Not all of this is a surprise. Prostitutes were among the first technologists. They were the vanguard of sex through technology in the pre-dotcom era — remember those wildly popular, super sexy 1-900 hotlines from the ’90s? After desiring to be digitized, they pioneered a more intimate kind of connection through groundbreaking means: using webcams to entertain customers’ fantasies, leveraging streaming video as VHS shuts down, relying on e-commerce alternatives to get paid. As writer and sex advocate Gabrielle Garcia suggestion: “Sex has always been a key stakeholder in the telecommunications sector.”
Today, to survive online as an influencer in some way—be it selling face cream on Instagram or fitness tips on YouTube—is partly indebted to what the Prostitutes understood in the early days of the dotcoms: Freeing yourself – customizing to scale required a personal touch. When OnlyFans debuted in 2016 and going mainstream during the pandemic, it was sex workers who took the lead, transforming the site from another startup into one of the generation’s most enterprising social platforms. This.
Pani Farvid, professor of psychology and founding director of New School’s Sex/Tech Lab in New York, said: “In many ways, sex workers have built the internet as a means to connect, work and stay safe. “However, like many professions that are feminized and stigmatized, they have been erased from the history of this technology.”
For the bandit Bate XL, like for some sex professionals, the adoption of new technologies is not necessary. A designer and performer based in New York City, he’s the creator of a popular Twitter account dedicated to masturbation enthusiasts, commonly known as “bators.” Now with 15,000 followers, @BBBLB8Bros launched during the lockdown, in February 2021, as a means of safely bringing together Black men, who, as Bandit said, feel revered in spaces space is not of the Negro.
Although Bate Bandit XL joined Twitter in 2018, after Tumblr bans porn, it wasn’t until 2020 that he started hosting virtual gambling sessions via Zoom (imagine a meeting on Zoom, only it’s not your co-workers and everyone is naked and masturbating). “That has become my primary source of repositories,” he said. “It exploded overnight, and within two weeks more than 100 people joined. It became so big that I decided to organize a digital space on Telegram.”
As demand for the sessions grew — “We started hosting them almost every night,” says Bate Bandit XL — he had to pay a fee; sometimes they last until four in the morning. It was decided that the group would grow in other ways. One way is to host an audio chat every Wednesday on Telegram, called Bate House, where members will discuss topics, current events, and commercial stories. “Some days we talk about mental health, other days it’s something else,” he said.
But growth comes with hiccups. In late 2022, Bate Bandit XL had to stop hosting virtual sessions via Zoom after discovering that a member was recording and selling them online. Given that the encounters attract Black men of all identities — straight, gay, bisexual, single, married, DL, and the curious — he doesn’t want to take the risk. danger to anyone’s safety or privacy.
Even when he failed, he continued the momentum by providing more alternatives to meetups — that’s how Bate House Live, the Twitter Spaces conversation, was born. It’s a useful addition to a private Telegram group chat because it allows for more free, public discourse for anyone who wants to listen or talk. “We wanted to have something for the community at large,” he said, “because we don’t just let anyone in.”
