Porn Valley- Blond, curvaceous and sexually adventuresome, Anita Cannibal never thought she’d have trouble finding a man.

She started dancing in strip clubs a decade ago, taking her clothes off for screaming Canadian audiences. Then she moved to the San Fernando Valley and got into porn.

Cannibal figures her job made her a million bucks over the years. She bought a house with her earnings and now uses them to finance her business studies at California State University, Northridge. She plans to become a lawyer.

But she never considered the unintended consequences of pornography.

“I wouldn’t have thought that it would be a problem to get into a relationship with a guy,” Cannibal said. “To have a partner in life is nearly impossible for me. The guys I’ve dated have these problems. They say, ‘You have to get out of the business,’ or they get hurt, or they get crazy and they want to do everything. It’s really hard.”

Hard in many ways, ways not found in a new employee guide or taught in trade school. Few career counselors would suggest that a student consider a job in adult entertainment.

It can be lucrative. It can bring fame. It can be easy work.

Those factors draw young actors by the hundreds, from high school dropouts
to professionals frustrated by their choice of vocation. But along with the Coach purses, the Vegas parties and the ample amounts of sex come perils most performers never imagine.

“An 18- to 20-year-old girl, is her life ruined if she does this? Ninety percent of them, yeah,” said Rob Spallone, an actor and president of Chatsworth-based Starworld Modeling. “They make their $1,000 a day, then they’re out of the business and they don’t have 20 cents.”

At first, the money seems great. Young unknowns can come in, earn a grand for six hours of work, then do it all over again the next day. With $30,000 rolling in each month, they’ve soon got nice clothes and a flashy car. Flush with success, they hit the town and party. Many turn to drugs.

And when you’ve grown accustomed to the Cadillac lifestyle in your teens, it’s hard to adjust to the Chevy budget, especially when your résumé lists porn flicks instead of a college degree.

“If I had a daughter, would she be in this? No,” Spallone said. “This is the worst. They get in and say, ‘I’ll do this six months and go back to school.’ Bull. You’re going back to school? You’re gonna get addicted to this, to the money, to the sex.”

When he got into the business in the mid-1990s, filmmakers used to ask for specific performers — the more famous, the better. Now, he says, they only ask for new, unseen talent.

This creates a difficult paradox for many young actresses: To get work, they have to perform more hard-core acts. While that pays better, it also lessens their appeal for future work and tends to shorten their career.

And in spite of the industry’s attempts to police itself through regular HIV tests, Spallone says gonorrhea and chlamydia crop up regularly. So many performers contract the diseases, he said, that they’ve coined a term — “ping-ponging” — for the way the infections bounce from actor to actor.

“They’re meteoric,” said Bill “The Bear” Margold, an actor, writer, journalist and trustee of the Protecting Adult Welfare Foundation, which offers counseling and services to struggling industry members. “They come in as filet mignon, then in six months, they’re hamburger. The best thing that they could be is a sterile orphan.”

Margold, a huge, mustached, bushy-haired man who resembles the teddy bears that fill his office, is fond of bold pronouncements. Orphans have no parents to grieve over their career choice, he reasons, while sterility prevents later regrets when a family replaces a porn career.

He helped create PAW in 1994, after the suicide of actress Shannon Wilsey, better known as Savannah. Though he passionately defends the industry, he simultaneously steers away prospective talent he deems unprepared for the lifestyle change.

He advocates the introduction of HIV and drug testing, the adoption of a ratings system to warn of violent content and a specific tax — similar to those for cigarettes and alcohol — with the money going to fund outreach organizations like his.

“When your privates become public, you lose your privacy,” he said. “People call me up and what they did 10 years ago is coming back to haunt them. And it will for the rest of their lives.”

In exchange for the $1,200 she accepts for performing sex acts on camera, an actress also often signs away the rights to her performance and image. What started out as one scene can then be repackaged in endless compilation films or posted in perpetuity on the Web.

“We know a girl who didn’t really do a lot of porn,” said Evan Seinfeld, an actor who runs the Studio City-based adult-entertainment company Teravision with his wife, porn star Tera Patrick. “She did a little porn, a little Playboy, but there’s an ad running in the back every month of 40, 50 adult magazines. She’s on the inside page of every one with a (penis).

“They airbrushed it on and now it’s the official ad of (a transvestite sex phone line).”

But most people don’t think about that, Cannibal said. They think about the money and the possibility of fame, then dive in. She followed Margold’s advice and slowly built up her career, which proved to be a wise move.

Without someone to guide her before she first had sex on camera, she’s not sure how things would have gone.

“In adult, there’s no training,” she said. “In any other business with some kind of risk, there’s training. If you’re working down on the docks in Long Beach, there’s safety classes. There’s nothing in this industry like that.”