Stella Barey Probably Makes More Money Than You (Still)
Her thoughts on Recent OnlyFans News, and How She Will Continue to Run Her Sex Life as a Company
I first met Stella a year ago, after I had just been fired from my job at a publication. I had been crying into my boyfriend’s lap for three straight weeks, until I came across a TikTok that brought a reluctant smirk to my face. In the 10-second clip, I learned Stella’s boyfriend was homeless, and she lost her anal virginity in the back of his car/house. Okay, it was more than a smirk. I scrolled-smiled through her entire page, and learned more: she was volunteering at a homeless shelter and Drew was one of her clients, he was a Marine, she had an OnlyFans, she was a well educated medical student, and perhaps most obvious, she was obsessed with anal.
I have to get to know this girl, I thought. Throughout my college years, I had been mildly infatuated with sex workers, whether it was the traditional pornstar like Asa Akira, or the New Age half-Youtuber-half-premium-Snapchater like Lena the Plug.
“Can you believe how much money we are about to make this month!?,” Stella beamed through my cracked phone. It was now almost a year later after our first interview, and Stella and I had essentially become partners. She was the porn star, I was the manager. In one year alone, we had sold hundreds of copies of our first interview, marketed thousands of new videos for her, and severely upped her subscriber count. Neither of us had ever made anything close to the money we were making. We were on top of the world.
What was your initial reaction after hearing the news about OnlyFans banning sexually explicit content?
“The first day, I was pretty depressed. I wasn’t really worried about myself, I feel like I have great fans. . . but it was just so disheartening.
My ex-boyfriend from college sent me a link to two different tweets about it. I thought it was a rumor, like how it always is. I started looking into it, and I think I told you first, and then I told Drew. I tried not to think too much, but then it got serious. We were venting about how hard someone can work, and it can just get taken away. Even though that’s not really the case, it’s just kind of how you feel.
It hit me in the afternoon and I started crying so much. I just got emotional, and it wasn’t about me at all. I felt so bad for all of the people affected by it. I started to get those feelings again: it’s not even worth it. . .I work so hard and there’s constant setbacks. Of course, that’s a mindset you only have for a moment.
I have a lot of savings, and a lot of fans that I have built up. . .I felt pretty okay. But it was a reality check — nothing is permanent. You never get to feel stable and comfortable in this job.”
For me, of course it was gut-wrenching. Although I had built up so much confidence in managing people this past year, and I felt lightyears ahead in terms of my knowledge about the sex industry, I was extremely heartbroken about the news that OnlyFans would no longer allow more than a nip-slip. Though my biggest client (Stella) profited mainly off of explicit sex tapes, “messy” play, and vigorous masturbation, I wasn’t worried about her.
OnlyFans has recently enforced their guidelines and took down thousands of videos showing scat, urine, fisting, and ‘playing’ with anything else besides a sex toy. How did that make you feel?
“That was the scariest part. I get really nervous when I get violations on anything, it’s the same as when I get one on TikTok. It ruins my day. It’s so scary. I’ve been deleted on Instagram three times, Twitter once, TikTok like 10 times. There is nowhere on the whole internet that I can say what I want to say. There’s nowhere I can be myself, except in person.
I also had no idea that those things were even bad, like fisting and putting a vegetable inside you. There’s always something I don’t know is wrong.”
Did you feel like you were being treated like a child? Did it make you feel unsafe?
“It just feels like there should be somewhere where you can do what you want to do. I don’t think every place on the internet has to be comfortable for everyone. It’s annoying.
Also, celebrities always say that they can be fully uncensored on OnlyFans. Tyga and Tana Mongeau say that all the time. But when you’re a sex worker, there’s so many rules. I am constantly at war with Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. And not on purpose, at all.”
In our last interview, you didn’t feel comfortable naming yourself as a sex worker. Do you use that term now?
“I think about that all the time. I was still so new, and I just didn’t feel like that was the right term to describe myself. Now I do, because I understand that a sex worker is just someone who works in and around sex. I also feel like one much more because I am filming porn with a co-star, and actually fucking. It feels different than just touching myself alone.
