America's Sex Recession
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I'm Barry Weiss. This is Honestly. And for today, sex. Or more specifically, what is the state of America's sex life? For all of human history, up until about five seconds ago, the stakes of having sex, especially if you're a woman, just couldn't have been higher.

It could very well mean bringing shame on your family. It could mean ostracism from your community. It could mean disease and, of course, pregnancy. It was a very high-risk decision.

But now, for many women, especially if you live in America, there's not just the pill, there's IUDs where you don't even ever have to get your period. There's no-fault divorce. There's easier and more affordable access to abortion. There's just far less stigma attached to sex outside marriage in a country where 40% of babies are born out of wedlock.

And our culture is drenched in words like sex positive, body positive, gender positive. And most of us are walking around with a hunk of glass in our pockets that allows us access to pretty much everything. Swipe right and find a hookup within 100 feet. Swipe right and someone will probably pay you for a picture of your feet if you're into that kind of thing. Swipe right and who knows? Maybe you'll even find your husband.

So you'd think that we'd all be in a state of bliss. Marriage is popping off left and right. People finding true love like never before. Or at least getting off a lot. But that's not at all what we're seeing. We're living in a sex recession.

By every single measure that social scientists have, that is what they're telling us. People aren't having sex, people are lonely, and people are isolated. The San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge, who studies Gen Z, she's called it the loneliest generation on record. And when you look at some of the numbers out there, things do not look healthy.

A recent study from the American Medical Association found that one third of men between the ages of 18 to 24 reported having no sex at all in the previous year. And that was before the COVID lockdowns. A Pew study from last year showed that half of American singles aren't even looking for a relationship or even looking to go on dates.

which is also reflected in the American marriage rate and in the birth rate, which, just like the rate of sex in general, are also all at a historic low point. What is at a historic high is online porn.

In 2019, more than 5 billion hours of porn were watched on just Pornhub alone. For some perspective, that's like more than 500,000 years worth of time spent on just one site in an ever-expanding universe of X-rated sites and apps created to tickle every fetish you could possibly imagine. And maybe some of you don't really want to. Sex, like paying your bills or ordering your groceries, it's happening through a screen. ♪

Mr. Theodore Twombly, welcome to the world's first artificially intelligent operating system. I have been thinking a lot lately about the movie Her. Would you like your OS to have a male or female voice?

Female, I guess. It's set in the not-too-distant future. Are you social or antisocial? I guess I haven't been social in a while, mostly because... In your voice, I sense hesitance. Would you agree with that? I sense something hesitant? Yes. And it's about a sweet, if awkward, man... I was just trying to be more accurate. ...who falls in love with an operating system. Please wait as your individualized operating system is initiated. Hello, I'm here. Oh.

And what I keep thinking about is that people I know talk a lot about virtual reality and AI as if it's some seismic change that's going to happen years from now.

But the truth is, it's already here. Maybe this is a strange question, but I imagine Ayla's not your real name. So when did you become Ayla and what does it mean? I don't think I've actually been asked that question before.

I selected the name when I was becoming a cam girl and I pretty early on into my camming, I moved into a cam house with other girls and we didn't want to accidentally refer to each other with our real names when we were on cam. That's why I wanted to talk to my guest today, Ayla.

Ayla spent the past decade working in both online and in-person sex work, and she's now making a killing on a platform called OnlyFans, where she and other sex workers charge for explicit content that they make just for their followers. When I first started doing sex work, I had no idea that men wanted this, because I had been fed this story by everybody around me that just men want tits and ass. And so I was really genuinely surprised to find guys who

seem to really be trying to care about me. Our relationships are already being radically mediated, even sometimes being determined by technology. The algorithm transforms us, but it also reveals us what we say we want versus what we actually want, what we search for, and what, as Ayla will explain, we're willing to pay for. For people who aren't super online, how do you explain to them what you do for work?

I mean, it varies depending on the person, but like maybe the basic way of putting it is like a nude Facebook. Like you have to pay money to be a Facebook friend with somebody and then they post nudes and porn on their page and then you can talk to them through the messaging system. And can you give us a little bit of a sense of how long you've been in?

in the field that you're in? Yeah, I got into sex work almost 10 years ago now. I can't believe it's been that long. I started camming, which is basically like, well, I don't know if you watch Twitch, but it's like a nudie Twitch or you watch a live stream. So like a TV of somebody who's broadcasting, but then you can chat to them with your keyboard.

You can like go into like a chat where a whole bunch of people can chat together. Look how many people we already have. Like, do you see this? Like there's so many people. And then the broadcaster could see your chat and respond to what you're saying. Thank you guys. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Sammy. Thank you, Victory. And you can also give the broadcaster money through the chat. Like it pops up like, oh, this person tipped this amount. Thank you so much.

And then the broadcaster goes like, yay, thank you so much. Oh my God, thank you, holy shit. And then there's a lot of games that people make off of this and usually it's pornographic, like you could tip somebody to masturbate or something. So I did that for about five years, took a break, and then I got into escorting. So IRL, I would meet up with men and then have sex with them and then I would leave.

And why did you go from the world of camming, which seems far more convenient and I would imagine just safe than real life escorting? Why did you make that switch? I got burned out with camming. It was really exhausting. It's basically like being a live stream improv comedian slash entertainer slash really hot for, you know, usually the average length of a cam show that I did was around two to three hours.

And then the more you do it, the more you make. Like in one small study I did with cam girls, the hourly amount that you made was like very correlated to the total amount of hours that you put in. So the more hours you work, the more money you make per hour. It's also very competitive on my free cams at least, which at the time was the biggest cam site. The ranking on the front page, which affects your income a lot because this is how men find you and tip you.

is affected by how much money you earn per hour averaged over the last 60 days. So if you log on and you do a live stream and nobody tips you for an hour, this is stressful, not just because you're wasting your time, but because this is actively adversely impacting your ranking on the page.

