Saturday September 11, 2021
Felicia Fisher on How Religion Affects Sex Workers
The Satanic Panic never ended. We are still stereotyping and creating evil out of what we don’t want to understand. Felicia Fisher is a fetish artist who has been in the adult industry for eight years, as of 2021. Felicia was recently featured in Hustler and has an extensive portfolio of fetish clips and horror movie credits. This interview is focused on how religion plays a negative part in its attempts to dismantle sex work. We also dive into the recent OnlyFans debacle and typical misconceptions.
We had someone familiar with the industry direct most of the interview, labeled under the alias “PES”.
Exodus Cry - Morality Advocate
TSIFO: What has been your experience with religion?
Felicia: I was raised with a portrait of Mary in my house.
PES: Have you ever experienced someone sending you a message about how you’re going to Hell for being a sex worker?
Felicia: I haven’t gotten that - well okay, I haven’t received any messages from anyone directly besides when I was on MyFreeCams when I was like 21 and some guy was like ‘God loves you, Jesus thinks you don’t have to do this’ and all that stuff - blah blah blah, but that hasn’t happened recently. I’ve seen other girls getting hit up with stuff like that on Twitter. I will say there is an Evangelical organization based out of Missouri that wants to shut down Pornhub. They’re called Exodus Cry and they were posting all of this propaganda like “ Pornhub is where sex trafficking happens. Pornhub is all rape videos.” Pornhub is this, Pornhub is that. People actually believed it to the point that Mastercard took down payment processing from Pornhub. We’re still reaping the repercussions of that, all because of that group and everything that led up to that point. They were given an interview with the New York Times, and people were pushing all that shit online. Because of them, there’s tighter regulations now on online porn. If you make your own porn, you have to have all of the paperwork readily available for people to view. They have to have people on there viewing the uploads to make sure people are actually consenting to the videos, which is a great idea but it’s also a given that the majority of people online aren’t uploading illegal content and just want to pay their bills. It’s all because of this religious organization that didn’t think sex work was a real thing. You were talking earlier about how they were using the liquor license as an excuse to come to your club and shut it down, and it’s the same thing.
People will believe anything they see on the internet and they’ll go along with saying “porn is evil, porn is trafficking” and say all this fucked up stuff about sex workers. After the OnlyFans thing, I saw artists that I knew being like, “oh, you can quit sex work now. You don’t have to do sex work now. Porn is for fucking losers.” Actually, there are Christians telling you this that and the other thing because they don’t want you to be fucking in the first place.
PES: With the OnlyFans situation, do you think the reversal of the decision will hold, and is it now just going to be a bunch of white women in bikinis?
Felicia: I think they really shot themselves in the foot. I’m seeing a lot of SW’s moving to other platforms and taking their clients with them, which I think is really funny. I think it’s mostly going to be Instagram models, etc. I really wish OnlyFans would have went the Larry Flynt route and put their foot down, saying that we’re allowed to do this and Mastercard has to change.
Get a Real Job
TSIFO: What’s your response to the typical get a real job comments?
Felicia: I‘m looking through my feed right now and it’s mostly nice things. No one has really said anything mean to me in a minute, which is nice. I feel like I have an argument for them if they want to say something, but I also have a block button and care more about my peace of mind than what they have to project on me.
I’ve had people tell me that by the time I’m 26, I’m going to age out of the industry. I’m 28 now and thriving in it. There’s people in their forties and fifties doing what I do, and people of all ages that have stopped performing and now do BTS work. This is a real job and a very real industry and it’s wild how people who aren’t in it think they know everything about it. It can feel like it isn’t a real job and I don’t feel like a real person when it comes to the bullshit people want to put on me for being a sex worker and the employment, banking and housing discrimination I’ve dealt with because of it.
PES: We can move on to the exploitation of women, because that’s a really big common misconception about any form of sex work. Everyone’s situation is different, but I think the jobs that we have are seen as desperate and that you don’t have any morals or care for your body.
