“I’ve done some Fear Factor shit in my life—a sweaty ass ain’t the worst,” a user named Hoochie Papa said in a recent Twitter Spaces discussion attended by a handful of OnlyFans creators, expressing his love of post-workout anilingus. From there, conversation flared with excitement, as topics zipped from craziest foods eaten (pig brain, alligator) to Spike TV (“That was my shit!”) to the domestic banality of Lifetime movies like Your Baby Is Mine and The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom. “I could sit and watch The Notebook,” he continued, “but I can’t watch no Lifetime movie.”
What you’ve likely heard about Twitter Spaces is only the half of it. Although it has been host to a botched presidential campaign launch and a fallen crypto founder’s farewell tour, its esoteric charms have taken hold in other corners of the platform. Since Twitter debuted the Clubhouse competitor in 2021, the audio chat feature, like Clubhouse itself, has lost a lot of the cultural cache it had back when Covid-19 forced people to find creative substitutes for connection without physically meeting up. Yet amid this quiet period in social audio—most experiments like Spotify Live and Reddit Talk have shuttered, and everyone’s horny for AI these days—one group, long at the forefront of critical shifts in technology and the way it’s utilized, has leveraged Spaces for information-swapping, community-building, and mundane enjoyment: sex workers.
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When the social audio gold rush commenced in 2020, sex workers were among the many groups of people looking to connect over shared passions. In time, Twitter Spaces became the go-to platform because it was one of the few that didn’t flag them wholesale as high-risk users (violations on an individual basis still happen, often citing an abuse of community guidelines). For a while, Mastodon had a thriving scene called Switter—since 2018, some 430,000 people used it to gather resources, bond, and safely vet clients—but in March 2022 it shut down in response to legislation like Australia’s Online Safety Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA-FOSTA) in the US. Critics believe such regulations do more to criminalize sex work than protect users. Twitter Spaces remains an outlier, one of the rare audio outlets for sex workers that has yet to dissipate.
The best of these discussions, like the one where Hoochie Papa professed his love of eating ass, ping pong from topic to topic with the ease of listening in on a private group chat. These informal gatherings vary in presentation: Most are on-the-fly, others are scheduled and promoted in advance, and topics run the gamut. It’s all a matter of who you follow and what you’re looking for, but most operate in the manner of dynamic discussions among people with shared interests.
I’ve eavesdropped on conversations about everything from modern dating and industry gossip (one engaging chat broached the topic of who is and isn’t safe to work with) to the regressive ban on DEI programs in colleges across Florida. Sex is still paramount in some of these bustling audio dens, like in the case of adult performer Gudda So Savage, who occasionally hosts late-night Spaces in the manner of a classic “phone bone,” conducting dirty-talk with fellow participants.
There is an acrobatic use of Spaces that many participants wield. The chats are deeply collaborative, educational, and occasionally erotically charged. The form appeals to the ease of personalized exchange, the very business sex workers have built an industry, and economy, on. (I never once came across someone using Spaces to sell sex outright—people generally just want to share their experiences and talk about their day—though I imagine those chats exist as well.)
Not all of this is a surprise. Sex workers were among the first technologists. They were the vanguard of sex-via-tech in the pre-dotcom era—remember the uber-popular, uber-sensual 1-900 hot lines from the ’90s? Once desire was digitized, they pioneered a more intimate kind of connection through pathbreaking mediums: using webcams to entertain client fantasies, leveraging streaming video as VHS died out, relying on ecommerce alternatives to get paid. As writer and sex advocate Gabrielle Garcia suggested: “The sex worker has always been a major stakeholder in telecommunications.”
“In many ways, sex workers built the internet as a means to connect, work, and keep safe. But, as with many feminized and stigmatized professions, they have been erased from the history of this technology.”