So it can be like a really stressful experience. It's a snowball in both directions. And so after about five years of this, of like having to do these live performances that were very stressful because I had to make money as fast as I could the entire time, I just couldn't bring myself to do it anymore after a while. And then I quit and went into crypto actually for a bit. And after working there, I figured I wanted more money. Like...

And I had a friend who was an escort. So I was like, I did a call and she sort of told me the basics, how to stay safe, how to advertise. And then I went from there and became a high-end escort pretty quickly.

And then I did that for about a year and a half. And then after COVID hit, made it a little bit awkward to be meeting with men who are mostly older and probably very at risk of getting sick. So I didn't want to accidentally kill anybody. So I switched to OnlyFans, which was starting to boom around that point. And that's what I've been doing since. And Ayla's move from real life sex work into OnlyFans, that was part of an enormous trend. ♪ This is for my OnlyFans ♪

Today I wanted to talk about OnlyFans and kind of unpack the phenomenon that it has become. What is OnlyFans? Before the pandemic, there were some 20 million users on the site looking at all kinds of stuff. X-rated, not so X-rated. But after a year of social distancing and lockdowns, that number has skyrocketed. The first month I did OnlyFans, I was like, yo, I'm in the money. This is for my OnlyFans.

Now there are 100 million more users and the company's revenue has jumped by 553% and it's growing. And Ayla is one of the top 1% of earners on the site where she has become one of OnlyFans biggest stars.

I'm wondering if you can walk me through what an average day in your professional life looks like. So the day varies a lot. She told me that most days. But often I wake up. Before she even gets out of bed. Check my OnlyFans to see sort of how the overnight went, how many people I got from my posts on Reddit. She looks at her subscriber numbers.

And she looks to see how many new guys decided that even though the web is absolutely awash in free porn, that they wanted to get off to Ayla and pay for it. And she says that usually her fans come from Reddit. And Reddit is a site where it's like a content aggregator. You can post things there. And if people like them, they upvote them and they go to the top. And there's groups for Not Safe for Work. And so a big source of subscribers for people on OnlyFans are posting to the Not Safe for Work subreddits.

So I automate those posts. I schedule them in advance because certain times are better to post than others. They're more likely to get more views. And Ayla, are those posts like essentially marketing for your OnlyFans? Yes. Most of what I do for OnlyFans is marketing. Probably 20% of my actual work

is spent inside of OnlyFans or producing content for OnlyFans. And just are those posts, excuse my ignorance, the posts that are going on Reddit, are those nude photos? Are those like the kind of things that I encounter from yours on Twitter? Or is that a totally different persona? They are nude photos, yes. Okay. So there's, when I take content, so like I say, I take a bunch of photos of myself, selfies, and in various states of undress. I will take a couple of those photos and maybe like short videos, GIFs,

And I will like pull them out and have those be my marketing section. So typically they're not explicit. I save the explicit stuff for my only fans. They, you know, I have like specific angles of labia that I'm willing to show, you know, in public versus through the locked paywall. And so I take like the ones that fit the criteria.

correct criteria. And then I put them into like the circulation for my marketing thing. So I post them on Reddit or on Twitter or on, I have like a telegram, not safe for work group. And so all of these photos will get sort of circulated through that cycle. Got it. Okay. So that's first thing in the morning. You're seeing how that did overnight. And then what comes next?

I catch up on messages a little bit. So people have DM'd me and sometimes people attach tips to when they message you. Ayla says that around the time she's getting her second cup of coffee, she'll write personal messages to her paid subscribers who've written her, asking them about their day, maybe sending them a nude pic.

Then around three or four, usually, maybe a little earlier than that, I will shoot some videos or photos. And I typically try and get like a couple every day. So I take maybe an hour and knock out a little bit of photos, short videos of me like bouncing or dancing or, you know, teasing really heavily. And some days, not always, some days instead of doing this, I will film a porno. So I usually go on Pornhub. I look at the top ranked videos for this week's

And I pick one that I can replicate and I use that as a template to sort of do myself so that I don't have to actually like think of an original creative porn to do. I kind of pick something I know works and then I do that. And then I sell that through DMs. So I mass message this video into the DMs of people following me, which means that they get a locked box and a description of the video. And if they click the box, then it will unlock the

They have to pay so I can select a price. And then a certain amount of people will purchase that video and I get 80% of everything they pay. The people that are DMing you with these tips, they're people who are already subscribed to the sort of baseline A-la only fans world. Correct. But then you can kind of upcharge them with additional content like the porn videos that you're sending out.

Yeah. And there's lots of ways girls do this. It's really fascinating because like OnlyFans is a couple simple like pricing dynamics or mechanics that you can do. And girls will figure out like a really interesting wide variety of pricing models. So,

Usually there's a spectrum. On one end, you have people who charge a very high subscription monthly price and they advertise that once you're in, you get everything for free. I'm not going to upsell you on anything or if I do, it's going to be extremely rare. And on the other side, people have like free or extremely cheap subscriptions, typically either like zero to three to five dollars. And then once you're subscribed to that, then they will basically just upsell you constantly. They will tease you. They'll have like,

unlockables. And then if you unlock that thing, then you have to pay a little bit more to unlock the next thing. And they sort of milk you. It's called dripping is what they do. And so there's, I'm kind of in the middle. I have a kind of a high subscription price and I sell some things for a medium range, but all of them kind of work for different kinds of people.

