Inside the 2014 Adult Entertainment Expo, it's immediately clear that this isn't going to be the rompy Playboy mansion scene of the '70s, where girls have pillow fights and chase each other naked through the halls and recklessly pass out hand jobs. The cold cement floors and bright lights make it feel weirdly sterile, like a farmers' market or an automotive swap meet. Only instead of butternut squash or carburetors it's some young unknown woman who got stuck with go-go dancer duty, wearing cat ears and smiling out at a crowd that is half offensively outgoing and half a little ashamed.

Outside, Stoya is racing up the ramp from the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel's Paradise Tower. She's pale and dark-haired — the quintessential girl next door in a velvet sport jacket and lace shirt. Her purse contains little more than a pack of cigarettes and a water bottle of wine. It's the fourth day of the expo, hours before the Adult Video News Awards ceremony, the Oscars of porn, where she's nominated four times, and as far as etiquette is concerned, she just doesn't give a fuck.

Now, at 27, Stoya's a free agent — free from the life of a contracted pornographer — which means she can say whatever the hell she wants about the major porn production companies, and she does. (She's a Vice columnist, after all.) It doesn't take her long, in the day I spend with her, to tell me how big fish corporate companies are devaluing porn by posting the films by small studios on pornography equivalents of YouTube. The studios then either go out of business or get bought out by the big companies. It sounds a lot like what happened to the music industry with the advent of Napster and LimeWire, but with porn sites, only a few sites make considerable bank off of advertisements. She wants me — and you — to know that the corrupt studios, the ones that accept poor working conditions for both crew and talent (Stoya mentions a time she voiced concern over shooting "in the desert at high noon in mid summer with no toilets on set in a place where rattlesnakes hang out"), are the ones who make all the money when we illegally download free porn, and what I guess you could call the free-range organic mom 'n' pop studios are going out of business because of it.

She has until the end of her cigarette to get to the mega-sized Adult Video News (the trade magazine that runs this whole circus) booth at the expo, ready to sign pictures of her own body parts and pose for photos with men who know exactly what her four cats and her "o" face look like.

It's hard to tell if her awareness of her own plywood universe is part of her character. A character that is "natural-looking," that is just like you or me and has sex you could have in your own bedroom. But the longer I spend time with her, the more it's obvious this is the point: Production companies spend thousands on hair and makeup to make sure Stoya looks just like a pretty girl walking down the street in Lower Manhattan. But she's not — at least not entirely. She's a porn star, the same way all the tan, bazooka-chested blondes flocking to the expo are porn stars. Her on-film aesthetic has been created just so that you forget: none of this is real.

See the full gallery of photos from the 2014 AVN Porn Awards here

***

If you aren't following porno politics, here's some backstory. In 2007, Stoya joined Digital Playground, considered among the top five biggest porn studios, as a contract girl, meaning they managed every minute of her life. When she wasn't shooting for them, her days consisted of being ushered from the hotel room to makeup to the signing and back to the hotel room for a couple hours of sleep. During that time she earned three "new starlet" awards in 2009 alone. Before joining Digital, she was a home-schooled girl from rural North Carolina, until she got into nude modeling — first still, then film.

"I wasn't sure how I felt about touching penises on camera," she says. "It just felt like that was where the line was, and if I decided to cross it, I've gotta go for it. I took two weeks to think about what could potentially become more difficult with my life. Do I want to work with children? Not really. Do I want to go into politics? No. It didn't seem like for me, personally, the ramifications would be that much."

Now men are shoving each other for autographed silicone replicas of her vagina.

***

While Stoya mans the AVN booth, I enter the official Adult Entertainment Expo, a three-ring flesh circus that smells like lube and cloying floral perfume. The AVN Awards themselves are about 30 years old now, older than almost every female performer here today but younger than most of the males, and have, almost since the beginning, taken place in Las Vegas. The Expo — the product-driven, stone-carved dildos and silicone vaginas side of the weekend — is only celebrating its sweet 16. But with the rise in piracy, the decadent years of the Expo have passed. What was once a sprawling ode to doing it at the 2.25 million square-foot Sands Convention Center is now shoe-horned into three event halls with cornrow-tight aisles of rising starlets, each sitting at high-top tables in butt-crease dresses and skyscraper heels, striking staple "gimme sexy" poses in front of mega-sized versions of their own oily naked bodies. Guests — hunched, late-30s, slavering — press up against one another in congested lanes, forcing way more touching than anyone wants at an event full of rogue boners. It's an uncurated crowd; anyone with $80 can buy a ticket. Even though I'm clothed I feel violated, the feeling driven deeper first by sexualized club music blaring through the speakers, then by constantly bumping into two guys inexplicably wearing cheap-looking Native American headdresses and one guy in a muscular donkey suit. Someone next to me shouts "Only in Vegas!" and I'm jealous of the rest of the world.

