 Meet Ayla. She's the daughter of evangelical Christians from Idaho, so poor they couldn't always manage to put food on the table. A former factory worker who never graduated college, she became one of the most successful performers on the adult subscription site only fans, earning in some months over $100,000 on the platform. She still does one-on-one appointments, but only with clients who can afford to pay top dollar. What's your price right now? $3,000 an hour. But Ayla is also known for her oddball social media polls, sexy and silly personal moments on Twitter, and for using her giant platform to spread hot libertarian takes, such as declaring, I like capitalism. I think generally most of what the government does should be privatized. I don't think it should be involved at all in healthcare, social security, or welfare. I'm not okay with you making laws that prevent me from doing what I feel is good for me. Like that is the border here. This is what like the respect of freedom is. Ayla is also an outspoken defender of sex worker rights who compares her current life to what it was like at the age of 19, waking up at 4.30 a.m. to put in 54 hours a week doing repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a windowless factory. Why do people talk about survival sex work, but not like survival factory work, or survival burger flipping, she wonders? Yes, there's exploitation in sex work, but decriminalizing sex work would let workers actually go get police help if they needed it. But even before she got rich and famous, back when she was scraping change off the ground to eat, Ayla says she still had libertarian leaning economic views. I met up with Ayla at her home in Austin, Texas for a wide-ranging conversation about everything from how sex work made her a better data scientist to why many successful practitioners in her industry are selling not just sex, but the personal connections that so many of us are missing in our lives. The entire session was just like me holding him as he sobs into me. And that was it. We didn't have sex. I've had sex with a quadriplegic who was like literally in a chair who couldn't move. I was like, yeah, that feels good. Like I'm helping you get something that just you can't get anymore. It feels really human and caring to me. So do you recall the moment you first decided, hey, I'm going to put my naked body on the internet? Damn, what an opening. I had worked at a factory for a year and it was really terrible. What type of factory? I was on an assembly floor, assembly electrical relays. So they're used in electrical systems to go off and protect us or manage. I don't remember. It was a long time ago. But I was standing on the floor and my little uniform on an assembly line doing the repetitive motion over and over again. And we worked long hours, like 50 hours a week. Had to be there at like 5 a.m. and left 3 or something like that. And it was terrible. It worked Saturdays and it was just absolutely mind-killing. So it was really soul-killing. And then after that I was like, okay, fuck this. I'm just never going to work for a boss again. I'm going to try and do my own thing. And I was really incompetent. So I failed at doing my own thing. But then I was like briefly dating this guy and he said, hey, there's a camming thing. You can like stream yourself live. And you know, if you want, I can help you do that. And we ended up never doing it. But after we broke up, I was sitting there, like sleeping on my friend's couch, being like, what the fuck do I do? I guess I'll just try this thing. Interesting. And so you got into camming and what was that like initially? Really scary? Because I had come from an extremely conservative culture, like really conservative. What religious background is your family? Christian fundamentalist, Calvinist, evangelical. Oh Calvinist. Wow. That's an interesting background. Yeah, you know about the Calvinists? I'm familiar with them. I'm scared of them slightly. Yeah, you're a Calvinist. My dad is a professional evangelical debater. He goes around debating people about the Bible and stuff. So from Calvinism to factory to camming, basically. There were a couple intermediary steps, but roughly, yeah. And what was that new life like when you started camming? Was it something where you immediately found it was a lot more stimulating in terms of thinking of your strategy and how to make money for yourself and how to really provide for yourself? Or was it the type of thing where you actually realized that parts of it were just as tedious as the factory work had been? Eventually. But for a long time, it was extremely good. Camming was a way that I could actually better myself. In a lot of the previous things, jobs I've been working in my life, I'd had a very small expectation of what my life could be. Because I was brought up to be a housewife who would maybe marry a middle manager somewhere and have five kids immediately. And so when I was like, okay, that's not the life for me. I didn't have like, oh, I could go to college, right? And I could become a lawyer. Like that was just not in the cards. And so when I started camming, I made $60 the first night and I was like, this is more money for four hours of work than I've seen in my lifetime. I