An intimate look inside the lives of student sex workers

On the fifth floor of the Colonial residence hall, every Sunday night around 6:30 p.m., Jenna got ready for work.

She stripped off her clothes, found a good angle, and snapped some nude photos of herself. In her suite, one of her suitemates tracked her earnings and spendings in a spreadsheet, while another fielded the steady stream of Snapchat messages from “thousands” of clients asking for content, often until 3 a.m. She paid each of them $300 a week.

“My friends in Colonial—they did it like homework,” Jenna, a junior journalism major, says of the sex work she did her first semester. “We literally became a little business, and we had the best time doing it.” 

The enterprise was second nature to Jenna, who has sold pictures of herself since she was a student at a high school where “nobody dated” and she craved male attention. She started a private Snapchat under the pseudonym Jenna Stares—the same day, she made $2,500 from 10 faceless photos of herself. 

“I realized how lucrative this is, and then I started making ridiculous amounts of money—like, drug dealer amounts of money,” she says. 

With her parents covering her tuition expenses, Jenna bought a Mercedes-Benz, a Gucci bag, Balenciaga shoes, and fancy sushi dinners for her friends. When a friend’s car broke down, she paid to have it fixed. 

Once, she went to Fajitas and ’Ritas a few blocks from campus with friends, ordered eight pitchers of margaritas, and texted a client: Hey, I’m out to dinner with my friends, and they want my sugar daddy to pay for it. He sent her enough money over Apple Pay to cover the entire bill. “It was great,” she recalls. “What am I going to do, start a 401k? I’m just gonna blow that money.”

As the dollars poured in, she learned to be savvier, saving half and spending half. She developed a fanbase, and clients began sending her money unprompted—just because. Go get a nice dinner, or go get your nails done, they would say. She had to start using Apple Pay because CashApp and Venmo flagged her account for “suspicious activity.” Grossing about $9,000 a month, Jenna estimates she’s earned upward of $120,000 since high school. 

“It was super transactional,” she says. “A sale could be done in three messages.” 

The newfound riches, she says, went to her head. “The biggest reason why I would spend that money so quick is because I could make it back in 10 minutes, easy,” she says. She lost motivation to apply for internships. 

To focus on her journalism career, she tapered off on selling photos. Now she’s down to just four or five long-term clients she can offer content to any time she needs a jolt of cash. Pulling back on sending photos has had its upsides. “Ever since I stopped, I became much closer to my parents because I wasn’t on my phone as often,” she says. “I used to always be on my phone messaging these dudes and making sales.” 

With her friends, sex work was “the topic of discussion every time I was around people,” Jenna says. “Once I broke away from that, I definitely felt like I made more genuine friendships with people and because people weren’t being my friend because I could buy them DoorDash, [or] I could buy their dinner.” 

Quitting altogether, Jenna says, has a hard deadline: “When I get a job,” she says. “When I get like an actual HR, signed signature, payroll job. That’s the time.”

For now, she’s content with her work-life balance. “I’m trying to be more of a regular college student, not like the Princess of Dubai, taking money and spending it,” she says. “I used to be overwhelmed, and now I’m cruising.” 

***

Sex work is a surprisingly unsurprising line of work for college students. The Student Sex Work Project, a three-year study led by Swansea University that interviewed 6,773 students in the U.K., found the top three reasons students opted for sex work were good money, flexible hours, and sexual pleasure. The study found that about five percent of students surveyed had somehow worked in the sex industry, ranging from webcam services to working in a topless bar to prostitution. 

The move of some sex work to an online format has made entering the industry that much easier. OnlyFans—a platform that charges “fans” a monthly fee to subscribe to a creator—has caused the popularity of sex work to balloon, especially after the pandemic limited in-person jobs or made them substantially riskier. 

Founded in 2016, OnlyFans surged from 120,000 users in 2019 to more than 90 million by December 2020, according to the New York Times. At colleges like Emerson—where the average financial aid award is $17,000 compared to a $70,000 a year tuition, room, and board charge—students often need a straightforward and sustainable way to generate income. Sex work, for some people, fits the bill.

One Emerson junior, who uses the alias WeekndWrrior on her OnlyFans account, began her expedition into sex work in September 2020. She’d dabbled in selling pictures online, but the combination of staying home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her diagnosis of psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, and the necessity of a steady income spurred her to make an OnlyFans account.  

“I love getting dressed up. I love being creative. I love to make content,” she says. “It’s nothing ever that I have to push myself to do … it’s stuff I do on the daily. I love to do it.”

