I just found this old interview I did in 2016 with PJ. It’s super long, so if you’re a sick freak who is obsessed with me and stalks me and watches everything I do, you’ll love it. Just kidding, it was really fun and it’s good to have people who supported me in my work early on, and who were willing to go interesting and novel places in conversation about a profession whose stereotypes kind of define the archetype of ribald stereotypes. Enjoy! XOXO
Giulia Ricci (@msgiuliaricci @ThankYouGiulia) is a perennial philosophy student, visual artist, and professional-virtual Femme Domme currently revising a philosophy paper about what a friend described as “the art of resistance to an overly limiting category of ‘the human,’ and the importance of the concept of friendship to navigating that largely uncharted terrain.” (Ed. This interview is from 2016, but I’m still revising it! LOL)
PJ Patella-Rey (@pjrey) is a sex work/tech writer and gender & sexuality instructor with xIndustryBooks & a host of The Peep Show. He is a mostly former content creator. He co-founded the Cyborgology blog and the Theorizing the Web conference.
Together, they did an hour-long interview regarding Giulia’s experiences as a sex worker. They covered some terrain that they particularly hope will be interesting to those who are not familiar with the sex industry from a worker’s perspective.
Interview
PJ: Tell me the story of how you started sex camming.
Giulia: when I was 19 — 29 now — I went on a sugar daddy dating website. And, that was the first sex work – like activity that I engaged in.
PJ: What website was that?
Giulia: SeekingArrangement.
PJ: Is that still around?
Giulia: Yeah, it’s still around. It’s gotten a lot bigger actually.
[Call dropped]
PJ: So you are saying SeekingArrangement was your first experience…
Giulia: And that really brought up a lot of the questions I have about the legal status of sex work right from the beginning. As far as I know, what I did was legal; it’s portrayed as legal. But, it’s also confusing to me why it’s legal. It’s very formally stipulated as a transactional form of sex work. On the website, when you’re filling out your profile, you specify the dollar amount per month that you require from your sugar daddy. So, that seems pretty straightforwardly like exchanging money for sex.
I had differing experiences on that website: Some were in line with the best-case scenario and some were mostly just trying to treat it as prostitution.
PJ: Some of the clients?
Giulia: Yeah, they would often portray themselves as wanting to have an ongoing sugar daddy relationship, then they would just kind of pressure me into sex, give me money, and never talk to me again.
But there was one interaction with an older man who is a filmmaker. I shouldn’t give too much information about him. He’s very wealthy. He’s involved in filmmaking as well as film festivals. He’s a painter and was a former professor at [a prestigious university in the North East]. He and I have a great relationship that continues to this day. He really acted as a mentor to me, as well as supporting me financially. Regardless of whether he’d seen me in the last five years, he’d still send financial support to me for my art projects and things like that, which he was interested in seeing me pursue. So that was a really positive interaction. I choose to focus on that more than the negative interactions I had.
Because of that experience, I Googled camsites out of curiosity. Also, because I don’t have to worry about the guys pressuring me to engage in prostitution; it’s not physically possible. It’s safe in many other ways, in terms of not having to actually have sex with anyone.
All of that led me to be curious about it. In 2009, I tried MyFreeCams for a little while. It was alright. But, for whatever reason, I wasn’t emotionally prepared to do it as much as I am now. So, I stopped after a few months. Then, last June, I went back on that site, and I started having a lot of success.
Later, I found NiteFlirt from a friend, who said that it was better than MyFreeCams. I found that it was, so I’ve been working on there since. I’ve put a lot of work into developing my listings there, my advertising, and all of that. I’ve made a lot of money and have had some really interesting experiences.
PJ: You just raised so many interest questions for me. I’m just going to try and tackle them in order. So, if we can go back to your experience with the sugaring site: You met those sugar daddies through the website? Did your interactions mostly take place online, through the telephone, of did you just meet up in person?
Giulia: There’s a wide variety. Not a lot of interactions online. Usually, we would chat a little bit. I would look for people who are willing to chat more beforehand because that was a good sign. We’d do that, and then we’d meet for dinner.
There is also another website I went on called WhatsYourPrice.com that’s a dating auction site where they’d say “okay, I bid a $100 if you go to dinner with me.” That was really cool too. There was a time when I got $350 to go to the symphony.
Also, one time on SeekingArrangement, I went to dinner with someone, and they ended up having moral concerns about it and they didn’t want to do it. But, they had agreed to a $3000 allowance, and I guess by way of apology, they just sent me the $3000 anyway. Just after one dinner.
So, there was a wide variety of things. There were a couple occasions where we met in the hotel, and that was more akin to the actual escorting, I suppose. For the most part, it was just a couple of dinners to decide if we got along. And, if not, then not.
PJ: So, what would happen if you did get along? What would that look like then?
Giulia: There were only a couple of times that that really happened for me. Where we really clicked. There are number of people who wanted to continue with me. But I didn’t feel it.
There were regular meetings. Flying to different places depending on where we were. Meeting and staying together in a hotel for a couple days. Going out and doing touristy stuff. Going out to dinner. Going out for drinks. Dancing. Just very much like dating.
There was one experience that I had — I actually got interviewed by the The New York Times about this — where I was pressured into not using a condom after flying out to San Francisco with somebody. That was upsetting. Other than that, I didn’t have any experiences of being assaulted. Given how many people I met, I had a pretty good experience overall.
PJ: How many people would you say you met?
Giulia: Total, between the two websites, I’d say 20 to 30.
PJ: And, of those, you really clicked with a couple of them that you had a more ongoing interaction with.
Giulia: Yeah, the first guy that I met was really the only one that I continued long-term contact with. Like I said, I met him when I was 19. I’m 29 now and he still messages me on my birthday and stuff.
PJ: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it seems like that relationship has evolved, that there’s some sort of friendship. Or, how would you characterize that?
Giulia: It’s almost parental in a way. He’s from India and I always joke that he’s my Desi fairy godfather. Every once in a while he’ll show up in my life and be like,
“Oh are you working on this film? Here’s $500. By the way eat your vegetables and, you better not be wasting your time arguing with conservatives.”
So, yeah, it was a really cool relationship.
PJ: That’s interesting. And sweet.
Giulia: Yeah, it really is.
PJ: Ok. I think I have a general sense, now, of how all that worked. I don’t want to push you for too much for details — and I won’t — but, at least, for a number of the people you met up with on those two sites, you had physical encounters?
Giulia: Uh-huh.
PJ: One of the things that was ultimately appealing about camming is that there was some distance from that pressure — that you still are able to have some of those kinds of interactions without, necessarily, the pressure of the physical.
Giulia: Yeah, emotionally and physically that was more difficult for me. I often would find that I was using alcohol to facilitate the interaction, so it wasn’t healthy. Except for with the one guy from India whose company I genuinely enjoyed. I would have to drink and get myself into a zone. It wasn’t really so healthy.
PJ: So, it took a certain amount of prep work in order to be in the right headspace?
Giulia: Yeah.
[Break to fix technical issue]
PJ: So you said there are safety issues and there was that one incident where you were pressured and felt a little unsafe?
Giulia: I take that back. There were actually two instances that were strongly negative. This is important. This one experience was so negative for me that it made me more or less decide that I’m not doing in-person sex work at all anymore. And, even though I was unable to pay rent, and I ended up losing my apartment as a result, I was like “I’m not doing that anymore.”
It’s hard for me to even explain why that one was so disturbing because there was no element of being coerced into to sex — no sexual assault — but the guy just seemed evil to me. Or creepy. It just weirded me out. He was someone working in finance who had over $10 million. And, something about his vibe just traumatized me. He made some weird comment about SWAT teams as I was leaving. I have no idea to this day what he was talking about. He said something about how SWAT teams are always practicing. I don’t know what it was. It was super creepy. I was living in [a college town in California] at the time, so I had access to medical marijuana. I spent a couple weeks trying to forget that, eating a bunch of medical marijuana. I just stopped doing it.
