The Anti-Influencers (II)

Part 2: Ana1Prin3ss

Sometimes, non-users of Only Fans like myself end up hearing about top earners anyway. This is largely because podcasters gain a lot of clout from interviewing them. It’s literally sexy, it’s interesting, and it’s a world that most people are entirely unfamiliar with from the inside. Giving air time to sex workers is considered the socially progressive and liberal thing to do, and while I wholly agree that sex work is deserving of more space in the cultural zeitgeist, I have seen some things in the past month or two that make me wonder if any of this is really helping to destigmatize the profession. 

Before I get into it, I want to say that I am neutral on sex work the same way that I am neutral on plastic surgery. Both things are tools, and tools can be used for good reasons or they can be used for bad reasons. It is impossible to tell who is using the tool for the right reasons simply by looking at them. I cannot watch a porn scene and ascertain the mental health of its’ stars, much the same way I cannot look at someone who has had plastic surgery and determine whether or not their aesthetic choices came from a mentally healthy place. Being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ is wholly insufficient, and the ability to unpack an issue with nuance is why I love long form writing. A majority of cultural happenings are simply too complex to fit into a Tweet thread.

When I told a friend what I was writing about for this installment of Thought Deli, she asked me if I thought I would be flamed for it. For one, my audience is almost definitely too small for me to get flamed, but more importantly: people who would reactionarily drag me online for what I’m about to say don’t have the attention span to read the entirety of this essay. I am far from alone in my opinion, even if it isn’t particularly trendy to say so at the moment. I have several contacts that are engaged with Only Fans or sex work of their own, and I spoke with them before I gathered my thoughts on this. Many of them have similar concerns and happen to think that the questions I am positing here are worthy of consideration.

One of these new Only Fans record-breakers is a woman named Stella Barey, who uses the online handle @ana1princ3ss. She recently served as a speaker on a guest panel at UCLA, an event that was organized by their Campus Events Commission. The Instagram post by @UCLACEC is captioned with the following: ‘Interested in learning more about the lives and experiences of sex workers directly from the source?’ The panel featured four women, only one of whom presently works primarily as a sex worker (Stella Barey). The other three women now work at SWOP LA (Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles) in Services and Outreach, BIPOC Social Justice Coordination, and the Secretarial + Fundraising departments. The panel was moderated by a gender studies PhD candidate. A little misleading if you ask me, as only one woman could be called a “direct source” at the time of the panel, but I digress.

I first became exposed to Barey when I came across a clip she did in an interview with Eileen Kelly, host of the podcast Going Mental, on my Instagram Explore page. I don’t listen to this podcast, but now that media = life, podcasts are not only recorded. Often they are videotaped. This provides the hosts with something visual to post to social media, so they can promote the episode. Clips of especially stupid moments with guests on Emrata’s podcast have been going viral for months, it’s clever marketing, and I suspect they choose the most contrarian and divisive segments to present without context. It makes the comment section go crazy!

In the first Stella Barey clip I ever watched, Eileen poses a question about aging and looking back on some of your more youthful follies. To paraphrase, Eileen expresses that while she used to post a lot of sexy content on Instagram and felt it was empowering at the time, as she entered her late twenties and thirties, she started to feel differently. Why she posed this question to Barey, who is 23 years old, I don’t know. If Barey will ever come to feel that way, she certainly doesn’t right now. Her response was pretty measured: something about how we all grow and change and evolve, so it makes sense that one would have different ideas of empowerment as they move through their lives.

(It is at this point that I am going to have to introduce the mention of some potentially triggering sex acts, many of which have to do with poop. I’m sorry in advance, and if you cannot personally handle scat discussion, it is probably best to stop reading here.)

The handle @ana1princ3ss doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination. What is somewhat unique for mainstream porn fame is Barey’s order of operations. In several scenes and videos, she has anal sex with a male performer, and then goes immediately from ass to mouth. In some cases, there is, for lack of a better word, poop on the performer’s dick when this happens. In an effort to be transgressive and scintillating (or maybe just to avoid cutting the camera to rinse off?) Barey has been known to ‘clean’ her own poop off of said dick. She talks about this openly, as well as the amount of bacterial throat infections it has caused her, which she says is well worth the views (and therefore money) that the videos get.

