“Viagra,” Jenna said. “It gets them all flushed, and their dicks won’t go down for hours.”

“Guys will get a reputation for having a wood problem, and girls don’t want to work with them,” she continued. “But they’ll say, ‘I want to work with Jenna because she’ll actually kiss me and touch me, and it’s hot.’ When there’s a connection, when you see a guy and a girl with their bodies against each other, that’s hot. I don’t find a dick going in a pussy hot. When I see a guy on top of a girl and his movement, that’s what I find hot.”

“But you have to show the other shots,” said Louisa.

“Yeah,” said Jenna, “because that’s what the guys are spanking to.”

So the actual fucking scenes didn’t do much for these women. And Jenna didn’t really like making them: “A lot of times with the boy-girl stuff — where you don’t actually see the penetration — it’s not really in, just because of the soreness.”

But oral sex was another matter. Feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon once asked, “Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?” That night I found at least one answer: other women who like to have penises in their mouths.

Louisa kicked things off: “Was it ‘The Wicked One’ where you were stranded in a car and you ended up in that house?”

“No, that was ‘The Kiss’ — that was a hot movie,” said Jenna. “That blow job with Peter North was awesome, wasn’t it? That come shot was like, ‘Wassup?’”

“What makes a good blow job?” Christina and I asked simultaneously.

“When the camera captures how much I’m loving it,” said Jenna. “When you can see the look in my eye, you know, and he’s just got a really big dick and it looks really good.”

“Totally,” said Louisa, “and you’re working it.” For the first time that night, I had to shift in my seat and cross my legs.

“It was just really hot,” continued Jenna, reminiscing about the scene. “He had me on a leash, and it was really nasty, and in the come shot it was like he dumped four buckets on me — whoosh! It’s the hands and spit and movement.”

Four buckets? A leash? The spit I understood — Jenna’s signature move, which leaves lesser practitioners slurping clumsily, involves lubricating a penis by dribbling saliva on it. “It feels better when there’s more spit; it makes my mouth water,” Jenna laughed. “I should trademark it — Jenna Lube! Jenna Juice!”

“It’s all about the hands,” said Louisa.

“And the variety,” said Christina.

“And your tongue on it,” said Jenna.

“Mm-hmm,” they all agreed.

“And where are your eyes?” I asked. I couldn’t help it; I’m a hopeless romantic.

“Right up at him,” said Jenna.

“Yeah, I love that,” cooed Louisa, who seemed to be doing a little seat shifting of her own.

“Like I love it, like you’re really loving it,” said Jenna, blithely veering into second person. I stopped trying not to stare. “And I’m moaning and telling him that I like it.”

Fortunately, dinner came before I did. We settled into watching “Dreamquest,” which is sort of a cross between “Legend” and “Cum One Cum All” and features Jenna traipsing through an alternate world of fairies and evil queens and trolls. (Promo blurb: “She came to save Fantasy.”)

With a budget of $250,000, “Dreamquest” is one of the most expensive porn movies ever made. (Such flicks typically cost $10,000 to $20,000.) Its producer, Wicked Pictures, spent that much cash to keep itself and Jenna squarely in the vanguard of high production values — using film instead of video, physically attractive stars, halfway intelligible story lines, non-throwaway sets — in order to lure an audience of couples and straight women.

“In the beginning, I really didn’t think about it, though I was never going to be in some gonzo movie shot with a High-8,” Jenna explained. “But I had watched movies before I got into the industry that were very stylized, with beautiful women in beautiful houses, but where the sex wasn’t so hot. So I thought, “Man, what if they had girls in there that enjoyed what they were doing and looked like they were really fucking, and were still beautiful. It would be huge. And that’s what I wanted to do.”

Unbelievably enough for anyone used to encountering porn as sweat socks and moaning on cheesy bedspreads — like, um, me — none of this was lost on its intended audience during our screening of “Dreamquest.”

“Some of this is really pretty,” Christina said. “It’s not like you’re just in a bedroom somewhere.”

“I love all the houses you guys shoot in,” said Louisa. “The costumes are great. And with women, you definitely can’t just get into the sex. There’s more of a story line.”

“We all need foreplay in everything we do,” concluded Jenna’s pal Tracy.

From the deft little move where she uses both hands to flick her hair from the back to the front of her shoulders during conversation to her willingness to be fucked by multiple candelabra on camera, Jenna obviously loves attention. But even she found it hard to watch herself in hardcore scenes. Whenever “Dreamquest” was about to shift from dialogue to sex, she started humming a “ch-wocka-wocka”-goofy porn-music soundtrack. And she kept up a running, fairly desexualized commentary about technical difficulties and bloopers.

