Sexual Gentrification: An Internet Sex Workers Built

Sex workers were early adopters of new technologies, pioneering and spearheading the use of new advertising mechanisms and financial technologies, populating platforms and building up their commercial user bases. Despite the integral part sex workers played in constituting the Internet, sex workers are now being deliberately excluded from services, platforms, and economies as part of widescale digital gentrification, sexual sanitization, and displacement.

This panel explores the proactive and unique role of sex workers as digital innovators and the grave consequences of sexual gentrification on sex worker safety and livelihood. 

Time: Tuesday, April 6th, 12 – 1 pm EST

Panelists: Sinnamon Love, Daisy Ducati, and Melissa Gira Grant

Moderated by: Danielle Blunt at Hacking//Hustling

About the panelists:

Sexual Gentrification: An Internet Sex Workers Built

April 6, 2021

Rachel Kuo: We are live and recording, everyone. But we can give two minutes for people to come in for all of our participants.

Danielle Blunt: Thank you, Rachel.

Lorelei Lee: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the second event in  our two-week long conference “Informal,  Criminalized, Precarious: Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers.” 

My name is Lorelei Lee and I’m a sex worker activist, writer and organizer, I’m a co-founder of the Disabled Sex Workers Coalition, a founding member of both the Upstate New York Sex Workers Coalition and Decrim Massachusetts, a researcher and analyst with Hacking//Hustling and a justice catalyst fellow at the Cornell Gender Justice Clinic. 

The “Sex Workers Organizing Against Barriers” conference is co-facilitated by the Disabled Sex Workers Coalition, Hacking//Hustling, Cornell Law School Gender Justice Clinic, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 

I am so appreciative of our conference co-organizers, Rachel Kuo, Danielle Blunt, Zahra Stardust and Tiffany Tso as well as of our conference co-sponsors, The Berger International Legal Studies Program, The Dorothea S. Clarke Program in Feminist Jurisprudence, The Cornell Labor Law Clinic, The Cornell Student Chapters of Outlaw, National Lawyers Guild, Women’s Law Coalition and the Black Law Students Association, Justice Catalyst, the Red Umbrella Fund and the Asian American Feminist Collective. Special thanks also to Livia Foldes, Naomi Lauren, Yves Nguyen, and Alexis Briggs for all of your work and support, as I think you all can probably tell, this conference was born out of a lot of collective work and a lot of collective dreaming. 

Thank you also to all of you who have donated via our Eventbrite page, our cosponsors and our public donations ensure that we can follow one of our core ethics in this organizing, which is to pay people for their labor, in particular sex worker organizers who do so much work that is unrecognized and unfunded. 

For each of our conference panels, closed captioning is available and the recordings and transcripts will be available afterward on hackinghustling.org, where you can also find the full events schedule. A recording of today’s panel will also be available afterward on the Berkman Klein Center’s events page. 

Our community agreements are adapted from the Asian American Feminist Collective, Brave Space, Collective Sex, AltDiv Hummingbirds and By Us For Us and are as follows; first, to bring in our histories and to speak from our own experiences, second, to be committed to each other’s  collective learning and growing, third, to be open to learning, forth, to respect the diversity of  our identities, which particularly for this conference, includes not assuming the identities of  organizers and activists for whom sharing every element of our lived experience is not always safe, fifth, to practice not using ableist language, sixth, to prioritize care for ourselves and each  other, this last agreement in particular, is a disability justice issue and both our panelists and  our audience members should feel free to do whatever is needed to care for yourselves during  this conference, including standing up, moving around, lying down or even disengaging from  any of the events at any time. 

We are very grateful to have panelists Zooming in from most continents on the earth, all of them except Antarctica and many of our panelists are Zooming in from North America or Australia, where we are living on stolen land that is always and still indigenous land. To learn more about the land you are living on, you can look at the resources collected by the Native Governance Center, which are available at nativegov.org. 

Today’s panel is called Sexual Gentrification Online: An Internet Sex Workers Built and is the first of three tech lunch panels looking at issues of sex work in technology. The second tech lunch panel on tech barriers to organizing will be tomorrow at noon  Eastern time and the third tech lunch panel on designing sex worker liberatory futures   will be on Thursday at noon Eastern time. 

For the third panel, if any of you are signed up for it, it’s co-hosted by the Berkman Klein Center and you will need to register for their link in addition to ours so Rachel  will drop that link in the  chat now and also if you have already signed up to the event bright,  we’ll email you a link to sign up for Thursday’s panel to make sure that you have access through Zoom. Our event today will feature approximately minutes of conversation with  our speakers and then we’ll open up the floor for Q&A if we have time, and we’ll answer questions that you have. You should feel free to put them into the chat or the Q&A throughout the hour. So with that, I would like to introduce our amazing moderator and  organizer of this event. Danielle Blunt is a New York City-based professional dominatrix and cofounder of Hacking/Hustling a collective of sex workers and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt state surveillance and violence facilitated by equitable access to technology. Blunt is on the advisory board of Berkman Klein’s initiative for the representative First Amendment and is one of the recipients of the EFF electronic frontier foundation Pioneer award. So take it away Blunt. 

