If you think about it, when looking at photos in all the magazines and websites we peruse on a daily basis, we usually don’t think of models as artists. They’re just the pretty faces or the attractive bodies we take in and then dismiss when we turn the page. At Zivity’s bootcamp, one of the things all the instructors emphasized was the need to maintain a dialogue with the model, making sure she was comfortable with where the shoot was going at all times. This is consistent with Zivity’s mission of being “a showcase for all women to have fun by showing off their beauty, gaining fans, building a portfolio and showing the world how much fun it is to be a star.”

But as great as all of this sounds, for a moment, standing there against the blindingly white walls of that studio in Potrero Hill, a question kept nagging me. The phrase “beautiful women” was used a lot by the Zivity employees I spoke to. Cyan Bannister, one of the co-founders of the company, told me that the photographers who do well on Zivity “all need to have a love of photography and of beautiful women”— an idea that is also echoed on the Website.

The scene behind the scene.

Maybe I’ve had a few too many feminist theory classes, but my PC Meter was going crazy. What does it mean to be beautiful? Who decides? Looking around, the majority of the people holding cameras were men and the only people taking their clothes off were thin, attractive women. Should I object? Was my silence somehow causing me to play some sordid role in the objectification of women? (OK, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but something was going on in me.)

Mona, one of only three women participants at the bootcamp, told me she was hopeful that Zivity would open up the market to models who weren’t “all skinny and all white.” She added that she’d like to see women of other ethnicities get involved, and that Zivity seemed open to that. That made me feel better. And then there was also the fact that though I was walking around a room with women taking their clothes off for groups of men with cameras, the vibe was still somehow all business, which in no small part was due to instructors like Christine Kessler. “I really wanted this to be a safe place for all of us. I’ve heard that other events like this get a high creep factor settling in,” she said between sessions.

Christine Kessler getting down and dirty.

That’s when it hit me: though the photos taken that day were sexy and fun, the process of taking them was neither. “It’s business. It’s work,” Kessler said. In fact, the main lesson that the bootcamp was teaching those 15 photographers was that sexy and fun are products of discipline and craft.

Who would’ve thunk it?

Special offer for Guardian readers: There is a waiting list to get into Zivity, as it is currently invite only. The first 100 readers to email sfbg@zivity.com can jump to the front of the line and receive a trial membership.