“You have to make sure your toes are pointed,” she said at one point. “Do you see the position she’s in? It makes it hard when you’re bent into awkward positions. You always have to open out to the camera.”

Which isn’t to say we didn’t get all the details we wanted. (Louisa: “Now, are you actually like –” Jenna: “Munching box?” Louisa: “Yeah.” Jenna: “Yeah.”) There was even a moment where Jenna, comparing herself with a pierced costar, lifted her top to show her right breast, where she usually wears a small barbell, thus providing me with a personal money shot.

“I don’t do anal,” Jenna proclaimed during one penetrating scene. “I do it at home, but not on camera. I gotta save something for my baby.” She paused. “And I want to wait until someone wants to give me an extreme amount of money. Or I’ll do it for my own company and make all the money myself.”

“This is funny, because I always end up fisting chicks,” she said at the start of another scene. “My hands are so small — they’re smaller than most penises — so it’s pretty easy to go in, and if they’re saying, ‘Give me more,’ I’m just like, ‘OK!’ But they can’t show that — it’s illegal. So they always yell at me, ‘Thumbs out! Thumbs out!’”

It was midnight, and it was over. I walked Jenna and Tracy to their car, into which they hopped with brief goodbye handshakes. I came back upstairs and cleared the living room of sushi, cerveza and cigarettes, carefully preserving one ultrathin, barely smoked and lipstick-smeared Capri for posterity.

“Two thousand dollars for a 15-minute tape,” said Christina. “Who’s taking advantage of who?” She had grown somewhat restless — however glossy the production, sitting through a close examination of a porn film’s interstitial scenes without any potential at all for diddling can get to be a drag. But she was impressed. “That little girl is going to change her entire industry.”

Louisa’s mind was elsewhere. “I wanted a hug,” she said. “Not because I wanted a hug from Jenna Jameson, but just because she was very quick to say goodbye. Things got very businesslike at the end, after I had just seen this woman violated every which way possible.”

“But,” Louisa added, “she probably thinks everybody wants something from her. A hug’s probably too much of her, too personal.”

Why do women who like porn love Jenna? Because she loves them — from precisely the distance that keeps men wanting her.

Christina: “Do you like her better as a blond or a brunet?”

“She,” it turned out, was Jameson, the top-selling porn star on the planet. I don’t recall much else from that night, but I remember thinking, “Jenna’s a babe — to women; must investigate.”

So I requested an interview on the subject of why women who like porn love Jenna, suggesting that perhaps she might like to view her work with an audience of said females plus, um, me. And as it happened, it didn’t matter that I was 2,000 miles away or that I wouldn’t be able to book a screening room or that I don’t even own a DVD player. Jenna loved the idea, and would be back East for the holidays. Five days later, she was on my living room couch.

Now a few questions pop up when the world’s biggest adult film actress drops by. What do you wear? I put on a dark shirt and jacket for the same reason Christina donned a sleeveless top — to avoid overt sweat. What do you serve? We ordered sushi — insert your own joke. And how do you make small talk? Male friends had their suggestions. Louisa’s ex and his buddies came up with a list of queries for Jenna, starting with “What does a double penetration feel like?” Christina’s brother told her to pounce if Jenna made a pass at her.

But there were no tensions to break. In person, it’s hard not to stare at Jenna. At 26, with feline blue eyes and a high-wattage, full-lipped smile, she is truly pretty — “not skanky or worn-looking at all,” in Christina’s words — as well as hard-bodied and so petite that her breasts appear enormous even though they clock in, we learned, at “just” 34D. She also dresses like a porn star: red jacket over a size-too-small Playboy T-shirt, tight black jeans and Spice Girl boots, not to mention the “Heartbreaker” tattoo on her right thigh.

But she was utterly approachable. She showed up with just one companion, a physical therapist/gal pal named Tracy, who set the evening’s cheerfully explicit tone by announcing, “I’m Jenna’s bitch!” And Jenna answered every question we put to her in a throaty, conversational tone, not in the soft girlie voice she uses in her movies.

Like many professionals in their 20s, Christina and Louisa are sex-positive feminists, women who see pornography as an extreme but not inevitably inauthentic representation of the pleasure, power and entertainment that sex can carry while remaining leery of its nastier incarnations. Louisa had rebuffed her boyfriend’s attempts to get her to watch porn until he popped Jenna’s “Flashpoint” in their VCR. “I have this thing about firemen, and the next thing I knew everyone’s having sex, and I saw Jenna,” she explained. “She had an amazing power that came across on-screen.” Christina first caught Jenna on Howard Stern’s program. “I was like, ‘Who’s this?’” she recalled. “She was smart, she was sassy, she was in control.”

