“For workers, it’s easier to post ads, it’s easier to post content. And then of course, all of a sudden we have selfies. So we’re not relying on managers and we’re not relying on photographers to construct and then post our ads. It gives an entirely different level of independence for what working can be.”

“One of the things that changed was our ability to work independently, to work without a manager, because we could reach out directly to clients.”

“Over the last dozen or so years, the Internet has allowed for a massive shift as far as access goes, and the sex industry has therefore become more accessible to would-be workers and clients. The sex industry has also simultaneously become more private and more exposed, more professional and more of an identifiable culture.”

“Would-be Larry Flynts now require only a web-cam, video cameras to upload real-time images to a website, maybe a digital camera, and software ranging from shareware to a $100 commercial package… Where women operate a site, they control their participation, performance, and imagery.”

“Before we applaud new digital technologies for the ostensibly agentic and lucrative potential spaces they create for women, let us realize that these benefits are clearly contingent on the race and nationality of the model.”

“Sex-worker-advertising sites are increasingly becoming online communities where people hang out to discuss different issues centered on sexuality, but the discussions also deviate from this topic.”

“There were early conversations about sex work in sex work-specific Usenet groups. alt.sex.prostitution was probably the biggest one of those. The first sex worker-only online communities, where we presumed we were just talking to ourselves, were on LiveJournal. A lot of the webcam girl community was focused around LiveJournal, but there were escort and stripper communities there, too.”

“The Web gives us a chance to show our fans who we are, without a journalistic slant painting us to be wanton harlots 24/7”

“Sites like livejournal and Blogger’s integration with WordPress granted all sex workers the ability to blog and generate traffic via Google to their websites.”

“For a year, Christian XXX blogged every day, and he inspired me to blog every day for a year on MySpace, which is really where I started to curate my brand in talking not just about my work but the things I do for pleasure, like concerts and my personal sex life.”

“In a netscape that tends to make invisible the narratives of Black women while it creates their bodies hyper-visual and hyper-accessible, these self-authored professional websites offer exciting, radical possibilities and prompt a variety of vital questions.”

“Beginning with blogging, there was the ability to actually see into peoples’ lives from the perspective of a worker. There was a demystification and a humanization of experience that was also educational. I didn’t have any community in real life at that point in time. It was because of these digital personas that it even felt safe to consider it as a financial possibility, and also have this safety net and community of people that I literally never have seen in person.”

“Initially I bought the camera to update portions of my webpage with pictures of myself. A friend joked that it could be used to do a FishBowl cam, but of a person. The idea fascinated me, and I took off with it. Initially the JenniCAM had an audience of half a dozen of my close friends, and it spread like wildfire from there.”

“Q: You’re naked sometimes, is this pornography? A: Pornography is in the eye of the beholder. Myself, I do not think this constitutes pornography. Most often, pornography is defined as something explicit which is made with the clear intention of arousing the viewer. Yes, my site contains nudity from time to time. Real life contains nudity. Yes, it contains sexual material from time to time. Real life contains sexual material. However, this is not a site about nudity and sexual material. It is a site about real life.”

“this site isn’t about sex, but sexuality and SENSUALITY is a PART of this site because that is part of my life. but you’ll see my dogs or me staring at my monitor glassy-eyed more than you’ll see sexual stuff.”

“i don’t mind people watching, in fact, i find it rather comforting, especially when i’m sleeping..i feel like you are all angels watching over me 🙂 i don’t feel that my privacy is being invaded since i am in control of my cameras and i am choosing to do this.”

“it is a window into my house, into my life ( not my life itself, a PICTURE of my life, please note the difference), my art, how i view things. it is a picture updated every 5 minutes showing what i’m doing right now or showing you something i’d like you to see. it is not a surveillance thing or a peeping thing, because i have invited you. sometimes it is more about showing you what is going on INSIDE me than what is going in in my actual physical surroundings. that is why i like to play with the filters and be playful with this medium.”

“ana shares what she chooses, through the filters she sees fit. sometimes the cam will crash and the picture won’t refresh every 30 seconds because the net and computers aren’t perfect. but if this happens, be certain in the fact that we are doing everything within our power to fix it asap. remember, nothing is owed to you but access to ana’s world, which can be as limiting or as expansive as she desires.”