was extremely excited. And it was something where I could actually see results from working really hard. And that was the first time I'd been put into a system where I could work really hard and have like concrete results from it. And so I just became obsessed with it. I lived it, breathed it, went to sleep, thinking about strategies. I had a lot of fun. I put in really creative shows. And it was awesome for several years. And eventually it got old, you know, because it's repetitive. So after it got a little bit more tedious and rote, it seems like you moved to escorting. And escorting requires in-person interaction. What appealed to you about this? Did this feel like a really big step? It did, kind of surprisingly. There's sort of a cultural line inside of the cam girl world. You know, there are cam girls who do escorting and cam girls who just don't do that. And so in the cam girl land, there was like, oh, we are all cam girls, of course, but we never actually fuck a man for money. That's like a little, and then there are a couple cam girls who did it and you would gossip about it or something. And so I had sort of this idea that I wasn't that kind of person, really. I had absorbed a lot of cultural fears about it. I had something in the back of my head that was like, oh, if I accept sex for money, I'm going to be dirty or gross or feel bad. It's going to be psychically damaging or something. Do you think those are Calvinist cultural fears or camming world cultural fears? I think, because it seems like there are taboos and stigmas coming from sort of both areas in an interesting way. It's not even just those two. It's the entire world. Everybody thinks that escorts are not sexually valuable as a mate. I mean, to fuck, yeah, but not as impregnate. What was escorting like? Tell me a little bit about that transition. Did that require you basically acquiring an entirely new skill set? Or was it something where you were able to build off of some of the creativity and the personal brand that you'd almost carved out for yourself via camming? Oh, they were totally related. It was really interesting to go into escorting because I'd had a very long history of working really hard as a successful cam girl. And I felt like I came into escorting expecting it to be hard, but found that a lot of the skills that I had from camming just very naturally went over to marketing. Like I already, at this point, understood what men want in a pretty intuitive level. I knew the kind of photos that worked really well. I knew the kind of like personality and strategy that men really respond to. What types of things did they respond well to, your clients? Yeah, so men want personality, they really do. And there's some sort of this fantasy that you're selling the guy on. Like I'm not just like a body for you to fuck. I'm some sort of like escapism that you can like fall in love with for a night who's, you know, warm and bubbly and fun to be around. It makes you feel great about yourself and a little bit therapy involved too. Is it like a summoning, a sort of manic pixie dream girl type vibe? Or is it like a different form of charm? It's pretty manic pixie, at least a bit. And obviously girls have different strategies, right? There's a couple of girls with strategies that work who are very different from me. But yeah, usually you want to be like the dream girl who's like careless, who like desperately wants to suck your dick, who's like really excited about life, who's going to like bring you out of your mundanity. And so I just like put that into my marketing for escorting and they went really well. What did the economics of camming look like and then the economics of escorting? What did your business model look like? With camming most of the income comes from a small percentage of men because the men are visible to each other and so there's much higher competition. As a guy, if you're like tipping the girl or giving her money, it's in front of other men which means that if you don't have enough money you are discouraged from tipping the woman because you're going to like sort of lose the competition. It's very competition oriented. And so you end up with a system where like 80% of your money comes from like two guys basically. Wow, really? Oh yeah, it's extreme. And this leads to a lot of vulnerability for emotional abuse too. If all of your money or like it's coming from just a handful of guys then they can make a lot of demands on you and you have to sort of respect that because if they dip out it's like a really big hit. Whereas with escorting, not the case at all because the guys are not visible to each other they're not competing against each other in any way. Your income is like much more distributed across men. Could you talk a little bit about the class differences in types of sex worker types of prostitution? Yeah, I did a survey of a bunch of escorts basically and found that like the amount of bad things they encountered like sexual assault or theft or you know police or whatever it was like pretty strongly correlated with their price range, like the amount of money that they charge per hour. So basically the more money you charge you're sort of like pricing yourself out of like more sketchy clientele. The people