The Saga of Quinn Finite and the Horny Military Base

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 both reimagining what sex work can be and changing the world — one swingin’, phalloplastic dick at a time.

On the evening of October 17, 23-year-old Quinn Finite, a Montreal-based OnlyFans creator, posted a naked photo to her Twitter account. Holding the phone below her waist just shy of her deep brown pubic hair to take a shot of her epic underboobs, she captioned the photo, “Your boner’s POV.” It was pretty standard Twitter fare for a porn model, but three days later, Finite got a surprise: The official Twitter account of Fort Bragg — the largest U.S. military base — had responded to her tweet. “My face’s, then my boner’s and then my face’s again before I come up to give you a deep long kiss,” it wrote.

Shortly thereafter, they replied to another of her tweets bemoaning a subscriber who complained about her pubic hair: “He’s lost and doesn’t know a good thing when it’s staring him in the eyes, or tickling his nose in this case,” said the home of the U.S. Army’s Airborne and Special Operations Command, with what I like to imagine was a gleeful, childlike giggle.

This, to be clear, was very odd. As anyone familiar with the U.S. military knows, it’s not a particularly sex-work-friendly institution, and prior to Finite, it had never wantonly thirsted after anyone on its social channels before. Finite’s fan base wasn’t particularly service-oriented at the time, either — though she later discovered that a few of her fans lived in the Fort Bragg area, why they chose her as an object of their uncharacteristic public affection was, and still is, a complete mystery.

That said, a tour of her OnlyFans may offer a clue. A bright and beautiful brunette with a natural allure reminiscent of an ingenue from mid-century French cinema, Finite oozes smart, girl-next-door energy. Her content is something out of a manic pixie dream-girl playbook that manages to pass the Bechdel Test, a self-described “personal sex diary” that she says “helps [her] learn how other people understand sex.” Having recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and sexuality studies, she loves figuring out the little things that make her subscribers tick, leaning fully into their desire for voyeurism as if their kinks existed to satisfy her, not the other way around.

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She’s extremely interactive, frequently pausing her personal masturbation sessions to post her fantasies to OnlyFans and regularly updating her subscribers with tidbits about her life and what type porn she’s watching. At times, she creates elaborate role-play videos that walk her fans through the real-life scenarios of jealousy or desire that turn them on (last week, she posted a role-play video pretending to have angry sex with her boyfriend after he “flirted with another girl at a party”). Most often, though, she’s brilliantly nude, flashing her natural body along with a radiant smile and the perfect tuft of pubic hair Fort Bragg so overtly adored.

As such, Finite was already relatively established on OnlyFans before the Fort Bragg incident went down. Lured in by the platform’s promise of pandemic-safe cash and committed to the indoors thanks to an immunocompromised boyfriend, she’d amassed a modest following of about 700, and was sitting pretty on an income of roughly $7,000 a month.

That all changed, though, when the military tweets started rolling in. She was in the car with her boyfriend when she first started getting Twitter notifications that Fort Bragg was horny for her on main. A few retweets turned into a deluge of mentions, and soon, her phone was vibrating off the hook with hundreds of messages letting her know that she’d become what was likely the first and only OnlyFans girl to be thirsted after on main by the most powerful military in the world. Her only thought? “Holy shit.”

Amused and thinking on her feet, she quickly offered a 50 percent military discount to her OnlyFans subscribers and tweeted that we should “normalize horny tweeting from U.S. military forts.” As a treat, she also posted a fake press conference skit on behalf of her bush the day after, a good-humored response that melted the hearts of her followers (most of whom were just as incredulous as she was that Fort Bragg was so Fort Horny).

The story was a viral hit. Within 72 hours of Fort Bragg’s big tweet, the story was circulating around news outlets, and by November, Finite found herself on the front page of Snapchat News. She was promptly interviewed on prominent YouTube channels and Twitch streams; meanwhile, The Military Times, Daily Beast and Business Insider reached out for interviews. To her surprise, the flurry of press ended up outing her to her friends and family. “My mom found me through the Business Insider article,” she says, explaining that it was actually a relief to finally come clean about her adult career. “She was cool about it, but that in and of itself was a shock.” Her father — a highly conservative guy — still doesn’t know, but as far as sex work coming-out stories go, Finite says being blasted by the U.S. military was “probably as much fun as she could have had with it.”