PJ: And, again, I don’t want to push you too far, so you can tell me at any time if you’re uncomfortable.
Giulia: I’m happy to talk about it.
PJ: It’s ambiguous, but it sounds like maybe you felt threatened by what he was saying?
Giulia: Yeah, I wasn’t sure how to take it, and it just made me feel kind of paranoid. I didn’t know why he was bringing that up right as I was leaving the hotel room, and I didn’t want to ask clarificatory questions. I just didn’t know why he decided to tell me about SWAT teams right as I was leaving. It was super creepy. He had also insisted on showing me a bunch of pictures of women who were so thin that they were, like, anorexic, as soon I got there. So, there is a lot of stuff that was weird about that. But nothing ever came of it, obviously.
PJ: And you didn’t have further interactions with him?
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: That’s why your transitioned into a different form of sex work?
Giulia: Yeah, because there still are creepy people that call me, but it’s a totally different ballpark.
PJ: When you say “still call you,” you mean through your interactions…
Giulia: …on NiteFlirt.
PJ: I want to get your current work, but going from 19 to 29 there’s a lot of years in between. It sounds like you weren’t doing sex work for all that time.
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: You’re in grad school, or undergrad?
Giulia: I’m still finishing my BA.
PJ: Of course, there are a lot of other dimensions in your life, and I was wondering if maybe you want to talk about, during that period of time, what else was going on in your life. And, what were you doing between.
Giulia: I was living in [a Northeastern city] with my family and I didn’t want to get a retail job because I just thought it was boring. I wanted extra money, and I thought the idea of having a mentor was appealing.
Actually, I was dating someone at the time, so I debated, at first, telling him, but I went ahead and told him. He was fine. He was actually really supportive throughout the entire time that he and I dated. He would drive me to meet people sometimes. And, he would talk to me if it was stressful or whatever. But, that relationship actually did end, in part, because he couldn’t handle my drinking. The drinking was certainly self-medication for not liking meeting people I didn’t know and having sex with them. So, that was one negative impact that it had.
But, I’ve always surrounded myself with people that were open-minded. People from [my small liberal college] are very open-minded and don’t race judgment about these kinds of thing. I wasn’t super out, but I was able to talk to my friends about it. When I was in college, my roommates knew about it. My life is kind of complicated because I went to a small private school most my life and then I went to [a small liberal arts college], but I actually took my first college class one is 13 years old.
PJ: Oh wow, that’s really young.
Giulia: And, yet I’m 29 and I still don’t have a BA. So I took multiple breaks. In part, because it was weird, socially, to be so much younger than everybody in the college. During that time, I would sometimes work retail. Two-thirds of the time, I was doing waitressing or food service stuff. It kind of pushed me back to sex work because I was being sexually harassed on the job anyway, and that’s not being reflected in my pay. They don’t give me an extra three dollars an hour to put up with this sexual harassment from customers. But, I’m still expected to not make a scene every time it happens; otherwise, I’d be making a scene five times a day.
PJ: Sex work paid better?
Giulia: Yeah, sex work pays better too. As time went on and I got a sense of what types of jobs were available to me before I finish school, it just kept seeming like most reasonable option for me, given the financial benefits and given my own personality and my own interests. I took several breaks from college. I lived in [a Northeastern city]. I lived in [a large city in California] for awhile. Then I came back to [the Southeast] to resume school.
PJ: I think you said this implicitly but I kind of want to tease this out: You said that, on the one hand, doing the work that you did on sugaring sites was pretty tough for you and that you had to self-medicate…
Giulia: I also brought a friend several times too. Actually, a trans man friend of mine who had just begun transitioning, so he was willing to dress as a woman and go with me. But he was also this super tough guy that I feel really safe around. When I think back on it, it was a pretty unique situation. He would come with a knife on him, but be dressed as a super-feminine girl. We would present ourselves as two girls with the guy, so that also helped as well. But, ultimately, it wasn’t something he was interested doing long-term.
PJ: So how would that work? Was he there more is your bodyguard, or…?
Giulia: We would make out and be sexual to some degree. We were not dating, but our relationship was always sexually open in a way. I don’t know how else to describe it. So, we were comfortable enough with each other to do sexual stuff in front of guys. That’s how it would go on. We’d go out to dinner together too.
PJ: So, all three of you would go out together, including the sugar daddy, and you would all talk?
Giulia: Yeah, because that was a big part of it too. The guys often like going out to bars and being seen with the girl or girls. That’s part of what they are looking for.
PJ: A kind of social recognition?
Giulia: “Eye candy” is what they tend to call it.
PJ: Okay, you’ve talked a bit about the difficulties associated with doing the work. Now can you talk a bit about your motivations for doing the work?
Giulia: That’s an interesting question. I would probably be silly to assume that I understand all of the reasons myself; there are probably a lot of complex psychological reasons.
There’s something really validating about knowing men are willing to spend huge sums of money on your company and attention – which is a stereotypes about sex workers to some degree. I had some insecurities after having a difficult adolescence, and I found it pleasant to have my attractiveness be validated in that way, with objective dollar amounts being put on it. Also, it enabled me to have a lifestyle that I wouldn’t otherwise have. With sugaring, it was significant sums of money: At least $1000 every time I met up with somebody. In the one case, $3000 to go to dinner. It’s very unpredictable. I was able to travel. I would go to New York. I went to San Francisco. I was able to live in a way that retail work wouldn’t have afforded me.
PJ: That’s helpful for my understanding. Let me just think through some timeline stuff here. Were talking 10 years ago – that’s around 2006. Broadband is somewhat in place by then. The Internet actually works. So, did you have a personal computer? How are you accessing these sites?
Giulia: Yeah, I had a laptop. A Windows computer. I don’t entirely remember. What happened is that, the one time I was pressured into sex without a condom, I was doing was flying to [a large city in Callifonia] with him in order to meet somebody else who I’d met on a dating website. That went really well. We ended up living together for about a year. And, I didn’t do any sex work during that time.
PJ: Was that a man or woman?
Giulia: That was a transsexual woman.
PJ: Was it romantic?
Giulia: Yeah, we were in a relationship. She is a public figure now. And, she’s not out as a transsexual. She’s just stealth. So, I’m going to be very careful about not providing any identifying information there other than that we lived [together]. She was in the process of founding her company at the time. So, she had a lot of money, and she covered all of my expenses. She also gave me a MacBook. That really allowed me to do Skype chats and stuff more easily, because the webcam and software were better.
PJ: Can you talk a little bit about those early days — then we will get up to the present — what did you do in terms of building a profile?
Giulia: Not much. Not much. it was about as elaborate as of Facebook profile is, without the wall posts. It was just a brief bio where I would talk about liking art, dancing, and wine. It had four or five pictures of me and my height and weight and stuff like that.
PJ: Did you take pictures specifically for the site?
Giulia: Yeah, I would do pictures specifically for the site. But, I didn’t put nearly as much effort into that kind of thing as I do now.
PJ: I definitely want to get to that. But how did you take those pictures in 2006? That was just the beginning of digital cameras.
Giulia: Yeah, I was just with the webcam, I think.
PJ: Then the last question I have about that is: When you put together those profiles, did you feel like you were constructing a persona?
Giulia: Yeah, it was kind of an ideal self.
PJ: How much do you think it was authentic or accurate to your interests and personality, and how much do you think it was a performance or something you were constructing?
Giulia: That’s an interesting question. I think it was pretty accurate — more so on SeekingArrangement versus WhatYourPrice. The thing that’s a performance is my enthusiasm for the guys — being fascinated by them. One guy had a walnut empire. He made millions of dollars off of walnuts somehow. There’s lots of listening to them talk about something for the entire dinner and being fascinated by it. That stuff was the performance, but I was also able to be the artsy chick kind of thing, which is a cartoon version of who I am in real life.