“As anacam, I began to experience almost immediately the sort of online bullying that happens to so many women online today. Being a single woman speaking her mind—while being naked, to boot—was a huge taboo. People would tell me that I should know my place. I was stalked and harassed.”

“Anonymity on the internet allows people to be their real selves, even if their real self is a troll.”

“Many sex workers who hadn’t turned to the internet willingly were essentially forced online to combat false negative reviews which had the power to disastrously damage their income.”

“Quality-of-life crimes in the ‘90s prompted street-based workers to migrate to the internet. People didn’t want sex workers standing around in their neighborhoods, and they would get arrested for loitering or for working on the street. Newspaper ads, and later the internet, allowed a certain segment of privileged populations to be able to advertise very cheaply and work more safely.”

“We could say that peep shows and porn theaters and street-level sex work, particularly those conducted in mixed-use neighborhoods, are being displaced by online ad directories and live cam sites. But more to the point, the Web’s sex markets are flourishing in the vacant spaces left in the wake of gentrification campaigns that imperiled the sex businesses that also called those blocks home.”

“The old prostitution haunts now crawl with nearly as many police officers as streetwalkers, part of New York City’s continuing assault on ”quality of life” crimes… But while prostitution may be less visible in the city, it is no less prevalent. The Internet, pagers, cellular phones and subterfuges like escort services have enabled more discreet forms of prostitution to thrive beyond the reach of the street-level crackdown.”

“Because web camming was still really new in the late ‘90s, websites like iFriends and Cam Girls Live were the early adopters of web cam technology. I had a webcam studio, and we had to run a T1 line into my guest house in order to be able to stream. The technology had not caught up with what we were doing; there were people who were still on 28 K dial up. So training the models to perform on webcam, you had to really train them to move very slowly and almost robotically, so that their image on the other side of the screen would come across fluid.”

“At the time, the idea that someone could emerge out of this mysterious void and speak back to you was mind-blowing. But it requires emotional labor to be present for that interactivity. Nowadays, there is an expectation, and sometimes entitlement, that sex workers be available 24/7.”

“Increasingly, sex workers, and everyone else, face the pressure to have a personal brand that corporations can mine for data. We need to figure out how to perform authenticity, and there are pros and cons to that. A major pro is that the more you’re able to be yourself, the more opportunity there is to connect with the people who resonate with that. The con is that you’re always on, and you have to figure out what your relationship to yourself is when everything about yourself is potentially available for consumption.”

“[With new tools], sex workers are actually in control of the places where they can promote their work. And you see communal safety, people advertising for each other, figuring out ways to make sure there’s mutual aid.”

“We started creating these gallery pages that featured thumbnails of the models on your friends list. And then when someone would click that image it would take them to their website. So this was a really innovative way of being able to drive traffic.”

“The popularity and ease of self-publishing on the Internet via blogs and websites has led to the rise of public bad-date lists and blacklists. This is due, in part, to the ease with which workers can put up and update their own sites.”

“Things like this popped up because sex workers needed a way to be able to share information with one another about who was a bad client. They started off in public spaces like this Blogspot site, and then later moved to more private, backchannel forums, listservs, or mailing lists. We needed to be able to share information about clients who were causing harm to sex workers… Tools like this really allowed sex workers to be able to work safely.”

“This website is a tool, intended to help you from booking a no-show appointment, dealing with someone who doesn’t pay you what you asked, or any other negative experiences that may arise in this discreet, service-based world that we inhabit.”

“When I first started FSSW [full-service sex work] if it was not for Tumblr & other sites I would have had absolutely no idea how to screen & stay safe.”

“Everything I know about being safe in sex work is because I was able to speak to other sex workers online.”

“As sex workers use technology for work, sex workers also use technology to organize.”

“I don’t even have to have people’s phone numbers, these are just people who I’ve had sex with for money on camera. And that’s like actually the only relationship I had with a lot of them, and yet, and we’ve never talked about politics, and yet we could go on Twitter and we could organize a fucking movement and stop the bill from passing.”

“Creating a community, creating how the work happens behind the scenes is just as important as creating a tech platform.”

“In addition to thinking about how sex workers contribute to technology, it’s important to be real about the fact that there are huge limitations to what kinds of tech can be made in the erotic industry.”