After holding a minimum wage job in Copley Square, WeekndWrrior says she can’t imagine affording tuition at Emerson without the money she makes from sex work. “I live alone, and I don’t have any support from [my] family. So I absolutely use this money for living expenses, school, textbooks, all of that,” she says.

In a statement to The Beacon, Emerson urges those who felt they couldn’t afford tuition to access available college resources. 

“We are deeply concerned to learn that students may feel that sex work is their only option to cover their expenses while enrolled at Emerson,” wrote Michelle Gaseau, Emerson’s director of communications and media relations.

But it’s not all about the money. WeekndWrrior’s recent diagnosis with PNES, a seizure disorder that can arise after experiencing a traumatic event, makes staying out for long periods of time or holding service jobs all but impossible. “That diagnosis, going forward with that in sex work, it really goes hand in hand with my treatment, because it just is having me be more open and empowering myself and taking control of my mind and my body,” she says. 

As a survivor of sexual trauma, WeekndWrrior turned to sex work as a beacon of hope when her body no longer felt like her own. She says it felt like a piece of herself had been taken against her will. “A lot of my trauma and my mental health, the way that it was panning out, it seemed just like a good time for me to get into something that would start to heal me,” she says.

WeekndWrrior says trying sex work for the first time instilled her with a newfound autonomy over herself and her image. “Before I did sex work, there were things that people could do to stop me. There were traumas that people could inflict on me or others to stop me from either embracing my sexuality or just embracing sex in general,” she says. “It feels like a piece is taken from you, so to take it back—and not only take it back but use it to your advantage and create this little business empire and having that creative outlet—of course I’m going to do that.” 

Jesse Battilana, a nurse practitioner for Emerson’s Center for Health and Wellness says WeekndWrrior’s perspective is a positive one, though it might not be universally applicable. “A patient being in control of their own body is an important component of trauma-informed healthcare,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “I would be very happy to hear it if someone’s sex work impacts them positively and reinforces their sense of control over their body and their right to consent. That said, I also would not discount the potential for a triggering or traumatic situation in this job.”

Annabelle, a junior creative writing major at Emerson, wore a red turtleneck and a star necklace as she recounted her entry into sex work. A self-described “hypersexual being,” she says she’s been “very erotic-minded” since she was a child, and was always drawn to the idea of sex work. “It was associated with pleasure, so I was like, ‘That must be awesome, having fun all the time,’” she says.   

Annabelle says she was hypersexualized as a child by a family member who groomed her. “Because of that and because I already had thoughts about sex at the time, it propelled me into this hypersexual being that I am now,” she says. She is proud of her work, but does “understand that at the time, the reason I had this idea was definitely not from the best place.”

As soon as she turned 18, she seized the opportunity to begin selling her nude photos through platforms like a private Snapchat, Fancentro, and OnlyFans. She posted a “menu” of content, and hundreds of messages piled up each day. Some of the men were trying to “save her” from sex work or were “time wasters” trying to get free content. She posted an order form on Reddit for customers to fill out. Her premium Snapchat cost $12 a month or $100 for a “lifetime” subscription, and she sent out more than five premade, impromptu pictures, and videos weekly. She uploaded daily to her OnlyFans, which cost fans $15 a month.

Most of her content was shot in her Piano Row suite—one of the rooms was empty, and she preferred taking photos and videos with as little identifying information as possible. She didn’t want any of her customers to associate her with Emerson, or even with Boston. The standard wooden doors and bed frames, however, were a telltale sign of campus living. “They would love the dorm thing. They would think it’s part of the young girl gimmick,” Annabelle says. “Being a college girl is a really attractive thing to them … [It] definitely helped me make a lot more money.”  

Some of her content featured her now ex-boyfriend, another Emerson student, who often did camerawork for her. Her suitemates helped out too. “It wasn’t unexpected for them to walk in and I’d be taking a photo of myself naked. They’d be like, ‘Oh, let me help,’” she recalls. “The extra hands really help and definitely take some of the responsibility off.” 

Her job was not a point of contention in her relationship with her boyfriend, and Annabelle says jealousy was not an issue. However, she says he was uncomfortable with her video-chatting clients after a particularly awkward Skype call with someone who sent her a Hitachi wand vibrator. But they came to a mutual agreement on that boundary (though she still “swears by” the vibrator). 

Annabelle introduced WeekndWrrior to the world of virtual sex work. They became friends during their first year at Emerson, sharing an interest in makeup and bonding over their struggles with mental health. Eventually, WeekndWrrior’s blossoming curiosity in sex work came up. 

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