[news.com.au]- I WAS sent down to Sexpo last weekend to interview the organisers of the “health and lifestyle” trade fair.

I entered an overlit hall at the showgrounds and a young chick wearing nothing but a pair of heels and a G-string handed me a flyer. I resisted the urge to get her a cardigan and ask if her mother knew what she was doing. With 60,000 people reported to pour through the gates over four days, it was odds-on her high school geography teacher would be one of them.

The fact that Sexpo can co-exist next to the handicrafts hall for one weekend a year says a lot about the progression of mankind, though I was interested to discover that it’s still illegal to sell X-rated movies in South Australia.

Among the many stands selling vibrating sundries and penis-shaped earrings, there wasn’t a naughty video to be seen. This struck me as odd, that a celebration of sex was allowed to occur only if it was heavily censored.

Some well-known porn stars were there to meet-and-greet the punters, and I got chatting to the “dirtiest girl in porn”, a relentlessly upbeat American called Belladonna.

You don’t win a title like “the dirtiest girl in porn” without being, err, extremely flexible.

What she can do with a baseball bat would hit you out of the park.

My eyes kept wandering over her gap-toothed smile and thick makeup, while my inner prude kept screaming at me: “This girl has slept with more blokes than you’ve ever met in your entire life”.

It was disconcerting, because she was so natural, easy, friendly and upfront about what she did.

She was the kinda girl you’d love to have a beer with.

Of all the potentially shocking things at Sexpo, it was Belladonna who took the wind out of my sails. When I got back to the office, I looked her up on YouTube (for research purposes, of course) and discovered that she had also been interviewed by U.S. journalist Diane Sawyer for a primetime current affairs program.

“When you’re telling me about (doing) things that really made you suffer, you’re still smiling,” Sawyer said to her.

“Because I want everyone to see how happy I am,” replied Belladonna, grinning through the tears. “But inside, I’m not happy. I don’t like myself at all.”

The business of selling sex is just like any other – supply, demand, marketing, competition. Everything – and everyone – has a price.

You can sell sex, sure. But you can’t sell love, or even like. And isn’t that what we’re really after?

I’M NOT quite sure what I expected to think – or see – when I met Belladonna, this week.

What sort of girl should I expect? Last year she won “Dirtiest Girl in Porn” at the FAME Awards in Los Angeles, which is sort of like the Logies of the adult entertainment world.

Quite an achievement – and one I can’t quite get my head around.

So, before she arrived for our interview, I found myself pacing around the office unable to relax with the weirdest mix of feelings swirling around my head.

My first possible mistake was doing a last-minute check of her website to see what she was all about. That didn’t exactly help because it made me well aware of why she had won that award in LA last year. To be honest, it even made me scared of her.

And then there was my moral dilemma. I couldn’t help feeling judgmental of her and I felt guilty about that. Does that make me a bad person?

In bounds this smiley, petite and pretty girl, dressed in a long-sleeved cream jumper and a pair of simple jeans. Nothing screaming porn star so far.

In fact, she looked like the type of girl you’d see in most offices, not the type whose work can’t be shelved in the general section of your local video shop.

She grew up in a strict Mormon family, not the poor, dysfunctional and maybe abusive upbringing of the stereotype of someone who works in the sex industry you might expect.

So did her upbringing in any way contribute to her path towards sex stardom?

“Yeah, because I lived such a suppressed life I think that I just went the other way, in a big way!” she giggles. “I first had sex at 14, which I guess was late when you consider I’d been having sexual feelings since I was about five.”

When Belladonna isn’t shooting one of the 250 adult movies in which she has starred, she’s a mum of a three-year-old girl, who lives in LA with her husband, who is now her exclusive cameraman.

How does a porn-star mum go about letting her child know that mummy’s a bit different from the other kindy mums?

For many of us, our mum’s way of informing us about sex is by leaving a copy of “Where did I come from?” on the end of our beds. (At least that’s how it happened for me.)

“I’ll tell her when she’s about five or six. I’ll tell her the truth,” she says. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. I want her to know that. I don’t want her to ever feel like she has to lie to people just to make them like her.”

I had to ask her if she felt that that would make her little girl’s time at school pretty difficult. Just having a funny name is enough to get crucified on a daily basis, let alone having the kids know your mum’s the star of Manhandling 3.

“I think it’s best to be honest, no matter what,” she says.

So what happens if she doesn’t fancy her co-star?

“I just learnt early on to find one thing about that person that I liked. A smile, a calf, or even a dimple. Just something I can

focus on.”

Sounds like a good, harmless plan if we weren’t talking about making a hardcore porn film with them.

I expected to come away from this interview feeling like I’d met someone who had some serious issues on board, and probably feeling really, really sorry for her.

But I didn’t. It’s hard to thrust pity on someone who is incredibly comfortable in her own skin, and is just like the rest of us who are lucky enough to have found what they love doing and what they’re good at.

And if DVD sales and her “Dirtiest Girl in Porn” trophy are anything to go by, Belladonna has pretty much nailed it.