who are going to be paying you a thousand dollars an hour are not going to sexually assault you. They're like a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or something who just like just don't want to fuck with that. It seems like you made a somewhat deliberate decision as you sort of went from the factory to camming and then to escorting and then you became highly selective with your clients. I imagine some of this is partially due to you being in high demand but also some of this seems like a deliberate choice on your end to try to make the situation safe for you and to allow yourself to have a lot of autonomy in terms of who you choose. It seems like you sort of opted into high-end sex work in a very deliberate manner. Is that correct? To some extent, yeah. I started charging you $800 an hour and then I eventually rose my prices to $1,200. Did you notice a big difference between clients like the clientele that you sought you out at $800 versus the higher end? Yeah, it wasn't a massive difference but there was definitely noticeable. There were definitely guys that were like, All right, this is job, this is work, let's just think of our happy place. And those price sensitive are these clients. The great ones tend to be less price sensitive in general. And when I raised my prices, the kind of guys that were really a dredge to deal with typically faded out, not 100%, but they were definitely way fewer of them. Have you ever experimented with pricing to such an extent where you raise your prices so high that so many people get priced out that it ends up not becoming lucrative? Like have you experimented with the upper end of that? This is what I'm doing right now actually. Right now I've switched to researching, like I'm funded to do research right now. So I basically quit sex work and so I was like, Fuck it, I'm going to raise my prices like really high because that's just for fun. Because I still really like escorting. Like it's still a fun experience and sometimes I'm noticing myself missing it. It's a really easy, great way to have sex with a new person for some benefits on the side too. So I'm doing that right now. And so I do have some interest, yeah. May I ask, what's your price right now? $3,000 an hour. Have you noticed any demand? Yes, definitely reduced. So you moved away from escorting and toward retirement. How did that transition happen? Because it seems like you've really carved out a huge space for yourself online, both in your writing and on Twitter. As this sort of like rationalist, public intellectual data collector. And so I think it's very rare to have somebody who is such an authority and who engages in sex work, but who is also this almost like data scientist type. What has this sort of dual identity been like for you and did that influence your retirement basically? Yeah, they're really go hand in hand. I'm surprised more sex workers aren't also data scientists. I went from escorting to only fans because COVID hit and it was like, right before COVID hit, I got a client sick with the flu accidentally. And I was like, okay, I don't want to risk this again. This would be really bad. I don't want to kill anybody. So I stopped that and went into Onlyfans. And Onlyfans, you get a very large reach. Onlyfans, you have to just like give as many followers as many platforms as you can. And that really blew up my ability to do surveys with really high sample sizes. So I just started doing that. Even I had been doing it before, but at this point I was doing it even more. Wait, so your platform became larger via Onlyfans, like you were getting survey results, you were having your Onlyfans followers be your respondents? Or was it that your profile overall was blowing up and so that Onlyfans fame translated to Twitter? It's something like in order to do Onlyfans very well, Onlyfans has a 50% churn rate of subscribers per month, which means that 80% of the work that I did with Onlyfans was generating new eyes on this constantly, like very high visibility, which meant that I was capturing followers, free followers on a lot of platforms. Like I have 350,000 followers on Reddit, for example, and like almost 200 on FetLife, 200,000. And so I had a lot of platforms with lots of subscribers on all of them, and that was what gave me the ability to do the surveys. Were you worried initially that people would think that it was weird or a distraction from the sexual content? Not necessarily, because one aspect of selling sex to men is that you're selling them an identity about themselves, right, that men like to think of themselves as the kind of guy who likes this kind of girl, even if they don't actually like it really, even if they don't independently pursue data themselves. So if you're like, hey, I'm a sex worker and also I do data, they're like, wow, I'm such a high-end guy that I like am attracted to this hot woman who also does data and look how like deep I am. Right, so I'm also, this is also selling the guys an identity for who they want to be. And so I think it actually helped. So you initially started sending out these polls on all of your different platforms, your Reddit and your OnlyFans and your Twitter to try to get as many respondents as possible, but that really snowballed