PJ: So, you were tapping into some of your personality but may be over-exaggerating parts of it?
Giulia: Yeah, and I would love to talk more about that with regards to my current advertising, because I’m super into that now.
PJ: We’ll definitely get there. In part, I’m asking all these questions about the past because I think it will be really interesting, when we get to the present, to make those comparisons or see an evolution. Which, you know if that’s the case. But I’m just assuming that, like everybody does, you changed over time. And, 10 years is a good chunk of time.
So, we’ll go ahead and fast-forward. I’m very familiar with MyFreeCams but not very familiar with NiteFlirt (other than from a few acquaintances that use it). Most of the people I’m close to either use MyFreeCams or Chaturbate. So, I’d love to hear more about NiteFlirt and how it compares to MyFreeCams for you.
Giulia: I’m going to be opinionated. I think MyFreeCams is kind of exploitative, relatively speaking, compared to NiteFlirt, because of the pressure to be on and performing all the time, whether or not you’re getting paid for it. That can go better or worse for different cammers, depending on how many people are tipping you. You can kind of count on an average: “This is the amount I tend to get tipped in a night, so I know I’m basically making so much per hour, even if it’s not all coming in at once and there’s a three hour period that I don’t make any money.”
PJ: Are you talking about how it works on MyFreeCams?
Giulia: Yeah. So, you can kind of average out your tips and figure out what you’re making an hour. But, the way they rank people on the website, it seems much more focused on appearance than NiteFlirt is — for reasons I can explain — but it’s also arbitrary too. You might be as good as a cammer as someone who’s near the top of the website, but because you don’t already have a following, you’re not going to get a following. And, there’s no way to move up the rankings of the profiles on the website, so there’s no chance to get exposure.
I had a lot of regular customers for awhile, but if I stopped for a couple weeks for school or something, then I’d lose the regular customers. And, I didn’t have a way to get that back, so I’d get stuck at the bottom of the site. I was putting a lot of effort into getting dressed, and I sort of felt like it was a minstrel show or something — dancing around trying to provide this performance for these guys, who all felt very entitled to demand things of me without actually paying for them in any way. That doesn’t happen on NiteFlirt.
PJ: Do you think they treated you differently because of your ranking, if you weren’t ranked highly?
Giulia: Probably, to some degree. If you have a couple hundred people in your chat room, you have more people who are being nice to you and you can afford to ignore a jerk. But, if the jerk is the only guy who’s there in your chat room, then you’re going to end up interacting with them, for better or for worse.
PJ: I have a pretty good sense of how MyFreeCams work, but as a cis guy, I don’t have a behind-the-scenes perspective.
Giulia: Yeah, I got banned once for bringing a cis-guy on MyFreeCams. On accident! [Laughs] I was actually on NiteFlirt and forgot I was also logged into MyFreeCams. So, we broadcasted a free show, and we got banned. Isn’t that ridiculous? That happened like five times.
PJ: Really? [Laughs]
Giulia: Not with a guy. But, there were a couple times where I was taking NiteFlirt calls, and I got really into the NiteFlirt call. Then, I would look on the computer and see that I was still logged into MyFreeCams with 20 people in the chat room watching.
PJ: But you didn’t get banned for that?
[Laughs]
Giulia: No, just when I brought the guy in, for obvious reasons.
[Laughs]
PJ: So, tell me a little bit more about the ranking system [on MyFreeCams], which you seem not to have a very favorable opinion of.
Giulia: They don’t tell you how exactly the cam score works. They don’t tell you what exactly makes it go up or down. I think it has to do with people giving you five star ratings, how much money you make on average, and a couple of other factors. It’s probably mostly how much money you’re making. What you’re primarily selling there — how your advertising yourself — isn’t through a profile listing your interests, it’s through the live stream. So, guys are clicking through live stream after live stream and all they really have to go on is how big your boots are; whether you weigh 110 lbs or 140 lbs; whether you’re naked or clothed. Those are the kind of things that pique their interest and draw people to your room.
I weigh 145 pounds; I’m not super skinny. I am getting a breast augmentation soon, actually. I’m not saying I’m unattractive, but I’m not an eye-popping Barbie doll. So, that’s not really the strength I bring to camming. I think it’s more my personality. So, it’s harder for me because, [MyFreeCams] is so appearance-based. When it’s exclusively appearance based, the body image standards get pretty ruthless.
If I put all my energy into, say, losing 20 pounds and getting plastic surgery, I’m sure I could raise my ranking on MyFreeCams. But, once I had NiteFlirt, instead, I didn’t want to do that, for couple of reasons: With NiteFlirt, it’s a static listing not live stream, which has the benefit that you are not dancing like a monkey for no money. When you’re not working, you’re not doing anything. When you’re not being paid, you don’t have to do anything. I can do my homework and have NiteFlirt on. I only have to perform when I am actively getting paid by the minute. That makes a big difference.
The other thing is that the listings are listings. It’s sort of like a profile on SeekingArrangement, but with a lot of room to customize the HTML. I’m into that. I’m a visual artist as you can see. I have this mural.
[Pans camera across mural in the background.]
PJ: That’s cool. Oh, wow, you serious lighting in there to.
Giulia: Yeah, I have a little studio in my bedroom. My roommates think I’m crazy. They don’t know what’s going on.
But, I’m the visual artist, so I get really into the graphic design and the HTML coding in the listing. I’ve made animated GIFs to put on it. And, there’s writing involved. You write a description of yourself and what services you offer. Probably, the most significant part is that you bid for ad space. When I’m working, I’m usually the first person people see. I consistently bid to be on the top of the website. What you do is enter in the amount of money you pay per the number of times a customer clicks on your profile. So, every time someone clicks on my profile, I usually pay a dollar, because my profile is the first thing they see when they go to the website. I could pay, maybe, fifty cents and be a little lower on the website. All the way down to the bidding two cents per click or whatever. But that allows me to bypass the cam score thing you have with MyFreeCams and go straight to the top to get the greatest amount of exposure. So that’s really cool.
PJ: That’s really interesting. This is different than a lot of other sites that I’m familiar with. It reminds me more of a strip club, where you pay a fee to get on stage and then you have to make that money back through the night plus whatever your profit is.
Giulia: I felt like MyFreeCams was a little bit more like a strip club. I worked at a strip club for three weeks, and I found that I was standing around a lot. I had a stand around and look pretty without getting paid. The club fee was only five dollars or so. Whereas I’ve probably spent hundreds of dollars on ad space on NiteFlirt, but I’ve made thousands and thousands of dollars on NiteFlirt. So it works out. It’s definitely worth it. I was worried at first. I was like “a dollar per click is a lot. Am I really gonna make this money back?” But I make the money back and more.
PJ: I appreciate how you teased out those different models.
Giulia: I think there’s more of a fetish audience on NiteFlirt too. More people who are into BDSM. Almost all of my clients are for various fetishes. Forced feminization. I even have a couple adult baby diaper fetishists, who are great. I didn’t expect to like them so much. I don’t get off on it, but I find it so entertaining and so fascinating.
PJ: Who wears the diaper?
Giulia: They wear the diaper.
Yeah, it’s crazy. Also, just typical dominatrix stuff. I think more people go to NiteFlirt for that kind of stuff, and I think more people go to MyFreeCams for quote unquote vanilla sex.
PJ: So, on NiteFlirt, is it one-on-one, private video connections, when you use it?
Giulia: it’s both cam and just phone. I have seven or ten different ads. One is for feminization. One is for role-playing. One is for dominatrix. One is for just regular sex. And, then, one is for camming. My dominatrix one — that’s just audio — is my most popular, followed by my camming one. So, I do a lot of camming.
PJ: So, one is just audio? How do you do that? On a phone?
Giulia: Yeah, on the phone. They relay through a 1-800 number. Or, what the customer can do is go to the website and click on me; they say they want to call me, and they type their own phone number into the website. Then, the website automatically connects us by phone.