Danielle Blunt: Thank you so much for all of your labor and love that’s gone into organizing and facilitating this conference together. I’m deeply appreciative. So let’s get started.

Despite being early adopters and innovators of new technologies, sex workers are being excluded from services, platforms and economies as part of a widescale digital gentrification sexual sanitization and displacement. Sex workers are frequently removed, obscured or otherwise restricted from spaces, technologies and resources that are accessible to our nonsex-working peers. Technology, surveillance, and criminalization impacts so much of sex workers’ lives. The way that sex work is policed on the streets both through racist transphobic

policing tactics and condoms as evidence parallel how it’s policed online through content moderation, shadow banning, and denial of access to financial technologies. 

Sex-working people who often live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities survive or don’t in a constant state of surveillance. This panel explores the proactive and unique role that sex workers as digital innovators and the grave consequences of sexual gentrification on sex worker safety and livelihood, and so on today’s panel Sexual Gentrification Online: An Internet that Sex Workers Built we have Melissa Gira Grant, Sinnamon Love, and Daisy Ducati.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer covering justice at the New Republic. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. She was a senior staff writer at The Appeal as well as a contributing writer at The Village Voice and Pacific Standard. Her future reporting has been published by Buzzfeed News and The Guardian, and her commentary and criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times book forum, and The New York Book Reviews — the New York Review of Books — Her essays are collected in The Best Sex Writing, the Feminist Utopia Project, and Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence, #MeToo. She lives in New York.

We’ll then hear from Sinnamon Love who is a kinky bi poly grown-up, a not safe for work content creator, an AVN and Urban X Awards Hall of Fame inductee. Sinnamon is a 26-year veteran sex worker and the founder of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, an organization dedicated to the dismantling the harmful impacts of racism and wage disparity in the adult industry through financial assistance, mental health and wellness resources, and education. You can follow Sinnamon at singleinbrooklyn.com.

And then we will hear from Daisy Ducati, who is a veteran sex worker and adult industry activist with a BA in Interpersonal Communication. Daisy has explored many facets of the adult industry over the last decade from performing live and online to producing content and events as well as being a founding member of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective. 

First up we will hear from Melissa and then from Sinnamon and then from Daisy and then we invite any questions from the audience. Whenever you’re ready, Melissa.

Melissa Gira Grant: Hey everyone. This is wild. First of all, thank you Blunt. Thank you Lorelei. Two of the people that I would not be thinking about these things in the same way without getting to work with them.

It was about three years ago today — exactly three years ago today that Backpage was seized by the Department of Justice, and I think some of the people that I’ve seen showing up in the chat were probably hanging out online with us that day just trying to process in real time what it meant to to lose that website. It was also just a couple of days after Congress had voted to pass SESTA/FOSTA, which hadn’t gone into effect yet, and despite that even though you know the– President Trump hadn’t signed that legislation yet Backpage was taken offline because of prosecution which might sound kind of pedantic, but I think it’s worth emphasizing because a lot of the reporting around this and a lot of the ways we’ve some people even the community have talked about this is that SESTA/FOSTA took Backpage offline, and the reality is that was the justification to pass SESTA/FOSTA. Backpage was taken offline anyway, and I’m starting there one because you know this is the three year anniversary of that, two Hacking/Hustling as a group came out of a reaction to that moment — both SESTA/FOSTA and the loss of Backpage, and also because I feel like we’re still living in the aftershocks of that moment. It’s not entirely clear that we will go back to an internet that is friendly to sex worker advertising not that it was ever that friendly, but compared to how things felt in 2018 I think things feel even more precarious for people now so I just wanted to acknowledge that and start there. 

This talk is something that I actually started working on in 2014 when my book came out so it’s kind of a pre-history of the sex worker internet and it takes us from sort of the beginning of red light districts in the U.S. which is a way of segregating sex work and physical space to the ways that the internet reflects basically a hundred years of trying to separate and segregate sex workers from everyone else, so let’s see if I can actually make slides work here. 

There… we… go, so this talk is called “w4m” in a nod to Craigslist’s erotic service section rest in peace the end of the american red light district. 

And that’s how to find me if you want to follow me on Twitter or drop me a note after this and I’ll show that slide again at the end. 

So this is a photo that some folks may have seen or recognized. It’s an image from one of the legal red light districts in our history. This is Storyville in New Orleans, and this photo was taken in 1912 by a photographer named EJ Bullock, and he was taking photos of women who worked in Storyville’s legal brothels, but it’s not entirely clear like what this photo is — like this could be a photo for an ad, this might be some like how somebody tried to entice customers, or it could be a photo of somebody resting after work, it could be like a completely staged photo that has nothing to do with anything. No one wore those particular stripe stockings when they were doing work or hanging out, but it looks cool. 