It was also very, very good for business. Finite’s subscriber count shot up from 700 to 4,500 almost overnight, boosting her monthly income to $35,000 and placing her in the top 0.14 percent of OnlyFans. But, as many of her new followers revealed in adoring DMs, it wasn’t just the hot pics they’d signed on for — they genuinely appreciated the way she responded to the situation. Lots of sex workers could have shamed Fort Bragg, called out the military’s myriad corruptions or used the incident as an excuse to highlight its long-standing love-hate relationship with prostitutes and porn, but instead, she’d opted to play along instead.

She wasn’t exactly sure, though, what to expect back from Fort Bragg, who first claimed their account had been hacked and then revealed the tweets had come from an “administrator” who’d been punished with “appropriate action.” Well aware that the military didn’t exactly appreciate those employed in her field, she braced herself for a possible trolling.

While it’s not illegal to possess or view pornography on personal devices in the military, the proliferation of online porn has made its presence known across bases both domestically and internationally, and it’s not exactly welcome amidst a military culture that tends to associate the traumas of going to war with subsequent dependence on porn and so-called sex addiction. Similarly, porn has been increasingly cited in military divorce complaints as soldiers struggle to control their use of it.

Thus, when her response affirmed the military’s desires — as opposed to shamed them — people took notice. Her DMs were flooded with “gratitude-filled messages” from service members who thanked her for providing some amusement during a heavily demoralizing time, and she suspects the whole situation — that is, being allowed to consume a sexy lady’s content without fear of punishment or reproach — gave them some much-needed relief. After all, if some high-ranking military account got accidentally horny on main and nothing really terrible happened to them afterwards (other than their Twitter account being suspended), why should they feel shame about being horny for sex workers behind the veil of their much more obscure profiles?

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To her surprise, virtually no one from the military attacked her over it, either. “Any whorephobic vitriol I received was offset by an army (sorry) of kind strangers who staunchly defended me, or maybe rather defended their own consumption habits, using me as a symbol,” she says. “Had this happened to any other online sex worker, I think the response from the military would’ve been similarly supportive.”

Finite attributes this oddly happy-go-lucky interaction with Fort Bragg to just how normalized online sex work has become, particularly over the past year. “Next to being a sugar baby, having an OnlyFans has become the least offensive form of sex work in the public eye,” she says. “With Beyoncé singing about it and tons of celebrities making accounts, there’s a huge line-blurring happening right now between porn and social media, as well as confusion around what even counts as sex work anymore.” Since the pandemic began, she says, being an OnlyFans girl is really no more salacious than “being a guy with a podcast,” and it’s interactions like the one she had with Fort Bragg that prove it.

Still, she’s hyper-aware that incidents like this don’t mean the stigma around sex work is gone from the military or the world at-large. Most celebrities don’t actually care much about sex workers, and the misconceptions people have about jobs like hers are both real and damaging. But her treatment by service members after the Fort Bragg thirst-fest represents an interesting display of acceptance that contradicts the perception of the military as a very traditional, patriarchal, anti-sex work institution. She’d like to think Fort Bragg’s horny tweets showed the more human side of the military and the relative level of openness they have behind closed doors and the anonymity of online profiles, but then, she pauses with a wry smile.

“They’re also just horny dudes who make stupid mistakes sometimes,” she laughs.

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Sovereign Syre

Sovereign Syre is a writer, comedian, adult performer, internationally published poet (not a joke) and prolific podcaster (totally a joke). She is currently the co-host of the historical podcast ILL REPUTE! documenting the lives of controversial women along side Siouxsie Q. James, and the co-writer of digital shorts on Unholy Bible Study.