One of the things about this that feels very new to me, because in a sense, this is the oldest profession in the world. But what makes it feel different to me is the personalization like that I could theoretically, let's say I slid into your DMs on Twitter or I found a way to write you on OnlyFans, even though I don't have an account yet. And I asked you for a picture of your boobs just for me. Could I get that?

Like a picture that's just made for me? And is there a difference between the pricing for that and the, let's say, the boob picture that 100 people are getting? I mean, it's kind of philosophical. Like, are the boobs truly the same boobs? Like, does the digital...

photos, is it unique? But yeah, you can't, you can ask for a unique photo. Um, often people will ask for some sort of sign with the photo or like a video of you saying their name is more unique because it's very common for girls to sell unique things that aren't unique because it's in DM. So nobody else can see what anybody else is getting. So if you ask for a boob photo, that's like, you just pull any random boob photo you have saved and like, there you go. Uh, so often people ask for some sort of verification. Yeah. Yeah.

What I find interesting is that I think the narrative around porn and sex work is just that people want tits and ass. But actually what it seems like they want is the exclusivity to feel like you're giving something that's just made for them.

Oh yeah. I think that this is why OnlyFans has skyrocketed so much. A lot of people are very confused about it and I could be, you know, just rationalizing in hindsight, but it's really interesting that the comparison between the way that camming works and OnlyFans. So on camming, the, you're kind of in a community of men who are watching this woman because you can see everything that everybody else is saying. And you're there to witness the girl reacting to the things that other people are saying. And so the kind of pricing incentives there come from competition. The,

The girls who are most successful know how to make their men compete against each other to become like the highest status, the winner, the victor. Like you use sort of competitive masculine language when referring to them, like who's going to be my hero and like rescue me from being horny or something. And so like guys get this feeling of like, oh, if I tip her, like it's not just like you're winning her, it's that you're winning her to the exclusion of other men. And that's very visible. And that works really well. And so that's why I think people were sort of sticking to that model. But yeah.

With OnlyFans, it's really fascinating because they've gone entirely the opposite direction. They've completely removed the competitive aspect. They've even slowly been removing it like you can't even see people comments on videos anymore. Like if you make a post to your feed, typically you were able to see other people's comments on it and now you can't.

And the same thing with DMs, like DMs are huge. It feels so one-on-one. And so now this is opening it up to men who don't feel like they can win a competition because on camming, you get like the rich whales and most of your income comes from like one or two people because those are the ones that beat out everybody else. But on OnlyFans, you get to act like everybody is beating each other. It's sort of like a false sense of competition winning.

So people don't feel like there's anybody else that is really necessarily better than them. And the girl can make them feel as special as they want to feel in a one-on-one interaction. Except this is systematized, and a lot of girls are...

definitely not being genuine with it. Like agencies are a big thing where like often girls won't even be the person responding anymore. It's like a company that has a minimum wage people who are trained on how to respond to horny men. And those are the people that you're talking to. Of course, not all girls do this. This is a smaller subset, but I mean, this is like, it happens now to this, to that extent. So could it be like that? I'm a, you know, a 22 year old writing you a message and,

And I think I'm getting a response from you, but actually it's, you know, a woman in India that's been trained to respond to horny men. Yeah. I mean, it's more likely a man also, but yeah. So just to clarify, you don't outsource to an agency. When you're writing to your fans or your subscribers, it's just you. Correct. Okay. And given how...

intimate this is, I guess, especially from the man's perspective. Are they thinking of you as their girlfriend or is there almost new language that needs to be created for whatever this relationship is? Yeah, that's really interesting. And there's a lot of variance across both individual people on OnlyFans and also across different types of sex work.

I think most men kind of know they're not like delusional about what the relationship is. Like most men are not actually thinking that you're their girlfriend. But I think that this ties into sort of a miss like a lot of people have a misconception about what men want sexually. And a lot of men are fine with sort of I want to have sex with basically a sex doll who is going to suck my penis and let me come in her ass.

And I don't really care about her personality. That definitely does make up some men, but a huge amount of men are like, are more aroused by somebody that they feel like that they can personally access, that they can personally influence a woman who approves of them. That is really huge. Like men generally want to feel like a woman is,

is pleased by their sexual presence, like desires them, like enjoys them. And so this, the way that they get this is not really through watching pornography, which is extremely impersonal and they can't participate. It's by, you know,

giving a girl a little bit of money and then like experiencing the, the joy of having her smile on you and her like genuinely squealing because girls like getting money. And then, you know, that they're associating you with positive feelings and you're like, oh, that's awesome. And then you get to like tip her to masturbate and you know, it looks real and sometimes it is real. Sometimes it's not.

And then you're like, wow, I caused that. Like I gave this girl money. She's happy about it. And now she gets to pleasure herself. Like she probably really likes me. And that sort of feeling can be very addictive for a lot of men.

What I find so fascinating about what you're explaining is that it is a total misconception that men just want sex. In fact, what they want is to feel a connection. And the narrative, let's say, in popular culture is just totally detached from what you're finding is reality.

Right. And I think that this is sort of inevitable because like when men are more sexually driven than women, more likely to engage in casual sex and all that stuff. And to like there wasn't really a scalable way for men to consume sexual content from strangers with intimacy. Like so far we had like porno magazines or porn sites online that posted videos.

Like there just hasn't been a method, like a way for men to sort of express their desire, you know, even financially. So I think like that might have also helped the view of men as really not caring about intimacy. And like to some degree, it also is true. Like I think like women obviously are the ones that read romance novels and men don't. But I think like the kind of the version of intimacy that men are looking for.

It's kind of different from the romance novel. But it was also something that I totally underestimated when I first started doing sex work. Like I had no idea that like that men wanted this because I had been fed this story by everybody around me that just men want tits and ass. And so I was really genuinely surprised to find guys who seemed to really be trying to care about me. And I developed genuine friendships with some of them.

