Defying Dick Expectations

While most of us were still figuring out how to flirt through a mouthful of braces, Trixie (her work name) was trying to start her own sex business. “I enlisted the help of the class slut in manufacturing business cards to pass out in honors pre-algebra," she writes on her web site, "advertising an escort service.” This was the seventh grade. Back then, she didn't have any takers—but let's just say that, well, her bed was made.

Today, Trixie runs her own independent porn site, TastyTrixie.com, where she performs in live webcam shows: stripping, masturbating, or all-around arousing viewers with her internet camera. She also posts photos of herself in sexy situations (Camping trip alone in the woods? Time to get naked!), and hosts ten spy cams positioned 24/7 around her home. For $29.95 a month, Tasty Trixie members have access to her other sites too, like Trixie’s Houseboy, Delia CD, and Spy on Us—sister indie-porn sites dedicated to Trixie’s boyfriend Tucker, his cross-dressing alter-ego Delia, and Trixie and Tucker as a couple. On top of it all, Trixie is also a phone sex operator. Watch her spy cams, and it may seem like Trixie’s day is spent hanging around looking hot. But this is definitely a full-time job.

Tasty Trixie’s tagline is “Not your average Web Whore!” Fitting since her approach to online sex work definitely isn't average. In her site's “about” section, she writes that her target audience is “people who want more than anonymous pink parts.” She claims readers don’t want “an animated sex doll” they want “a real girl next door.” That modifier pretty much sums up Trixie: real. Her body is beautiful, but not always perfect. Her spy cams not only capture her getting off on a plunger handle and using a gourd as a dildo, but also her bad hair days.

Unlike most people who want to talk with Trixie, I didn’t need a credit card to get her on the phone. Still, I was surprised when she told me she was answering my questions sprawled out in front of a spy cam. That meant she couldn’t tell me her real name. It’s not the first time live cameras have altered the way she acts. When her young nephew came to visit her recently, she had to make sure his image didn’t appear anywhere on her site—according to credit-card companies who process Trixie’s payments, minors can’t be caught on webcams. And then there's the rather significant detail that her entire sex life is broadcasted live. I ask if that's a strain on her relationship with Delia. Trixie explained it actually works the other way. “When we have sex and it’s not caught by the spy cams,” she says, “it’s strangely disappointing.”

Tasty Trixie opened its virtual doors five years ago, but Trixie has been an online sex worker longer than that. Over a decade ago, she willingly left the trappings of a “normal” adult life—college, marriage, and an office job—to get "paid to masturbate.” She started out doing cam shows for a large website called iFriends, where a variety of women are available for pay-per-minute performances. But a big site like that requires compromise, says Trixie. “It’s a limited platform. You’re not always the one in control.” There are certain advantages to working for someone else though, she admits—like an established customer base. “A girl on her own ends up spending so much time just getting customers,” she says, “Putting out ads, posting on message boards. It’s exhausting.”

Though she still performs for iFriends, running her own porn site in tandem has really let her “break out” and be herself. “When I self-publish my website… there’s no one telling me who to be. When I want to do something, I can do it.” Trixie's unique situation affords her the luxury of speaking her mind. “There’s a lot of safety built in here for being pro sex work. If I were a stripper, I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, don’t think you’re going to walk away from me without paying for that dance’… It’s about safety. Here, I have the privilege of being really vocal.” And Trixie is nothing if not vocal.

For example, in her live-cam shows, where her customers are expecting her to be “entertaining and sexy,” she says she enjoys “telling them things they don’t want to hear.” Like? That she has her period. Or that she has to use the toilet. “They have their dicks out and they expect that they’re not going to be challenged,” she says. “It’s a shock.”

But customers certainly seem to like it. Especially since Trixie, who is in her thirties, forsees a long future in web-sex work. “When I’m forty, people won’t want to see me, but I can think of a million ways to still have a presence,” she says. “This is a project for the rest of my life.”