In the stories that follow, and elsewhere on Pitch.com, it might seem as if we've got one thing on our mind. It's true ­­— and we're not ashamed of it! Welcome to our Second-Annual Sex Edition. We think it's a pretty nice package.

The Truth Behind Zoey

The fact that a dead girl turned out to be a porn star was a shocker. But the real truth was what it said about us.

By ALAN SCHERSTUHL

Here's the victim in happier times. She's spread across a beige bed in a beige room in what must be a beige apartment complex off a frontage road someplace. She wears a pink mesh top and black knee-highs but is otherwise exposed, with one leg scissored up and the other spread wide with gynecological bluntness. This is the point of the photo, of course, the only reason that it exists.

But that's not what makes it arresting.

She's grinning. She has slipped off her panties with a cheerful flourish, is waving them high above her head. The air blooms in them. There's a blooming in her face, too, a look wholly unlike what we expect from women who make sex a performance or a business. She looks pleased and surprised, the way you might if you somehow managed to yank away a tablecloth without disturbing the place settings.

She looks the way any of us look when we're naked and goofy with someone we trust. Except better, of course. She looks better.

If it were a painting, a Balthus or a Currin, it would fetch a fortune. If it were for sale online, as it was last fall, it would command $40 a month for access to it and other photos. But because the girl is Zoey Zane, it's available more cheaply still. Although the Web has been purged of all official Zane photos, five minutes on Google will turn up this one, free and bastardized, with two lines of text added by some anonymous prick. First, about a quarter of the way up her long, slender arm: "Emily Sander, AKA Zoey Zane."

Then, an inch below her shaved vagina: "We'll Never Forget Her Contribution To Society!" 

Like all of us, Emily Sander had secrets. Her biggest, perhaps, was that her real-girl appeal was rooted in genuine real-girlness. Kansas real-girlness, even. She was Olathe-born, and she lived in El Dorado, half an hour northeast of Wichita. She worked as a secretary at the local electric company while taking business courses at Butler Community College. She dreamed of Hollywood. One friend remembers her as having an affinity for Dorothy, from The Wizard of Oz.

The world learned this late last Thanksgiving, not long after media outlets from the Associated Press to USA Today reported the disappearance of 18-year-old Sander. The case at first seemed ripe for yet another nationwide missing-white-woman freakout, the kind that reinforces middle-American prejudices. Here was a sweet, white college girl last seen in the company of a Mexican man, 24-year-old resident alien Israel Mireles. But dark details quickly gathered, tainting the template: a bloody hotel room, Mireles' alleged flight to Mexico, and then, on November 28, a sensitively phrased headline on FoxNews.com: "Missing Student May Have Been Porn Star."

A day later, ABC was less equivocal: "Body Found in Search for Teen Porn Star."

Many of the pieces that followed expressed prim surprise at Sander's "double life." Typical was the glib disgust of Lynda Johnson, who contributes articles to an online newspaper called The National Ledger. Her piece, posted one day after the discovery of Sander's body, opens with "She was Emily Sander by day and Zoey Zane by night.... The teen lived a double life and was willing to strip for anyone with an internet connection as Zoey Zane."

Many other writers employed Johnson's facile day-night construction, cribbed from the tagline of 1984's exploitation classic Angel: "Honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night." In one sense, this was appropriate; the reporters and the filmmakers were selling the same titillation.

In reality, though, any such reaction is untrue in the most literal sense. Just check the photos of Sander and two other models on a sunny afternoon at the lake, beaming and preening as half-dressed Wizard of Oz characters. Sander wears a silvery miniskirt and pointed cap. She's the Tin Man, and she's grinning.

Sander's death is shocking. But what isn't is the fact that, in America Gone Wild, a "sweet, good kid" — as her grandfather described her to ABC — might take her clothes off for money and post her naked photos online. For half a century now, Hef's Girls Next Door have been leaning nude on hay bales and stirring lemonade topless. Playboy bush is a perfect timeline of both the country's increasing comfort with pornography and pornography's corresponding discomfort with the natural. Before '69, the magazine hid the bush entirely. When it appeared, it immediately began to thin, becoming less unruly every year —  a patch, then a tuft, then a Velcro strip, then a sharp-lined eyebrow. And then, finally, to keep up with Penthouse and strippers and former Mouseketeer starlets, nothing at all.