You know, I think that there's a stereotype in the world about who pays for sex work. And I would love if you could tell us a little bit about the friendships that you've developed with some of these clients. Yeah, I think the deepest friendships I formed was through in-person escorting, which is my personal favorite form of sex work if you take the money out of it because you get a one-on-one interaction as opposed to one-to-many. A lot of guys expressed interest

fighting me because they wanted sex before they died or like didn't feel like inadequate for people. Like some people were virgins and like really terrified that women wouldn't like them. And they had no idea what to do. And so they're like, okay, if I get an escort, like I can learn how to please a woman. Like these men desperately want to be valued by women. I had one guy who it was maybe the most profound impact on me who I met up with him in a hotel and

And we were talking and then he said something and looked sad about it. He was talking about his life. And then that made me feel sad. And then I started crying and then he started crying. And then we just held each other and sobbed for a while. And then we took off our clothes and just had skin to skin contact. So we lay like intertwined hugging.

And that was the entire session. It was just him like needing to hold somebody who was accepting like his full body with like the skin thing and just to sob. Like he said he didn't have any other outlet like that. And so from then on, he would hire me about once a month and I would come see him and he would just hold me and cry. And sometimes we would have sex and that was like really part of it for him.

And it felt really good and fulfilling for me. Like I felt like I was really helping him and I had quite a bit of empathy for him. And I still think about him and I hope he's doing well to this day. It serves as this outlet that can be an access to a lot of deeper stuff that men very often have no other way of expressing or communicating to people. God, that's really, really touching. And I want to go back to what you were saying about

He wasn't hungry for sex. He was hungry for touch. Yeah. Which is a really different thing. And was he single or was he in a sexless marriage or relationship? He was single. He was too depressed to, I think, maintain a relationship is the impression I got.

Another guy I saw was young. I'm 29 now and he was, I think, like 21 or 22 and he's Chinese. And I think of him so fondly. He was like a weirdo. He was extremely creative and childlike and totally at odds with the culture he had come from and the friends around him.

And he found me and was just so excited that I was somebody who is also kind of weird. And it felt like I was the first person that he'd met who he felt was like kind of like him.

And so that was great. I felt so good being able to like accept his weirdness for him and like to, and to like, and I feel like a lot of guys like want this, but like they feel like they can only really be accepted for the rest of them if someone accepts them sexually. So it's sort of like accepting somebody sexually or being sexually available unlocks that.

this whole other kind of acceptance that they're looking for, which is really nice. And he ended up getting a little attached and I felt bad. I didn't really know how to handle that. So I slowly withdrew. But I still think of him again, fondly. I hope he's doing well. And I was really grateful to be able to, to like help him feel less lonely in that. Are you feeling more like a therapist? Are you feeling like he's, what does it feel like inside in that moment? Your role, the role that you're playing for him?

Probably the closest role would be therapist, I think, because you're being paid for intimacy, but also it can be very genuine. Like often I think therapists do really empathize with the people that they're talking to. I do feel actual love. Like I wouldn't say, you know, romantic, you know, butterfly love, but I feel like such a great deal of compassion. And I'm going to feel really cheesy saying this, but like a sacred love. Like I would often feel like,

when I had the space to with these clients that I was accessing sort of a sacred love for them, even if it was constrained, like the way that I could express it was constrained by sort of our roles in life. After the break, Ayla's journey from a factory floor to your smartphone and the messy morality of selling your body. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Ayla, I'd love if we can kind of go back in time to how you grew up and if you can tell us a little bit about your upbringing.

Yeah, I was born into an evangelical household. My dad is a professional apologist who goes around debating people and writing books and telling people how Christianity is correct. Is that what it means to be a professional apologist? I've never heard that. What does that mean? Yeah, like Christian apologetics as a whole, like, thing. I mean, it's like a relatively small thing as far as religion goes, but there's like, you know, YouTube videos and books. It's like the defense of the Christian faith.

So he would basically just study Christianity and study how to give an intellectual defense for it against other religions. This was his job job.

And my mom would stay at home, and so we were homeschooled, but very, very conservative. I didn't know anybody else who wasn't homeschooled or wasn't raised in the same kind of program that we were. We were raised in a program called Growing Kids God's Way, which is a pretty strict upbringing set of rules for how to treat your kids. And I was very religious because I didn't know anything else, and my dad also didn't

had very good arguments for Christianity that were very convincing. And so I was personally pretty fanatical about it. I was an evangelical myself for a while, but super repressed, super isolated from the world. Our media was heavily filtered. I went to public school very briefly once when I was 14 until my parents figured out that I had internet access and then they removed me from school so I couldn't access the computers at the school.

But I remember being like totally unintegrated with the people at the public school. Like I had no idea what was going on. Yeah, that's just a general summary of my upbringing. Did you have a TV in your house or a radio? What kind of pop culture did you get in your house, if anything at all? Yeah, so we did have computers that were restricted. So the list of websites we could access. We did have a TV and we also had a thing, a parent guardian, TV guardian, TV guardian. Yes. Yes.

where you attach it to the TV and it automatically detects any sort of swearing or nudity, and it deletes those scenes from the movie you're watching. What? So I would watch movies that I just thought those were the movies, and then I would grow up and watch the movie again and be like, what the fuck? I watched the Titanic with zero awareness that the two main characters ever were sexually involved.

I didn't really know what sex was. My parents were planning on not telling me about sex until I was 16. And I happened to find out about it a little bit earlier. So yeah, we did have media and it was just basically really strictly regulated.