But I share it because I feel like we have so little physical documentation of what this very brief time in our history — the legal red light district — looked like and I think the fact that this is so ambiguous tells us a lot about what the whole idea of a legal red light district even means, so kind of contrary to the the mythology around a term like the red light district you know you may have heard of things like the red light districts of ancient Rome or you know the red light districts of like Europe before you know the before prostitution was formally legalized in places like Amsterdam or in Germany. But the reality is the term red light district actually first appears in English in print in the United States, and it’s really not as far back as I would have originally thought. 

So this is from the Sandusky Register, which is a local paper in Ohio. This is from 18.. the 1880s or 1890s, and the article in which the term red light district first appears is in relationship to the Salvation Army. So the Salvation Army as far as I can tell from this is in Louisville essentially like trying to rescue sex workers, and so the the way that we first even like get this term in usage at least you know in popular usage is to talk about the activities of people who are trying to do something to sex workers not something that sex workers themselves are doing. Not a term that necessarily even they use but fundamental to it is this idea of segregation. So this is saying the Salvation Army is limited to this particular zone, these particular streets, and they aren’t supposed to go anywhere else, and I think the subtext of that also is like we kind of don’t want to deal with you Salvation Army coming here to rescue prostitutes. At least that’s how I read it.

This is a photo from the 1970s. I love this photo because it’s from Boston which also had a legal red light district, but it was a very experimental kind of legal red light district. So in the 70s obscenity laws across the U.S. started to relax in different cities and different states experimented with, you know creating segregated neighborhoods for adult bookstores and peep shows and strip clubs, and in Boston that neighborhood got the nickname the combat zone. This is Cody Lee, she worked at the Mouse Trap Cabaret, and at that time in 1975 the mayor of Boston did this midnight tour around the city. His name was Kevin White, and he brought reporters with him on this tour. He went to strip clubs, and he told reporters that my idea of a city has room for these places, which I cannot imagine any U.S mayor saying today. Then it didn’t last very long. 

This sort of like revisiting of the idea of having like a segregated place where sex work happens in cities once we get to the 80s once we get into the AIDs crisis once we get into sort of massive gentrification in cities. We see the end of this era so even though it has this very particular context in which the ideal red-light district came to be in the United States in a very small period of time when it was actually legal it remains with us, right. You see the remnants in certain cities of certain neighborhoods where sex work was pushed to the outskirts or you know certain blocks that just still have that reputation of being where sex work happened, but the idea that that sex workers use the city in a particular way to attract customers — that’s coded and sort of not meant to be understood by everybody goes back much further. 

So this is an image from a project that I was part of called The Aphrodite Project, and it’s a reference to these shoes or a reference to a practice the Greek prostitutes used to attract customers they would — on the bottoms of their sandals — they would score a word or their initials or a message, so that when they walked it would leave a trail and customers would know what that particular trail was they could follow it to where they worked. It sounds like so completely rudimentary, but I like — I think of this when I think of all of the different ways that sex workers have tried to exist in public space when they weren’t wanted. And all like the coded ways that sex workers use public space including the internet to find people and the signals that only those people would necessarily understand. It’s essentially advertising but in a stealthy way.

To go back to New Orleans, this is what advertisements would have looked like then so even though you have a legal red light district, and you could go there and potentially meet people   you know they also advertised in these blue books is what they were called, and here’s one of the sample advertisements. You know, they’re not illustrated so you won’t see those like photos that we saw at the beginning, but they would travel even far outside of New Orleans. I think of them as almost sort of like you know a tourism guide of New Orleans. Whether or not everybody who had one of these books even ever went to a red light district, it’s a kind of an artifact, and it’s a way of talking about sex work that was accessible to people who wouldn’t ever necessarily go. 

Moving ahead in time, I think this is probably the very first kind of sex work ad I ever saw from like the yellow pages or whatever. I couldn’t find like the exact one I would have seen in the 80s, but I feel like this is pretty representative. But the ones that I remember seeing did not have photos, they had this like really cheesy clip art like those lips. 

And then moving up to Backpage you know this is a lineage of ads this is nothing new. The idea of advertising sex work even though it feels like every 10 years there’s a new sort of moral panic about it as if this isn’t something that sex workers have been doing forever and as if it isn’t something that has been a political fight forever, and it’s as if it’s not something that like we’ve even thought about in terms of how we design our cities and our neighborhoods and who is allowed to go where. I blurred out the vast majority of things in this ad because I think one of the things that was so unique about Backpage, and you can see this is an ad that was posted in 2014 is that you could disappear, you know. You could take the ad down when you didn’t want to be working anymore, and it made for some people who wanted to work in this way. You could work in a very ephemeral way, and particularly now when I think we — we know that sex workers ads and online presences are so surveilled that there’s law enforcement technology that is even more sophisticated than we knew in 2014. The idea of being able to disappear from the internet I think is something very powerful and something that feels honestly impossible, and when I think about why Backpage was a target I think that that’s part of the reason why. It gave people that power to not only work on their own terms but to not have to like be known forever to the internet as a sex worker, be known forever to people in their community as a sex worker.

