Producer Bottom

Wanna make a sex tape?

Inspo—

“So often in telling sex work stories, the storytelling process is a form of striptease indistinguishable from sex work itself, a demand to create a satisfyingly revealing story, for audiences whose interest is disguised as compassion or curiosity.” —Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work

“The only time I see you these days is in my projections” —Rina Sawayama, Where U Are

“We have generated billions of dollars for social media platforms through our desire— and then through a subsequent, escalating economic and cultural requirement— to replicate for the internet who we know, who we think we are, who we want to be. Selfhood buckles under the weight of this commercial importance.” —Jia Tolentino, “The I in Internet” in Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion

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A big reason I got into porn was to have sex with very hot guys without being responsible for any of the logistics of it. Through porn, I could realize a fantasy of truly non-committal sex with men who otherwise demand an investment of feeling or effort or time to pin down. I like intimacy and romance, but I also fantasize about bottomhood as the concession of agency, or at least, of asking for what I want. To understand my sexuality, I’m afraid you will have to understand the both professional and erotic draw of being pimped without being raped. Or, in more optimistic terms, to have sex with men without having to really deal with them. You can imagine my dismay to find, only a few years into the industry, that self-produced content would radically alter the gay porn landscape, and would become nearly necessary to the sustenance of both income and personal brand.

To understand these pages, you must understand them as the convergence of two hyper-individualized, freelance career paths that few take seriously: sex work and social media branding. In fact, the transition of thirst traps into amateur pornography illustrates the thin boundaries between sex work and social media, on the one hand, and what was always already pornographic about social media— that is, the public expression it gives to private desires and their satisfaction, on the other.

It’s become something of a running joke that the social media gays we love to hate all inevitably turn to OnlyFans in their desperation for (not a decent living or economic agency, but) realer metrics of superficial approval. This contempt is not new, only a regurgitation of how even the liberal wing of society already talked about whores, as empty-headed but hot-bodied scammers resistant to legitimate work and its slow but supposedly fulfilling returns. What is new is how clearly and immediately we can witness the people we follow, some more passively than others, slide across a threshold of impropriety from confessional to peepshow. It does not matter how much we believe in that impropriety, or that threshold, but how little we believe in a future in which it matters, or a future at all. An apocalypse is a lot like a burlesque act, after all.

Meanwhile, many of us seasoned whores have found the conditions of our labor profoundly restructured. Like other innovations we now know as digital media, these fan pages answered a collective desire to resist the corporate-studio structure of porn production by empowering precarious and frustrated workers to become self-representing creative client-producers. In spite of its glamorous exterior, studio porn does not book or pay most models enough to truly live off of, especially long-term. Fan sites, by contrast, appear revolutionary to many performers, because they give us much greater agency over our work, including the environment in which we film, how we engage with other performers, and how our bodies are represented. But agency confined to a marketplace, neoliberalism’s great parlor trick, revolves around not an organized collective but the absolutely liable individual. These platforms have incentivized working together as performers to film sex, but not much else, generating competition to produce as much content as frequently as possible. So much for easy money.

It’s hard to satisfy this standard of regular output while also maintaining a sense of integrity to my own sexual limits and desires, including how I communicate with partners. This might sound bizarre for a sex worker to say, because we are supposed to be masters of this balance, but there’s no guidebook for this. Every new technology or relocation or relationship might require us to recalibrate. I’ve tried to impose a simple boundary to minimize these liabilities and others, to only film with other pros. The trouble with this, however, is that hooking up with a gay porn star visiting New York City, even if you are also a gay porn star, is like trying to catch a rabbit in a field of hares, and the rabbit disappears when you say you’re in Brooklyn. And I still have to weed out the bottoms. So, propelled by necessity, I try pitching the idea of recording to my casual hook-ups.

Sometimes I feel like I struggle more than others to convince tops to film sex, especially my favorite kind of top, one I just met. A lot of guys freeze up even after agreeing to it. I might just phrase it poorly, but the act of filming sex seems to contradict the roles I have set up for my own pleasure. Men seem to recognize, a minute or so into pressing Record, that there are new stakes involved. This is so strikingly different from before, when filming sex emerged from an organic desire to capture not only an erotic image, but an intimate secret, which is also a souvenir. When men would film me getting fucked, it allowed us to marvel at the ways our bodies could fit and force into each other, the camera a tool of simultaneous admiration and humiliation. In making a sex tape, we play with the thrill of exposing a depraved self, me as dick pig. If I want this too much, if I request it too eagerly, tacitly hoping to share it for personal gain, I upend this erotic schema. No matter how hard and cruelly I am fucked, no matter how convincingly I groan the words “use me,” I have contradicted myself with the camera. The top suspects he is being used. He forgets how to use me, too.

That’s one explanation, anyway. There are other ways to make a sex tape, and to have sex, that do not hinge on dominating the person exposed by the camera. I also have sex that is relaxed and sex that is versatile, and have felt the impulse to record a moment of play merely to memorialize something I found beautiful, even romantic. I have gotten off on the presence of a camera not because I feel disciplined by it, but because I feel flattered. But I fear I have given myself away, that all my ambivalence amounts to a kind of false modesty. It’s just strange to be in the business of advertising my own desirability, whether as a social media personality or as a sex worker. It’s strange to build a living upon asking to be admired.

XO

TY