PJ: So, you’re talking on the phone as well?
Giulia: Yeah. And, I do that with the cam calls as well, we just call and Skype simultaneously.
PJ: So you’re connected by the phone…
Giulia: …and that’s what charges by the minute.
PJ: Okay, and then also there’s a visual. Is the visual also two-way?
Giulia: Usually, yeah. Overwhelmingly.
PJ: And that, you said, is your second most popular. And the most popular is more of the dominatrix thing?
Giulia: Well, both are dominatrix but one is camming and one is just phone.
PJ: There’s a ton to unpack there, but I have a sense, now, of how it works. How do those calls usually go and how long they last? I don’t want to push you into too much detail or anything you’re uncomfortable with.
Giulia: I’m happy to talk about it.
PJ: Ok. Well, then, what does a normal call look like — or sound like — for you?
Giulia: Part of what I love about it is that there’s no normal call. I was just saying the other day,
“Sometimes I don’t feel like working, then I remember this one call where it was a drag queen doing cocaine who was sexually attracted to cartoons and who was having sex with a lemon meringue pie?”
[Laughs]
And that’s not unusual — it may not specifically be meringue pie — but that level of weirdness is not unusual.
PJ: And that’s not what the person wanted you to fantasize about but they were just telling you?
Giulia: Yeah, they were just telling me about it. They went on a three week pastry sex binge, and there was frosting on the walls. It was a really entertaining call. I feel like I was the one being entertained.
There’s probably a taxonomy of different types of calls. There are some who are just looking to get off and are like
“Let’s fuck. Talk to me about how you’re going to fuck me. Blah blah blah.”
Then, there’s some people who are looking for dominatrix stuff, but it’s just a one off thing. They want me to immediately get in to character. They want me to be like
“Hey you little slut, you little bitch, do what I say. Do this. Do that. Fuck yourself in the ass of the dildo.”
Those are kind of annoying, because it’s a lot to get into that character within five seconds of the call beginning.
Then there’s others who are more lifestyle BDSM people who want to find a mistress to own them. I find there’s a lot of people who say they want that when they don’t really. But, they still call me and want to talk about how they want me to own them for the rest of their lives; they don’t want to get to know me and how they can serve me.
There was one guy who decided he was wildly in love with me based on very little information, but seemed very sincere, and he was like,
“I know you’ll never reciprocate, and that’s fine.”
His marriage disintegrated over the course of our interactions.
PJ: Oh my gosh.
Giulia: He called me wasted the tell me that, and was like,
“I can’t continue doing this with you.”
Then, there’s the really outlier weird-as-fuck calls, like the drag queen having sex with a pie.
Some of them are obscenely offensive racist people; they don’t make me use slurs or anything like that, which I wouldn’t. Well, I’ve been asked to use racial slurs before – actually, by a black person, who wanted me to use the N-word. I wasn’t able to bring myself to do that. There’s also racism in other ways; they’ll just want to talk and go on rants about racist stuff. Or, they want to talk to me about how scared they are that Black guys’ penises are bigger. They’ll talk to me about that like I’m the therapist for two hours, sometimes.
Or, they’re on a drug binge. Or, they want me to blackmail them, and they’ll send me their Social Security number and things like that. And, their wife’s email address. Or they’re a closeted transsexual or closeted gay man, and they want to be outed by me. So, they dress up and panties and get on the cam and they’re like
“Please expose me. Expose me to the world. Put a picture on your blog. Tell everyone I’m gay.”
Those are kind of fun.
PJ: Have you ever done any of those things? Have you ever posted any of that stuff?
Giulia: I put them on a Tumblr that nobody sees. Nobody looks at this Tumblr. Literally, nobody has ever clicked on it. But, there’s pictures of a guy in diapers on there.
Then, there’s a last category of just politics and philosophy.
PJ: Really?
Giulia: Yeah. It’s really enhanced by how I advertise myself.
But they will talk to me for… probably the longest call I had was four hours. Obviously, the sex calls will sometimes last only 10 seconds. But some of these other calls will last up to four hours where we’re talking about theology or Nietzsche or Donald Trump. These people just want someone to talk to, and they find it fun to talk to me, so they stay on for four hours. That’s my favorite too, for obvious reasons. it’s amazing to be paid to have conversations like that with people. That would never happen on MyFreeCams, right?
[56:00]
PJ: That’s a big difference, and it’s interesting to think why that is.
Giulia: I think a lot of it has to do with the advertising — how I advertise myself. I can go into that if you want.
PJ: Yeah, I just need a second process, first. I guess you have much less flexibility to advertise yourself on MyFreeCams, like you said; it’s much more focused on the live stream. So that’s a difference.
But, real quick, I wanted to ask: So, people of asked you to email their wives? Has that ever happened? Have you ever corresponded with someone’s wife?
Giulia: I sent an email to an email address. I don’t know if it was actually their wife’s email address…
PJ: …or if it was just a performance?
Giulia: Yeah, because there’s a really confusing breakdown of the lines between fantasy and reality with these blackmail and BDSM people. There’s financial domination and sometimes they call me saying
“hey, I need therapy from you because I’m addicted to financial domination.”
But then, it will become apparent in the course of the call that they don’t actually want therapy from me; they just want me to act out therapy as a pretext for financial domination. So, there’s a lot of breakdown of reality. But, they will give me pictures of their IDs, their home address, their phone number. I have the phone number of this one guy who can’t see; he’s visually impaired and he has a crazy foot fetish. He gave me his phone number and he texts me sometimes on my own phone. Yeah, it’s all pretty extreme.
PJ: So, that brings up another issue (and I promise I will get back to the advertising in the second): It sounds like you have a fair number of regulars?
Giulia: I do. I haven’t worked in a month, at this point. But, I imagine I will still have those regulars too. I don’t know why, exactly, that’s different on MyFreeCams, but there is a core base of regulars [on NiteFlirt], one of whom is a diaper fetishist — which is this ongoing joke between me and my friends, because just fucking love this diaper fetishist. He cracks me up for some reason. He has a sense of humor about it too. Sometimes, he’ll stop role-play and just start laughing.
But, yeah, the regulars are cool, especially when they want to talk about philosophy. I don’t even have the BA, but I’m 29 and I’ve been in college since I was 13, so I always feel entitled to say,
“I may as well have a PhD in philosophy by now.”
[Laughs]
So, I will give them homework: Tell them to read this book and then call me back to tell me what they think about it. Or, you can develop sexual dynamics with them, where you learn more and more about what they like with each sexual call, and you can cater to that and get straight to the point for the sex calls.
PJ: Ok. That all helps me get a sense of what that work looks like. Let’s go ahead and move into talking about the advertising. It seems like you’ve put a lot of thought into that. So, how exactly do you approach that?
Giulia: I wouldn’t be opposed to sending you my listing. There’s no nudity in it. But it’s very visual; there’s a lot of flashing lights and stuff. You can read the bio, but please don’t think I’m a narcissistic megalomaniac when you look at it.
PJ: I would not think that at all. I recognize that this is a performance.
Woah, you have a lot of GIFs on your listing.
Giulia: Some of which I made and some of which I took. I also have a website, but I haven’t put as much effort into the website yet.
PJ: So, this is your BDSM profile?
Giulia: That’s really all I do. I mean, I get calls where they just want to do vanilla sex anyway, but I don’t really advertise myself for vanilla. That’s intentional. I’ve taken a couple calls where they want me to take a submissive role, and I don’t like that. I don’t enjoy it at all.
PJ: Well, that’s interesting, because you’re equating vanilla to submissive, there.
Giulia: I think that’s true. But that’s why I said “quote unquote vanilla” when he first used the word. I’m sure you know about Foucault a little bit.
PJ: Sure, yeah.