into something bigger. It wasn't just you, it wasn't just an exercise in brand differentiation for you where guys ended up being into it, but it's also like a thing that you are known for and you've sort of established your reputation for yourself as this data scientist. Tell me more about how that evolved. I've been sort of dabbling in it for a very long time. I think I did my first survey in like 2014 and Hyde said it was really terrible. I was just like, let's ask people questions. And then I didn't understand about like question structure or how to process data afterwards or anything. I'm not formally educated. I was homeschooled and did not really go to college. So all of this has been self taught or through like tutors or friends who helped me. So my knowledge is pretty spotty and I'm learning all the time. I'm like pretty good in some areas and like really underdeveloped in others. So we met at Hereticon this conference in Miami which is sort of a gathering for oddball intellectuals. And you were on stage and you made the really interesting comment. I don't really get that mad when I'm sexually assaulted. The interviewer who shall remain nameless sort of got really uncomfortable and let out like an awkward chuckle and then moved on very quickly which I thought was a sort of odd response because I was like, wait, that's, you know, a very heretical thing in our society especially in the current moment. And I think that's so interesting. Like I want nothing more than to understand what you mean by that. So why don't you get that mad when you're sexually assaulted? That's a great question. Now's your opportunity to expand on it. I'm not sure. It's probably a couple different reasons. Like one is I suspect that I just am like not very sensitive to negative stimuli. Like if you do like a bad thing to me, I'm like, ah, okay, and I move on with my life. And so there's some sort of like predisposition maybe genetic bear that just it rolls off me pretty well. Typically when I've been sexually assaulted it hasn't resulted in like meaningful damage to me. Like I'm not, it doesn't break a leg and I don't get pregnant or anything. And it's like annoying. I don't like it. But it doesn't feel like it really sticks in me very much. It's like, well, if nothing bad happened then I can just move on with my life. And it also depends on the context a lot. Like I've been sexually assaulted while working as an escort before. And that was like pretty unpleasant. But also it's like, it feels kind of an extension of what I'm doing already a little bit. That I feel like people are gonna, if they hear that they're gonna misinterpret that a while online. What do you mean by that though? I think that's really interesting. Does it feel sort of like to some degree you're suspending a sense of what you want to do in order to engage in this voluntary relationship, this transaction. And so this being assaulted or having that be violated further is a natural extension of that. Yeah, something like that. And to be clear, I do not view escorting as in itself as sexual assault whatsoever. But it's something like maybe you're- You're suspending sometimes your own needs and desires I imagine in order to do something that you've contractually agreed to. Like say you're hired to load a bunch of boxes into a truck and you're like loading boxes and it's like you're consenting to it. It's not like you're the most fun thing ever but whatever it's life. And then like somebody comes along as you're lifting something and like dumps a whole bunch more weight on the thing that you're lifting. And it's like you're still like in the context where you're doing the thing. And then the situation sort of changes to become more unpleasant. And in that case like, sure it's not great, you didn't consent to it. Like that shouldn't have happened. But maybe it's like a little bit easier to handle because it's a slight modification of what you're doing already. But it almost seems like what you're reacting to is a sense that a trauma or an event that is disturbing or that you dislike doesn't have to be something that wields so much power over you for years and years to come. Which I think runs very contrary to the cultural moment that we're in. Yeah, this seems absolutely true. I think like the majority of trauma is like culturally determined. And I'm not saying that we should say things that are good to make people who suffer them have a good time. But I am saying that like a lot of the actual sensation of oh shit I'm traumatized by this event comes from the sense that this should not have happened. And that is something that society tells you. Like I was pretty abused when I was growing up by my dad. And when I got to be an adult to everybody was like oh my god I'm so sorry they reacted with like such sympathy and care and stuff. And that caused me to view my childhood as very bad. Because before it had just been like oh this is kind of painful like this sucks but like everybody has to do things they don't like in childhood, right? And then it was only once I got to adulthood that culture reframed this for me. And it was in that reframing that I experienced trauma from it. And in order to undo that trauma in myself I had to undo that framing. And so I