I’ve been a phone sex philosopher on Niteflirt for ten years. Across thousands of calls, my clients have been overwhelmingly respectful and non-fascist—some are arguably committed opponents of fascism
For the past decade I have occupied what is, to my knowledge, an unusual position within the online sex industry. My work on NiteFlirt has never consisted merely in performing domination. Trained as a philosopher, I built a practice around the proposition that intellectual life itself can become the medium of erotic authority. Conversations that begin with power exchange routinely wander into Aristotle’s account of virtue, medieval angelology, the theology of gender, the aesthetics of the Baroque, Nietzsche’s critique of morality, or Deleuze’s philosophy of desire. Rather than offering clients an escape from thought, I invite them deeper into it, treating philosophy not as decoration but as a discipline capable of reorganizing perception itself.
The singularity of that approach has not gone unnoticed within the profession. Mistress Stephanie Locke—a devotee of Eartha Kitt, photographed by Helmut Newton, and one of the pioneering Los Angeles Dominatrices, who opened her first dungeon at the age of twenty—once remarked to me that, in all her decades in the industry, I was the only Dominatrix she had encountered who had made academic philosophy the organizing principle of her practice
The late philosopher Helen De Cruz, Danforth Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, was thrilled to learn that I used her text Philosophy: Illustrated to instruct my clients. My callers have included graduate students struggling through Difference and Repetition, candidates for the priesthood of the Anglican church of England. Men seeking counsel on theological questions surrounding sex and gender, and combat veterans who, unable to sleep through the explosions of Independence Day fireworks, have asked me to read Deleuze’s brief essay “Desert Islands” until they drifted to sleep. Such requests are, admittedly, eccentric. Yet they point toward a conception of erotic labor rarely acknowledged in public discussion: that the deepest form of seduction is not always corporeal but intellectual. Wisdom, I have long suspected, possesses an erotic force that spectacle can only imitate.
It is for precisely this reason that Current Affairs’ recent essay on NiteFlirt struck me as such a dispiriting read.
The disappointment begins before one reaches the first paragraph. The title, the accompanying illustration, and the article’s framing all prepare the reader for an encounter with extremity—for the familiar spectacle in which sex work functions less as labor than as cultural pathology. One need not deny the author’s experiences to notice how quickly they are elevated into a representative portrait of an extraordinarily heterogeneous profession. The result is journalism that risks reproducing precisely the sensationalism it ought to interrogate.
This tendency has a long history. Sex work has repeatedly been represented less as work than as theater: a cabinet of curiosities populated by political fanatics, damaged souls, and erotic grotesques. Such representations flatter readers with the promise of peering behind the curtain into a hidden world while leaving the ordinary realities of professional practice almost entirely invisible. The consequence is not merely aesthetic. It reinforces a public vocabulary in which sex workers appear as spectacles to be interpreted, or obscene actors to be criminalized, rather than workers to be understood.
My own experience differs markedly. After ten years and thousands of conversations, only a small fraction of my callers could plausibly be described as holding genuinely fascist political commitments. The overwhelming majority have been courteous, intellectually curious, and often startlingly reflective. Some have devoted themselves to forms of public service or civic engagement whose particulars I cannot discuss without violating confidences. None of this disproves another operator’s account. Anecdotes are real. But anecdotes remain anecdotes, and no single operator—myself included—can claim to have exhausted the social reality of a platform that encompasses an enormous diversity of workers, clients, interests, and relationships.
More interesting, to my mind, is what the essay neglects altogether. At a historical moment in which technology companies increasingly normalize AI-assisted identity verification and biometric surveillance, NiteFlirt prohibits AI-generated content and has thus far refrained from requiring facial-recognition database scans as a condition of participation. That decision deserves considerably more attention than it typically receives.
This matters for reasons extending well beyond the sex industry itself. Throughout the modern history of policing, the adult entertainment industry has frequently served as testing grounds for surveillance techniques that later become normalized for everyone else. Sex workers have often found themselves among the earliest subjects of intensified identification regimes, financial monitoring, digital censorship, and investigative technologies whose eventual reach extends far beyond their original targets. Whether one approaches these developments from a civil libertarian, feminist, or left-wing perspective, the underlying question remains the same: once a technology of surveillance becomes accepted for one stigmatized population, what principle prevents its wider deployment?
From that perspective, the defense of privacy within sex work is not merely an occupational concern. It is a question about the future of anonymity, voluntary association, and civil liberty in digital society. One need not have any personal connection to sex work to recognize that the expansion of biometric identification raises questions extending far beyond a single platform or profession.
After a decade in this field, I remain convinced that virtual domination has barely begun to reveal its intellectual and therapeutic possibilities. The relationship between authority and desire need not culminate in abject humiliation (unless you want it to!). I do not rely upon theatrical cruelty, or ideological performance. Our work can become an occasion for philosophical education, aesthetic refinement, disciplined conversation, and genuine transformation. There are older traditions in which eros has always been bound to wisdom rather than mere sensation. For more on this, see my essay on my professional website regarding the role played in ancient Greece by the elite hetaera.
Forget “Secret Diaries of a Call Girl” accounts. An adult entertainer was just elected to public office as a Senator in Colombia. It is well past time that we acknowledge these traditions of trailblazing and empowered adult entertainers deserve a place in contemporary discussions of sex work as well.
Readers interested in learning more about the philosophical dimension of my practice may find a more representative introduction in “Active Love and Love in Dreams,” my lecture on the distinction between fantasy and reality in sexuality, available on my YouTube channel. It is, I hope, a better account of what I have spent the last decade attempting to build than any lurid headline could hope to provide.
Author’s Note on AI Assistance
This essay is an unusual one for me in that it was written with the assistance of ChatGPT acting as an editorial collaborator. I am currently preparing for a seminar with the Hintenet Foundation on the role of the humanities in an age of artificial intelligence, and much of my writing time has necessarily been devoted to that project. At the same time, the rapidly changing political and legal landscape surrounding adult entertainment convinced me that it was important to publish a timely rejoinder to Current Affairs’ portrayal of NiteFlirt rather than postpone the discussion until I had the leisure to draft a substantially longer essay unaided.
No other prior essays on this Substack blog were written in consultation with AI. The underlying arguments, factual claims concerning my own professional experience, philosophical positions, anecdotes, and editorial judgments are entirely my own. My contribution consisted in determining the thesis, selecting the evidence, making every substantive claim, and deciding what ultimately appeared on the page. ChatGPT assisted by proposing organizational structure, improving transitions, refining syntax, tightening prose, and helping recast portions of the essay in a literary-critical register influenced by magazines such as Harper’s and The New York Review of Books. Every sentence was reviewed, revised, accepted, or rejected by me before publication.
I regard this use of AI as analogous to working with a human editor rather than outsourcing authorship. Indeed, there is a certain irony in relying upon AI to defend a platform whose value lies precisely in preserving authentic human interaction. Rest assured, my work on NiteFlirt remains entirely human. I do not use AI-generated conversation, AI-generated videochat companionship, or AI-generated erotic content in my professional practice. One of the reasons I continue to value NiteFlirt is precisely that it resists replacing human intimacy with algorithmic simulation. If anything, this essay reflects a distinction I might explore in my seminar: although controversial as was the advent of the printing press, photography, and even the practice of writing itself (which Plato argued was easier to misunderstand than the face-to-face, human, spoken word), AI can be a legitimate instrument of scholarship and editorial craftsmanship without becoming a substitute for the irreducibly human forms of judgment, conversation, and companionship upon which both philosophy and erotic labor ultimately depend.