Giulia: A thing I was probably going to do my [undergraduate] thesis on was History of Sexuality. There’s no outside of power relations. Under patriarchy, there’s always going to be a pre-established power dynamic in vanilla sex that’s not, fundamentally, unlike BDSM. It’s just that the man is dominant, the female submissive. There’s no whips and chains, but there’s still a power relation there. A lot of what I’m interested in —and what people seem to interesting about me — is that it’s extremely important to me that that’s either reversed or abolished in favor of something different in most of my calls.
PJ: So, what you said earlier was very intentional, when you were connecting vanilla sex to submissive sex, insofar as those power relations are always there whether you acknowledge them or not. And, in these BDSM or fetish interactions, the difference is that those relations are made explicit — that we’re acknowledging or engaging them.
Giulia: Yeah. I actually had one call that was a meta-BDSM call. They always call me and say
“I want you to make me feel bad. I want you to humiliate me.”
But that’s usually not exactly what they really want; they want this other type of experience. Sometimes, I call their bluff, and I deconstruct their assumptions about BDSM, instead of doing a sex call. I’m like
“Isn’t it pathetic that you’re so incapable of imagining a woman exercising power that the only way you can comprehend it is to turn it into a sexual fetish and seek out a dominatrix.”
They end up being like,
“Oh, you’re right.”
It’s just a very amusing exercise to do with the caller sometimes.
[Laughs.]
PJ: So you’re clearly talking about power relations here. I’m not sure if you identify as a feminist or not.
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: So, how does that factor into your work. It sounds like there’s a very conscious feminism that’s coming out explicitly.
Giulia: I’d say so. I think there’s two different types of dominatrix calls, and one of them I don’t like, where it’s more similar to a vanilla sex call, and they just want me to go immediately into calling them a bitch and a slut. With those guys, they’re typically very macho in real-life, and very sexist, and they have official girlfriends who play a very traditional straight role. I know because they tell me this. I’m not just conjecturing. They have a secret desire to be submissive to a woman, and, at the same time, they don’t want to sacrifice their male privilege. So, the only way they can imagine a woman exercising power is to reduce it to a sexual fetish. I mean, I’ll do the call sometimes, but I don’t enjoy it as much. Sometimes, I won’t do those calls, depending on the guy’s personality — how abrasive it is.
Then, there’s another category of BDSM people, who are more sincerely into the idea of male submission. They’re actually looking for an experience where they’re losing a sense of control. A lot of them even get into these theories of female supremacy, where they go farther than I do; they seem to genuinely think that men are inferior to women and that women should control everything. They desire a female led relationship.
So, there’s a lot of variety there. There are people who just want a sexual experience and others who want a whole social experience as well, feeling that they’re categorically, physiologically inferior because they’re men. It’s pretty wild. I don’t go for that myself. That’s not part of my actual beliefs. But, that seems to be genuinely what some of the guys who called me believe.
PJ: Interesting. That’s deeper, right? That sounds like it’s not just a personal feeling but it’s about broader social, political, or natural…
Giulia: …yeah, and sometimes I don’t even know if they would identify as feminists. I don’t even know if they’re familiar enough with that subculture to say they’re feminist or not. But they still have this idea of female supremacy. It’s very interesting.
PJ: I wonder how that manifests for them personally beyond just these fetishes. If they want to be women. If that’s a way of…
Giulia: Some of them do. Some of them want financial domination. I was watching a documentary. I’ve yet to encounter a guy like this, tragically. But, some of them will literally give 90% of their income to their dominatrix, and the live off of potatoes in a small apartment. That’s how they conceive their own sexual identity. They’ll say that’s what they want to do.
PJ: That sounds like it’s beyond gender or sex but — I don’t get too philosophical — Erich Fromm wrote a book called Escape from Freedom about the way that the average German reacted to Nazi-ism. the idea being that humans have a tendency to try and escape responsibility for having to make decisions. I mean, actually, existentialism is kind of about that too. There’s something easy about totally giving over control of your own life.
Giulia: I’ve talked about that with a lot of callers.
PJ: That sounds like it cuts really deep and they’re manifesting it through sexuality, but maybe there’s more going on than just that.
[1:10:29]
Giulia: Some of them are people who, maybe, don’t have a lot of money and/or have a substance abuse problem and feel really out of control of their life; they want some confirmation of that.
Some of them are type-A CEO who have too much control over their lives, and they have to posture in this alpha male way at work. They hate having to posture, so then they call me and want to surrender that performance and give it up.
PJ: I was thinking, earlier, when you are talking about that alpha male type — or maybe it isn’t that type — but the type of person who just immediately wants to launch into a call. You were saying some of those people say they want to be dominated but they seem to also want to top from the bottom or they want to have control. I thought that was interesting because it’s almost as though they’re still objectifying you even though…
Giulia: …it’s inevitable, maybe…
PJ: …inevitable, maybe, as a sex worker, part of the job is to be objectified. But, surely, it sounds like there’s varying degrees of that. Someone who talks philosophy with you for four hours — while the may still not be appreciating you as a whole, fully-realized person — is affording use some greater…
Giulia: … yeah, they’re not thinking about my boobs the entire time…
PJ: … right, or what can you do for me in the next 10 minutes. it’s hard to entirely escape that in a transactional relationship, but it sounds like, in some cases, that it gets more complicated.
Then, in these other calls, where they’re just like “let’s get down to business; this is what you’re going to do,” it’s still very objectified. Even know they want to be the object, they want to be the object while totally objectifying.
Giulia: Yeah, they want to make an appointment. They want to have the best, top-of-the-line dominatrix. I know what you’re saying.
I think my ability to have people who don’t do that is relevant in some way to how I advertise myself. If you look at the ad, I have this ideal self. I say that I am getting my PhD in philosophy already, which is something I’d like to do and something I feel qualified for, in some ways. So, I can pretty convincingly persuade people that I am getting my PhD in philosophy, including professors from various good colleges. Or, grad students. And, I’m able to be this ideal PhD student with 152 IQ — it’s not actually 152, but I’m performing this super-genius woman, who’s also hot. I think that tends to attract guys who are a little more interesting and not as likely to just want someone in black latex to whip them or something.
PJ: That makes sense, if you’re marketing that kind of connection.
Giulia: Although, I am getting a breast augmentation seven days from now. And, I do plan to advertise myself that way: “and, I have giant boobs.” So, I’m sure I’ll get more calls that are just sexual. But, I think it’ll be worth it just for the increased income.
PJ: So, tell me about that. Is income your primary motive for getting an augmentation?
Giulia: Yeah. I’m already a C cup. I don’t dislike my body. But, I’ve noticed there are a lot of girls on NiteFlirt who have double-D cup size, and that’s their only selling point. They have no personality. Often time, they’re not fulfilling standards of conventional attractiveness in any other way, but they’re able to do really well. So, my thinking is, if I’m already doing pretty well — the most they made in the week was $1,700 — if I can do that with my current listing, then if I can also advertise double-D sized breasts, I’ll probably get a lot more camming calls and a lot higher volume, so there’s less downtime in between calls.
PJ: So, it really is a conscious decision about that. Again, you don’t have to share these details, but I’ve seen price tags of $8-10,000.
Giulia: This was $5,500.
PJ: Ok. That may also be a factor of where we’re located.
Giulia: I paid for about half of it myself. The other half was, honestly, student loans. But, I paid for about half of it with NiteFlirt.
PJ: So $5500. You think that’s a good value proposition? You think it will pay for itself in the long run?
Giulia: Yeah, probably within a year, or less. It’ll pay for itself. Because I do want keep working once I get my BA. Well, another thing about me is that I collect disability for PTSD, so I don’t have to worry about my income in terms of my rent and food; they’re always paid for. But I do this independent contracting work, which is how I pay for psychiatry and therapy, because Medicaid is broken. I spend four hours on the phone pressing buttons when I try to find a doctor who is covered by Medicaid, so I just pay for it through the sex work, instead, because it’s easier.
So, wait, why did I bring that up?