think that the same goes with sexual assault and consent, right? Like like the trauma of the consent a lot of it I mean not all of it to be clear there are like concrete bad things that are not determined by society. But a lot of that trauma is coming from culture telling us like oh you should be pretty upset about that thing. And then our brains are like okay yeah you're right. You've been conducting a rape survey online sort of in your role as this this data scientist and public intellectual. I took it because I thought it was fascinating and so it was some like 50 questions and basically a sliding scale a continuum where you rank the degree to which sort of counts as rape versus doesn't. So what were your findings? Yeah I had about 5,500 people take the survey and found a wide spectrum of things I guess. Some like easily packaged things where like women tended to be more likely to rate things as rape than men. By what degree? By what factor? Women's average rating was 54 out of 100 and men's was 44. I think mine was probably around the guy response leveling maybe in the 40s. So what types of things were you surprised that people considered to be rapey? Versus what types of things were you surprised that people broadly found to be less violating of consent? I included two controls or what I thought were controls. One was like okay question is very clearly rape like somebody jumps out of a bushes stranger they scream and stuff. And the other one was like you have sex in a relationship to make your partner happy. I was like that's clearly not right that's clearly a zero like nobody like everybody has sex in their relationship to make a partner happy. And it was rated pretty low but it wasn't zero it got rated 13. There was in fact another one that got rated even lower than that which was having sex with an unenthusiastic sex worker which I thought people are gonna rate higher than that. That was very surprising to me. What types of things worth universally declared rape by people? Jumping out of bushes and screaming and fighting removing a condom without consent. Stealthing. High up there. Stealthing yeah. Or like a husband forcing sex on his wife even if the wife thinks this is okay. Comes from a culture where this is okay. Interesting. I feel like that's maybe a response that like would be affected by whether people are US based or international because I wonder whether in some cultures where like marital rape laws have been either are still in place or were more recently repealed whether people have slightly different cultural attitudes toward that. Yeah I also suspect so I suspect that there's like this is one spectrum along which people evaluate if something is rape or not like to what degree does like the person thinking that it's normal make it okay. Like if both people involved are like this is a normal thing to do like does it still count as rape? And this is like one thing that seems to divide people. You asked a lot of questions if I recall about people who are neurodivergent or otherwise like or disabled and the degree to which they're sort of capable of consenting to sex. What did you find about that? It seems to be like roughly in the middle people had different views on it but one thing about this that I find interesting like one reason why like mental capacity seems really fascinating to me is because we have a lot of opinions about like teenagers you know or children like their ability to consent to sex and generally the the perception is no they can't but maybe like a 16 year old could have sex with another 16 year old and this is fine. But like the reason why we say children cannot consent to sex is because they don't have the mental capacity to agree. So I'm like okay what if we take a mentally disabled person who has the mental capacity of a 16 year old for their entire life right and so do our intuitions say the same there like should we never allow them to have sex with anyone and so that's a really good way of like testing our intuitions about this. And what do people's intuitions say about that? I did had a teen having sex with adults question okay and in the question of this was like at least visibly eager like the 16 year old expressed being very excited about this thing and then I also asked a question about somebody with with Down Syndrome very eagerly having wanting to have sex with somebody who is neurotypical and it was not considered great very very very low for the Down syndrome person but it was what's considered pretty rapey for the 16 year old. That's fascinating that's so different than how I would anticipate those responses to go. What other big gender differences did you see other than the sort of top line men tended to rate things as less rapey than women did on average? What other gender differences did you see were there any themes that came up where men generally regarded something as permissible whereas women didn't? Relationship pressure was a big one so so scenarios that involve some level of like emotional desire for sex or asking for sex when the woman doesn't want to typically in this context of a relationship men were very much like that's not rape and the women were like that is definitely more rapey which was pretty surprising to me. At hereticon