- If I had gone back in time and told past self,
'Oh, you're going to become literally a prostitute,'
I would have sh*t myself.
I'm Aella, and I'm a Heretic because I believe
online sex work is probably more damaging for society
than in-person sex work.
Also, it's very likely that
prostitution can save marriages.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels and misfits,
you can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- Hi, I'm Aella.
I am a sex worker and a researcher.
I was raised in a very conservative
Christian household,
a very sexually-repressed atmosphere.
I remember when I was informed
that I was going to one day
have to be naked in front of my husband—
I felt suicidal.
And so, eventually, I got out of that
and became a sex worker.
- That seems like a leap.
How did that happen?
- My prospects in life were like,
I maybe would be a cashier at a, you know, Walmart forever,
and that would be fine.
I was like, 'Okay, I don't want this for my life.'
Eventually, I had a friend recommend
this camming thing where it's like, well, you live stream,
people watch you and they tip you.
I had been homeschooled my whole life,
isolated from media,
so there was like a very intense cultural disconnect.
Turns out that, uh, if you have breasts
that really breaches a lot of cultural barriers.
I developed a reputation for being extremely goofy.
A common routine for me was a Sex Mime.
So, I would like, dress up a chair,
make love to the chair in a very realistic fashion.
And that's how it all started.
I think that a lot of people stigmatize sex work
because they assume that the workers don't like it.
Typically, people from more wealth, who they imagine
engaging in sex work and they're like,
'Oh, that would be really disgusting for me.'
This is a typical mind fallacy.
They assume that everybody must be like them
and suppressing it in some way.
And they're like, 'Okay, so, we want to protect
other women from doing this.'
Like, 'This is for your own good.'
Well, it would be for my own good if I were like you,
but I'm not.
If you're a woman and you're engaging in sex work,
you're doing that because it's the best option
you have available to you.
If you remove that option, or if you punish her
for engaging in it,
you're making her life actively worse.
So in this regard, I think sex work is definitely
good for humanity.
But there's definitely, I think,
maybe more negative side effects
with the online work than with the in-person work.
The online work is almost inherently dehumanizing
because it's very asymmetric.
I'm not actually engaging with an individual person
so much as trying to figure out
what kind of behavior will generate
the most amount of boners all at once.
Whereas, with in-person sex work,
it's no longer asymmetric.
You're one-on-one, and it's like there's some form
of healing or intimacy that I think comes through sex,
in a way that, like, online sex work can never be.
I had one client, and our very first session, like,
I got naked, ready to do the thing.
But somehow he ended up just crying, and I held him
with skin-to-skin contact and we just cried together,
and that, like, really direct touching somebody
and like having access to their body—
I think really generates that care in me,
which for some of these men,
especially the ones that have been married
for 20 years in sexless marriages,
like, this can be really healing and therapeutic for them.
And it probably saves marriages
because otherwise, if these men, like, absolutely
could not cheat on their wives, they couldn't see a sex worker;
there's a good chance that that sexual frustration
would bleed over into other things,
or be more likely to break down that marriage.
- Intimacy,
physical intimacy, seems to be a big, important part of a
healthy, functioning marriage.
If the only way to provide that is from an external partner,
does that diminish the quality of the marital relationship?
- I mean, if you're in a marital relationship
and you're not getting sex, then getting sex elsewhere
is not going to degrade the relationship any further.
It's not that, like—
uh, no,
that's the end of my sentence.
I want people to be more compassionate.
I want people to look at people who are making choices
that they might not personally agree with and be like,
'Well, there's probably good reason
that the person did that thing.'
Like, if you had been born in that person's body,
and like, woken up and gone through the same experiences,
that's what you would be doing too.
This doesn't mean that we
don't need to change their behavior,
like I'm fine with incentives.
Like, if you don't like that, your husband is seeing a prostitute,
I'm like, happy for you to talk to him,
or like, try to get him to stop in some way
that makes sense for you.
But also,
I think we can do this from a perspective of compassion,
like we can be like,
'Hey, I want you to change your behavior
because it's hurting me.'
But also, 'I don't judge you for it, like, I get it.'
That's what I would love to see more in the world.
I can generate more things,
I'm sorry, I'm just low on sleep.
It's going to take me a minute.
How much time do we have left?
- We have 13 minutes.
- Oh wow, that's so much time.
- It's a lot of time.
- Okay.