Probottom Book Club—
“This whole trying to be like me really isn't funny anymore.”
—Cordelia, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S3E5: Homecoming)
“They always said that you knew best
But this little bird's fallen out of that nest”
—Annie Lennox, Little Bird
“It’s not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it’s the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation.”
—Aldous Huxley, Island
I signed up for OnlyFans back in the beginning of 2018, and switched to a different platform not long after. It took over a month to get verified, which didn’t establish a strong first impression of the company for me. Other industry folks had been complaining about late or missing payouts, as well as subscribers being double-charged. Nobody knew who was running the site, and it still possessed a thin veneer that it was not primarily a platform for porn. I approached the site with immense caution, unsure if the site would abruptly oust adult content like Tumblr or get shut down by the Feds like Rentboy or Backpage. However, others approached it as a gold rush, worth getting into while the getting’s good.
The site certainly resolved many of the complaints of porn performers who’d been in the industry awhile. Studios don’t book often enough or pay well enough to support models’ livings, yet they expect us to maintain the flexibility to travel across the country mid-week on short notice, making it logistically challenging to balance full-time work with a porn career. Most models get even less work after a few years of overexposure, passed up for an endless supply of newer amateurs, and even the most popular HIV-positive models are excluded from many major studios. We already felt the pressure to maintain exhibitionistic social media personas, hopeful that large followings would bring in bookings, so mobilizing those followings around a paywall made a lot of sense.
Meanwhile, micro-influencers from outside the realm of porn also found it tempting to sell their much-requested nudes, and many had already started to using Snapchat or Skype. Longtime thirst traps mobilized their huge followings to OnlyFans, too, but with a much lower ante than porn people whose dicks and holes were easy to find. For me and other porn folks, this meant competing for attention with people exposing less for more, such that an established model’s compendium of homemade hardcore had as much earning power as an influential thirst trap’s short stripteases and showers.
This didn’t bother me as much as other kinds of competition. It felt unfair to collaborate with someone much better at pulling in subscribers than I was, because they had more robust capital (i.e. more followers) or simply committed more effort to their page. As I was entering the influencer economy, I felt increasingly paranoid of being paid in “exposure” and “collabs” that didn’t properly benefit me. In turn, I felt uncomfortable asking casual hookups if I could film for my page and coin off their cocks for free. Given the amount of regulatory tedium involved in porn production, posting videos of hookups or exes seemed like a thicket of legal and ethical liabilities that I wanted to avoid. It felt like a lost cause to try to compete with performers who produced more content more often by lacking these reservations.
My biggest reservation about fans sites, though, was that it meant taking up a whole new set of skills and responsibilities not because I wanted them, but because what it means to be a porn star is changing. I’ve said before that the reason I got into porn was to fuck hot guys for money without all the administrative work of recruiting, scheduling and ego-stroking. I like the idea of being set up with a stranger by a (somewhat) accountable third party, knowing only that he meets some kind of commercial threshold of good looks and/or big dick. All I’m responsible for is showing up, cleaning out, and taking it like a champ.
I did not want the job of porn director or producer, and I certainly never wanted to be pushed into taking on either job’s labor and liability by the spontaneous currents of hustling under capitalism. I wanted cash in hand for a job well done, not the raw material for variable earnings. I wanted boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn’t, not the inescapable temptation to convert personal experiences into profitable content. So for as long as I could, I resisted the fans site hustle even as I maintained a modest, non-committal stream of clips. I tried to keep my subscribers’ expectations low, and turned down most offers to collaborate. And anyway, I was finally getting booked frequently for well-paid studio work.
Until, of course, I wasn’t. When the pandemic hit, productions came to a halt. As restrictions eased and the industry came up with low-liability production practices, local and contracted models were first in line for bookings while I continued to wait. The months dragged on, and the pandemic unemployment assistance ran out. I took a long break from worrying about what I look like in front of a camera, from thinking about my body in terms of value and comparison. I watched all the people who’d considered fans sites as a last resort suddenly run out of resorts, and their fears about being nude on the internet give away to full-blown nihilism.
Meanwhile, I redecorated my room and jerked off in new and exciting positions. Despite my inactivity, my subscribers didn’t disappear like I always feared they would, and I began to slowly stir up a sense that maybe making content isn’t too complicated or competitive to try finding what works for me. After all, I like getting fucked on film for money, and I need the money.
My personal boundaries have re-settled into creative anxieties, and maybe they always were just that. But I’ve found that working through such anxieties is a practice, not a riddle— something I get better at through trying, not through sitting around worrying over. In spite of my trepidation, I am beginning to make an effort to be my own pornographer. Which leads me to here, the ol’ newsletter, where I hope to share some of what I am learning about how to navigate this strange world of content and collabs and sex and fans. Maybe it’s professional development, or maybe it’s an exclusive look behind the scenes. You’ll have to subscribe to find out.
XO
TY