you talked about how you don't you're not generally in favor of government intrusion into sex and into people's sex lives but you did mention that you would sooner have if you had to you would sooner have the government regulate only fans than regulate in person sex work why is that? If we're going by the like how much harm does this cause the population sort of thing my my guess my intuition is that only fans like might be more damaging to society as a whole than escorting and to be clear both of them are not very damaging I think it's worth it we're not really in favor of state intrusion into people's sex life generally as a principle in this room yeah but but only fans seems seems worse to me mostly in the sense that it feels much more impersonal and asymmetrical it feels more like a system of sex as opposed to like genuine sexual interaction like with escorting there's a very human thing it feels very organic and I feel like a little bit like a hippie talking about this I'm not typically very hippie like except for all the LSD but it really does feel different like I when I went from camming to escorting to only fans the escorting felt the healthiest to me like I felt the best after doing it I felt like I was doing the most good in the world whereas the other two are very asymmetrical it's me versus like a whole bunch of guys I'm fascinated by this because I think it's counter how a lot of people maybe not libertarians and people who are pro sex work but the idea that escorting is doing good in the world runs counter to how a lot of people view it but you you're saying you felt that really viscerally what did that feel like to you how would you describe that feeling to somebody who's perhaps opposed to it it feels much more dehumanizing to be on only fans and again happy only fans exist this is not a criticism like but it did feel like I was actually dehumanizing the men more and they were dehumanizing me because it's about numbers I mean we have 50% turn we're like I'm thinking about funnels I'm thinking about like how many eyes what's the conversion rate I'm thinking about like at what time of day do I post this thing to get the most unlocks that sort of thing and so the men are no longer like individual men right there they're like little data points in a thing that I'm trying to maximize I'm no longer interacting with a human I'm interacting with like like a massive ants on the ground that I'm trying to like corral into giving me their money and it's like that terrible movie the social network where Vincent Cartizer has all the computer monitors and is like pulling all the levers and it's that's how you're looking at only fans as opposed to escorting yeah exactly and so it's fun like I only fans it's like fun in that kind of way but it definitely is removing some sort of human element from the sexual interaction anyway that it's like impossible to do with escorting like with escorting you're just placed in front of a human being and you like make eye contact and you talk with each other and get to know each other and then you just that is just powerful in a way that like I can't replicate anywhere else you said there's a component of almost therapy you're doing and selling men to some degree an image of themselves uh what was that like more specifically in escorting like do you have examples of that of like these deeper sort of connections that you made there are definitely several men that I knew that like I still think about really fondly to this day um there's like like there's guys who I think there were two dying of cancer and were like I don't want to die without having the warm embrace of a woman in my life I was like sure that's I'm like fully for here for you to help with that or there was one guy who's like really depressed and our first session like we sat down on the bed and we were talking and it just felt to me like there was like sadness behind him and then I just asked about that and then one thing led to another and the entire session was just like me holding him as he sobbed into me um and that was it we didn't have sex um I've had sex with a quadriplegic who was like literally in in a chair who couldn't move uh I was like yeah that feels good like I'm helping you get something that just you can't get anymore it feels really human and caring to me you've talked a little bit about what percentage of your clients are married and how it's actually a pretty high number how do you think about that in this phenomenon of married men seeking you out in my survey about 50% of men who seek out escorts are married and this seems to hold true with my personal experience um and often they would talk very fondly about their wives be like my wife is great like I never want to hurt her and it felt very compartmentalized a lot of times men to go to go to escort specifically because of that compartmentalization right they don't want to like have an affair with somebody at work who might like bleed into their life and actually like pull out more of their emotional resources they want like a just a sex experience that they can like put on the shelf and go away because often they care about their wife and they want to protect their wife from from any sort of like bleed over they're like oh