Also, now that I am doing collaborations with other OnlyFans creators, I’m like: okay, my job is sex. That was a whole new phase for me, doing girl-girl. I was like: woah, I am having sex with another person that’s not my boyfriend of two years. I’m so made for this job, but you never know until it actually happens.”
Stella and I reminisced about the little world she was in before she started making boy-girl and girl-girl content. About how she was just alone in her room making porn by herself for thousands of (mostly) men. We then reminisced about the little world me and her were in, before OnlyFans threatened our sacred treasure and taught us to sleep with our weapons beside us. Before, we always found a way to be in a secret universe. It was like we were perpetually in a fort at a sleepover. Except we lived thousands of miles apart and mainly discussed anal, logistics, and money.
How have your expenses changed since last year?
“Now I have a business card, because now write-offs are a thing that are expected with my LLC. In 2020, I just didn’t have that many expenses. I would put the random lingerie and sex toy on there, but that was about it. My tax accountant had to find more write-offs for me, because it just wasn’t enough.
Now, I have upped the production value a little bit. Occasionally, I’ll buy new tripods, ring lights, get my nails done, and then lots of sex toys. I have a blast buying a ton of toys and writing those off. Oh, and then a new phone every month or two, because I get banned from TikTok and have to have a phone with a new IP address.
I’ve also started to invest and expand my business, but not with month-to-month expenses. I just paid 30k to have my website and server built. But, I pay that much at least to OnlyFans every month with the percentage they take, so it’s really not that much in retrospect.”
I never really talked to you about how it was once Drew got back from the psych ward. How did your relationship change once he came home and started making porn with you?
“It has gotten so much better than I ever thought it could be. I got much stricter about: this is what I do, this is what matters to me. He had just come back from the psych unit. I loved having him in my life, but I wasn’t about to let him go crazy again and make me unstable. I told him ‘you can come live with me, and you can have a place to stay and food on the table, as long as you focus on your health, don’t smoke cigarettes, stay sober, and don’t be a total menace to my health and happiness.’ And he wasn’t at all, he was so thankful.”
I was sort of in shock at her explanation of her strictness. Sure, we talked occasionally about her relationship with Drew, but our texts mainly consisted of business, planning content and swapping TikToks. The last time we did an interview, she told me she would do anything to keep someone in her life. She didn’t mind paying for friends or guys if they added value to her life. I respected her for it. My therapist would have had a field day “helping” her with her boundaries, but still, I deeply respected her for it.
Stella continued, “We made a few videos before he was in the psych unit, but he hadn’t really worked with me. Once he came back, he became really comfortable with my job, and realized that he was made for this job too,” Stella giggled.
“He told me he used to think about doing porn when he was in the Marine Corps. He’s really excited about it, he’s such a creative person and he started directing it. He watches porn all the time, which has become such amazing research for us.
It takes such good communication. I am a pretty particular person. I am easy going and good at working in groups, but I also have a type of quality product that I want to put out. It’s hard to communicate with him sometimes. It has 100% caused so many fights.”
What is one example of a disagreement you have with him?
“I want to film it point-of-view. Always. I love POV videos. He’s always like ‘well, that’s too hard for me because I’m the one filming the whole time, and I also have to stick my dick in all your holes.’ That’s one of the main issues we have — he wants there to be all of these angles, and I think he overcomplicates it, and then he’s not enjoying it. For me, the main point of the video is to make people feel like they are having sex with me. Like, intimate.
Anyone can go watch a role-play video, but with my site, they want to see me. It’s not about the angles, it’s about translating a feeling. I think the reason my brand works so well is because it’s real. I have real orgasms in all of my videos, even if it takes a long time. Sometimes I just won’t have them at all.
