Meet Aella: the intellectual porn star

OnlyFans, the self-publishing pornography app, has taken off during the course of 2020 with an average of 200,000 new users signing up each day. The platform allows creators to release photos and videos to paying subscribers; while the content published is entirely the choice of the creator, the most common genre is pornography. Freddie Sayers spoke to Aella, one of OnlyFans most successful and best-known creators, to discuss the morality of pornography and the reality of modern sex work. In an extraordinarily candid conversation, Aella explains how she rationalises her lifestyle. She believes that while some people get into sex work because they are already on the outskirts of society and it is the only choice they have to survive, others join the business because they “realise this is the best way to earn money for the least amount of work and are doing it strategically. A surprisingly high number of women in the rationality community have tried sex work.” Aella puts herself in both categories; on the one hand, she got into porn when she was desperate, but now believes that her highly analytical, high de-coupling mind meant that she was well-suited to this her line of work: “I think that my brain is different. I’ve noticed that since I was a kid, I’m just different in the way I process things”. Perhaps Aella’s success (she is among the top 0.3% of earners) can be at least partially attributed to her data-driven approach. She regularly conducts polls among her viewers and analyses the data to inform her content and grow her audience. She grew up in a ‘fundamentalist Christian’ household, and says that, rather than a rebellion against her upbringing, she believes it was oddly good training for belonging to a group that is very little understood by wider society. Does she not feel sex is sacred at all? Does she not worry that an example is being set for hundreds of thousands of girls for whom it would be very harmful? What about the men – what sort of men is a society with unlimited porn producing? She offers answers to all these difficult questions, and many more. Thanks to Aella for giving her time.