Wrapping up my porn career

It's been reel

On July 8th, 2019 sex worker and writer extraordinaire Maggie McNeill published my first guest post on her blog, The Honest Courtesan, wherein I came out to the world as, well, a whore.

I checked, and was surprised to realize it was a mere eight months later, on April 25th, 2020, bored in my studio and still saving up to retire early, that I started my OnlyFans.

And now, almost exactly three years later, I’m announcing that I’m not going to post any more content for the foreseeable future. I’ll give you a moment to mourn.

Okay. So, this seems like as good a time as any to indulge in a little reflection on my path to, through, and I guess out of sex work.

In the course of our debate on legal sex work, my opponent Rebekah Charleston repeated the old canard that no little girl grows up wanting to be a prostitute.

Well, my babies, I know that I grew up wanting to be a mistress. And, really, what’s the difference between being a wife, mistress, or whore? If you depend on a sexual relationship for your sustenance, it’s the same arrangement with different names.

In 80s and 90s TV and in movies, a wife was usually a dependent, nagging, boring, dumb, frumpy ball-and-chain. A mistress, on the other hand, was a sexy, exciting, fun, interesting, savvy, liberated woman. Wives lived in staid suburbs. Mistresses lived in luxury apartments downtown. Wives had short haircuts and mom jeans. Mistresses had long, beautiful hair and sexy dresses.

I wasn’t allowed, of course, to want to be a mistress. Adultery was a sin, and God couldn’t even look at sin. So being a mistress would separate me from God, maybe forever.

As a true believer, at the ripe old age of 22 I had PIV sex for the first time on my wedding night. This is when I started trying to be a sexy, exciting, fun, interesting, savvy, and liberated wife.

At 26, I divorced my husband. My slow deconstruction of Evangelical Christianity started to ramp up.

There’s a whole book to be written about my journey from Southern Baptist to sex worker. But in the meantime, I’ll share my two least-favorite things about sugar babying and how they led me to OnlyFans.

1. Listening to boring men

2. Being close to men who were lying to their wives

Intellectually, I’m a full moral relativist. Emotionally, I’m a huge fucking moralizer.

I may have rejected Evangelical Christianity’s teachings around sin, sex, and hell. But I still have a massive preference for honesty, for reasons I’ve written about here.

Porn felt like a great way for me to do sex work without having to listen to boring men or be close to men who were lying to their wives. Plus, it was a far more Covid-safe form of sex work. Safer in every way, really.

A lot of my OnlyFans subscribers told me their wives were fans of my writing and approved of their buying my porn. A lot of them were single. The others didn’t tell me and I didn’t worry about it too much.

OnlyFans is a narcissist’s wet dream. It was the nicest place on the internet. People just gave me money and compliments.

I grew up believing all men preferred a very narrow standard of beauty and a narrow slice of sex acts. OnlyFans taught me so much about how much variety there is in what turns men on. It vastly increased my body acceptance.

And, it made me tens of thousands of dollars. Without the savings and income from OF, I wouldn’t have felt able to go full-time on Sex and the State last year.

I feel so lucky to have broken out of Southern Baptist sexual shame to join my foremothers Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Maggie McNeill, Margaret Cho, and more women too numerous to list. We weren’t born into the kind of privilege that allowed us to pursue a life of the kind of writing we were clearly born to do. So we did sex work to make it happen for ourselves.

I’m stopping now for family and personal reasons. And because I don’t have to rely on that income anymore.

For some reason, posting was always difficult for me. For partnered content, I regret that I was never able to find a consistent, face-out partner to show people what sex can look like over time with someone I love. I’m pissed that so many people are such cowards and that stigma still exists and that long-term passionate sexual and romantic love is so rare.

For solo content, I have some remaining hangups about masturbation which I don’t fully understand and honestly don’t want to be bothered with exploring right now. As I told my therapist, if I had to choose between only having sex or only talking about sex for the rest of my life, it would be no contest for me. “You’re preaching to the choir,” he said. “I’m a sex therapist.” We laughed and laughed.

I’m going to keep the profile active so people can retain access to the content they’ve paid for.

But it’s not just, if I’m real, concern for my subscribers that makes me want to keep the profile up. I’m proud of my porn. I like there being a record of how I looked naked from 2020 to 2023.

In the debate, Rebekah accused me and my ilk of wanting to get women into sex work. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I want a UBI. I don’t want anyone to have to do sex work, either to survive or to be able to do the work they were born to do. But as long as scarcity and sex work exist, I want anyone who feels it’s their best option to be able to do it as safely and without stigma as humanly possible. And by doing sex work unashamedly, for a short period of time, in a very small way, I made the world look just a little more like I’d like it to look. I’m proud of that. And I want there to be a record of it.

I’m so grateful I got to help destigmatize sex work and pornography by being face-out and using my real, weird name. And doing sex work and making porn helped me fight to decriminalize sex work and pornography.

I’m grateful I got to give people sexual pleasure! That was maybe the most fun part of it all. I’m grateful I got to show people at least a little bit of what authentic female sexual pleasure looks and sounds like.

I guess now I’m technically a former sex worker. But the distinction feels a little too black-and-white for me. Who is a sex worker? I’m still writing about sex. I’m sure some people get some sexual pleasure out of that fact. Certainly I’m still an advocate for sex workers.

I’m excited to have more bandwidth for this newsletter and to no longer have “You should be posting to OF” hanging over my head at all times.

Anyway, my babies. In sum, no ragrets. It was fun and profitable intellectually, emotionally, and financially. I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad to be stopping.

And, lastly, I’m so so grateful to everyone who supported me in any way through it.

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