 I thought it would honestly be really funny if I read my blog post naked. That's writer Kathy Reisenwitz. On the day that she sat down for an interview with Reason, she had been posting photos and videos to the website OnlyFans for about two weeks. One of the goals that I have for My OnlyFans is to get more people exposed to my writing. I've been writing about sex for a long time. My blog is called Sex in the State, and I am very big on sex positive feminism, which holds that sex is inherently morally neutral. OnlyFans is a social network like Instagram or YouTube, except the creators get to charge for their content. Nudity is both a loud and a common feature. And I think there's also this kind of dualism where you're like that kind of girl or you're not that kind of girl, like you're either someone who makes money from, you know, their brain or their body. And I think that's dumb. So when I saw some women who I respect intellectually start their OnlyFans, I thought that's a trend I like to see. It's a thing I want to be part of. It's a thing I'm curious about. And so I gave it a whirl. OnlyFans is catching on during the COVID-19 quarantine. The company told Forbes that it's getting 150,000 new users a day. It's a relatively straightforward way to make a little money from erotic photos and videos. I'm experimenting. So I posted videos of like me torquing in a thong, you know, just like pictures of my butt in lingerie, pictures of my butt without lingerie. You know, I'm still trying to figure out like what exactly I wanted What Ryzenwitz and new OnlyFans users are engaging in lives under the big umbrella that covers sex work. Though OnlyFans has gotten some mainstream attention during COVID-19. A number of sex workers found their way to the site and websites like it years ago. It's just another tool for navigating a world that stigmatizes and outlaws parts of their work. But it's also a milestone in the story of how sex workers use the Internet's many technological devices to thwart middlemen and vice police to apply their trade in safer and more autonomous ways. So many more women are able to be their own producers now. Constance Penley is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In the early 1990s, she and her colleagues sought to give pornography the same study as other mediums in the film and media studies department. Since then, she's taught a porn 101 class and researched its history and importance to culture. With the rise of camming, there's been an extraordinary power shift in the industry away from studios, away from bigger producers, the bigger agents, distributors. And now it's much more in the hands of people who may perform in adult industry films. But that's not the main part of their living. Do you know anything about the history of webcam? Is there like a... I am the living history of webcam. No, but truly, I mean, I was doing analog webcam at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco, it was like 2009. Susie Q's career tracks what the very transition Penley has been writing about. She started her career at the Lusty Lady Theater, a strip club owned by strippers. It was the job that I got right out of the recession. I had my liberal arts degree in hand and I was no longer going to put up with retail and things got a lot better. People literally walked in off the streets and opened a door, put a dollar in the slot and saw my naked body and we had a conversation through glass. But the peep show was failing. We weren't getting the money. We were not hitting the numbers. We were all making like just above minimum wage aside from what we can hustle from our individual like private shows. Then a pornographic website called kink.com was looking for webcam performers. I was one of the first generation of kink live girls. You would get scheduled, you had a PA on set, so you had a full kink.com set. There was like the Bordello that had like a cow skull in it, a stripper pole. There was the medical set. It was a whole deal and it was a completely unsustainable business model. So that shut down. Leaner sites came, but the payouts weren't always high enough to make it a priority for performers. Meanwhile, Susie Q saw the rise of social media platforms in real time happening all around her in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Most of my clients were Silicon Valley tech industry folks. I had a podcast. I was really interested in this intersection between technology and sex work. Then in 2011, a new app debuted in the App Store. Snapchat was the first platform we had that had content that would disappear, that you could kind of eat. And it was so illicit, like you just wanted to send a dick pic. It just it begged for it, right? Podcasting was another technology with low barriers to entry that allowed Susie Q to interact with her fans and get paid directly. I had a way for people to have a recurring monthly charge on PayPal that would then support the podcast or get them access to premium snap feed or whatever. Then came mainstream camera sites that offered similar autonomy, allowing performers to keep about 70 to 80% of what they earned through tips and private messaging. Part of Susie Q's webcam business is done through a website called Model Centro, which owns fancentro. It generally works the same way as only fans. But Model Centro really created essentially the adult industry's square space and the ability to just plug and play your own site where you could feature your own content. And then users can access that via their smartphones. That really changed the game. Camming is just one part of a sex worker's business. Performers also do studio films, stripping, escorting, making appearances, selling merchandise and even creating Amazon wish lists. The more eyeballs means the more popularity and the more popularity means the higher the rates across the board. There are ways in which the workers in the adult industry have to be even more creative in their precarity than a lot of other people because of the stigmatization, because of the legal status and all of that. But for artists, sometimes constraints can push you to be more creative. Instead of studio lighting, cameras may use a desk lamp. Instead of a set, they may use their messy studio apartment. They must choose between a stationary laptop camera shot or go handheld on an iPhone. Currently, right now, while we're in lockdown, I feel like everyone is creating their like auteur porno science projects. We're all at home being like, OK, what do I got? I've got the cell phone. I've got this makeup brush. Yes, we're doing an ASMR makeup brush. Sure, that's instruction for you today. You know, it's just like what it's such a creative challenge. Sex workers have always had to be creative to survive. Before the mainstream Internet, sex work was done mostly on the street through pimps and was dangerous. But when sex workers got online, they were able to cut out the middleman, screen clients and create a world for themselves that was more lucrative and safer. Only fans and websites like it are the latest chapter in that story where sex workers get to decide whom they let into their world. You can create even more authenticity because you are speaking to someone. You are really letting that person on your own terms, of course, completely on your own terms into your life, into your creative space. If I go live for only my fans, it's wonderful. It's just like hanging out with the gang. Hey, guys, I got this new body wash. Let's see if let's see. You know, it's funny. I've been on social media. I'm like super active on Twitter, have been for a really long time. Only fans is like the nicest place on the Internet for me right now. Like, buy a lot. People come to have a good time. Like, they come to say nice things and be nice to me and each other as far as I can tell. Like, I get compliments. I get money. Like, it's it's nice. We can make sex what we want it to be and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing shameful about that. It's a beautiful thing to make meaning of our own sex lives.