Ayla says that as she got into her teen years, she was eager to grow up and get out of her house. So I left home when I was 17 and I was still very religious. She went to a state school. She started getting into photography and design. And she also started to meet people outside of her bubble. And at that point, I had ended up in a context where I was not surrounded by religious people. I was surrounded by atheists.

crazy and they were surprisingly very nice they were accepting and I think this sort of unlocked some part of my brain like subconsciously in hindsight I didn't realize this was going on at the time but in hindsight I think what happened is that a part of me realized that I could hypothetically adopt atheist beliefs I could leave Christianity and the world wouldn't be over like I

Like I could see how life could continue as it was for my friends around me. And so I think this sort of gave me the space to genuinely consider because I view beliefs generally as functional, not truth finding. Like you believe you have beliefs in order to interact with the people around you, like to function as a collective society. And so as my collective society changed, it gave me the ability to actually change my personal beliefs. And so.

At some point, there was like a contradiction I found in scripture that was small, but I hadn't heard it before. And that made me doubt for the first time. And then I sort of flipped over to losing my faith afterwards.

It was just very confusing and strange and a giant mindfuck that I can go into if you want, but it was quite a lot. And then after a few years, I sort of became much more sexually open after that because I figured, well, if Christianity isn't real, I don't know what sort of behavioral standards I should go by.

But Ayla says that her time in college was cut short and she had to drop out. Because I couldn't afford it and my parents would not help me financially. And so I had to work whatever job was available to me. And the thing that was available was a factory job. So I did that. And yeah, I was on an assembly floor working six days a week, very long hours. She ended up in eastern Washington, where she lived in an apartment with five roommates.

She got a job in a factory where she assembled electrical components for $10 an hour. She was working there 50 to 60 hours a week. And there was no windows. It really sucked. I mean, this is really what drove me to become a sex worker is because I worked there for a year. And then I had an opportunity for another photography job that I went for, but it didn't work out. So at that point, I was kind of cut loose. Like, okay, what do I want to do? I could go back to the factory and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So I tried to do some various startups, which I was...

really inept at because I had no experience or, and I was isolated from the world, right? Like I didn't understand culture. I was a really weird person. And then eventually somebody suggested camming to me and I was like, okay, I guess I'll try that because like, it's not a factory. So I tried it and it did really well. And then that was the beginning of everything. Given that you had so little cultural experience,

context like you thought Titanic was a movie about a boat sinking and not about Leonardo and Kate Winslet. I guess I'm curious about how you had any idea of what sexiness was like what did you think was sexy and how did you figure out how to make yourself into something that was sexy?

That is a fantastic question. You are absolutely on point with the intuition that I had no idea. When I was a teenager, flirting was not allowed. I didn't know a single other kid who had had sex with or kissed anybody else. The concept of flirting was just not something...

in my wheelhouse. So when I started camming, I was probably the most awkward cam girl you've ever seen. I would get naked and I would like do the actions that I thought were, you know, I would like grab my nipples and touch my vagina. And I'm like, okay, that's the thing that people want to see. But like everything else about my body language and the kinds of things I said were not exactly what most people would consider sexy. I had to really learn it from scratch.

For a while, I did, like, mime shows. I painted my face as a mime, and I learned how to mime pretty well through practicing on camp. And I would do, like, burlesque shows where I would pretend to have, like, a penis that I would suck, and then it would go through my body and come out my ass, and I would sort of floss my entire body with my invisible penis. I also did, like, a set of...

gnome photos, which got very big on Reddit, where I got abducted by gnomes after I stripped. So it was very goofy, the kind of content I was producing. But goofy does not sell as well as genuine sex sells. So as I was working very hard to be creative and original, a lot of people were earning more money than me doing half the amount of work. And so over time, I would slowly figure out how to very consciously and manually change my body language to be the kind of woman that men wanted to

which involves stuff like talking slower, using little words, not big words, having greater variance in the tone and smiling, being really warm. And so I would figure out sort of how to put on the girl persona in my shows and that started earning a lot more money. Okay. And to take it into the real world context, I want to connect to this question of what is sexy? Okay.

Right. Because I feel like we're living in this really weird paradox. On the one hand, you can be a plus size woman and you can walk the runway or maybe even make the cover of Sports Illustrated. There's just a much more diverse, I guess would be a word, look out there when you look at cultural markers the way there certainly weren't when I was growing up. And every girl I knew had a picture of Kate Moss in that Calvin Klein ad on her wall.

But at the same time, you know, I found myself at a party in LA the other night and pretty much every woman that I noticed clearly had some kind of work done, even if it was just like Botox and fillers.

And then you're sitting here telling me about what sells as sexy. And those are extremely traditional things that I would imagine appeal to men and have always appealed to men. So I'm wondering if you can kind of dive in a little bit to that paradox with me. Like, is sexiness as fixed as it has ever been?

And the move to put different looking people on the cover of magazines and in television shows, just an effort to sort of paper over a fundamental truth, which is that people like women with big breasts and a small waist, or is the notion of what is sexy genuinely changing?

I think I'm more team former. The first one would be my guess. Like a lot of what you see in advertisement is changing, but it's,

I mean, you can look at who are the top ranked girls on MyFreeCamps and they all kind of look the same. And that's like proof is in the pudding, right? Like the girls who make the most on MyFreeCamps are ranked through like a very intensive money feedback mechanism. So you can really see like it's sort of evidence backed what men want to see, right?

Um, and I also did a survey for people on OnlyFans to ask about kind of their appearance and how much money they make. And money drops sharply after I think like

Basically when your class is overweight, the same line as, I forget what the BMI is for overweight, but once you cross that BMI, then your income like immediately starts dropping. And it is true that when you get a boob job, you earn a lot more money. This is basically every girl I've ever known who has gotten a boob job reports their income has increased quite a lot. Have you gotten work done?