They wanted to see whether the Jenna they admired, with her patent enthusiasm, was real or a cover for a latter-day Linda Lovelace — coerced, abused, recanted. Once Jenna reassured them, she set off a chain reaction of affinity, even identification, and the women started gabbing about their common problems — men, money, menstrual cramps. It was like “The View” with vibrators.

“Everybody thinks of porn as, ‘It’s really bad, and these girls are on drugs, and they’re having to suck dick to even get in these movies in the first place,’” Jenna said. “I’m breaking that stereotype. I always like to say, ‘Hey, man, this is healthy, and I’m happy, and I run my own show, and nobody tells me what to do.’ I’m not saying every girl has the same opportunities, but I’m trying to change things.”

In fact, Jenna is a big enough star that she can name her movies and her costars, she receives royalties (a previously unheard-of privilege in the contract world of adult films) and she has launched Club Jenna, her own production company. She’s even thinking about starting a talent agency to help prevent aspiring porn actresses from being mistreated, she told us.

“Good for you,” Louisa said.

“If you’re dating someone, do they get jealous?” Christina asked.

“It’s really hard to be committed to anyone if you’re having sex with other people,” Jenna replied. “I always end up having to make a decision between the guy and my movie, and that’s sad. But it’s a double-edged sword. If someone said, ‘Good work, honey, go get fucked,’ I’d think he must not really love me. I try to go out with guys who are not in the industry, who like me because of who I am. But the minute they fall in love with me, they want to — ”

“Take care of you,” said Louisa.

“Have you for themselves,” said Christina.

” — change me,” said Jenna.

“Do you have a lot of female friends?” Christina asked.

“No, just Tracy, my publicist and my assistant at Club Jenna, that’s all,” Jenna said. “It’s very hard to find normal chicks.”

“How long do you think you’re going to be doing this for?” Louisa asked.

“I’m not really sure,” Jenna said. “Now I’m producing my own movies, but it’s hard to walk away when you’re on top.” Indeed. Porn starlets typically make no more than $1,200 per sex scene (with men; lesbian action maxes out at $800 a pop), and often burn out after pushing through a few hundred films in a couple of years. In contrast, Jenna just completed a DVD for which she got $60,000 for one-and-a-half days of work — “and it was only girl-girl!”

“This is the way I want it,” she said. “Five movies a year.”

In addition, Jenna dances at strip clubs two weeks of every month — “you should see the carnage” — raking in about $8,000 a night in appearance fees, tips and merchandise sales. And she sells tapes, sometimes auctioning the right to customize them on eBay. “I’m on the road all the time, and I talk to my fans, and they tell me what they want,” she explained. “I can shoot a little video in 15 minutes and charge $2,000 for it.”

“You trust your money manager, I hope,” Louisa said.

“I hooked up with this guy, and he’s the best,” said Jenna. “He pays all my bills, and I keep track of everything.”

“Good,” Louisa said.

“When you’re having sex on film, do you come, or do you just kind of shut off part of yourself?” Christina asked, finally careering the conversation toward sex now that Jenna’s IRA seemed to be in capable hands.

“It depends on the day,” Jenna said. “I’d say 25 percent of the time. It’s always pleasurable, because I get off on being in front of people and everybody watching me, so I’m wet and everything. But having an orgasm is a concentration thing, and the scenes stretch from one to three hours.”

One to three hours? I thought.

Christina and Louisa also wanted to know about the risks of having promiscuous sex for a living. Jenna works with just a small group of men who wear condoms in all penetration scenes, and she undergoes testing for HIV every month. “It’s always in the back of your head,” she said. “But to tell you the truth, I trust the people in the industry more than I would just going to a bar. If something goes wrong down there, we’re not going to be able to pay the rent. It’s when you get someone who says ‘I just want my $600′ that it can get ugly really quickly.”

“So where do you draw the line between what you consider healthy porn and things you find objectionable?” Christina asked.

“When a guy’s grabbing a girl by the hair and she’s like, ‘Yeah, fuck me,’ I think that’s hot,” Jenna said. “But I’ve been seeing these videos where these girls, they have this look on their face, and you can tell that they’re not enjoying what’s happening to them. That’s when I say, ‘Enough.’ When I’m shooting my movies and the girl looks like she’s out of it, we’re done. I’m sure there are guys out there who are like, ‘Oh, yeah, she deserves it,’ but that is not the market I’m trying to hit — at all.”

Part 2: Jenna shares her professional secrets.