See the full gallery of photos from the 2014 AVN Porn Awards here

***

Sometime after 1, Stoya is sitting at Pink Taco. She's been joined by her boyfriend, the absurdly charming 27-year-old porn star James Deen, and Skin Diamond, a stunning 26-year-old raised in Scotland, who will, later tonight, take home the award for Best Oral Sex Scene, but who is, right now, straight demolishing a steak burrito. They're discussing the first time each of them has slept with the other, as if we're talking about the first time they rode the Pirates of the Caribbean roller coaster. I ask if Stoya has many friends in the industry, which she doesn't, partly since she's based in New York and is a fairly hardcore homebody. Diamond is one of the few actresses Stoya talks to the whole day, and, besides a Big Beautiful Woman award winner named Kelly Shibari, Stoya spends most of her time talking to male performers.

It's hard to picture this Stoya, the free-speaking, guacamole-and-merlot-for-lunch Stoya, as a Digital Playground contract girl, beholden to a corporation's schedule. That's what she was until she left a few months ago, in large part because of Digital's 2012 takeover by MindGeek, the virtual big box store of porn. Now she's just Stoya, the opinionated porn star people who don't watch porn talk about. MindGeek, which also owns the free entertainment sites YouPorn and Pornhub, has a nasty reputation for devaluing competitor films by allowing them to be posted for free and then leaving the studios to find and erase them, the same as when a YouTube user uploads a full-length Pixar movie. "I don't give a flying rat's ass if you wanna steal the work I did with Digital Playground because the people who own that are the people who enabled this piracy boom," she says. Because of them, it's changing the players in the business and altering the way people who come to this convention perceive the performers. "It's gone from 'Oh my god I'm so happy I can't believe you came here, thank you so much' to 'Yeah I'd fuck her, if it was easy.' I think it has to do with how the girls are performing in content that's put out there for free. That's an implication of valueless."

It shows in internet searches, where consumers aren't searching for a certain performer or studio anymore. Now they look for terms like "teen," "milf," "brunette," and "tattooed." And, in Stoya's case, "natural." It's like Netflix reducing Meryl Streep to "strong female lead," but seedier.

In her gut, Stoya believes MindGeek will go down for how it treats its crews (she says most of Digital Playground's successful contract girls have left, with more in toe) and the slippery ethics of its 'tube sites. And, she hopes, flowers will bloom from that crater as mom and pop studios fill the void, creating the next boom. This time, the male performers will look more pale, less muscular, and more sweet than chiseled. We talk about the rise in female viewership, about whether women lean one way or another. To be clear, I have not come to the Hard Rock Hotel to tell Stoya that all women want to watch the same kind of sex. But it's day four of the expo, and everyone's a little testy. "The concept of porn for women drives me insane," she says. "It's like, 'We made porn for women because you're all exactly the same and want the same things.' The concept of feminist porn as well. Feminism can be great, can be horrible. ... I'm just so offended by the whole idea of catering it toward women."

But what about women liking a particular actor, like you or Deen?

"It's a great marketing tool, natural beauty. So much work goes into looking all-natural. But there's nothing natural about it. It's all buzzwords and Google hits."

***

See the full gallery of photos from the 2014 AVN Porn Awards here

At 9:30 p.m., all talent, directors, industry players, and fans are asked to find their seats in the awards hall, which, if this were a concert night, is where The Black Keys would play. It's a zoo. Bright latex and plunging necklines, perfectly spherical breasts as far as the eye can see. I quickly learn that male porn stars are short, averaging something like 5-foot-10, which helps make their dongs look huge. Evan Stone, who has been in over 1,500 films and looks like a 7-foot-tall, Fabio-esque He-Man on screen, looks like a Hobbit when he rushes by me in what I can only call a G.I. Joe costume. Flashbulbs strobe rave-like from the balcony to the general floor seating. Everyone is loud. Everyone needs a drink before everyone else. Everyone wears expert-level heels. Someone named Machine Gun Kelly performs one song and then makes way for the master of ceremonies, a grating blonde with awful jokes about having sex on her period. There is no press table, but there is a blimp floating high above the crowd with the Fleshlight sex toy logo printed on its side. For over two hours the awards will be read: Best oral sex scene, best new starlet, best anal sex scene, won by an in-life couple who get teary-eyed during their thank you speech. There's a Grease porn parody and a movie called American Cocksucking Sluts 3. And Ron Jeremy looks like he's been dead for a year or two.

At the end of the awards, I email Stoya to find out where to meet, to see how she felt about the ceremony (she didn't win any of her categories, though, earlier, she said she didn't expect to). She never responds.

By 11:30 my feet can't handle standing any more and I go out into the main casino, where things have deteriorated into what I picture Jersey Shore would be like if it was shot in Las Vegas and the cast only had an hour to live. The usual Hard Rock Hotel crowd has mixed into the AVN's, and a thick perimeter of grinning dudes line the hall, calling themselves pervs but not moving an inch. A drunk guy grabs an emerging actress's arm and won't let go, while another brushes her back. There's concern on all the women's faces. It reminds me of what Stoya was talking about, the casualness with which adult entertainers are treated with the rise of free downloads and the cheapening of the industry and, like the drunk and the actress in front of me, it's hard to watch.

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Photo credit: Mikey McNulty

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