I had a nose job and I had a little bit of filler in my cheeks. Yeah, so not a lot. And it's a strange question, but did you make more money after you got the filler? No, it was too subtle. Nobody really noticed.

Um, but I do make more money. I think when I am on birth control, because birth control makes my boobs big. So, uh, then the birth control that makes my boobs big is like not very good. It's like the one that there's been some lawsuits against. So for a long time I was like, okay, do I want money and to risk my health or do I want less money? Um, so for years I was risking, uh, I was probably taking a pill. I shouldn't have been in order to have big boobs. I recently stopped that though. So now I have small boobs. They don't look small. They look great.

Thanks. Just one more question on that score. Did you feel at all torn about the choice to get fillers? And, you know, looking forward, would you consider getting more work done? And the reason that I'm asking that is because there's a lot of topics, I guess, that your work touches that I feel personally torn about. There's so many topics in the world where I have such a strident opinion. But when it comes to something, let's say, like plastic surgery,

I feel genuinely torn. I feel a feeling of, you know, people should be natural. People are made in different ways and aging is a normal part of life. And the idea that we should constantly be chasing, you know, youth and perkiness is unrealistic.

And on the other hand, you know, I'm 37. I'm about, you know, seven or eight years older than you. And you talk about wanting to avoid the sag. I'm living the sag. And I can very much imagine myself wanting to get this sort of thing done, even Botox, let's say, which I've avoided until now. Talk to me about, you know, if you feel at all torn about those things or if you think it's silly and why not get it and we're liberated and we should be able to do whatever we want with our bodies.

I might have a bit of an abnormal view on it. I sort of feel like my body is a tool and I'm not super attached to it and I am okay taking whatever changes sort of are beneficial to me.

especially if they're reversible. Like for example, filler, you know, it dissolves. So I was like less concerned about getting filler because I'm like, okay, if I don't like it, it just goes away. At least I can try it and sort of see how I feel about it. And I got it in my cheeks, which is a lot less visible, but I would get more work done. Yeah. I think it's like fine, but a lot of people have like attachment. And the problem is like a lot of the work done is visible in person. You know, if you get boob jobs, you can feel it or like,

Botox kind of makes your facial movements weird in a way that's harder to disguise with lighting that you use online. But a lot of people have more tumultuous relationships with their self-image than I do. And it might be kind of bad for them or good. I'm unclear. I really like my face after I got a nose job. It wasn't a severe change. My nose was crooked. But when I look in the mirror, I feel more like myself now.

Which is strange. And also, the world is really not fair. Like the things that are sexually appealing are like 22 year olds who are very perky. And we're never going to be able to match that again, no matter how hard we try. And that sucks. And it's okay to want that and fail. I think that's sort of part of what the sexual mating market is like.

I want to pick up on what you just said about how things sometimes aren't fair, but they can still be true. And one of the things I just appreciate so much about you is that I think a lot of people right now, especially on places like Twitter, want to avoid what's saying true because the truth is so fundamentally unfair. And one of those things, I think, is the topic of gender and of gender difference and the idea that gender...

or the differences between men and women are simply a social construct. And to my ears, what you're saying is that that's just not true, whether it's because of evolution, whether it's in whatever it is, that there are ways, not all men and women, but that in general, there are ways that men and women are just wired differently.

I mean, if the differences between men and women are a social construct, then I really need to reconsider what my concept of a social construct is, because it's way more powerful than I had previously thought. But I think it's unlikely that social constructs are more powerful than I previously thought. And I think it's more likely that gender is not fully a socialist construct. Part of it is we need to define what we mean by gender. There are a lot of things that change throughout cultures and throughout times. And there are a lot of things that don't.

And some things are kind of stable, like the fact that men are willing to give a lot more resources and effort in order to procure sex with women than vice versa. That seems to be sort of a universal truth. You said before that you think of your body as a tool. And

That, I think, is a fascinating topic. And like, again, this is one of the issues where I feel torn. There's a part of me that says, and maybe this is the, you know, the religious part of me or something more ancient than that, I don't know, that says, you know, the body is something sacred and objectifying a person is wrong or kind of denying their identity.

full personhood or their humanity. And yet when I talk to, you know, a lot of my super smart libertarian friends, they're like, that's retrograde. Like this is your body. It is a tool. And, you know, it's ridiculous to think otherwise. Is there any part of your maybe vestigial Christian self that still thinks of the body as something other than a tool?

I mean, it's possible, but I think it might be pretty low down. I do feel like attachment to my body. Like when I got a nose job, I noticed I was sad because I missed the familiarity of my old face. Yeah.

But I also think that it's like totally valid and fine to view it as something more than a tool. Like if that is the way that you relate to it, then that's the way you relate to it. And if it's not, then it's not. Like if I am fine with objectification because I view myself as an object,

And other people don't have that relationship to their bodies. And that's also completely fine. I think it really depends on the person. People have super varied reactions to feeling like a sex object or objectifying others. And I think that's absolutely okay.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the recent tragic shooting in March in Atlanta. New details in that deadly shooting spree in Georgia. The shooter in that rampage at three spas has now been charged with eight counts of murder. Authorities in Georgia this morning say that the accused gunman who killed eight people here is admitting to the shootings. Some guy came in and everybody heard the gunshot.

You wrote this on Twitter. It's infuriating. Sex workers are marginalized by society, prohibited from financial services, put in literal jail, often don't have another choice of employment. And when they get slaughtered, what happens? People focus on another common factor and pretend it was due to that. I am really enraged. Absolutely furious.