the thing that I'm not getting is sex I'm just going to go have that and and that's it usually it's men or like older men whose wives just are not sexually interested anymore like have a very low sex drive maybe are too exhausted they're just it's just not for them and the guy doesn't want to pressure her to like make her have sex with him and she usually is very uncomfortable if he would have sex with anybody else or opening the relationship so what can he do to get his needs met and a lot of people are like well you signed up for this you know you committed to a life with this woman but really I think culture does not adequately prepare people for this they're just like oh you're going to be in love forever and it's going to be fine but it's not and these people are blindsided by it and so in order to cope with this they often go and see an escort and this can help them preserve a marriage that may have fallen apart if they if they didn't do something like this one thing that we've been paying a lot of attention to at recent is the backlash toward sex work and toward porn and the sort of push toward regulating a lot of these sites like only fans and cracking down on payment processing capabilities of these sites there's also been this really interesting sort of social conservative trad movement that's been bubbling up in the last few years that I imagine you have a lot of exposure to by being a very visible sex worker online what are these objections like and how have you addressed them in the past or how do you look at addressing their object objections yeah the objections are typically something like this is damaging society in some way or it's like an addiction that is like hurting your psyche it's like damaging your ability to bond to pair bond to have intimacy to love and these don't feel true based on my personal experience it's possible that they are true for some people like I don't want to just outright be like all of your criticisms are incorrect but there's also a thing which I feel that they miss which is like the trade-offs right like we have a lot of trade-offs from driving cars we get into accidents and die there's pollution and I'm not going to say that no nobody dies from driving cars but I'm also not going to be like we should get rid of cars like for any sort of like new thing that we have instituted there's going to be benefits to it and there's going to be cons and the question is not are there cons the question is are the benefits worth it and so I feel like a lot of the criticisms I get are missing that they're like oh well there's cons we should stop the cons and I'm like okay yes there's there's cons but I'm not sure that like doing something that ruins the benefits is like worth it like a lot of people watch porn for a reason porn has been super beneficial to me in my life personally and I'm like I would be like pretty pissed if people got rid of it how so how has it been beneficial to you it's made me feel like less fucked up or something like I have like odd sexual desires and I study kinks right so like I talked to so many people who have odd sexual desires and the existence of porn sort of like validates this in a way can be like oh I'm not like weirded abnormal there are other people like me out there producing content for each other to make each other like happy and satisfied and that seems really wonderful are you more worried about the social threat from this sort of like quickly this this trad movement that's quickly gaining traction or are you more worried about the threat from politicians people like Josh Hawley who tend to really ride the wave of porn panic and and attempt to oftentimes spread lies and misinformation about sex trafficking and stuff like that are you more worried about the cultural threat or the governmental threat or do you see them as two sides of the same coin they work in tandem right like governments make laws based off of cultural pressure often but if I had to compare them I would say I'm more afraid of the people that hold the power and so this sounds like the politicians I'm okay with cultural movements as long as they don't use force in them like I'm okay with people genuinely arguing hey I think this is harmful for you like I'm down to have this discussion I'm down for you to make like a strong movement that sweeps the land but I am not okay with you making laws that prevent me from doing what I feel is good for me like that is the border here this is what like the respect of freedom is so I'm fine with the culture but like the thing is I just at this point don't trust the culture to be able to still respect freedoms that people may disagree with do you see attention between the fact that so much of the tech crowd is kind of a huge fan of yours and seems generally interested in in some of these pro-sex work ideas but then there's also this interesting almost trad wave that's sweeping a lot of that to me I sort of sometimes see the same people celebrating some things but almost heralding the sort of impending cultural crackdown yeah I'm glad that I exist for this or something like like I've had a couple people tell me that I changed their perception of sex workers like oh I didn't know sex workers could be smart like I've heard that