Sex workers appear on the livestreams of famous manosphere influencers to boost their followings--but often end up being degraded. Adult film star Willow Ryder didn't immediately recognize the man who entered the Miami party she was at earlier this month, but she knew he wasn't part of the sex work industry . He had an entourage and what appeared to be a hulking bodyguard. Her friends told her it was Clavicular, aka Braden Peters, a popular Kick livestreamer known for " looksmaxxing," or resorting to extreme measures to improve his appearance. Ryder says she didn't know exactly who Clavicular was or what he talked about on his stream, but she knew that he had a massive following.

Presearch's "Doppelgänger" is trying to help people discover adult creators rather than use nonconsensual deepfakes. For three days in February, porn star Alix Lynx flew to Miami for her first exclusive creator gathering where she was in full grind mode: shooting Reels and talking strategy with other creators. "It was kind of like SoHo House for OnlyFans girls," she says of the experience, which is called The Circle and drew more than a dozen sex workers, including Remy LaCroix and Forrest Smith. Lynx, who is a former webcam model turned OnlyFans starlet, has a combined 2 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X . She joined OnlyFans in 2017 with "the luxury of having my own following," she says, but those numbers haven't always translated to subscriptions. It's why she was in Miami.

The use of cryptocurrency in sales of human beings for prostitution and scam compounds nearly doubled in 2025, according to a conservative estimate. Many of the deals are happening in plain sight. Cryptocurrency's frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view. In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking--largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings--grew explosively in 2025.

More than two dozen prostitutes line a Queens New York City street soliciting sex. At the exact time Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was live-streaming her "Madden" NFL video game session with vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, on Twitch, her constituents were taking to the streets to protest rampant illegal prostitution and crime in the neighborhood she represents. The progressive "Squad" member was slammed by fellow Democrat politician Hiram Monserrate for playing the video game on the streaming service Sunday afternoon while residents from her district held a rally calling for their community to be cleaned up. "We need advocates not gamers," Monserrate, a former New York state senator who is running for State Assembly, told Fox News Digital. The Queens neighborhood is well known as a "Red Light" district, with some residents comparing the unsanitary and seedy conditions to a "Third World" country.

A group that includes sex workers, sex tech businesses, and sex educators has demanded a seat at the table to shape AI regulations that they say could lead to discrimination against them. A group of sex industry professionals and advocates issued an open letter to EU regulators on Thursday, claiming that their views are being overlooked in vital discussions on policing AI technology despite also being implicated in AI's momentous rise. In response to European internet regulations, a collective of adult industry members--including sex workers, erotic filmmakers, sex tech enterprises, and sex educators--urged the European Commission to include them in future negotiations shaping AI regulations, according to the letter, seen by WIRED. The group includes erotic filmmaker Erika Lust's company as well as the European Sex Workers' Rights Alliance campaign group, and is signed the Open Mind AI initiative. The group aims to alert the commission of what it says is a "critical gap" in discussions on AI regulation.

Meta's online ad library shows the company is hosting thousands of ads for AI-generated, NSFW companion or "girlfriend" apps on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. They promote chatbots offering sexually explicit images and text, using NSFW chat samples and AI images of partially clothed, unbelievably shaped, simulated women. Many of the virtual women seen in ads reviewed by WIRED are lifelike--if somewhat uncanny--young, and stereotypically pornographic. Prospective customers are invited to role-play with an AI "stepmom," connect with a computer-generated teen in a hijab, or chat with avatars who promise to "get you off in one minute." The ads appear to be thriving despite Meta's ad policies clearly barring "adult content," including "depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative."

In the spring of 2001, when I was just 18 years old, I launched a multiyear career as an online porn model and cam girl, giving paying customers access to my naked body in the form of photo sets and weekly cam shows broadcast in the members' sections of my paysites. By today's standards, the work I did was laughably low-fi. The bulk of what I put out into the world was just softcore stills. Even my cam shows only offered viewers the chance to watch an image refresh every 15 seconds or so, basically providing access to a slow-moving digital flipbook. Over the course of three and a half years, I only shot two videos--and one of them was completely silent, thanks to a malfunctioning microphone.

A red-headed woman stands on the moon, her face obscured. Her naked body looks like it belongs on a poster you'd find on a hormonal teenager's bedroom wall -- that is, until you reach her torso, where three arms spit out of her shoulders. AI-powered systems like Stable Diffusion, which translate text prompts into pictures, have been used by brands and artists to create concept images, award-winning (albeit controversial) prints and full-blown marketing campaigns. But some users, intent on exploring the systems' murkier side, have been testing them for a different sort of use case: porn. AI porn is about as unsettling and imperfect as you'd expect (that red-head on the moon was likely not generated by someone with an extra arm fetish).

How to Do It is Slate's sex advice column. Send it to Stoya and Rich here. I have been dating my boyfriend for about 10 months now. I'm struggling with information he shared with me very early on. At the beginning of our relationship, he told me that he has seen escorts before.

In August, Savannah's entire monthly income was at stake. OnlyFans, the social media platform where she built her career, making an average of $2,000 a month from subscribers, had just announced it would be removing content like hers from the site. But there was little she could do about it. She remembers thinking: "OK, well, this is another Thursday, I might as well finish my Chick-Fil-A, and I'm just gonna chill here and wait for us to get some sort of response." Savannah, 24, is part of a vibrant, supportive community of online sex workers that underwrite OnlyFans's considerable financial success; it's now valued at over $1 billion. But in a move that may foreshadow changes to come, that community was shaken when OnlyFans announced it would be banning explicit content on the site. "The sky falls on OnlyFans, like, every three or four months," Savannah says, wryly.