What’s the hardest thing about my job? My answer may surprise you.
I created Anabelle in the Spring of 2016, 9 months before Tim Stokely launched OnlyFans. I haven’t substantially changed the way I work in the past decade, but OnlyFans has, I think, radically changed the way in which people access, view and enjoy sex work.
For centuries, sex was something you enjoyed in and with your body. People would physically meet and enjoy a sexual encounter in the hay bales, in a forest glade, behind the bike sheds, maybe sometimes even in a bed! Yes, people thought about sex, but the images in their heads would largely be from real-life sexual experiences they had first experienced in their bodies.
Photography and film began to move sex from a physical experience (in the body) into a mental experience (in the head). The internet turbocharged this process. Today you can access a continuous flow of images, both real and AI, moving and still, to feed an often voracious dopamine habit. I think both women and the art of sex have been degraded in this process.
In spiritual terms, prostitution is the act of selling your soul for money. In my work, I never feel like a prostitute, because I am following my soul’s calling. But when I have to engage with my site and feed it photographs – that is when I feel most like a prostitute, when I most feel as though I am selling my soul.
The ordeal of taking photographs for my site forces me to step into a world which is all about presentation and packaging: appearance, makeup, lingerie, and poses. It’s a world made for fake – fake boobs, fake lips, fake smiles. A world in which the photographer incites you to smile into the camera by suggesting that you, “Think about how much money he’s going to spend on you.” The fake world of film is as far removed from my experience of sex as I think is possible.
In my experience, sex is an authentic connection between two bodies, two energies, two souls. That’s what I delight in offering and giving.
How can you make such an offer visible? It is the intangibility of sex that gives it its magic.
Authentic sex in which you connect and feel and experience, is not visible. It is a feeling. It is a sensation. It cannot be turned into a photograph or a film; I don’t think many artists have managed to capture the magic. Words also fail to describe the experience because the English language isn’t a language of lovers – it’s a language of bureaucrats. We lack the vocabulary to describe it and there’s no kind of image, painted or photographic, that can capture it. All you can do is drop into the space and experience. Yet I have to go through the ordeal of having photographs taken because that’s an essential part of every business’s marketing in the modern world.
And it’s an ordeal I absolutely hate because it reduces something so beautiful and so magical to something that, for me, just feels tawdry. You put my body in lingerie, pull it into poses to hide my belly, and I feel cheapened by a process that turns my 4D work into a 2D image. Worse, as I select the images that my bruised ego can cope with, I know I am conforming, as far as I am able, to stereotypes of what a sexy woman should look like: legs, boobs, bum – but as little tum as possible!
As I get older, the process becomes more of an ordeal, and on more than one occasion, I have considered hanging up my stockings and calling it quits. But then I work with another beautiful soul, our energies connect, dancing together for an hour or 90 minutes, and I am reminded that sex is so much more beautiful and incredible than any image or film could ever dream of replicating.
The modern world fetishes youth above all else. Women (and increasingly men) are marketed endless products in a consumer culture that relies on our self-hatred for their profit and growth. Youth=beauty=sexy in our topsy turvy world. Our ageing bodies are deemed less sexy and erotic than youthful ones in our overly visual, material world. Never mind that the energy within our bodies – our quantum selves, if you like – is timeless, never ages and is more easily connected to, with age and experience. Ironically, whilst the process of taking photographs gets harder and crueller with age, my confidence in my actual body and my work has grown exponentially over the past decade.