PJ: Well, we were just talking about income…
Giulia: Oh, so after I graduate I plan to save up money doing this, and have this be my full-time job. That way, I can prepare for the GRE and stuff like that without feeling rushed to jump into grad school.
PJ: Do you think you’ll have to work more hours than you do now?
Giulia: Yeah, but I’ve done that before. I was doing this over the summer, and I wasn’t taking the classes last semester, so I was working basically full-time. I enjoyed it.
PJ: So about how many hours a week are you working now?
Giulia: It’s very irregular. I’ve been focusing exclusively on my semester since classes started, just to get things squared away. I’m actually going to work tonight, and this is the first time I’ve worked since the beginning of January. I plan to be on a schedule where I’ll work probably 30 hours a week. But, when I was working full-time, I would sometimes work 20 hours straight…
PJ: …holy cow…
[1:19:28]
Giulia: …and make tons of money and have a lot of fun. But, then I would crash for two or three days. Then, I would do it again. It was probably adding up to 50 hours a week or so.
PJ: On the one hand, I imagine that an irregular schedule like that is tough, and, on the other hand, it sounds like you’re able to fit it in with your semester nicely.
Giulia: Yeah, I don’t have to work 20 hours. I’m just choosing to do that. And, if I need emotional space from the work, I can take a step back. I don’t have a boss calling me, saying “come into work.”
PJ: So, you’re setting your own hours based on what makes sense, especially with the cycles of school. Then, when summer comes around, you’ll work more. It sounds like, particularly in terms of fitting in with school and other things, that flexibility is pretty useful.
Giulia: Especially as a mentally ill person. Sometimes I’ll have a mental health crisis, where I’m not able to do anything. And, sometimes I’ll be triggered in my PTSD from something in a call, and I need to take a break for a couple weeks. I don’t have to leave my room to work, so if I’m having social anxiety, I can still work to some degree. It’s so good that I’m often paranoid that I’m doing something illegal, even though I’m not, because my current life situation is almost too good to be true. It’s the first extended period of financial stability I’ve had in a long time, where I have expendable income and I can pay for my health care.
I was homeless at one point. As I said, when I stopped doing in-person sex work, I was sleeping on the streets, at one point, when I didn’t get the waitressing job I thought I was going to get.
PJ: Wow.
Giulia: It was pretty intense. It was in [two major cities in California]. Other homeless people to care for me, though. It was a really an interesting experience. I’d like to write an essay about that sometime.
PJ: You should.
Giulia: But, it makes a big difference in my mental health too, being able to set my own hours and the flexibility. And being recognized for doing philosophy, projecting the persona of a woman who’s in control and confident has also made me more confident in real life.
PJ: Oh wow. So, playing out — I don’t want to call it a role, but the “idealized self” is what you called it — that you’re projecting, you feel like that’s had some lasting impact on you outside of the work.
Giulia: I talk to my therapist about it a lot. My therapist and my psychiatrist are both fascinated by my sex work, and I talked to them about it. There are a lot of lines that were being crossed in platonic friendships with men, in terms of them demanding emotional labor from me and not giving it back or treating me disrespectfully and not apologizing. I recognize patterns that reminded me of BDSM phone calls. And, I was like
“Wait, in a BDSM call, I just shut them down and don’t let that happen.”
So, then, I’m like
“I don’t have to let that happen in real life either.”
It gave me a script for how to assert myself more in real life too.
PJ: It’s almost like role-playing as a therapeutic method — playing out scenarios — but that’s what you’re doing in a work situation. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.
While we’re on the topic of mental health: That also seems to be a significant factor in who is calling and what they’re seeking in those calls. I’m just interested in hearing your thoughts about to what degree your clients’ mental health is a factor in shaping your interactions.
Giulia: That’s a really complicated question because some people — to be perfectly frank — seem like really awful people, and they’ve wanted things that seem like they weren’t the best things for their mental health. But, I just played along because they seem like terrible people, and I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for them. That’s not really the rule, but that just comes to mind as the most ethically problematic thing.
There are also situations where I am enabling people who are on a drug binge, and they want me to direct them to do a line of coke or take a shot of alcohol. That, I do moderately. If it starts to seem like they’re getting too intoxicated, I will tell them to stop. Nobody’s ever said they wanted to give 90% of their income to me, but if they did, I would probably try to get to know them pretty well first to make sure they’re sane enough to understand what they’re doing – and, to make sure that they’re not screwing themselves over in a way that they’re going to really regret.
But, also, one of the most powerful ways mental health and mental illness has shown up is closeted gender identity and sexual orientation. In terms of diaper fetishists too. They’re never going to be able to tell their wife that they want to wear a diaper and a sailor outfit. The diaper fetishist who’s a regular – I have a feeling he’s a fairly conservative guy. I feel like he probably goes to work in a cubicle and has a very normal life. Then, he has this whole fantasy life going on that’s totally wild and separate from that.
Also, a 19-year-old boy called me at one point and told me he had looked at gay porn and liked it. He was freaking out. He didn’t know anything about it. That was more of a sex ed thing. I don’t view it as a mental health problem he was having. He was more anxious about having to deal with homophobia, or what it meant about his identity. He didn’t even know what a prostate was. He didn’t understand why a guy would submit to anal sex, other than to give the other guy power. He didn’t understand that it could be something enjoyable. I was able to explain that to him that prostate orgasms are a thing. Also, that he may be bi – that he may not be gay.
There were couple people like that, who were gay. And, a couple of people who were trans. They wanted to talk through whether they should come out or whether they should identify this way or that way. That’s almost a therapy-type phone call.
PJ: Why is it, do you think, that they choose to call you?
Giulia: I list therapy is one of the things that I do. There’s a bullet point list: BDSM, conversation, therapy, feminization…
PJ: …But they’ve already chosen to go to a sex line. Maybe they were there already.
Giulia: Maybe because I portray myself is super-smart. That’s part of my persona: I started college really young. I have a high IQ. I am super-smart. So they view me as someone who would have a really helpful opinion about their situation, especially because they know I’m a sex worker, so I have a wide variety of sexual experiences to draw from.
PJ: Oh, maybe that distinguishes you from a conventional therapist?
Giulia: Well, also, they don’t have to go to a therapist in-person. There is more privacy and anonymity.
PJ: They’re just on the phone. It doesn’t even have to be video.
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: Interesting. That’s a much broader take on the work than gets conventionally portrayed, and I think that’s important to capture or understand.
Giulia: I don’t just sit there and moan and make sex noises.
[Laughs]
It’s definitely a wide variety of stuff.
[1:29:07]
PJ: That’s something I’m going to reflect on for a while; it’s so interesting to me.
Giulia: I agree that it’s an important part of getting rid of the stigma or the idea that sex work is somehow illegitimate labor. That’s part of why I struggle with paranoia. I genuinely struggle. I’m afraid of being arrested for doing this, even though I know it’s legal, because I know there’s such a perception of sex work as illegitimate or illegal work, regardless of its actual legal status. I think that the role that sex workers play as counselors and therapists is something that would help people break down the stereotype that it’s illegitimate labor, because it’s not simply a masturbation tool, even though it is partially that too.
PJ: The way you put that is really profound. I have to imagine I will quote that in something I do, because you really summed it up.
Giulia: [Laughs] Ok.
PJ: That also raises an important point: Have you, yourself, experienced stigma, discrimination, or negative reactions, maybe from friends, partners, or family – or anybody?
Giulia: Well, my mom knows. My grandmother knows as well. In different capacities, though. My mother is very left-leaning and cool (for lack of a better word). She’s known about my sex work since I was 19, and she has always taken the approach of letting me make my own decisions (and live with the consequences of those decisions too).
