Sex workers are still hot for Twitter spaces

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Not all of this is a surprise. Sex workers were among the first technologists. They were the vanguard of sex through technology in the pre-dotcom era. Remember the super popular and super sexy 1-900 hotlines from the ’90s? Once desire was digitized, they pioneered a more intimate kind of connection through innovative means: using webcams to entertain customer fantasies, tapping into streaming video when VHS died out, relying on retail alternatives email to receive payments. As a writer and sex advocate Gabrielle Garcia He suggested: “The sex worker has always been an important actor in telecommunications”.

Today, to exist online as an influencer of some sort, whether it’s selling face creams on Instagram or fitness advice on YouTube, is, in part, beholden to what sex workers understood in the first nuances. from the dot-com days: giving yourself away. -Scale customization requires a custom touch. When OnlyFans launched in 2016 and became a mainstream hit during the pandemic, it was sex workers who once again led the momentum, transforming a startup site into perhaps one of the most entrepreneurial social platforms of this generation.

“In many ways, sex workers built the Internet as a means to connect, work, and stay safe,” says Pani Farvid, a professor of psychology and founding director of the New School’s Sex/Technology Lab in New York. “But, like many feminized and stigmatized professions, they have been erased from the history of this technology.”

for bat bandit XL, as for several sex professionals, the adoption of new technologies is out of necessity. A designer and performance artist based in New York City, he is the creator of a popular Twitter account dedicated to masturbation enthusiasts, commonly known as “bators.” Now with 15,000 followers, @BBXLB8Bros launched during lockdown, in February 2021, as a means to safely bring together black men who, Bandit says, felt fetishized in non-black spaces.

Although Bate Bandit XL joined Twitter in 2018, after Tumblr instituted its ban on porn, it wasn’t until 2020 that he started hosting virtual bat sessions via Zoom (imagine a Zoom meeting, only it’s not his coworkers and they’re all naked and masturbating). “That became my main source of accommodation,” he says. “It exploded overnight, and within two weeks over 100 people joined. It got so big that I decided to organize a digital space on Telegram.”

As demand for sessions grew—”We started hosting them almost every night,” says Bate Bandit XL—the cost got to him; sometimes they lasted until four in the morning. It was decided that the group would evolve in other ways. One way would be to host a weekly Wednesday audio chat on Telegram, called the Bate House, where members would discuss established topics, current events, and business stories. “Some days we would talk about mental health, other days it was something else,” he says.

But growth came with setbacks. In late 2022, the Bate Bandit XL had to stop holding virtual sessions via Zoom after discovering a member was recording them and selling them online. Since the gatherings attracted black men of all identities—straight, gay, bisexual, single, married, licensed, and curious—I didn’t want to risk anyone’s safety or privacy.

Even with the setback, he built on the momentum by offering more alternatives for meetings, which is how Bate House Live, the Twitter Spaces conspiracy, came to be. It was a clever addition to Telegram’s private group chat because it allowed for smoother public speaking for anyone who wanted to listen or speak. “We wanted to have something for the community at large,” he says, “because we don’t let anyone in.”