I started writing about this stuff around the time this story would have appeared in 2008. It was around the same time that I was also still doing sex work, and the websites that I used and my community was using were under a huge political attack, and Craigslist was kind of the beginning of that attack, and one of the ways I think that it was made a very powerful attack is it started talking about the websites as if they were like a person or a place. So in this case, Chicago — Cook county of Illinois that’s in Chicago. Their sheriff Tom Dart who’s still out there and still active and still fighting sex work ads. He describes Craigslist as a pimp, which is kind of bizarre right like how can a website be a pimp? So you see that kind of language start to proliferate to make something that’s pretty neutral just like a communications platform sound nefarious if not exploitative and violent, and at the time of this ad or time of the story Craigslist didn’t even charge for ads. You know the reason they started charging for ads is because law enforcement wanted them to be able to track who was advertising. This is on the left the taller gentleman that’s Jim Buckmaster who’s the CEO of Craigslist and standing next to him is Richard Blumenthal who at the time was the Attorney General of Connecticut. Now he is a senator and was one of the major architects behind SESTA/FOSTA, and this is the story. I wrote about this at the time the headline was not entirely my choice. I think getting sex work into a headline in 2008 was still a struggle so what we have is Craigslist CEO not a pimp just enormously helpful to sex workers. You know the idea that anybody who would help sex workers even if they had never even intended to. Right like Craigslist wasn’t invented to make sex work advertising possible, but then they end up sort of getting wet. You know carried up in the stigma against it and made suspicious I think in this case because they were such a neutral platform. You know if you went on Craigslist to look for a sex work ad you would find it adjacent to apartment ads, other job ads things like that, and I think that was another reason that they were such a target is because it sort of made sex work adjacent to anything else that people might be doing online. 

Right, that’s very different than a red light district where this is a segregated space. This is something that said sex work has a space alongside all other kinds of jobs people might be looking for, all other kinds of services people might be looking for. This panic of like is a website a brothel? Is a website a pimp? What are we gonna call it? Like this is the New York Post deeming hookers turn homes into brothels on Airbnb which I guess means that if you’re a sex worker, and you rent an airbnb whether or not you’re doing sex work there you have turned it into a brothel. I guess just by virtue of showing up. And what even is a brothel anymore? I think this is a very — this is one of the other reasons that this ad panic is so powerful is because we’re in a moment of disruption. In the 2010s you know the idea that there would be physical brothels anymore was you know not what it had been and police now didn’t have physical spaces necessarily to police so the idea of like trying to find sex workers by I guess tracking Airbnb ads   was something that police had to adapt to, and you know didn’t have to adapt to, right? Like I don’t think that anybody was necessarily even bothering anybody but there was a whole wave of stories that were just sort of like unsuspecting Airbnb hosts realizes that their apartment was a brothel which it just is a deeply stigmatizing thing and and as a result sex workers were getting their accounts suspended whether or not they were even working out of where they were staying, so that’s a very different sort of way of like thinking of how sex work is visible. 

How technology drives the visibility of sex work from you know something like Times Square which you know I think of cities as kind of technologies. I think of spaces like Times Square where you had sex work adjacent to you know low rent apartments adjacent to theater adjacent to the New York Times. To have sex work in the center of our cities, in the center of our lives is something I think that’s really scary to people, but what drove sex work out of Times Square you know the moral panic that was sort of similar to the one that took down Backpage, the one that took down Craigslist. It was about money also right, it was about politics, it was about turning this space through gentrification into something that was seen as more profitable and more desirable for the city of New York so it happens hand in hand. It’s never just the police, it’s never just the city and real estate interests. Police become an arm of those interests, and those interests end up engaging in policing, right.

That’s what we see online now you know where you look at content moderation which has the effect of gentrifying the internet by pushing sex workers out, but the blinds are so blurry between content moderation and policing community management it’s very hard to say without actually saying what your values are. Who belongs in a community to say what that feels like if you feel like you’re being pushed out of a community that doesn’t feel like community management that feels like policing that feels like punishment and surveillance, and this surveillance is real. I think that most people probably that I saw showing up in chat this is not news, but like the more that these low-cost ad sites became impossible to access the more that sex workers had to build a sort of persistent online identity the easier it became to be surveilled and the easier it became to just sort of for law enforcement or websites to just constantly associate you with that identity whether or not you wanted to be known that way. You know, you may have used your Paypal account once to get a deposit and as far as they are concerned you’re a sex worker forever, and you shouldn’t have an account just to use. 