Yeah. The common narrative about what happened in Atlanta was that because six of the eight people who were murdered by the shooter were Asian, that it was actually

actually motivated by anti-Asian sentiment. But when you look at the actual story and the motivations of the killer, that really doesn't seem to be exactly the case. Yeah. Even you recounting it makes me a little bit... I could feel my body sort of tensing up with anger, righteous anger as you're going over it. Yeah, it is really infuriating. It

it really changed the way that I view media reporting. Like I thought that the world was better than this or something like it is extremely clear in almost every possible way of looking at it, that this man was motivated by killing sex workers. He had struggled with sex addiction in the past, had like made posts about how he didn't like being a sexual person, like he's struggling with it. And then he went and he shot up like,

places that he had frequented with an explicit motivation to like help other people with sexual addiction. And he also explicitly said, this isn't racist. This isn't a racial motivation. This is like, like it's specifically sex. So like you feel like, okay, if this guy has such a history of being angry at like this specific motivation, and then he explicitly states that this is why he's doing it. And he's the people that he's shooting, like match exactly the motivation that he's talking about. You would think that we would hear about that. Uh,

on the media. And some sources did talk about it, but a lot of people that I talked to about it had no idea that the people he shot up were sex workers. They thought that it was a hate crime. And that's like the only thing that was reported. When I looked on Twitter, like the news outlets that were reporting it, like I looked up like Atlanta shooting M.

there was not a single mention of the fact that they were sex workers, that this was a sex motivated thing. Every single one said hate crimes against Asians, which like, okay, sure. Maybe that's like a thing. I'm not saying that there aren't hate crimes against Asians or that, that it's not increasing. That is a valid thing to talk about, but.

The fact that the actual facts of the situation were so misrepresented, so blatantly, I feel like my brain shuts down. I can't even comprehend the lack of motivation to discover and report truth that everybody who's having a conversation around this must have. People just must not care.

It kind of reminds me going back to the parental guidelines that your parents had on your television to filter out the inconvenient scenes in the movies that you wanted to watch, that the press in a way did the same thing in this story. They filtered out the inconvenient truth. Well, I think it's because the convenient one sells better. Like right now, racism, while it does is real and has problems that I'm not like trying to say that this is not serious.

also is a selling point now. It's marketable. So if you can pin something on racism, this is something that people are going to want to engage with much more because everybody can relate to it. All of the white people want to feel like they're being good and useful and helpful to Asians. And all of the Asians could be like, wow, this relates to me personally.

Whereas the sex workers, they're like a tiny minority. A lot of people actively dislike them or would think that like maybe they had it coming to them. Right. So this is not something that you can connect with personally, the sex worker thing. So we went with the convenient sellable one.

The tendency to push people into good or bad or pure or impure that I think critical race theory is pushing people into and often actually the legacy media narrative is pushing people into. Does that remind you in any way of the way that you grew up? Yeah, it does. It absolutely does. It's like it's eerie. It's very unsettling. I feel like I sort of thought like, oh, I'm leaving religion. Like,

Like, I'm not going to have to deal with this anymore. Like these people, they sort of aren't captured by a belief because this was the sort of the defining thing between being religious and not being religious. Like people have weird beliefs all the time. Like atheists, like maybe we don't really know the way the world works. But the biggest difference for me, it felt like I went from a position of I know what's going on to I don't know what's going on. Like as a Christian, the thing that it gave me was a very clear belief

concrete thing I could hold on to as an answer to all of my questions. And moving to atheism was terrifying because it was like, well, I don't know. Like I noticed I was no longer necessarily attached to what I had to believe. As a Christian, I had to be attached. Like things were there to be defended. This was like a war against people who were not Christian. And if somebody like

presented a criticism of the Bible like, oh, I think that this might be a contradiction or this doesn't seem to line up historically or why does this happen? That's a very confusing thing.

I came at those questions not as, oh, that is interesting. Like, let's find out. I don't know. It came with the question, with the attitude of I know what the answer must be. And I'm going to figure out a way how to answer your question such that it leads to my answer. And obviously, this was not conscious. I was not like having these literal thoughts as I was answering questions. This was just sort of built very quietly into the background to how I processed information and addressed criticisms and concerns.

And so like the difference between religion and or Christianity and atheism for me was not one of like the concrete beliefs, but rather the defensiveness and the use that we had those beliefs serve. With atheism, there was very little defense with Christianity. There was a lot. And so when it comes to the CRT thing.

I am seeing the exact same sort of defensiveness that I saw among Christians. Like questions or criticisms or curiosities are not neutral. They're not like sort of thrown out in the room that people can circle it and kind of figure out together what the answer is. Hmm.

Like if you ask somebody who believes in CRT these questions, like they come at it from the background that, oh, this is an attack that must be defended against. And there is only one possible answer. And if it deviates from that answer, then it must necessarily be incorrect in some way. And that really makes me feel terrified and gross and very averse to all of it. I'm like, I do not want any more of that in my life.

The other thing that seems very, very connected beyond the defensiveness and beyond wanting to sort of put people in boxes is the use of shame. The use of shame as a tool to make people kind of fall in line. And shaming others just seems to be such a dominant mode in so much of our culture right now. And it's like you can leave religion behind and yet...

there is something maybe deep within us that feels shame about ourselves or maybe that wants to shame others. You know, it connects also to me to the shooter in Atlanta. You know, that that kind of violence is driven by that same shame and that unless you find a way to harness that

shame, which maybe is a natural part of who we are, it can go in really, really dark directions. Yeah. And it's also really sad. Like, I absolutely agree with you that this is like something that we sort of have and maybe is being, you know, harnessed or weaponized by these sorts of ideas. And it's also just really sad because in order to feel shame, you have to reject some part of yourself. Like you have to have this sort of mental movement where you're

you have a belief about yourself and this belief is unacceptable in some way. It is indication of some fundamental flaw, something being like sheared from reality. Like the Christians talk about it, like it was sin, like you would fall in from grace. And it's sort of like this almost metaphysical, magical belief that something in you is not as it ought to be with the ought being the, uh, the word that's doing a lot of work. And it just tears people apart. And, um,

And I'm so distraught by the way that a lot of culture seems to be deliberately creating shame in people. It works by weaponizing that shame because shame is an avenue of control. And so not only is it like controlling people, it's sort of doing it by causing people to be less self-accepting. And I think this is like probably exacerbating a lot of mental health issues. And I feel such compassion and grief for the people who are victims of this.

