Life in the Fap Lane: My Pandemic as a Sex Worker – Part One

OnlyFans or: How I learned to stop worrying and wear a mask while selling pictures of my vagina for money 

30 seems as good an age as any to write an in depth expose about the more salacious corners of my life , and the COVID-19 pandemic of the year Where Nothing Good Happened For Anyone, (2020) seemed as good a time as any to try sex-work. I thought a lot about where to start this story- did it all stem from when I got fingered for the first time in a movie theatre by my first boyfriend at the tender age of 14 while watching Napoleon Dynamite? Or should I start just 4 years in the past, the day after The Election-you know the one-where I woke up in tears because overnight, America had somehow elected an orange repugnant narcissist with zero governing experience over an actually qualified but historically polarizing female candidate? Or, I could start with the humid July day in the midst of that UNPRECEDENTED Covid-summer where some teenager didn’t check his blind-spot and annihilated the right side of my 10-year-old Prius (gifted to me a year and a half prior by my Floridian-retirement-community-bound parents). You could say that all of these events had their part to play in what eventually led me to that digital blue lock. 

There are many reasons why I feel totally fine with sex work, but the main one is that I had actually been doing many of the things I now get paid to do on OnlyFans for years via tinder-for the low, low price of fleeting emotional validation and sometimes dinner. But as the Joker and most Jews say, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” After $1,000+ erroneously spent on my stupid fucking piece of shit burden of a car from 4 weeks of general bad luck, I felt compelled to earn my money back. At the time, the fastest (most legal) way I could think of that fit into my particular skill set was OnlyFans. The site had been gaining quite a bit of notoriety during the pandemic and I had been working regularly as a nude model for 6 years at that point. My Instagram was already full of carefully cropped and edited nudes plus other types of thirst traps that had hundreds of loyal likers over the course of 5 years… So letting it all hang out by posting the unedited versions of my most-liked pics for whatever horny dudes were willing to pay $5.99/month to see them didn’t seem like much of a stretch. I made $1,000 my first week. 

I’ve never had a particularly bad connotation with the idea of ‘sex work’ in and of itself, having also worked in the burlesque industry for 8 years as a lighting/sound designer. I promise this isn’t a cover letter, but with a background in theatre, nude modeling (for artists/art classes), and being paid to watch beautiful human beings of all shapes, sizes, creeds and colors strip to music for a decade- the idea of actually DOING sex work seemed extremely within reach. I do recognize that for the majority of individuals, sex work is just not normalized which is why most of you are interested in reading this in the first place. It’s another world for you- a foreign, strange world where nudity not being directly associated with vulnerability and shame is borderline unthinkable! I’m your Fifty Shades of Gray… but with less fantasy and more Judaism. I’ve been desensitized to this world of professional sensuousness. It’s like growing up with a sister who is A-romantic/A-sexual; if I hadn’t grown up with it, I would probably be skeptical too. But A-sexuality is super fucking legitimate and so is sex work. I always say my sister was born without a libido and I got 2. So, here we are. 

Who even AM I, by the way? Literally no one. I am one of the Great Many in almost every possible statistical aspect of any popular worldly enterprise. In terms of social media I have less than 650 followers on Instagram and I’ve never used Snapchat or Twitter. My YouTube channel has 24 subscribers, giving my user data to TikTok scares me, and I’ve used Facebook daily since 2008. I do have some 1400 Facebook ‘friends’ but most of them are ‘comedians’ (read: open mic-ers) whom I’ve never met, just so we’re clear about my complete and utter lack of influence on anybody. I just don’t have influencer-vibes. I don’t have a work-life balance, minimalist but elegant decorative knick knacks, or hair that has ever dried the same way twice. I’m Andi Sacks pre-makeover. I have no clue what a boomerang is or what it’s doing on Instagram outside of Australia. 

My Human Stats: 

• 30 yrs
• Female
• White
• Jewish
• 4’10” (yes, really)
• Educated
• Working stand up (musical) comic and speech pathologist
• Straight with some bisexual tendencies 

I spent 7 years as a single twentysomething where I tried all of the notable swipe-able apps from which I met hundreds of men ranging from the uniquely absurd to the hideously deplorable and I had sex with most of them. I only got chlamydia once and have learned to live with probably permanent HPV. After 10 years and 150+ partners, 20+ (negative) STD tests, 5 UTI’s, 4 yeast infections, 3 threesomes, 2 stalking-no-contact orders, 1 enraged phone call from a surprise-wife on Christmas Eve, and a bag of used panties sold via Craigslist, I feel uniquely qualified to tell you about my experiences as a Pandemic-Era OnlyFans girl.

(Am I even hot? Fuck, I don’t think so, but apparently enough people who collectively are willing to pay 6 months of my rent do, so I’m not gonna yuck their yum. I will, however, capitalize on it as best I can. Business 101).  

Some less statistical but just as important aspects of my personality I feel you should know at this time include the fact that I’m incredibly emotionally needy. I’m financially independent just like Beyonce, but I thrive off validation- hence the stand up comedy. Your laughter and applause is my Vitamin D. Losing it completely won’t kill me, but it sure will make me shitty and insufferable, and quite frankly, not my ~best self~. Being booked consistently as a model for art classes never felt as validating for me as performing as a comedian or doing actual sex-work does. Sure, nude-modeling is quite freeing and did release me from the social construct of viewing nudity as congruent with vulnerability, but I always assumed I got booked regularly because I had a car, was reliable, punctual, and could stay still for upwards of 25 minutes. It never occurred to me that the way I looked- the physical aspects of my ‘classically feminine’ body- were in any way associated with or responsible for my consistent bookings. I’m sure there’s some leftover body dysmorphia/low self-esteem baggage I’ve not yet unpacked since undergrad in there, but I think we’ll just store that suitcase behind the couch for now and call it a day. 

To clear up some myths about being a nude model: I do not ‘get off’ on being nude in front of strangers. (Having sex in front of strangers is a totally different thing). As far as just being drawn while nude- I absolutely enjoy it, but I don’t masturbate to the thought of it because the atmosphere of modeling never felt sexually charged to me- except for that one time in that rich lady’s coach house where I was alone with a male artist/model who I had made out with once and he tried touching my vagina during a pose. But other than that, I never associated modeling with orgasms or sexuality. Sex work, however… hoh boy. I can tell you right now that in the past, if I wasn’t on my period or battling a UTI or yeast infection, then I was masturbating at least once a day. Since starting onlyfans…those numbers have… increased. Substantially. And boy are the vibrators my fans bought for me tired! Ha, just kidding, they’re tiny rubber sex-robots, they don’t get tired. 

So anyway, there I was, this sexually charged horndog of a nude model/comedian/speech pathologist (with the former unrelated to the latters) trying to find full time work mere months after getting a sorely won masters degree during that UNPRECEDENTED and confusing Covid-summer when suddenly I found myself dropping a grand of cash that I had no intention of spending on that bullshit excuse for a hybrid vehicle that I relied on to make the little money I was making by cobbling together 2 part time clinic jobs and 2 regular babysitting gigs that barely covered my rent. It was clear to me that I needed to expand my fiscal reaches and start earning from new (legitimate) sources. I figured, like my mother always says at Best Buy, “It never hurts to ask”. So I created the profile, posted some content, charged $4.99/month (the lowest price you could charge without being free), then posted a thirst trap on Instagram for my 542 followers to see and make their own assumptions and judgments about. Then I posted the link on another racy IG story and money poured in so quickly from sources I honestly would never have expected… I was stunned but validated in a new and fantastically addicting way.