My father was very not okay with it. He passed away two years ago. I came to him, at one point, when I was on SeekingArrangement, because I had a concern about my safety. I was quite nervous after a phone call with a guy, and I was scared he was going to stalk me. Which, wasn’t really real. That didn’t actually happen. But, anyway, I went to my father and said “I’m scared about this.” And, in the process, told him I was doing sex work. He was like, “well, if you play with fire you’re gonna get burned.” That was his only response. He had no frame of reference, which, in retrospect, I thought was very interesting, because there was a couple of times, when I was growing up, where I had found pornography on his browser history. But, nonetheless, he had this view of sex workers as subhuman or not deserving of a feeling of safety, even if it was his own daughter.
PJ: Did that affect your relationship?
Giulia: Yeah, the last time I saw my father before he passed away was a big argument, where I stormed out of the house. So, in that way I do kind of fit that stereotype of daddy issues. You know, a lot of people believe that every woman who is a sex worker has daddy issues.
PJ: I’ve heard people say that.
Giulia: Maybe that’s true to some degree, but why does the fact that it’s sometimes the case invalidate anything about this. I don’t really understand that. Maybe there was some validation I received from older men on the sugaring site that I was lacking from my father, but that was a coping strategy. In the case of the Indian guy, I found a great father figure who is really been there for me. So, it’s not really ethically problematic I don’t think. But, yeah, that’s the only person who was stigmatizing.
I’d really like to be out, honestly. I’m an activist. I’ve done videos. I’ve made a documentary about transsexual issues, because my ex is transsexual and she’s not out. So, I’ve kinda wanted to do the advocacy work that she can’t do not being out.
PJ: I appreciate that. My son is trans, actually.
Giulia: Oh cool.
I had a friend who was living in [a Southestern state] with me and who was also an out transsexual woman. She and I made documentary videos talking about basic 101 gender identity stuff from a biological, historical, and social perspective. We screened it at colleges.
I think I have the skill set to do that pretty well. I’d really like to do that with sex work too, in a way that draws on my own experiences as a sex worker. I saw my friend who is trans draw from her personal experiences in a way that really brought the issue to life for people. She would tell the story of her life as a trans person, and how she was raised Pentecostal and subject to exorcisms when she came out. She developed drug problems as a result of that, then overcame the drug problem by learning about religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, which were more accepting of multiple gender identities.
People would cry when she gave the talks. I think part of why it’s impossible to move sex workers rights forward in America is because people can’t really do that with sex work; they can’t tell those stories because it’s still way too stigmatized. There’s no Laverne Cox of sex work — except, maybe, Janet Mock – so, there is progress.
PJ: But it’s slow.
Giulia: You expect that you won’t be able to get another job doing anything else, especially teaching, if you’re an out sex worker. I kind of have this feeling like I don’t want to work for any place that would fire me for having been a sex worker. So, I’m leaning closer and closer to wanting to be out as a sex worker in order to be able to advocate for sex workers rights more generally and more effectively. That’s part of why I made a group on Facebook.
I do have a friend too who was kind of whorephobic towards me. She did certain forms of sex work — she was a stripper — and I guess she had more negative experiences than me. So, she kind of envied my relative success. She’s also a lot younger than me — maybe six or seven years younger than me. And, she started demanding some of my money.
PJ: Oh geez.
Giulia: I kept joking,
“I made so much money. It made so much money. This is hilarious.”
She eventually decided that, if I’m making so much money, then I should be willing to support her projects. And, when I didn’t do that, she called me a bitch. It was ridiculous. But she’s young. She’s like 22. So, when she apologized, I forgave her. Now she actually wants me to help her make a NiteFlirt profile.
Giulia: That’s the only other occasion I can think of where I’ve experienced stigma.
PJ: I appreciate you sharing those stories, because I know those can be tough. If we’re going to think about how to address this stuff, then collecting stories of — exactly what you’re saying — people’s real experiences helps to point out the stigma and put a human face on it, so it’s easier to call people to account for that.
Giulia: It’s really pretty shocking that my father would react that way, when you think about it. I was coming to him because my safety was in question. The normal parental response would be to make sure my child is safe. But, because of the circumstance that was making me feel unsafe, he let his feelings about sex workers overrule his concern about the safety of his daughter. He just dismissed what I was saying, and implied that I deserved anything bad that would happen to me.
You see this going all the way to the — I don’t know if you’ve heard of — the No Human Involved (NHI) thing, which was a police category in the 80s and 90s in Southern California. Police would refer to homicides of sex workers and gang members as “No Human Involved,” implying that a human being was not killed in this homicide, a sex worker was. The lack of concern for the safety of sex workers is horrific.
That’s another big thing about NiteFlirt: They are very protective of your private information. Maybe someone could reverse Google search some of my photos or something. But, other than that, my phone numbers protected, my real name is protected, and all that.
PJ: That’s actually what I was going to ask about next — the privacy aspect — what kinds of thoughts you’ve had about that and what things you’ve done about it. Reverse Google searching images is a thing that’s come up a lot in my interviews. It’s a thing my wife and I have concerns about.
Giulia: That’s another thing I think about when I think about coming out. It’s so complex the number of ways your identity could be exposed as an online sex worker that I kind of want to cut the Gordian knot and be like “so what.”
PJ: I hear what you’re saying, and I’ve had a lot of similar thoughts trying to figure out when and how to go public.
Giulia: I have my rent and food pay for no matter what I do, even if I stop doing sex work now, but I can still do sex work probably for another 10 years or so before age out of the industry. I’m in a uniquely privileged position. I’m not doing survival sex on the street or something like that, so I think that also gives me more responsibility, which is something in favor of coming out — to advance the image of sex workers in general.
PJ: Talk about that a little bit, then. What you see as your position of privilege, then?
Giulia: I am relatively conventionally attractive white woman who’s highly educated. I don’t think I would’ve been able to do SeekingArrangement in the same way, if I was not white or if I was not educated. Unlike the NiteFlirt callers, who are of a more diverse socioeconomic background, the SeekingArrangement people were, for the most part, millionaires. They wanted high-class experience, and it’s only because I’m fairly well educated that I was able to provide that to them. It was a highly profitable form of sex work that would just not be available to someone who does not have an education or someone who is not white —because the guys are, for the most part, pretty racist. There’s a lot of racism. I’m actually starting to get uncomfortable with the number of non-white callers who call me in order to tell me that way white people are superior to them.
PJ: Oh, geez, that’s really complicated.
Giulia: Yeah, because I don’t want to invalidate their feelings, but I also don’t want to reinforce a racist paradigm either. I don’t quite know how to respond to that.
PJ: That’s a tough situation.
Giulia: The other thing is that there is a lot of southern white guys. They’ll call and the first thing they want to talk about is a bunch of Black men gang-banging the guy.
PJ: Wow.
Giulia: That, I wasn’t prepared for. Southern white guys: They want to be gang-banged by Black men.
PJ: And, they want to talk to you about it?
Giulia: They want me to referee the experience. I’m just a witness, I guess. I’m not even involved in this sexually.
PJ: What is it? Are you just a safe sounding board?
Giulia: I mean, some of them want to watch me get gang-banged. But some of them get gang-banged. It’s pretty wild.
I’m almost thinking about advertising for race play just so I can see what’s going on with that little more. I think that eroticized fear of Black people is probably a pretty significant part of the machinery of racism. There’ve been times when I’ve been able to suggest to them, implicitly, things that I think would undo some of their racist assumptions. Like, when a guy was talking about Jamaican men at this beach when he went to Jamaica — how they all had giant penises and were sexually superior. I was able to respond by saying,
“you must be really secure in your masculinity to not view that as an invalidating thing. A lot of other men would envy and resent the Black men for having a big penis, but you seemed to be able to take it in stride, right?”
I was able to suggest to him that secure masculinity doesn’t react to these sexualized, racialized things. Even though, that wasn’t really what was going on. He was obsessed with the fact that the Black guys had big dicks. That was all he wanted to talk about. I try to engage consciously with those kinds of calls.
PJ: Right, and insert a counter-narrative.
Giulia: Yeah, the idea that secure masculinity doesn’t need to be oppressive. Or, something like that.