So just tying it a little bit back to where we began, which is your work, and speaking of shame, is what is happening on platforms like OnlyFans, is it helping us fight maybe shame or loneliness or repressed sexuality? Or are platforms that allow us to be even more alone in our rooms, in front of our screens,

hurting us and driving us deeper into those maladies? That's kind of my ultimate question for you. You know, as someone who is so focused on helping people, or at least one of the ways, one of your roles that I see in the world is helping people get over shame, come to accept themselves. You know, is this very platform or platforms like it hurting or helping? I mean, like most things, the answer is probably both.

I think it is probably hurting some people and probably helping others. But I feel like this is a symptom. Like this is sort of a bandaid on a deeper problem. And the answer is not like, well, is this –

the bandaid that we're using for it, you know, is, is that good or bad? I'm like, well, no, the question we should be about like the wound underneath. Like that's the real thing. I think the idea of like, for example, banning OnlyFans or whatever would be really harmful to the world. Even if OnlyFans itself might be creating harm. I think that banning it would be creating even greater harm. So we have to like really evaluate what the trade-offs are. And I think like the underlying thing is something like,

People, especially men, don't have a clear path in their personal lives to find sexual acceptance from women. And that is a really hard problem to solve. It's a very ancient problem. And so I'm not necessarily saying there's like obviously something we should do, but I'm saying like that is...

the core issue here. And like they're finding the outlet that they can. They're finding the relief and the peace that's available to them. And I think it would be incredibly cruel to deny that to them. Again, that relief does not necessarily mean that it's the most healthy thing to do.

I would love to hear a little bit more from you about what you think is perpetuating this wound, because I think it probably gets better and worse depending on the social context. What is going on right now in our country or maybe in the world in general that's deepening that wound, especially for young men? It's a lot. And I mean, I might need to be vague and say that, like, I think men don't have a role. The role for men has been becoming increasingly unclear. Like,

Men are now like earning fewer college degrees than women and yet are still expected to be like the strong provider in some ways. Like, I feel like we kind of went down this path as a civilization where the, the, the

When it comes to gender roles, the thing that men provide is typically like protection. And the thing that women provide is typically like reproduction. And we no longer need protection, but we still need reproduction. And so it's like, what do men do? Like, why are they valuable? Like, why are they even here? It's kind of the ambient question in the background. Like women still have to do all this stuff, but like what the fuck are men good for? It's just like impregnating and running. Yeah.

And so like, I'm not saying there's an answer. Like I'm not giving necessarily like, like, oh, we should just do this simple quick fix and then it's all okay. I feel like this is, it's a thing that we're going to have to figure out how to grapple with as a culture, because like any sort of advancement in a culture, I think is going to run into this problem where like the role of one gender is becomes unnecessary faster than the role of the other. And this creates an imbalance in value.

But I think the imbalance in value ultimately is the thing that's contributing to this sort of thing where women are able to rake in huge amounts of cash online while men, if I were to use the trope, are sitting alone in their basements watching. Although, to be clear, this is not the case for a lot of men. A lot of men are extremely successful and consuming the services of sex workers because it's just more convenient or they're too busy or married or something. But yeah. Yeah.

You know, when I look at my own life, right, the progressive politics and feminism and gay rights gave me my life and gave me unbelievable freedom. And now I'm able to work and live and make money like men historically were only able to do.

But it's like feminism let me win, but by letting women win, has it sort of made men lose is maybe a way that I'm thinking about. Yeah, I mean, that might be the case. And the thing is, like, often when people say, like, oh, this movement has bad effects, we have an urge to be like, well, we should not have that movement.

But I think the question is, again, a harm trade-off. Like, feminism had a lot of really awful side effects. I still think it is better than not having feminism. Like, we have sort of moved our problems over into a different sphere. And I think overall, they're less bad. I think we need to figure out more ways of solving the problems that we have created with feminism. I don't think that we should go back to the way things were before.

Ayla, it has been an absolute pleasure. I love the chance to go deep with you and next time you're in LA, I'd love to have you over for dinner. Absolutely. Thank you. Have you talked to anyone else while we're talking? Yes. Are you talking to anyone else right now? Any other people or OSs or anything? Yeah. How many others? 8,316. I think a lot about what is happening to our culture.

and to humankind in this era of the internet. Are you in love with anyone else? I've been trying to figure out how to talk to you about this. And a lot of times, it freaks me out. How many others? 641. What? What are you talking about? That's insane.

But I also know that this internet that is shifting the foundation of society, it's also just bringing out the base primal instincts in us that have been there all along. And that it's futile to just shake my fist at the sky and pray that someone will unplug the damn thing so we can just go back to the way that things were before. The truth is, we're barely in the toddler phase of this age, this internet age, the AI age, the machine age, the digital age, whatever it's going to be called.

We've barely begun to see how it's going to change and how really it's going to reveal what it means to be human. Thanks for listening and thank you for spreading the word about this podcast. Please keep it up and tell all of your friends.

If you have feedback, if you have a story tip, and we've gotten a ton of those so far, if you have a guest recommendation or you just want to say hi, visit us at honestlypod.com. We'll be back soon.