Pause, because that’s a lot to process. Not the fact that she does it willingly, nor the fact that this subset of pornography has enough demand to bring her nearly 200k a month, but the fact that she positions this act as one of extreme personal empowerment due to the lifestyle it affords her. To hear her tell it (and I have, on no less than four full-length hour plus podcasts where she was a guest), she is simply doing what she loves, and finding tremendous financial success while she’s at it. If you have brain worms, the gut reaction might be something like: good for her! But even if it’s good for her, I’m not so sure it’s good for the rest of us.

For background, Barey is the daughter of a doctor and a finance executive. She was the recipient of considerable financial privilege before deciding to go into porn. As the story goes, she was applying to medical school, getting ready to obtain a pre-med degree, before she had a change of heart and realized that it wasn’t what she wanted to do. After being introduced to the industry via sex parties, she realized she could have an “actual life” as a porn star. To quote Part 1 of her episode with Eileen (this topic begins around the timestamp 20:08): “Even though being a doctor is so hard, by the time I was applying for med school I was like, this doesn’t feel like a challenge anymore because I know I can do it if I stick it out. If I have the drive in me to do it still, I know I could. So I was like, what’s something I don’t know if I could do?” And maybe that’s true for Barey, but listening to that made me feel like I could benefit from being a little more delusional about my potential.

We now live in a society where suggesting the opinion that scat play is disgusting is enough to get you branded as anti-sex work, anti-slut, and a Puritanical killjoy. I saw a fairly brave Twitter thread where a woman was essentially poking holes in some of the claims Barey has made around her experience, and the comment replies were largely antagonistic towards her. For me, the most interesting comment reply was something along the lines of ‘everyone hating on Stella in this thread is broke.’

Which brings me to my main issue with all of this. If you have a scat kink, by all means, live your truth. I have no doubt that exploring such a kink in a safe and consensual way is incredibly empowering. My concern is that, culturally, we are so deep into late capitalism and survival is so cutthroat and competitive, that many of us truly believe that if you have achieved financial success, it’s admirable no matter how you’ve done it, and no matter the personal cost. This is not only devastating to me, it is reductive.

One big problem I have is the fierce economic competition that platforms like Only Fans create. While Barey might genuinely enjoy this work and feel empowered doing it, she is making the playing field more difficult for women who do not want to perform more extreme acts. For every woman on Only Fans who would choose to make the content she does, there is at least one woman (I’d argue far more, as my research does not suggest that it is an even ratio) who is doing so out of financial necessity. Because of desensitization to porn, frequent viewers often seek out ‘freakier’ and more fringe content with time. If a person watches the same porn scene every day, eventually it is not going to be as exciting as it once was. Viewed on a macro level, one can start to imagine the effect that this can have on young people, a huge majority of whom are watching porn well before they have sex with a person in real life. Performers who had been making a decent living on Only Fans posting tamer content now have to compete with the Stella Bareys of the world, and you don’t have to be a statistics major to infer that most of them didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at going to medical school. 

The disenfranchisement of core users of the platform by suddenly big names (remember when Bella Thorne joined OF?) has been a boiling point for some time. While I’d argue Barey made her name in porn first, vs. being a celebrity that decided to dabble, it does amaze me that none of the podcasters I listened to asked Barey about this. It’s such an obvious interview question: “Do you feel that by creating content that most performers wouldn’t, you could be unintentionally pressuring other performers to push their own boundaries in order to financially compete?”

Honestly, this kind of thing is why I am burned out on interview-style podcasts. The primary reason for having one now is marketing, which means the goal is to gain clout in order to drive purchases to affiliated ad channels or product lines. It is most important now, above all, to be considered a ‘friend’ to every guest, because God forbid a bridge gets burned or a single career opportunity is lost. No one is really brave enough to ask hard-hitting questions to their subjects’ faces anymore. Even famously contrarian podcasts like Red Scare tend to sympathize more with their guests when they are in-studio and recording with them than they would discussing them in a regular episode, if the person was not present. I have watched tens of painful clips from Emrata’s podcast, and even though she has a range of guests with a variety of different politics and opinions, she nods along noiselessly to every single thing each one of them says, despite the glaring contradictions across the board.

Free idea: someone start a podcast that is not afraid to be antagonistic towards guests. I have no doubt that there would be people who are still willing to go on and play the game, and I can virtually guarantee that in this cultural time, it would be welcomed with open arms. All it takes is a willingness to be brave. I’m being brave right now publishing this post. 

In the wise words of my plastic surgeon: you can’t be brave if you’re not scared!