De'Bella－or Debbie, as everybody calls her－decided late in life to become a porn star. Last year she turned 50, time, she knew, to chase her dream.

「I love sex,」 she explained, biting into a hamburger before embarking on her scene for the day at a rented house in the San Fernando Valley, on the fringes of Los Angeles. She was wearing a bright pink satin and black chiffon nightie with a matching thong and heavy makeup.

「I decided I wanted to do something different,」 she said. 「I'd been working behind the scenes, and my friends said: 『Why not do movies? Have some fun, and get paid for it?'」

So she has. Since May, De'Bella (she did not want her real name published) has used days off from her job as an administrative assistant at a sex-related entertainment company, Platinum X, to shoot about 30 scenes, with men mostly 19 and 20 years old.

And while she is sort of a novelty, it is no longer unusual (hey, Hollywood, pay attention) to see women, and men, of a certain age performing in sex movies.

「There has been a greater openness to older performers than there once was,」 said Mark Kernes, a senior editor at Adult Video News, or AVN, the industry's main trade paper. 「Typically, once you got to 35, your possibilities were pretty much shot.」

Not anymore. The pornography industry, that multibillion-dollar-a-year symbol of airbrushed American carnality, is aging. The advent of Viagra, the maturing of sexually aware baby boomers and overall improved health and beauty are all contributing to the graying of naughty.

The biggest change is in the sexual desirability of women old enough to be the viewer's mother. It has been fueled in part by pop culture's embrace of the sexy 40-something women on the TV show 「Desperate Housewives」 and 「Stacy's Mom,」 the 2003 hit song about a teenager's mother who 「has got it going on.」

The mature-woman genre represents one of the fastest growing areas of video pornography, say leading distributors and retailers, and this month it will be inaugurated as a category at the AVN Awards, the Oscars of the skin trade.

Most of the movies are like the one De'Bella is shooting on this particular day in the Valley, a gonzo shoot－meaning it is more or less plot-free sex for 40 minutes or so. When her performing partner, Rod Fontana, 54, shows up she smiles sweetly and shakes his hand. They have never met before.

「What's the premise on this one?」 he asks. 「Pizza boy?」 Whatever. Within a few unscripted minutes they're mostly unclothed, panting and moaning for the camera, obviously unbothered by onlookers.

The director, Urbano Martin, points his camera strategically, scarcely disguising his boredom. The market for beautiful, airbrushed young women 「is oversaturated,」 he says. 「This is more normal people, more meat on the bone, like what you have at home.」