The Craigslist ad was seeking someone to sext on OnlyFans. It sounded good to me: remote, well paid, creative, and sexy. In the spring of 2021, I had just received my last severance check from the media company I’d been laid off from, and just paid my deposit for grad school. I had just turned 25. It could be fun, I thought, to pretend to be someone else. (Along those lines, I'm using a pseudonym here.) Carefree, young, horny, hairless. The kind of girl who was constantly masturbating—not using a Hitachi in a vegan co-op, but touching herself in an athletic, graceful way. The kind of girl who always cums during sex, multiple times. The kind of girl who is always DTF, especially if it’s with you. For my interview with the model I dressed sharp and wore a lot of eyeliner. She was fresh faced, pretty in an approachable way. She smiled and asked me thoughtful questions about my writing. Then she offered me the job on the spot. I said yes.
For three months, I worked a 6 a.m. shift, pretending to be a fun-loving girl next door. OnlyFans markets itself as a website for all kinds of creators, but in practice it’s a marketplace for basically any kind of porn you can imagine—a highly-interactive PornHub. Creators post sexy pictures of themselves and entice users to buy expensive pay-per-view content, or sext with them. That’s where I came in: top creators simply get too many messages for one person to reply to. There is a whole cottage industry for ghostwriting OnlyFans chats. Some of it is run by enormous branding agencies and staffed by labor offshore in countries like the Philippines. My job was run directly by my boss, no middleman. All of the chatters I knew lived in North America. Some of them did other kinds of sex work on top of ghostwriting on OnlyFans. Others were like me and were just good at pretending to be horny online.
But obviously there was a learning curve. You’d think after spending my adolescence catfishing men on ChatRoulette, it would come naturally, but most of my sexts sounded kind of ESL, at least at first. Slavic, maybe. Baby you make me horny. Baby I am so wet for your penis. Baby I want to ride your cock like it is a mechanical bull. Baby cum on my perfect little face. Daddy I am sooo wet rn 4 u <3. Suck on mommy’s titties!! I bet your cock is literally so small lmao. I bet ur a virgin because u have no game haha. Oh my god am I making you hard? That’s sooo awkward. Can I see? Pretty please? 😈😈😈😈😈😈
I was better when they asked me personal questions. Like what I liked to do in the morning (hot yoga then masturbate in my gym’s sauna, eat my bff’s pussy), or what I was reading, or what my interests were (hiking, going to the beach with my friend whose pussy I like to eat, making awesome healthy meals). Inevitably, stuff from my own life seeped in. I was online for hours, and had to make it fun for myself—trying to convince men to read Donald Antrim, suggesting they check out the Au Pairs. But the main thing I tried to make clear was that I was almost always fucking, thinking about fucking, or trying to fuck. That way you’d know that if you just so happened to need a little help with that morning wood, I was totally there, in a cool down to earth way. Just as long as you paid.
The guys I talked to didn’t really care too much for the details, but they did help move things along. They wanted to get off talking to the hot early 20-something girl they thought they were messaging. They wanted to see her tits, hear her cum for them, rate their cock. What I also provided was a girlfriend experience. They wanted someone who could listen. They’d blow entire paychecks so they could see and hear all of her and fall in love in the process. I was there to facilitate it, on demand. The money that rolled into my account was perhaps better than you’d expect, but definitely not enough to cover my rent, so I cobbled together other freelance gigs on the side. In the meantime, the sound of my boss fingering herself in the videos I would send out started to sound like white noise.
I started to get regulars. They were janitors and night porters, guys just out of a graveyard ICU shift, or at gas station convenience stores with bad lighting and days-old hot dogs on a rotating grill. They were virgins. Teachers. Lawyers. A lot of them were probably lying. Their wife was a bitch and they liked talking to someone who could really listen. And it totally helped that the special someone was young, and those perfect tits didn’t hurt, either. They drank beers, margaritas, espressos, cans of Rock Star, a tall glass of whole milk. Sometimes there were pictures. Long day at work today, beer time! They sent me videos of themselves cumming into crusty fleshlights. When I do this, picture that it’s your tight little cunt. They asked me if I thought they had a good sized cock. I’d always say yes yes yes, so good, unless they had a humiliation kink. It’s really small, how do you fuck with that thing, so sad. Send message.
I’d do this while I sat on the couch of my Brooklyn apartment, while my roommate slept. I drank shitty coffee, messaged hot girls on dating apps that promised alternative lifestyle choices, texted the ex-boyfriend I was sleeping with again, played music in the background off of my laptop speakers. It’s so nice talking to a real girl who is so beautiful, they’d say while I picked at my nail beds, Usually on OnlyFans all the girls on here are actually like some fat dude who lives in his mom’s basement. I can tell you’re real.
My shifts dragged. It’s the kind of job you can’t take a real break from. I had to be in the zone in case someone wanted to buy one of my boss’s blowjob POV videos, JOIs, or full length pornos. I never got turned on watching her, but I sometimes couldn’t look away. She was an actress, a performer who knew her angles. The way the bluish fluorescent lights pooled onto her face when she came. The way her eyes rolled back. The way her lips parted and how this somehow implied gratitude. When the guy she was fucking put his finger in her mouth and she giggled her soprano giggle. She was playing the part so perfectly. Porn is like this. All artifice, carefully choreographed.
But sometimes real-life sex is like this, too. I’ve been an actress in my own life. I’ve said the right things, made the right noises, asked for the right stuff. I’ve felt like a trained seal, adorably jumping through a hula hoop to the tremendous applause of Floridians in plastic Sea World ponchos. I’m almost always someone else in sex. Kinky, funny, slutty. Of course I’ll touch myself in your Prius while we cruise two negronis deep down the highway. Of course I’m totally down to do it on the bathroom sink—it’s just like that Kanye song! Of course you can put your thumb in my ass— it’s your property after all. In my sexual career I’ve been a confidant, a bestie, a facsimile of a perfect girlfriend, even and especially when I have been belligerently in love.
Most PopularI haven’t felt particularly liberated in being so performative. I’ve felt the most vulnerable and real when I’ve used my vibrator alone in my bed while my boyfriend sat in another room, reading a Bookforum. Perhaps that’s what made me good at the job. I know that sex isn’t often sexy. That we are the most real about our desires when we are alone. And that catfishing men on the Internet to get them to pay for sex they weren’t actually having is a business transaction. It is not hot. It is a job, and not a job that will make you feel like a glamorous Gloria Steinem in a Playboy Bunny costume. Sex work is of course still work, and in the end this was not very far from sitting in a cubicle in a grey, fluorescent-lit call center sending customer service updates.
And my boss was a boss, which meant I sometimes felt very frustrated by her. I didn’t intend to quit when I did. I think I had just had it one day. I was going off to grad school in a few weeks, I was tired of being chained to my computer when I should’ve been doing something like going for a run or literally finding a better job. Summer was ending. I had to pull the sweaters out of my closet. My ex-boyfriend and I had decided to make it work. I finished my shift, texted my boss, told her it was great working for her but I was moving on. She thanked me for my hard work and told me to use her as a reference. It was just a job. People quit jobs all the time.
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