Erica, an anonymous sex worker on Reddit, can always tell when her clients are alt-right, or have been red-pilled and sucked face-first into the conspiracy-laden hellscape of QAnon. They make it obvious in their usernames. They spew it on social media. They show up in MAGA gear. They even tattoo it near their dicks: More than once, a client has requested an online cock rating with some fascist inkstain drilled into their skin, their sheepish-looking boners dangling from their jeans just a few inches away. (Norse tattoos, apparently, are a dead giveaway, especially runes or Thor’s hammer.)
Many sex workers pass on these guys if they reveal their affiliations before or during a session. Despite hiring them constantly and being institutionally obsessed with their inner workings, the far-right has been notoriously unfriendly and violent toward sex workers, especially if they’re trans, of color or both. Sometimes, it’s just easier and safer to next them and move on.
Erica, however, has a different strategy. In January, she posted a thread to the subreddit r/QAnonCasualties describing how she deals with clients like these, summing up her tactics with a single, unforgettable line: “Take these motherfuckers for everything you can.”
In a post titled “Males Who Are Q/Q-Adjacent/Alt-Right/MAGA/Peripheral From a Female Sex-Worker POV,” she outlined how she overcharges her alt-right clients for sexual services in order to divert their resources away from shady or potentially violent activities. “For this specific type of loser, I have zero remorse taking their money, and I hope anyone else out there in my situation feels the same way,” she wrote. “Some chud sending me $500 for 10 minutes of my time is $500 less spent on travel expenses for fascist demonstrations or weapons, and I’m a-okay with that.”
She didn’t outline her methods any further — or return repeated requests for comment — so the specifics of her approach are unclear. But what little she did say really struck a chord. Her post racked up more than 3,000 upvotes and nearly 280 comments, almost all of which applauded her for “fleecing” the alt-right and “taking one for the team.” Many commenters thanked her for her service and a few even pointed out how good an example it was of the incredibly hard — and real — work that sex workers do (both in general and to combat the alt-right).
But of all the spirited discussions and praise her post racked up, one particularly popular comment stood out: “All hail the antifa sex army.”
In case you haven’t noticed, antifa has been in the news a lot lately. A common scapegoat used by conservatives and the alt-right to deflect attention from the actual perpetrators of violence, it’s been incorrectly blamed for everything from looting and violence during the George Floyd protests to last month’s Capitol riots, and Trump even spent a few months of 2020 trying to get it labeled as a domestic terrorist group.
That’s fascinating because antifa is an ideology, not an actual organization with an infrastructure or leadership; as per FBI decree, it’s just a loose group of leftists who share a similar ideology around squashing autocracies and white supremacy. But while antifa has been described as “militant,” their disconnectivity makes the idea of a sex worker “army” seem laughable and far-fetched. How could something that mainly exists in concept produce a unified army of single-minded sex troops?
It probably can’t — and the commenter who posted about it was almost certainly being cute — but on second thought, they weren’t that far off. From Nazi-fighting sexpionage agents in World War II to the Italian prostitutes who were imprisoned for challenging Mussolini, sex workers have a long and colorful history of resisting fascist forces, and while few do it under the guise of “antifa” today, it seems like everyone from OnlyFans stars to pro-dommes have developed tactics for dealing with Q-types, MAGA guys and the general riff-raff of the alt-right.
Jill, an anonymous pro-domme in Portland, has her own special method. “I’ll see them, and I’ll charge them more if they bring that bullshit up during the session,” she wrote in an r/AskAnEscort thread I posted about the topic. “I have worked on deprogramming Trump supporters and forced them to read Black feminist literature and make donations to several Black and indigenous charities. If they’re extra annoying, they only qualify for cock-and-ball torture.”
Several Nazis have applied to see her over the past few years, some of whom she thinks are just trying to see how she’ll react. Like Erica, she can tell who they are by their tattoos — they have swastikas, the numbers 88 (for “Heil Hitler”) or 14/88 (for the 14 Words) or just straight-up “SS” etched somewhere where she can see it. But instead of ignoring them or taking them as clients, she passes their info to her local antifa chapter (Rose City Antifa) so they can “monitor their ass[es]” instead. So far, she’s helped them identify a handful of Proud Boys, hammerskins, boneheads (racist skinheads), local alt-right provocateurs, KKK members and other “chud types.”
“Sucks to suck,” she says.
Bella, a 40-year-old sex worker and pro-domme in the U.K., has a slightly different approach. Writing anonymously over email, she tells me she also uses her specialized skill set to “flip” right-wing neo-Nazi types, but rather than “bleed them dry,” she prefers to talk it out. A hypnodomme with a psychology background, she’s more prone to listening empathetically and encouraging productive conversation than she is draining their money, a service she says some extremist clients actually seek her out for.
“I’ve had clients come to me in the past with the intent — conscious or otherwise — to change their thinking on certain topics,” she tells me. “I’m pretty open on social media about my politics, and some men (it’s always been men in this situation) know that deep down, they’ve internalized some messed-up stuff.” Using the one-two punch of hypnosis and BDSM, she untangles and reframes these beliefs, a process she refers to as a “sort of therapy.”
“It sounds contrary to many assumptions about dommes, but coming at subjects with understanding and compassion instead of direct confrontation can be effective,” she says, explaining that she’s flipped about 10 right-wingers this way. One of them was a racist ex-military man who badly wanted her to “deprogram” his hateful beliefs; like many clients of sex workers, he believed the vulnerability and intimacy of the moment might help break him down. “Some men sexualize their fears and prejudices, as it’s the only way they can work through them when they’re too scared to commit to an official form of therapy,” Bella explains. “In a way, [sex work] is a deflection from dealing with their problems directly, but it’s still a way in.”