phrase a couple times from different people and so I think there's some sort of like humanizing that I'm doing and I'm bringing to it and like maybe that this is sort of like helping provide some balance to the wave of trade coming through I bet I don't know the best I can do is just be honest and wait what's an assumption people make about your work or your career trajectory that you dislike or you wish they wouldn't make well there's a lot of those I really don't like that people think that I'm doing it just to be edgy I really deeply am curious and weird and it feels very true and organic to me and people from the outside often see what I'm doing and think wow she's like like deliberately trying to provoke reactions and people and there's not much more to it in a world where Ayla makes the rules what types of cultural norms would you like to see surrounding how we think about sex and or how sex is regulated or perhaps deregulated generally I prefer like individual autonomy over like any sort of regulation there so if like if you want to go sell your body on the sex market go for it good for you I would prefer people to be like a little bit more flexible about how they think about sexual trauma like be not necessarily that you're trying to tell people that they are not traumatized but rather that you're more open to the idea that maybe you don't have to be traumatized there's a lot more flexibility for actually finding out the way people genuinely feel about their sexual experiences before trying to tell them how they should be feeling about it feels like a great norm to me what are your greatest hopes and fears for the future of sex either the future of sex work or the future of our cultural norms around sex I'm pretty hopeful about it like our trajectory so far has been towards greater sexual permission and like likely there's going to be up and down waves as we get better about it and in the short term it may in fact get worse but I'm pretty optimistic for it overall like sexual permission comes out of like losing consequences for sex we no longer get pregnant why don't we have sex which is incredible unless we want to throughout all of human history if you have sex it makes a baby and pretty scary it makes sense that we had a bunch of like fucked up rules to try and govern that but we no longer have that and now for the first time humanity is like we can fuck without babies and it's leading to some really weird stuff and like to some like negative outcomes too like if you just sort of release a pressure on a population you get like a whole bunch of things some positive some negative and so yeah there's some like possible really negative outcomes that might come from this especially with people's reaction to it like people are not sort of like evolutionary like in a physical sense like ready for there to be like a whole bunch of sex happening all the time with whoever you want you know like the the sex utopia or something which which makes sense it's reasonable but like a lot of people have backlash to this by like maybe imposing like draconian laws that are like supposedly meant to protect women you know while simultaneously victimizing them I'm thinking of like Joe Biden's like violence against women act and stuff like that attempts to protect women who are victims of domestic violence but ends up actually inviting the police and all sorts of domestic altercations in a manner that sometimes doesn't actually help and I think that this is an exact a great example of a theme which is like oh we're starting to see a negative outcome and we try in our sort of like incompetent the good good intentioned way to try to implement some sort of law to fix it but it's just like a series of like band-aids on on it like a pretty deep problem and usually I think that problems are better left to sort of like sort themselves out if you if you can do that like without like creating any force on it and what are ways in which you think the coming sex utopia will actually be wonderful yeah I would love people to be able to get their needs met when they need to like I think the Institute of Monogamy is great for some reasons and pretty misleading in others like like I mentioned earlier people go into monogamy without fully understanding that they're going to have to spend a life you know like sexually tied to just this partner and that people change really drastically and we have no affordance no room for people to try to get their needs met in that sort of situation so I'm hoping in the future we are much more like flexible and understanding about this sort of thing that we sort of decouple like a abnormal sexual behavior from threat like oh you can do this thing that is not like standard accepted and like bad things are not going to happen like I'm I hope that we as a culture will sort of like actually like feel that hit us in a deep way and then move according to that do you think that will happen I suspect so I don't I assuming that we don't all die in some sort of horrific AI extinction like it might take a couple centuries but I suspect we're moving in that direction yeah that would be really sad if the AI extinction happened before the sexual utopia yes thank you so much for talking to reason yeah thank you