next 48 hours. Also, rule number one, never tell the Internet what you think you’re going to be doing in five years, and never tell them about a project before it is in the can. Because when that doesn’t come out, or doesn’t come out for a year, the Internet gets fucking pissed.