Some sex workers have even gone mainstream with approaches like these. Last year, pro-domme Empress Delfina went viral after exacting an invention of hers called “Trump Conversion Therapy” on her willing clients, a tactic that earned her a flurry of media attention and surge of session requests from conservative men seeking help for their warped ideologies. A domme who specifically entertains humiliation fetishes, she jokingly modeled the program after the gay conversion therapy efforts supported by Mike Pence and the cult-like brainwashing tactics Trump used to rally the alt-right, and as with Bella, she sees it as a way to “deprogram” their violent, hateful way of thought.
“I didn’t call it ‘deprogramming’ until it became evident that Trump supporters were behaving like cult fanatics around late 2017 and 2018,” she says, rifling off a list of textbook habits MAGA-types started to exhibit around that time: spinning defenses, abandoning their friends and family, dressing in uniform. “This obsession started to become dangerous when Trump started to encourage violence,” she continues. “He would fantasize about the ‘old days’ at his rallies, and the ‘again’ in MAGA reinforced that. Violence wasn’t just a fantasy, but becoming a reality that his supporters had to accept in order to get what they wanted.” Deprogramming them through Trump Conversion Therapy became her way to “save his supporters from themselves.”
The way it works is simple. She starts by using simple humiliation language to break clients down, then incorporates both physical pain and sexual pleasure to retrain their brains. Whenever they have a Trump-y thought, they get pain. Whenever they start thinking along more logical, empathetic lines, they get pleasure. As is the case in all consensual BDSM scenes, hers are tailored to her subs’ interests, comfort level and boundaries, though many of her right-wing clients like to push the envelope, especially when it comes to humiliation. One client of hers likes to sit in an orange, trash-filled garbage bag during their sessions, the orange color — and the rubbish — becoming a stinky stand-in for Trump. Another chants “I’m Putin’s bitch!” — chanting helps with the brainwashing — and a third has to shout “Build the wall!” while sticking a hot pepper up his ass. Throughout the process, she reminds them that her job is to “return to some balance to their thoughts” and to “vote blue no matter who.”
Whether or not these tactics stick or create any sort of real change in her clients isn’t her concern; she sees her role as an entertainer, not a licensed therapist, and in her eyes, many of these men need professional help. “My work only involves converting them in a session,” she says. “I have no control over what they do afterwards. It’s up to them to follow their own rules.”
Still, like Bella, Empress Delfina isn’t so much interested in fleecing her clients for money as she is in changing their minds. “‘Bleed them dry’ isn’t an approach I take since eventually that’ll render them useless,” she explains. “I don’t want to destroy these supporters; I want to use them for my profit. I’m a businesswoman, so keeping them financially bound to me, not to Trump, is my goal.”
Plus, she points out, any real attempt to exploit or destroy conservative, Q-type or red-pill clients is no better a strategy than the ones Trump employed while in office. Thus, while her politics are about as far left as they can get, she’d rather be above the fray, creatively outsmarting MAGA dudes instead of stooping to their level.
But as fair-sounding as that is, not all sex workers are on board with such tactics. In addition to the many who see client interactions as too vulnerable and sensitive a space to toy with politics in, others are against any kind of overcharging or deprogramming whatsoever, even when it’s consensual. As one wrote in the r/AskAnEscort thread, “[Sex work] is never a good time to ‘reprogram’ someone. This is a perfect example of facing extremism with extremism. You NEED alternative opinions in politics. Would you really want to live in a cult world where everyone thinks and acts like you?”
There’s no right answer to that question, but Jill had a pretty quick response. “Being a racist piece of shit isn’t an alternative opinion,” she fired back. “It’s violent, disgusting and despicable. I don’t seek these individuals out, they seek me out, and if they weren’t interested in the first place, they wouldn’t come find me.” She concluded by saying [sex workers] are “collecting Nazi scalps this year” and offering the aforementioned commenter a “haircut” out of her own pocket.
But while Jill reports Nazi-type clients to Rose City Antifa and identifies with the antifa movement herself, none of the other sex workers I interview claim any sort of official affiliation with it. To the best of their knowledge, there’s no organized effort on the part of antifa or any other organization to swindle or deprogram Q-dudes and the alt-right, either — right now, they’re all just individuals who’ve decided to put their own particular stamp on things. Likewise, Rose City Antifa says that while they support sex workers and their rights — and the two groups have many overlapping goals — there’s no sex worker-specific arm of their chapter.
Perhaps that’s because any sort of organized effort to manipulate right-wing clients using sex and desire wouldn’t be that different from what fascist groups have done in the past. “An ‘antifa sex army’ sounds fun, but also reminds me of the same sexual repression tactics from the right,” says Empress Delfina. “They both want to control you by using methods of sex.”
That’s why Bella would rather change minds than drain wallets. Doing so requires patience, communication and empathy — three things fascist forces tend to lack — and, somewhat sunnily, her goal in life is to “leave the world a better place than [she] found it.” Though, she’s not completely opposed to the Erica Method if hers don’t work out. Were there some sort of organized sex worker front hellbent on financially ruining Q-types and the alt-right, she’d happily enlist. Or as she puts it, “I’m all for sex workers taking all they can.”
Isabelle Kohn
Isabelle Kohn is a sex and relationships journalist, educator and consultant who, for some reason, keeps writing about livestock instead. She writes features and long-form pieces for MEL, usually without the help of Clippy.
