NEW YORK — The New York Times (NYT) has published a report examining how sex workers are coping with the social isolation mandates caused by the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The story by Gabrielle Drolet, titled “Sex Work Comes Home,” leads with Oregon stripper Kelpie Heart, one of many offline sex workers that entered the world of live camming in the past month. Heart recently signed up for CamSoda.
“As 16 million people in the United States have applied for unemployment benefits in the last three weeks, a rush of people like Ms. Heart have sought new work performing in sexually explicit live broadcasts,” the NYT explained. “And, as nearly half the world is under some form of stay-at-home orders, people who do this work are also seeing a large growth in customers.”
CamSoda VP Daryn Parker told the NYT that “there had been a 37 percent increase in new model sign-ups this March, compared to last March.” ManyVids’ Bella French told the paper that the new model sign-up had increased by 69 percent.
As for viewers, CamSoda reported that the number of new viewers has doubled compared to early 2019.
CamSoda model Mileena Kane sounded a cautionary note, however, by telling the NYT that she is “meeting a whole bunch of people more frequently than I normally would, but there’s not much more money.”
Cam model Allie Awesome explained that “there’s a large amount of people that are looking to jump into this industry for the first time, and that saturates the market quite a bit.”
Awesome said she feels privileged that she is able to work from home.
“There has been a shift,” the cam model told the NYT about her current work practices, “but it isn’t like I’ve suddenly had the rug pulled out from under me and I’m unemployed, you know?”
The article offers a nuanced view of cam work, surprisingly free of the stigmatizing tropes often used by mainstream sources when covering sex work.
It ends with a quote by Portland sex worker Valentine educating the paper's readership about sex worker rights as human rights.
“The idea that all sex workers make a lot of money is not true — or that we’re just simply just showing our bodies and we have no integrity and we have no brain behind us,” Valentine said. “It’s really so much more than that. We’re all people.”
To read the article, click here.