It’s also hard to explain all the nuances of OnlyFans and TikTok that are just embedded into me at this point. He doesn’t have social media at all, so it’s even harder to explain to him what will do better, what will go viral and what won’t. Especially when the work is something as personal as sex. It’s hard to give him constructive criticism. I look at it in such a business way and I don’t look at it with feelings. But he’s still invaluable to what I do. I just need to find a way to communicate with him in a sensitive way, and at least try to explain these nuances that he doesn’t get.”
What can sex workers do to prepare for situations like this? What are you doing to combat sudden changes in the online sex world?
“I’m still trying to figure out what the smartest approach is for me. When this happened, one of my initial thoughts was: well thank god I still have Twitter. Twitter is the most powerful thing right now in terms of social media for a sex worker. It might not be there forever, but at least it’s here right now. Getting a mailing list was super important for me too. Even if I lose all of my social media, at least I have thousands of emails and I can reach my fans that way. Reddit is super powerful, and thank god for TikTok. Finding another site to build up is also very important. I’m still new to this, but I know that Ginger Banks and Alex Adams, who have been doing porn for over 10 years, are so used to this. It’s not the end of the world if a site like OnlyFans gets taken down, they’ve had to restart multiple times. So I guess: just don’t get comfortable.”
Do you cringe when OnlyFans girls refer to “their team”? I hear that a lot, in a tone that seems to degrade those who do it on their own. What are your thoughts on girls signed to huge management teams and agencies?
“My brand is super personal. That’s how I like things and how I feel most authentic. I can’t expect everyone to be that way, but I think that’s why I’ve done so well.
When people refer to their ‘team’ they’re just trying to make it seem way more official than it really is, and it’s just sad to me. A ‘team’ means people are taking a lot of money from them. I started this out of college, but if I started when I was eighteen, my understanding of the business would be completely different. I get why some girls would feel like they couldn’t do it themselves.
Most girls don’t know what they are doing, and it’s sad because they could be collecting such valuable information every day. I have gained so much knowledge on marketing and confidence in running my own business. If I had someone else doing it, I would be in the same spot I was in a year and a half ago, and so anxious.”
I read Stella a quote from our last article: “‘I feel fear all the time. When I first started sharing, especially. I went through a period where I was like: Am I actually insane? Am I imploding my whole life!? Stella explained her fear of losing fans and followers, and how much appreciation she has grown for people in social media. Every day that she was earning more, the fear grew. We laughed at the silly irony of sticking a dildo up your butt on camera one minute, and then thinking to yourself the next something so arbitrary and little as: what if no one cares about me?”
How have your fears changed?
“I always remind myself of that feeling of fear before I went into porn, I was so terrified that I was going crazy. I could not figure out if it was a stable choice. The other side of me was listening to society, and had me thinking that I was ruining my life. I didn’t know which one was reality.
Now that I have seen how things have been going for the past year and a half, I realized that it actually is as stable as I thought it was. I have a background, I have evidence, and I am a lot more confident in my ability to recover fans and followers after a social media account gets taken down. I have evidence, and I can no longer be fearful of my following disappearing. I have proven that I have done it again, and again, and again. If I get deleted, I know I can build it all back up. I know what people want.
Now the fear is less of a day-to-day fear, and it’s more about: will I continue to be creative, and enjoy my job, and have the will power and grit to do this everyday? So when I feel sick, or I feel depressed I can’t think about work. I’ll start feeling disempowered, or nervous about the amount of energy my job takes, and will continue to take.
Once I feel better again, I love doing my job, and I think it reflects in my work. To do this long-term I have to make sure I am mentally healthy. I just want to continue to be my real self.”
Whether it was a way to get more investors, an actual safety measure to ensure their payment processors, or just a straight up good-ole-fashioned publicity stunt, the threat of OnlyFans banning porn will happen again, in some form, in some way, on some platform. Although sex work is one of the oldest professions in the world, there will always be people who don’t want it to exist. There will be people who don’t want sex workers to win, in any way.
I know the fort at our sleepover will be threatened sometime again, but our blades are sharpened. This time we’re ready.