One example, I talked to some of the investigators involved in one of the operation cross country ops around this time in Colorado, and you know this was the first time in 2014 that I heard of not just the ad sites being targeted, but in this case it was a verification site. I can’t remember which one it was but it was a for where essentially you could only even get in if somebody else vouched for you, and you were verified, and they had discovered that, so now we have police expanding their network even further, right. It may have been t-401 I’m not sure which one it was but it I think is what kicked this into another level of panic within the community, and one that we’re still sort of wrestling with. 
Which is now the ways that we work to keep each other safe now the knowledge that we’ve gathered to reduce harm that has become a vulnerability. That is something that’s exposing sex workers to policing and surveillance, and I don’t… This is old, but you know when you look at these two maps together this is the Eros ad map. This is just where people are right like this isn’t necessarily a reflection of like where sex work is happening. It’s like this is where like population is but you see these things right like Polaris will put them out saying oh these are the the trafficking hot spots across the country, and it’s like that’s just that’s just where cities are, that’s just where people are sex workers are, anywhere people are, but it’s very powerful. I think to sort of raise this idea of like sex workers are all around you and isn’t that dangerous and don’t you have to protect yourself. So for me at the end of the day like this issue of gentrification the internet and sex work ends up having very little to do with technology. I think it’s about politics, it’s about values, it’s about do sex workers belong in our communities, and if you aren’t starting from that place that sex workers do belong in our communities you know whatever comes out the other end is going to feel like surveilling. It’s going to feel like policing whether or not that was the intention so I’m going to leave it there because everyone else has a million other amazing things to say. But thank you.

Danielle Blunt: Thank you so much, Melissa. Next up we have Sinnamon.

Sinnamon Love: Hello, hello. Yeah, thank you. That was so amazing, Melissa, to see some of that, the map to show where people are working.  

I lived in — You know, I was working in the industry back in 19… When I first started back in 1993,    I answered my first ad for figure modeling in the back of an LA Weekly, which also had ads for phone sex and strip clubs and all of the things, you know pre-Internet. We were advertising — people advertised in the newspaper, in the weeklies that would come out in the red boxes on the street corners. And I feel really fortunate to have been able to learn how to be a sex worker from other sex workers who were advertising in newspapers and how they had the opportunity to advertise in that way. 

It’s interesting to see how quality-of-life crimes in the 90s impacted the migration from the newspapers as well as the street-based workers to the Internet. People didn’t want  sex workers standing around in their neighborhoods, and they would get arrested for loitering or for working on the street. And so the newspapers allowed a certain segment of privileged populations to be able to advertise very cheaply, to be able to work, and later, the internet allowed people to move from — those who were able to move from the street and from the newspapers to the Internet and work more safely. 

The internet really allowed not just sites like Eros and Exotics and Backpage as well, really allowed for sex workers to be able to find independence and not need other people to –, you know, facilitators to book them, manage them, protect them from — bail them out, the ability to share information, to be able to —  sorry, there’s construction going on outside my window. It ‘s a little distracting. But the ability to be able to work independently, to screen your calls. Not that we weren’t doing screening prior to the internet. We were certainly screening calls from the newspapers, but the Internet really did allow you to access information in a way that we just didn’t have before. Being able to look up someone’s phone number, being able to look up someone’s address, being able to verify that the phone number someone was calling from was in fact the number to their office. These things were —  it was really a necessary component to being able to be safe. 

I think a lot about how the internet also allowed people to work when there was no work in their area, the ability to travel from a city where your look or your gender identity, your body, makeup might not be commercially viable in that city and being able to still work and make money. We know that every sex worker can tell you that sometimes the city that you are usually working in, you won’t make any money. And so being able to get on a plane or bus or train and be able to travel and make money someplace where you are appreciated for being you has been such an important part of the dynamic for sex workers as well. 

And also just it’s interesting and it’s funny looking at  those pictures of New York City prior to gentrification and it becoming Disney-fied, having  worked in a peep show booth in New York City in Times Square at one point in my life, and then later turning to webcaming, seeing how the modern-day webcam is really that peep show booth but placed online. There’s so much of what we do today that we can see in the ways in which sex workers work before. Working — being able to work independently as a phone sex operator as opposed to working in a phone sex mega facility on Sunset Boulevard and getting a paycheck from a company as opposed to doing it independently and just having someone take a  percentage from you has really shifted the ways in which sex workers have been able to gain and maintain independence. Because, there’s just so  much. 
Yes, I worked in a peep show booth in Times Square. My first trip to New York I worked in a big show booth for two weeks. But there are a lot of  — gosh, there’s so many ways that — so many things I want to talk about and I literally just stepped out of therapy before I came into this room  so it’s my head is a little swimming still. So forgive me for not having my thoughts together. I wanted to talk about some other things. Gosh, I want to talk about some other things, and I can’t think of what I’m going to talk about. I’m going to pass this to Daisy, and I think I will do much better in questions later. I think that’ll be a much easier transition for me today. 

Daisy Ducati: Hello. I am Daisy Ducati. I’ve been in the industry for almost a decade now, and I started out also working in a peep show. I worked at The Lusty Lady in San Francisco, and it was like a worker owned cooperative and we had a union as well. It was an incredible experience, but even there, we found out that someone from one of the larger Déjà Vu-owned clubs was sent in to supposedly help us as a management consultant to sort of aggregate our business and  help us do better. And ultimately cut a deal with our landlord to completely shut us down, so even there, we were dealing with attacks from all sides. 

