(Or How to Disappoint Your Aunties)

No kid dreams of becoming a porn star when they grow up. But, by the time I had turned 19, bolstered by the unencumbered confidence only a 19-year-old can possess, I found myself flirting with the idea of escorting, of porn and of sex work more generally. I had recently moved to a new big city for a gap year (or three) and was testing the boundaries of my new found adulthood. Cowed by fear of other people’s expectations, it would take me another five years to finally get in front of the camera.

When I was little, I wanted to become an architect. Then a lawyer for a hot minute - a childhood ode to my stepdad. Then the host a of a late night comedy show. Then, and always, a writer. When I was little, I couldn’t have imagined that I would become an Onlyfans creator, that my job would involve taking off my clothes for the camera. That I would explicitly deal in the erotic for all the internet to see.

The erotic, according the black lesbian feminist poet and patron saint Audre Lorde (bow down), “is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (Lorde et al., 1984). The erotic is a meaning-making life force, a deep sense of knowing and capacity for creativity and joy. I periodically return to Aunty Audre’s work, like I return to Zora Neale-Hurston and James Baldwin and Chimamanda Adichie, and Nawal El Saadawi and…and…and…my personal repository of deities present and past who hold me and mould me in my queer black-womaness. I shroud myself in their texts like a shield against the ugliness of living. That said, as I forge a path for myself outside of convention, I wonder…can the text still hold me?

One of the hardest parts of growing up is facing the people who love us and raise us and rejecting their view of the world. As the child of intellectual professionals, becoming an Onlyfans creator, who deals in sexual fantasy, is about as off-script as you can go. For the first time, I feel judged by my spiritual aunty. In Lorde’s world, “[…] pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling”. How can this be when I feel deep erotism when creating my work? When I’ve got Kehlani cheering me on and I’m looking fiiiiiiiinnne in my shea buttered skin and the camera and I get into deep flow, I am firmly in the erotic. Are pornography and eroticism truly diametrically opposed? Or is there a capacity for deep joy and connection in online sex work?

I am hoping the latter. I am hoping that my content goes beyond empty, disembodied online porn. I am hoping my content makes people feel seen in their own desires. I am hoping that my content inspires the joy of living in a body capable of immense pleasure. I am hoping that my sense of the erotic awakens the erotic in others.

Here’s to hoping.

The Sauce:

Lorde, A. (1984) ‘Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider. Trumansberg, NY: Crossing Press, pp. 53–59.