Pani Farvid, director of the New School’s Sex/Tech Lab
Today, to exist online as an influencer of some sort—be it hawking face creams on Instagram or fitness tips on YouTube—is, in part, to owe a debt to what sex workers understood in the earliest tints of the dotcom days: Delivering self-customization at scale requires a personalized touch. When OnlyFans launched in 2016 and became a mainstream hit during the pandemic, it was sex workers who again led the push, transforming the site from just another startup into perhaps one of the most enterprising social platforms of this generation.
“In many ways, sex workers built the internet as a means to connect, work, and keep safe,” says Pani Farvid, a professor of psychology and founding director of the New School’s Sex/Tech Lab in New York. “But, as with many feminized and stigmatized professions, they have been erased from the history of this technology.”
For Bate Bandit XL, like for several sex professionals, the adoption of new technologies is out of necessity. A designer and performing artist based in New York City, he is the creator of a popular Twitter account dedicated to masturbation enthusiasts, commonly known as “bators.” Now at 15,000 followers, @BBXLB8Bros launched during lockdown, in February 2021, as a means to safely bring together Black men who, as Bandit says, felt fetishized in non-Black spaces.
Although Bate Bandit XL joined Twitter in 2018, after Tumblr instituted its porn ban, it wasn’t until 2020 that he began hosting virtual bate sessions via Zoom (picture a Zoom meeting, only it’s not your coworkers and everyone is naked and masturbating). “That became my main source of hosting,” he says. “It blew up overnight, and within two weeks there were over 100 people joining. It became so big that I decided to organize a digital space on Telegram.”
As the demand for sessions grew—“We began to host them almost every night,” says Bate Bandit XL—the toll weighed on him; they’d sometimes stretch until four in the morning. It was decided that the group would evolve in other ways. One way would be hosting a weekly Wednesday audio chat on Telegram, called Bate House, where members would discuss set topics, current events, and trade stories. “Some days we’d talk about mental health, other days it would be something else,” he says.
But growth came with hiccups. At the end of 2022, Bate Bandit XL had to stop hosting virtual sessions over Zoom after discovering that a member was recording and selling them online. Given that the meetups were drawing Black men of all identities—straight, gay, bi, single, married, DL, and the curious-minded—he didn’t want to risk anyone’s safety or privacy.
Even with the setback, he built on the momentum by providing more alternatives for meetups—which is how Bate House Live, the Twitter Spaces confab, came to be. It was a savvy addition to the private Telegram group chat because it allowed for a more free-flowing, public discourse for anyone who wanted to listen, or talk. “We wanted to have something for the community at large,” he says, “because we don’t just let anybody in.”
Perhaps in spite of the escalation in propaganda and hate speech since Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, this particular use of Spaces by sex workers feels particularly promising because it extends a long history of innovation in the audioverse, from the analog use of phone sex lines and talk radio to podcasts, ASMR, and newer narrative-driven apps like Quinn.
“The capacity to relay more of our humanity and to foster a deeper sense of understanding as well as connection” is what excites Farvid most about this evolving audio terrain. “It’s a bit complex, though, as the issues of de-platforming remain and need to be better addressed,” she says of Twitter’s fickle treatment of sex workers in recent years, when accounts tied to various adult performers and porn platforms like Clips4Sale were either shadowbanned or suspended without notice.
For Bate Bandit XL, the transition to Spaces has been an idyllic one, and so far his account hasn’t faced problems with shadowbanning or suspension. He says Bate House Live regularly draws hundreds of listeners. One of the more memorable conversations the group had not long ago was around “the origin of shame.” But they also occasionally play games (the rapid-fire “60-second hot seat” is a favorite), discuss topics on bator etiquette, and talk about how to navigate sexual desire in public settings.
Despite the success of the conversations, not everyone is convinced. “[Some members] have tried to get us to move off of Twitter Spaces and onto other platforms,” Big Bandit XL says, “but if the audience can’t talk back to us, I don’t want to be there.” He remains undeterred by those persuasions. More recently, he tapped four regular participants to lead weekly chats, which has been a boon for discussion. “It’s more or less turned into a Black bator version of The View,” he says with a laugh.
