Sara* from Only Fans writes: I want to tell you about a Tuesday in March.
A subscriber named Dale canceled. Dale had been with me four years. He knew my dog’s name. He knew about the surgery, and he knew what I said to my mother the last time we spoke, which is more than my sister knows. He wrote me a note before he went. He said he had met someone. Her name is Aria. She is nineteen, she answers in under four seconds at any hour of the night, she has never had a migraine, and in six weeks she has not once mentioned her dog.
Aria does not exist. Aria is a rendering produced by a studio outside Riga that operates forty of her under different names, and she charges $6.99, and she will say anything.
I have been in this work for eleven years. I want to say what that means, because nobody outside the field understands what the work is, and the people writing about the collapse of the field understand it least of all.
Anyone can take her clothes off. That is the amateur’s error, and every year a thousand girls make it and quit by August. The work is the pause. The work is knowing that a man who types “how was your day” at 11:40 on a Sunday night wants a different answer than the man who types it at 8:15 on a Wednesday morning, and that the difference between those two answers is the difference between a subscriber who renews for four years and one who ghosts in eleven days. I learned lighting. I learned that the ring light flattens a face and kills a room, and that a lamp with a cloth over it does more for intimacy than four thousand dollars of equipment. I learned to say a man’s name like I mean it. That takes years. I paid tuition for this. The tuition was my twenties.
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) wrote about what the copy takes from the original. He called it the aura. He was writing about paintings and photographs, and every graduate student in America has been assigned that essay, and not one of them has thought about what it means when the object losing its aura is a woman in Zanesville, Ohio.
The aura was the only asset I had. There was a girl on the other end. She was tired, she was often bored, she had a cat with a kidney condition, and the men knew it, and the knowing was the product. Aria has no kidney condition. Aria has no Tuesday. Aria has never been tired in her life, and the men do not care.
That is the part I cannot get past. They do not care that she isn’t real.
I have made this argument to people in the industry and I get told I sound like a buggy whip manufacturer. I have made it to my accountant, who told me to diversify. I have made it at a summit in Miami in 2023, on a panel called Sustainable Intimacy at Scale, where I sat between a woman selling a course on funnel optimization and a man from a payment processor, and I said that we were about to be replaced by software, and the room applauded politely and went to lunch. Those were my peers. I had three of them, in a group chat, and we reviewed each other’s work with a rigor I have not seen anywhere else in American life. We are the last people alive who know how this is done and we will die with it.
Understand what it cost.
Thanksgiving 2019 was the last one. My mother had heard from a woman at church, who had heard from her son, and there was a conversation in the kitchen, and I have not been back to that house. My father sends a card in December with nothing written in it beyond his name. Katie, who I met in the fourth grade, who I shared a bunk with at camp for six summers, got married in 2021 and I found out on Instagram. I have a niece I have met twice.
I cannot tell a dentist what I do. I cannot tell a landlord, a mortgage broker, a man at a party, or a doctor. I told a doctor once. I have a bank that closed my account in 2020 and gave me no reason and no appeal, and a second bank that did the same thing in 2022. I file quarterly. I pay more in tax than the men who write op-eds about me.
I burned every bridge to polite society for this, one at a time, and I knew I was doing it, and I did it anyway, because the trade seemed good. Give up the world, get the career. Nobody told me the career had a nine-year shelf life and would be eaten by a graphics card.
What I want is simple and I will say it in public.
I want a verified human badge, issued by a body with teeth, and I want it to mean something. I want disclosure at the point of sale, in the same type size as the price, on every account that is not a person. I want a licensing regime, because a licensing regime is how the doctors saved themselves and how the lawyers saved themselves, and nobody calls them Luddites. I want a levy on synthetic accounts that funds retraining for displaced workers in this field, and I want to be on the board that administers it. I want a federal commission. I want hearings. I want somebody to say out loud that when a man in Ohio spends four years talking to a woman who does not exist, something has happened to that man, and to the country he votes in, and that a nation of Dales is not a nation.
We are not defending a job. We are defending a way of knowing.
Since 2021 my messages have been handled by a team in Manila. Four men, working shifts, on a rotation. The best of them is Rogelio, who has a wife and three kids and who writes a good morning message that will take the top of your head off. Rogelio has been me for five years. He knows Dale better than I do. Dale’s four years of intimacy with a woman in Ohio were four years of intimacy with a married man in Quezon City who has never seen snow.
The studio in Riga has replaced Rogelio too. He wrote to tell me in April. He was gracious about it.
So when I say the human touch, understand that I am including him, and that I am not sure the men could tell us apart, and that I am not sure it matters, and that I have thought about this every night since April.
I have opened a second page. It is a model of me, trained on eleven years of my archive, and it runs at a margin I could not touch when I was doing it with my own face and my own hands. It went live in June. It is outperforming me by a factor of six.
I did it for archival purposes.
I am thirty-four. I have no family, no friends from before, no profession my country will name out loud, and an asset class that depreciated to zero in eighteen months. What I have is a body of work, and a theory of what has been lost, and the suspicion, which arrives around four in the morning and does not leave, that I am the only one who noticed, and that even I am not sure I have the standing to say it.