I guess from there, I went into online sex work and adult film. Back when I first started, online friends didn’t exist and there were so few resources for independent online work. There were a couple of webcam sites and a couple of phone sex sites and promotion was a little more…Complicated. I’ve seen many, many, many sites come and go. There were times that one website would be my main source of income and then suddenly that website wouldn’t exist anymore. One of the things that I learned early on as a sex worker especially online sex worker is you absolutely have to cast a wide net because the job is just so precarious. There’s no real stability. There’s no real sureness. You kind of have to be prepared for the worst at all times, and that adds a lot of anxiety to the work  because you just really never know what your job is going to look like tomorrow. And it’s more than the regular anxiety of being an independent contractor and owning a business. You really just don’t know what is going to stand in your way. 

But even with Onlyfans recently, there was the situation with Bella Thorne where she promised things that weren’t necessarily delivered on and then because of that, people were upset that they lost their money and Onlyfans put into place new restrictions on how much we can charge for content and how much we can receive in a single tip, and that greatly affected a lot of people’s daily income that they survive off of. So we’re constantly subject to changes of terms of service and websites disappearing and resources completely disappearing. There was also a situation recently with Pornhub. A lot of people that are outside the industry don’t understand that some of us actually use Pornhub as a source of income as well as for advertising for our other revenue streams. And recently there was an attack on Pornhub, and it’s a good thing that  they’ve started to require accounts to be verified for age, and I think that’s awesome. However, their payment process was impacted and now no one can receive tips or sell content on Pornhub so it’s only free content allowed on Pornhub and there were many, many, many people that were making the majority of their income selling content and getting ad revenue and promoting themselves solely on Pornhub. You really never know what’s going to happen. There was actually an award show during that time that they were having and we were all expecting to stream during the award show and be able to receive tips, and we found out a day or two before the award show that we would no longer be able to receive tips through the website. So everything is just completely precarious at all times. It’s incredibly important to sort of spread yourself out if you’re going to be an online sex worker and work on many different sites and  promote yourself many different places. It makes the workload much greater because you can’t just focus on one thing, and you can’t just focus on one stream of income and create content and sell it on this one site and promote it on this one site because you just never know what’s going to change tomorrow. 

With social media, the terms of service is constantly changing. I remember when you used to be able to be nude on periscope. I remember sending tweets from my phone. I remember times when it was okay to advertise on Instagram as long as there was no nudity. And all of these things have changed in just my time in the industry. With Twitter, they have kind of mildly tightened up their terms of service and put some restrictions on what you are and are not  allowed to post. They still allow nudity. With Instagram, there have been tons and tons and tons of changes to their terms of service recently, and now they’re starting to target even advertising dancing performances and burlesque shows and a strip shows and there was a time where the hashtag stripper was completely shadow banned, and you  couldn’t search for stripper on Instagram. It’s incredibly difficult to even adhere to terms of service if it’s constantly changing to exclude more and more people. And then with shadow banning, it limits our audience and our reach on the internet, which in turn limits our income. If you post certain words or speak a certain way or talk about a certain topic, you can risk being shadow banned on any social media platform and then you risk completely limiting your audience income. And so you have to speak in coded ways for use in secret terms or spell things in strange ways in order to try to reach the audience that’s actually following you. If the algorithm catches on, you certainly aren’t reaching the people that have chosen to follow you. 

And it can be extremely stressful and extremely detrimental to one’s income. And even on Twitter and Instagram if you’re shadow banned you can be search banned so the people who are looking for you actively have an impossible time trying to find you. They have to type in your name exactly and sometimes your profile still doesn’t come up. And when you’re using social media to advertise your business or to reach the audience that pays your bills, it’s awful to be not exposed to the audience that is specifically looking for you. So it’s a challenge at every turn, and we never know what’s going to change, and we have to constantly be monitoring the terms of service for every platform. We have to constantly be monitoring the rules for websites that we’re on and our streams of income. 

There have also been times that websites simply disappear because of whatever. A lot of times adult platforms have issues with payment processors or another thing that happens is there’s problems with investors and suddenly the website has to shut down. It’s completely, completely precarious and out of our control entirely.  And if you are an online sex worker, you’re sort of just subject to the whims of what’s happening on the Internet and freely all you can do is adapt and move forward somewhere else. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting, and it’s a real uphill battle and I think a lot of people think that online sex work is going to be easy. But it’s a constantly changing struggle to put yourself out there and to reach your audience and it’s a lot of hard work to be honest. Yeah.

Danielle Blunt: Thank you so much, Daisy, Sinnamon, Melissa. Amazing to hear all of you. I will say we are opening up to questions. If you want to add them in the Q&A of the webinar. 

But yeah, I think one of the common threads that I’m hearing throughout this is how something to paraphrase what Melissa said, technology drives the visibility of sex work and then the visibility of sex work drives further policing and criminalization and it’s this exhausting practice that Daisy was talking about of finding the new way to communicate with the new way to organize and stay safe and share community resources. 

