By Alissa Chadburn

'ARE YOU SURE you got enough spanking shots?" Zille, flushed, wide-eyed, and nearly naked, asks photographer Malcolm W. Lying prone over an inflatable exercise ball, palms and toes on the floor, gym shorts pulled down around her ankles, and cherry red, already bruised bottom in the air, Zille is perfectly poised for a few more shots. She's just been walloped by butch top Alexi, who tied Zille's wrists together with a latex stretching exercise band and administered the hard whacks with the sole of Zille's gym shoe. When Alexi and Malcolm playfully kid the enthusiastic Zille that she must want more, she assures them she's simply being professional.

It's a hard day at work for real-life couple Zille and Alexi Defeu, creators and stars of the Oakland-based BDSM dyke porn site DarkPlay.net, the flagship site of the CyberDyke Network (www.cyberdyke.net), a consortium of 16 independent, lesbian-centered erotic Web sites.

What began as a personal interest in kinky sex and exhibitionism turned into a full-fledged business for the couple in 2000, when DarkPlay first went up. Now they have hundreds of subscribers eagerly returning for steamy updates. When she's not in front of or behind the camera, Zille is busy doing graphic design and HTML coding and assisting the network's other Webmistresses. Alexi also runs her own site, Playbutch (www.playbutch.com), a new addition to CyberDyke featuring hot boi pinups and butch-centered erotica.

And they've figured out a business model that lets them work with other independent, dyke-run sites – many based in the Bay Area – in a group that can compete successfully against the big, well-financed corporate porn outlets.

How did the couple's sexual inclinations turn into a full-on business enterprise? Zille and Alexi had long seen a need for more high-quality dyke smut online, and after modeling for some sites, they decided they could do it best themselves.

Once DarkPlay was doing all right financially, they wanted to share skills and collaborate with other Webmistresses looking to do their own lesbian porn sites. And thus was born the CyberDyke Network, which runs more like a family business than like a porn ring, with Webmistresses sharing their knowledge and skills, and sometimes models and photographers.

Although CyberDyke sites are geared toward women, men make up more than half of the subscribers (though numbers vary widely from site to site). Alexi and Zille strive to keep prices low (one monthly fee of $20 gives members access to all the sites), and they offer incentives to encourage more women to sign up. According to Zille, statistics show that "men think nothing of whipping out their wallets to buy a membership at an adult site, [whereas] women seem very hesitant to do that. [It's as though] signing up at a site will make irrevocably true the fact that they have sex drives and fantasies that are valid and need satisfaction."

The notion that it's hard for women to acknowledge these drives and fantasies is a troubling one, and the CyberDyke Webmistresses are out to change that. Helping women gain satisfaction and learn more about sex and their own sexuality is one of the driving forces behind their work. "We don't make the images that others expect or the images that we're sure will bring in the highest number of subscribers," Webmistress Kyri Connelly says. "We make porn for women who love sex, love their bodies, and who appreciate that porn is not an industry for only men to make and spend money." What's more, lesbian sexuality is celebrated and respected, not merely exploited for a hetero-male audience. Perhaps that's why, according to Zille, CyberDyke has a much higher percentage of women subscribers than most porn sites.

In many ways, the Defeus face the same business challenges as any other artistic entrepreneurs. Zille says one of the biggest challenges in running DarkPlay has been balancing artistic integrity with financial interests. To compete with corporate-run sites, the duo have to keep abreast of trends in the industry. The addition of more specific fetish-oriented sites to CyberDyke has allowed the couple the freedom to keep DarkPlay "an art project that pays for itself," as Zille describes it. However, no matter what their content is, to be included in the consortium, sites have to meet DarkPlay's high standards, producing quality design, frequent updates, and artistic images or stories.

Unlike the vast majority of "lesbian" porn on the Web, DarkPlay and the other 15 sites in CyberDyke feature real dykes having real(ly) hot sex. Ideas for shoots often arise from the couple's own diverse sexual repertoire, making the site feel like an intimate journal of Alexi and Zille's naughty adventures.

Including high-quality hardcore, fetish, and BDSM photos, streaming videos, and scintillating narratives, DarkPlay's dyke-on-dyke content is exceptionally creative and wickedly kinky. Members can browse through galleries filled with pics of gothic vampire play, four-girl punk rock gang bangs (watch out, SuicideGirls), necrophilia scenes, and romps for plushies and looners (i.e., stuffed-animal and balloon fetishists). Authentically salacious, DarkPlay is nothing like the typically faked, cheesy lesploitation generally propagated on the Web. (Indeed, the scene between Zille and Alexi described above, at the end of which Zille performs cunnilingus on her butch partner, clearly demonstrates the Defeus' commitment to pushing the boundaries – butch bush is rarely seen in any porn, lesbian or mainstream.)

When Connelly first came across DarkPlay, she thought, "Finally! Someone is making porn that is not only geared toward dykes but [is] also edgy, striking, and real." Her e-zine, Pervgrrl (www.pervgrrl.org), which features writing on radical sexuality and gender expressions, became a partner site to the network, and since then she's worked on two other sites, Sappho's Girls (www.sapphosgirls.com) and Grrl Tools (www.grrltools.com). Intelligent, erudite, and sensual, Sappho's Girls features the beautiful girls of Sappho frolicking in bed and reading books (an activity you rarely see porn stars engaged in). Grrl Tools offers enthusiastic toy reviews and "testing galleries," in which members can see the results for themselves.

From soft- to hardcore, fetish to comix, the network features an impressive range of interests for discerning porn-lovers (with four more sites set to go live soon). Local writer and editor Lori Selke runs Story Mistress (www.storymistress.com), a erotica site where members can read well-written original smut to accompany the other sites' visual fare. Fetish-specific sites like Posteriority (www.posteriority.net) and Leaky Girls (www.leakygirls.com) appeal to those who like back-door action and pee play, respectively. From big beautiful women to faerie porn to rope bondage, there's a site here for almost every porn-loving dyke.

Zille, who worked as a nude model before starting DarkPlay, says that in the world of Web porn, CyberDyke's motto, "Happy models do better shoots," is rare. "We respect models' limits – and also just respect them as people, which is oftentimes sadly lacking in the adult industry." The difference is demonstrable – in the affect of the models, who look genuinely happy at the end of scenes, and in the enthusiasm of the sites' members. In online forums, members chat about favorite shoots and offer their input for new ones; some fans who have never done adult work before end up modeling. And Zille has received a flood of e-mail from people "thanking us for showing them they are not alone in their desires, that what they are into is not 'dirty' or 'wrong' in any way, but healthy sexual fun!"