12 Days of XXXmas

12 Days of XXXmas: The Sex Workers You Need to Know This Holiday

This year will forever be known as the year the pandemic struck, but there was one, glorious upside to 2020: Everyone and their mother got on OnlyFans. With the pandemic pushing the curious and unemployed toward new sources of online income — and celebrities like Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion name-dropping it left and right — OnlyFans’ model sign-ups skyrocketed 75 percent, luring as many as 500,000 new subscribers to the site a day.

The effect? Things like camming, premium channels and amateur porn reached new levels of normalization that finally illuminated sex work for what it can be: a real, viable and, frankly, pretty hot career. But sifting through it all can be a tall task. With so many new creators (there are over a million on OnlyFans alone) — and so many others to learn about — it’s hard to tell who’s doing what, where they’re doing it and what it all means.

That’s why this year, we’re swapping out the typical 12 days of Christmas for something even better: 12 days of sex workers who should absolutely be on your radar. Whether they’re breaking new ground on OnlyFans, using their platform to call attention to issues like racism and immigration or shattering our ideas of who’s “allowed” to make porn, sex workers are not only reimagining what sex work can be, they’re changing the world — one swingin’, phalloplastic dick at a time.