And I guess my first question is, with facial recognition technologies and verification practices and the dearth of advertising spaces online, how does the segregation of sex work from other spaces and the removal of many of the tools the sex workers used to stay anonymous and ephemeral change the industry? How do you see technology indivisibility as a site for both harm reduction, community organizing and a side of potential harm? And I dropped the question in the run of show doc if you want to read with eyeballs if that’s easier. Or if anyone wants to comment on anything that any of the other panelist said, I think that would be a great starting point.

Sinnamon Love: I’d love to hop in there. Facial recognition in general is — when sex workers show their face, they make more money. That’s undeniable  — it is what it is. People want to know who the person is that they’re seeing. Not being able to — people don’t show their face for a wide range of reasons. But now with facial recognition software, it’s becoming even harder for folks who do choose to show their face because now you are at risk for being recognized by law enforcement as you’re traveling to the airport. People are being stopped when they are traveling in and out of London or Australia or certain airports internationally. Law enforcement, they pull your ads and they wait for you as you’re coming through customs and will immediately deport you. It’s one of those things where it’s a Catch-22. 

It’s like do you want to make more money? Are you willing to risk your being outed by someone tagging you in a photo that winds up showing up on your Facebook page where your friends and family recognize you? The potential of being outed to employers if you are also maintaining a regular job. Really if you choose to do  his work and you’re showing your face, it becomes very   difficult for you to have a life outside of sex work. The minute you show your face, it’s like that’s — your image is permanently attached to sex work and also you are at risk for being doxxed as well simply because of the ways in which facial recognition software can then attach your image to something that you posted on a non-adult, non-sex work pages. Facial recognition software really is challenging to the industry. It’s very dangerous to the industry, and it prohibits people from being able to have a life outside of sex work if they’re trying to maintain separate lives.

Melissa Gira Grant: I have something to add just really quickly. It’s funny that I think all three of us had experience working in the peep shows and what was really beautiful in the time I was working in the peep show, so in the early aughts, we were in the upward swing of online sex work. And there were people who were doing both camming at home and doing Niteflirt which I think was a big thing then working at the peep show.

But one of the things that made the dancers at the Lusty Lady first organize and push for a union was because customers were coming into these booths that had one glass and filming the dancers’ performances without their knowledge or consent. And the staff — there’s always custodial/support staff who are working outside the booths who could theoretically intervene in dancers would try to flag the staff and say got a camera, come get them. Sometimes they’d be abusive to the support staff. One of the demands was to get rid of the one glass and for support staff to take that more seriously. 

One of the things that was great about working in a peep show and is still great about working in some in-person venues where you are not expected to have a gigantic persona, and you can drown personas, and you don’t have to have any online necessarily — any online identity. You truly could clock into the peep show and clock out, wear a wig look, really different you could conceivably not be known to anybody in your neighborhood, your family, where you went to school. That’s increasingly being taken away and that I think —  putting more penalties on the persistence of someone’s sex work identity, whether they’re even doing sex work anymore. Customs pulling them into interrogation at the airport because they show their face in an ad once and it’s still dinging them for like advanced screening or something like that or whether it’s like all these stories that we hear about sex workers trying to transition out of the industry and get other jobs and the fact that they’ve done sex work and photos of it come up, and that’s used against them. I feel the penalties on that are like a scarlet letter that the internet has accelerated whether or not it was supposed to. 

There’s just a story that dropped on BuzzFeed right before the panel about police departments using AI, using Clearview AI facial recognition specifically, and how they aren ‘t just using it for law enforcement purposes. They are searching those databases all the time for all kinds of things that they are not supposed to be doing. It’s a violation of their job duties to look you up in the DMV database to figure out where you live. It should be for AI searches too and we just — the idea that police now have access to these databases that have scraped our photos without consent and can use that information to find people even if it’s not in the course of their policing sex work which I think we are very aware of. But nobody knew I think I could say with certainty in the early 2000s when they were putting their faces online for sex work that that would turn up in  in  databases that police had access to 24/7. We didn’t have the opportunity to  consent for that because we didn’t even know that could happen. The irony is the AI services that are surveilling us are complete black boxes themselves. We have no way to know what they know about us. We have no way to demand to be erased. It’s a huge problem in the idea that we should have consent. That is something that I think a lot of people are thinking about.

Daisy Ducati: I would also like to say that often this technology is weaponized against us and used to doxx and harass us. Something as simple as a reverse image search could lead a random person on the internet to a lot of information about us personally and can be used to even physically harm us and it puts us in a scary position sometimes.

Danielle Blunt: Visibility definitely has a lot of costs in this industry. Thank you all for adding that. I think that when we’re talking about gentrification of both physical and digital spaces, it’s really interesting to talk about how algorithms or these black boxes code people as sex workers whether or not they’re actually doing sex work. Similar to how I was beginning to talk about how sex work is policed on the street through racist and transphobic policing tactics.