Felicia: I hear a lot of people saying that, and if you really care that much, then why don’t we have universal basic income, affordable rent, a fixed foster care system? If you really think this is someone’s low, what brought them there and why aren’t you fixing that before it gets to that point? Which I think is bullshit in the first place because I feel like my life quality changed for the better after sex work. Coming from a poor family to actually middle class now, I would have never had that if it wasn’t for sex work, especially having trauma and things that make it hard for me to work a vanilla job. That’s another thing people don’t talk about too. How many sex workers are disabled? How many had trauma that came before sex work? How many are struggling in other ways?
Sometimes the easy way out is okay because no one else is going to give you money. No one else is going to give you financial security. Why are you going to work a forty hour work week breaking your back for what? Insurance that comes out of your paycheck, and you bring home $400 - my ass.
PES: In a way, it’s everyone sort of taking back their power. There’s revolution woven into it, because we’re not gonna work your shitty job. We’re going to do sex work and work for ourselves. You’re then not going to have anyone to work your shitty jobs, and you’re going to have to change shit.
Felicia: Why is the conversation always centered around women - which I think goes back to the concept of white slavery. You just want to “protect” white women. It’s been this way since the 1800s. They could give a fuck less about people in poverty. They could give a fuck less about people of color. They could give a fuck less about men, trans people, or non-binary people. It gives me freedom. It gives other people freedom. You can argue that it might not give people freedom, but at that point why don’t we have the ability of having some sort of social service for sex workers. Harm reduction of some sort, so people feel protected instead of just letting people suffer because sex work is illegal. You can’t go to the cops, because you’ll get arrested.
Christian Nation
TSIFO: What do you think drives some of these negative opinions?
PES: Men not being able to control women. Not to be binary, but that’s a lot of it. The great irony is that a lot of these men come to the strip club.
TSIFO: Why do you think Christians are so afraid of sex workers?
Felicia: To preface this, I know many Christians that are sex workers. That being said, this is a Christian nation, and even if people aren’t Christian, they’ve fed these ideas people have misconstrued from the Bible that are engrained into our country’s laws and the ideas of morality. You’re taught since you were young. Why doesn’t this country have comprehensive sexual education uniformly available across the U.S.? When there is sex ed, why is it abstinence-only? Why are we trained that women are whores when they do XYZ with their body? Why are strippers and sex workers in general seen as disposable? Why are porn stars seen as whores who will never get their life together? I tried to open a new bank account recently and I said I was a sex worker and they wouldn’t let me open it. I was looking to open a new business account, and I just wanted to clarify to them that I was a sex worker and I work in porn. Am I able to open an account here? They called back and said that they don’t allow that. I ended up opening one with another bank I disclosed to, but I feel like a lot of sex workers have to switch up the truth a little bit to get around the discrimination. Technically I’m a model and videographer, but in reality, I film myself fucking my pussy.
Weird Stories
PES: The most memorable comment I’ve gotten at the club is that my pussy looks like the nose of a dolphin.
Felicia: In 2017, I was on a cam site and someone wanted a private, so I went private with him. He goes, “I’m a filthy pig. I like to be nasty.” I asked him to show me how nasty he was. He started fucking his butt with a dildo. He pulled it out and I saw some shit come out. I thought he was just going to ignore it because I was going to ignore it, but he picked it up and smeared it all over himself. He started fingering his mouth with the shit hand. Oh my god, you are nasty. You’re really nasty. He kept gagging himself with the shit hand and threw up on himself. I was floored and had no idea what was going to come next. He kept fingering his mouth and sucking on the dildo, fucking his ass with the shit. See, this is a lot! He nutted and asked me if there was anything else I wanted him to do. Piss on yourself, you’ve already done everything else. I wanna see all the fluids. Let’s go. He pissed on himself, then he abruptly shut off the cam, and I’ve never seen him again.
