Every week while walking to Stanley Hall for class, Cassie’s phone buzzes. Sometimes it’s a friend asking to meet up and other times it’s her mom checking to make sure she’s doing fine. However, a good amount of the time it’s her Cash App. Cassie has just been paid by a man with a pseudonym. He tells her over Twitter that he’s sorry she has had a bad day and he wants her to treat herself to lunch. She puts her phone back in her pocket, satisfied, and makes a detour to Yali’s.
Cassie is a college student at UC Berkeley and currently a sex worker. She runs her business through Twitter, which she describes as an underground OnlyFans. For context, OnlyFans has identity verification for its users and safety measures to make sure its creators don’t get scammed. OnlyFans also expects its creators to show their faces, which is an unacceptable compromise for Cassie, who dreams of becoming a teacher one day. Twitter, on the other hand, has almost no regulations. Sex work on Twitter can be anything its creator wants it to be. Some use it in tandem with OnlyFans and Snapchat, building NSFW empires. Others, like Cassie, use it as a temporary way to make money towards some goal, obscuring their faces from pictures and sometimes lagging on their customers for hours.
Cassie first considered online sex work when she started college. She was given work-study as part of her financial aid package but struggled to find a job during her first semester. A few of her friends encouraged her but others did the opposite, and eventually, her school commitments forced her to drop the idea. It was only later, while living at home during the pandemic, that Cassie posted her first picture.
Her account grew fast at first. Within a few days, she gained over a hundred followers, but growth that tapers out after an initial rush, which is apparently standard for Twitter sex workers. Having hit a rut, Cassie started reaching out to other camgirl accounts. Paige, who had 15k followers at the time, followed Cassie and retweeted her pictures. Soon after, she created a group chat with other girls looking to expand their following and invited Cassie to join.
The group chat was created with the purpose of promoting each others’ work, but later became something more. Some girls talked about their past trauma, forming close friendships. Others messaged each other individually and eventually fell in love. Cassie was able to grow her following in relative safety with the help of the group chat, learning how to market her content, how much to charge for certain images and videos, and what kinds of customers to avoid. The girls also sent some of their content in the group chat to get feedback on the images.
This became an issue when it was revealed that Paige was actually a man. The images that he had posted were screenshots taken from an unrelated woman’s OnlyFans.
The group chat was disbanded and a new one was created. Paige was blocked, sales plummeted, and the customers worried that the person they were chatting with wasn’t who they said they were. By lying about his identity and profiting off of a woman’s image, Paige had violated the consent of the women in the group chat and showed he did not understand the women’s past experiences.
The women of the group chat almost all had past trauma, most caused by rape or sexual assault. Cassie is no exception. Growing up, she felt deeply uncomfortable with being touched, something she attributed to the repeated sexual abuse she experienced as a child. In high school, she felt the need to explore intimacy but struggled to hold hands or kiss anyone she dated. When she was in 12th grade, she was sexually assaulted in the school bathrooms. Her assaulter then spread rumors about what had happened. Suddenly, people looked at Cassie differently. Later, she agreed to let her boyfriend film her during sex but didn’t consent to him showing the video to all his friends.
By selling her nudes on Twitter, Cassie had been taking control of her own image and body. She was the one who controlled what others saw, and she was the one who ultimately benefited from it. When men with pseudonyms sent her money, it was because she had chosen to show those particular pictures to that particular man for that particular price.
Although sex work on Twitter is dangerous, Cassie feels that it is worth it for now. She likes having extra money to spend on coffee and a way to make money almost immediately if she needs to. She enjoys the attention and compliments. Most of all, there is the healing that comes from making her body exclusively the product of herself.