from www.abcnews.go.com – When one couple found themselves in financial dire straits, they turned to performing live sex sessions streamed to a pornography website to pay the bills and support their 20-month-old daughter.
Tyler, 24, and Berkley, 21, who did not want their last name revealed, said they can usually make about $1,000 a week from doing five nights of amateur porn via webcam around midnight.
Their story is featured in “Amateur Porn,” the first episode of Season 2 of “Our America with Lisa Ling,” which premieres Sunday, Oct. 16 at 10 p.m. ET on OWN.
“We did it once together, that first night,” Tyler said. “Within 30 minutes we had made, like, $300. And I was like, I’m done with the normal 40-hour week. I’m done.”
The website that hosts their videos is just one of 24 million pornographic sites on the Internet. Tyler and Berkley’s clients will pay up to $7 a minute. About 75 percent of that goes to the hosting website, but the couple said it was still worth it because the money allows them to live comfortably.
Hair pulling, biting and ordering each other around are just some of the strangest things the couple said people have asked them to do during their live sessions. It’s all filmed in their bedroom while their daughter sleeps in a different part of the house.
“We keep a baby monitor turned down really low so if we do hear a rustling or anything … we’ll sign out, go tend to her and usually come right back to work,” Tyler said.
The downside: The couple says the reality of performing sex for work is that it takes away their desire to be intimate in the off-hours.
“Because it is a job for us to have sex with one another, sex outside of work doesn’t really happen,” Tyler said. “It’s a total sex killer.”
“Having sex off and on for two, three hours, it gets kind of hard, especially the kind they want,” Berkley said. “It’s, like, rough, so it wears on you a lot.”
Tyler and Berkley had been dating on and off for about five years when Berkley got pregnant at age 19. Even though they both had jobs, the couple struggled to make ends meet and their parents couldn’t offer any financial help.
“It did get to the point where we weren’t making enough money,” Tyler said. “If I would have lost my job, we would have had nothing, you know. We would have been without.”
Without a college degree, Berkley was only able to get short-term work as a cocktail waitress in a night club, and Tyler said he could only get jobs that made less than $350 a week.
Doing amateur porn, they said, was a way to provide for their daughter and be responsible parents. Tyler added that their goal is to eventually make enough money to go to college or trade school and stop doing porn — hopefully, he said, before their daughter is old enough to start school.
“I don’t want to be broke,” he said. “I don’t want my child to be broke and I don’t want to live a broke life. I want to live a comfortable, happy life. Porn’s giving it, and I’m gonna take it.”