She has described herself as the 21st-century equivalent of an Ancient Roman gladiator - and it's hard to argue, really. The physical endurance required for what she does is beyond even that of many professional athletes; she is both an outcast and a celebrity, and one of these days her job might very well kill her.

Her name is Sasha Grey.

Or rather, that's her professional name. She took it partly from the Oscar Wilde novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and partly from the infamous “Kinsey scale” of male sexual orientation (most of us allegedly fall within a grey area). She's very much into all that student-intellectual guff. In interviews, she'll often name-drop the French director Jean-Luc Godard, or Mr Oops-I-Seem-To-Have-Disappeared-Up-My-Own- Bottom himself, Jean-Paul Sartre.

And yes, Sasha Grey is a porn star. A new kind of porn star.

For a start, the biologically improbable things this 21-year-old Californian is willing to do on camera go far beyond erotica and into a territory that is halfway between the torture chamber and the circus.

Or, y'know, so I'm told.

Then of course there's her intellect, and her striking good looks (Rolling Stone called her a “Kate Beckinsale lookalike”). Not to mention that she was hired as a model by the leading fashion company American Apparel (she posed in socks), and has been cast as the leading actress in a new recession-themed movie, The Girlfriend Experience, directed by none other than the Oscar winner, Steven Soderbergh.

It's an exquisitely cool film - Grey plays a $2,000-an-hour Manhattan call girl, with her character serving as a metaphor for our post-crash, get-money- wherever-you-can mentality - but it suffers for never seeming real. Which brings me to my point.

I can't decide whether Sasha Grey herself is for real, or if she's a kind of Manchurian Candidate for the adult entertainment industry: a brainwashed emissary for the empowerment of degradation, sent out into the US mainstream by some dark higher force until the moment is right for her to put a bullet in our collective soul. And your soul would die - wouldn't it? - if it was your daughter doing what she does.

But if someone has brainwashed her - by God, he or she did a good job. She even has her own video blog, which she uses to rebut media attacks. Only there haven't really been any media attacks; all of America's moral outrage seems to have been saved up for Wall Street and General Motors. In contrast, the spectacle of Sasha Grey as female role model has barely raised a murmur.

“I think more and more, you're seeing women that actually want to be [in porn],” she told an interviewer recently. “There are plenty of us that are just as perverted as the next guy, and who enjoy doing this.” And what if this is actually true? After all, by doing what she professes to love, Grey has made hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, starred in a critically lauded Hollywood movie, launched her own production company, and directed her first “adult feature” (please don't ask the title). Perhaps it's her fans who are the ones being exploited.

Or maybe it's just mutual.

The money's shot

While Sasha Grey is clearly a new kind of porn star, she might also be the last kind of porn star, ie, one that gets paid. Like Detroit's car makers and America's big city newspapers, LA's once recession-proof pornography industry has been rendered virtually obsolete by new technology. That's one of the reasons why there are so many foreclosed houses out in the San Fernando Valley, where 6,000 people were once employed by the blue-movie studios.

And it's not just the XXX-rated versions of YouTube that are inflicting all the damage - it's America's unlimited supply of digital cameras, mobile internet connections, alcohol and teenage bad judgment. Thanks to the new craze of “sexting”, everyone can, and probably will, be a porn star for 15 minutes.

Whether or not they'll grow up to regret it is another matter.

Hot off the press

If you need proof that the US pornography business is on its knees (so to speak), just take a look at the people who are being hired to run it: journalists. First it was Michael Precker, the veteran foreign correspondent for the Dallas Morning News, who took a job managing a strip club after he was offered voluntary redundancy. And then on Monday it was announced that Scott N. Flanders, who used to run the Orange County Register, will replace Hugh Hefner's daughter as the head of Playboy (which is reportedly up for sale, with Sir Richard Branson interested).

I'm sure both these men are very talented. But take it from me: if there's one group of people on Earth who can ensure that sex doesn't sell, it's the one that has been running America's newspapers for the past few years.

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