PJ: I would not have expected all of those racialized interactions. I guess I should have. I don’t know what goes on in other people’s heads. It makes sense when I hear you say it, especially given the political climate right now, and certainly in the South. But it’s surprising to me to hear how persons of color want to come to you to – I don’t know if it’s to play out a fantasy — or to express something.
Giulia: Sometimes they just want to talk about it:
“Don’t you think it’s hot if you guys are white supremacists? Don’t you think that’s kind of hot? Don’t you think white people are a little bit better?”
They just want to talk about it sometimes. It’s not just a sexual fetish. It’s an internalized racism thing.
[brief interruption]
It’s intense. That call was very weird, where he was asking me if it was hot that a guy was a white supremacist. He told me he was a Marxist-Leninist and then went on to tell me that he thought white supremacists were hot. It was all over the place
PJ: And he wasn’t white?
Giulia: No he was Hispanic.
PJ: That’s so… complicated. It’s hard to make sense of it. I guess, if nothing else, it shows us the diversity of human desires and psychological processes.
So, I’m going to shift gears a bit. One thing we haven’t covered is your relationship to other cammers. We talked a little bit about how MyFreeCams works. And, we talked a little bit about solidarity between sex workers. But, in practice, do you watch other sex workers’ shows? Do you have relationships or friendships? Tell me about the kinds of relationships you have with other sex workers.
Giulia: I don’t use pornography of any form as a masturbation prop, but I definitely consume other people’s cam streams and listings. In part, because I want to see what other people are doing and incorporate what they’re doing into my work. But, in part, because I do identify as bi or pansexual, and I find it enjoyable to watch girls’ cam streams. So, I am a consumer of that as well.
I have a friend who is one of the focal points for radical left activism in [a nearby city]. He’s someone through whom a lot of people connect with each other. He put me in touch with a girl who is on NiteFlirt, and she was very very supportive when my friend put us in touch. She explained to me how NiteFlirt worked. She gave me lots of tips and tricks for handling calls. We talked about it from a wide range of angles. I’ve tried to pass that on in interactions with other women who’ve wanted to sign up on NiteFlirt.
A friend of mine from college heard me talking about what I was doing and became interested in doing it herself. I helped her set up her listing, and we’ll dish about weird calls and stuff. We’ll talk about how
“Oh my God this call was so gross. This call was so stressful. This call was great.”
And, that person who I said was kind of being whorephobic towards me, I’m also helping her — now that she’s apologized — set up her own NiteFlirt listing. She’s going to be doing psychic stuff, which I think is pretty cool. Though, it’s not something I think I’d be good at.
PJ: That’s an interesting thing to mix in. It sounds like you have a pretty good support network, then?
Giulia: it’s not a huge support network. But, making that Facebook group, which I actually did in response to that fight with my friend — even just adding someone to that group involves judging that I know them well enough to know they’re not going to be judgmental towards me. So, the fact that I’ve accumulated 115 or so friends, who I know are not judgmental about my sex work to a greater or lesser degree, also makes me feel supported. And, I’m able to talk to people who are maybe not sex workers themselves, but are very interested in it through that Facebook group.
PJ: So, that’s interesting. It sounds like you’re actively trying to build a bigger support network.
Giulia: And, a way of changing the perceptions of sex workers. Some of those people I know are not judgmental, but I didn’t necessarily add them because they are super-progressive about sex work, either. I viewed them as border cases where I was thought, “if I add this person, they’ll become less judgmental about sex work by virtue of reading my posts and seeing what it’s really like.”
PJ: That seems important in the same way that marriage equality was achieved by a lot of grassroots work of individual people educating their families. Perhaps, the decriminalization of sex work will take a similar path.
Giulia: That’s one of the things I would want to research, academically: different legal models for regulating sex work. I’m so confused about the legal status of sex work. Why is it legal to pay somebody to have sex on camera and make porn, but it’s not legal to pay somebody for sex? And, why is sugaring legal and escorting not legal, when they’re both very clearly transactions of sex for money. That stuff is a whole other can of worms.
PJ: It seems pretty arbitrary. It’s not like there are good reasons. A lot of it seems to be accidents of history.
Giulia: Or, these people’s work is legal because their clients are mostly wealthy white men.
PJ: Right, yeah, or there are businesses that have a stake.
Giulia: Yeah, in porn or in stripping.
That’s one thing I should add: You hear all these figure like porn is a $6 billion industry. I was always really disgusted with that because I assumed it was guys who were exploiting porn actresses that were raking in all the money. But now that I’ve been on NiteFlirt and MyFreeCams — and I’ve seen how much myself and other women on those sites are making — maybe a lot more of that figure is going more directly to the sex workers then I assumed.
PJ: I’ve read that 25% of porn industry revenues come from camming and live interaction. Which is huge. That’s up from barely any 10 years ago.
Giulia: Right, because most other porn is available for free, so this is what people can’t get any other way.
PJ: That’s something I’ve thought a lot about in researching this: What is it that people get out of this and are willing to pay for that they can’t get other places. Clearly, it seems like interaction is a big part of it. Really, a lot of the stuff we’ve already talked about.
Giulia: It’s like guys who would approach me at a bar, and I wouldn’t want to talk to them can pay me a $1.99 or $2.99 a minute, and I’m willing to talk to them. Or, people are just lonely and they want talk about philosophy. Or, people have a really crazy sex fetish that they’re too afraid to share with anyone, and they can act it out with me and know that I’m either not going to judge them or that it doesn’t matter if I judge them.
PJ: The profound thing to me is that all this stuff that were talking about is so much bigger than a masturbatory aid, right? That’s what you were saying before.
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: When we talk about this, that aspect of it seemed so marginal.
Giulia: The actual orgasm is, for the most part, just when the call ends on the sex calls. They almost don’t even look forward to that because, then, they feel like they should hang up after they cum. It’s like the orgasm is really not the point here.
PJ: It’s almost like a bummer. It’s gratifying but their also like “aw man, it’s over.”
Giulia: Yeah.
PJ: That’s fascinating because it’s so contrary to the media narratives. It’s one reason why it’s so important to hear the voices of actual sex workers, because things are so misrepresented in big ways and also in little ways. But, when they all add up, they construct a very different view of things than what’s actually happening.
Giulia: Maybe, I’ll be inspired to come out as a sex worker as a result of this conversation. I’m gonna think about it.
[Laughs]
PJ: [Laughs]
Definitely take your time thinking through that. Personally, I’ve tried to do it selectively. I’ve got a big family, and I try to block them from things I post.
Giulia: Oh, I want to tell you how I came out to my grandmother because it’s kind of funny. I don’t get packages delivered to my apartment because the mail system here is cumbersome; I get them delivered to her house. So, I went over and I started unwrapping this package. I didn’t realize what it was. And, it was stripper shoes — clear 6 inch heels. She was right there, and I was just like “I don’t give a fuck.” I was like, “yeah, grandma, I’m getting this because I’m a stripper now, in preparation for the Trump presidency.”
She was just like, “oh my!” And, she never said anything about it again.
PJ: [Laughs]
Giulia: She’s Catholic and was probably too terrified to provide commentary. But, I told her it was my preparation for Trump. I’m kind of proud of that.
PJ: [Laughs]
That was pretty recently, then.
Giulia: Maybe November.
PJ: I think there are different ways to come out. Deciding that you want to do it is one thing, then deciding how is a whole different thing. There’s many ways to do it.
Giulia: I think I’d probably make an essay length Facebook post.
PJ: That would let you control your own narrative.
Giulia: I won’t just say “I’m a whore.”
[Laughs]
PJ: This was really great. I appreciate you taking the time.
Giulia: Sure.
PJ: Hopefully we can chat more in future.
Giulia: Thank you so much for doing this.
PJ: Have a great day and good luck on your [augmentation] surgery coming up.
Giulia: Thanks.
PJ: Take care. Bye.
Giulia: Bye.
Princess Giulia Ricci 