I guess I’m curious how seeing – um –  platform policing plays out and with the takedown of websites like Backpage and – um –  further policing online –  um – Sorry this question is all over the place but like with FOSTA/SESTA we saw the removal of all the free and the niche sites first, so I guess what I’m wondering is if folks could talk a little bit about how criminalization and policing like who – who is it harming, who does it hurt, who becomes invisibilized by the platform, and who is able to remain visible.

Sinnamon Love: Yeah, I mean I guess I can –  I can hop on. I mean we see this um you know Daisy mentioned um Bella Thorne earlier and um the ways in which she was – you know she and her sister actually were allowed to advertise their adult content on Instagram whereas um you know for the rest of us who do this work for a living and depend on this work for a living you know if we were to do this to do the same thing we’d be de-platformed right away. 

We – you know it’s and the same thing and this this goes not just a you know doesn’t just isn’t just racial or or even we see this happening often with people with larger body types um we also see this just happen in terms of celebrity in general. Um you know.. a you know… a you know… Cardi B who I love dearly and I actually you know I really like what she’s done with her career you know if she decides to twerk or you know or dance around half naked in on you know Instagram she’s not going to get de-platformed, but if you know but sexy dancing is something that is um a violation of terms of service on Instagram. 

And so you know people who are outrightly sell you know selling sex not necessarily for in-person meets but even just for legal porn you know legal pornographic material are banned from using these platforms in ways that are beneficial to them. And you know it’s interesting that like you know these sites are using you know they’re using FOSTA/SESTA as a very broad um in a very broad definition to be able to dismantle the selling of legal pornography online. I go back to this often but pornography has been declared and determined by a court of law as being separate from prostitution since 1988 in the US versus Freeman and yet we are still being penalized as if we are doing it – as if it’s the same thing. You know we’re seeing this now with these conversations about um online performance prostitution is what they’re calling it now like in Wyoming and also in Oregon. And you know but and that is – is really trying to roll back this you know an already set precedence that says that pornography and and prostitution are not the same. 

And so it’s – you know – we see that – you know Black and brown folks, queer, and trans folks um folks who are you know fat folks are all penalized and policed a lot, you know. It’s in ways that other people are not – you know the – when you are a darker complexion person and your body type, your skin it shows as if you have more skin showing in the algorithm and so you can be um taken down… You have a post taken down because it looks like you have you might look like you’re naked because you have more skin showing or what have you. 

It’s – it’s really um it’s right that we are over policed in these ways um and and and that you can’t even advertise. You know, you almost have to think about you know other ways that to advertise on these platforms so that you can circumvent the laws and the regulations. I mean I highly recommend for everybody to set up a single one-page website not a linktree because you also cannot post adult content to linktree but I highly recommend set up a simple one-page website that has you know some brief bio information some safe for work (SFW) photos and links to your adult content so that you can have a completely safe for work um you know website that you can link to from your social media so that they don’t deplatform you for the sake of linking to adult content. 

You know, it really is um preposterous that we have to go jump through so many hoops when the internet has always been a safe space for porn and and part of it also is you know I really um I blame the mainstream adult industry for not being more um adamant about protecting the rights of workers, not going after sites like Napster back in the mid 90’s early to mid 90’s the way that the music industry did in order to get a handle on piracy. That would have eliminated a lot of the issues with sites like Pornhub in terms of having these um you know having pirated content that you know and user uploaded content um would have if they had jumped on top of you know on top of piracy back then we wouldn’t be where we are today. Where that’s concerned. But we but we and also you know because the industry had to do such a um because the the industry had to separate itself from in-person sex work um back in the late 80s in order to you know to bypass some of the the legislation. It really didn’t do – um the industry didn’t really do right by those who were still doing in-person sex work to be able to make sure that we also that the folks had that the rights to work safely. You know we’ve seen this happen so often that you know even within the industry there’s been this um you know for a long time there were people who were you know blaming in-person sex workers who were also doing porn for outbreaks of you know of uh gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV you know without considering the fact that you know we are all adults having sex with other adults both on and off camera whether there’s money involved or not. So so by not by not stepping up and um you know working towards protecting the rights of those who are um doing in-person work as well it really has made it difficult for um for sex workers to even apply the legal trade online um because whether you’re doing in-person or online or both we’re all criminalized and penalized and policed in the same ways, and  we really need that the big money from some of these companies to push towards lobbying to put to to um make sure that sex work in general is is decriminalized. 

Danielle Blunt: Thank you so much I  just want to say that we’re at time. Sorry there was some confusion about if we were ending at 1:30 or 1, but with the lunch series we were supposed to end at 1 so if anyone needs to hop off please do.

I wanted to say that our next event is tomorrow at 12 PM EST. It’ll be on Sex Worker Activism Barriers, Exclusion, and Organizing, and we hope that you can join us the conversation on Thursday. RSVP to Berkman Klein there is just a link that was shared in the chat.