Content note: sex work, adult content, consent, sexual boundaries and stigma. Critters… There are certain things I can say online without even blinking now. I’ve been to orgies. I like kink. I wear a fucking pup mask. I’ve written about STIs, watersports, dark rooms, getting railed over furniture and enough questionable decisions to make my Google search history look like evidence.
But apparently there were still two words capable of making me hesitate. Sex worker. Funny, isn’t it? I could post my body online. Sell adult content. Have people pay to see more of me. Talk publicly about sex. But saying: “I’m a sex worker.” That somehow felt different.
The conversation that changed it It happened at a Wellington Pup Kennel Club meetup. Which, honestly, feels like an appropriately Woulf place for an identity crisis. I was hanging around with a group of critters when sex work came up. One of the pups had previously worked as an escort.
So I started asking questions. Not interview questions. Just curious ones. What was the industry actually like? How did he think about the work? What surprised him? What did people outside the industry completely misunderstand? And somewhere during that conversation I realised something fairly fucking obvious.
I was already in the room. Not literally. Professionally. I was already creating adult content. I was already using my sexuality commercially. People were already paying to access sexual content I created. I had simply been describing myself through the platforms. OnlyFans.
JustForFans. Adult creator. Content creator. Anything except the bigger category sitting underneath them. Sex worker. And for some reason, hearing someone who had actually worked in another part of the industry talk openly about it removed some of the weight from the words.
So I tried them on. They fit. Sex work doesn’t all look the same This bit matters. My experience of sex work is not everybody’s experience of sex work. I make adult content. Someone else escorts. Someone does cam work. Someone strips. Someone creates fetish content.
Someone works independently. Someone works through agencies or venues. Someone loves the job. Someone treats it purely as income. Someone is completely public about it. Someone would be horrified if their family found out. All of those realities can exist at once. I’m not adopting the label because I suddenly think I understand an entire industry.
Quite the opposite. Talking to people who have been in it longer than me has made me realise how much more there is to understand. What I can do is talk about my experience honestly. And use that as the doorway into bigger conversations. That’s kind of the whole fucking point of Woulf.
Here’s something people still need explained Paying for sexual content does not mean you bought the person making it. Apparently that sentence still needs saying. So let’s say it properly. If you subscribe to somebody’s content, you have paid for whatever that subscription includes.
You haven’t purchased unlimited access to them. You haven’t automatically bought: their phone number. their address. their attention. a meetup. a custom video. a sexual favour. their relationship status. their private life. or the right to negotiate them past a boundary because you sent money.
Payment is not blanket consent. And being openly sexual doesn’t change that. This is one of those weird cultural assumptions around sex work that becomes obvious as soon as you look at it. Nobody walks into a restaurant, buys dinner and assumes they now own the chef.
But introduce sex? Suddenly some people behave like paying for access to one thing means entitlement to the entire person. No. That’s not how this works. Sexual doesn’t mean available This one hits close to home for me because Woulf is deliberately sexual. The mask.
The photos. The stories. The flirting. The adult content. That isn’t an accident. I enjoy it. But there’s an important distinction between being sexually visible and being sexually available . They are not the same thing. A thirst trap isn’t consent. A subscription isn’t consent.
Previous sex isn’t consent. Being naked isn’t consent. Being kinky isn’t consent. Being a sex worker isn’t consent. Consent still has to happen between actual people around the actual thing that is happening. Every fucking time. And that principle travels into content creation too.
Agreeing to have sex does not automatically mean agreeing to be filmed. Agreeing to be filmed does not automatically mean agreeing for the footage to be uploaded. Agreeing to something being uploaded to one platform does not automatically mean agreeing for it to appear everywhere.
Those are separate conversations. They should be treated that way. Cameras make consent more complicated This is something I think adult creators need to talk about more. The camera changes the equation. Because sex ends. Digital content might not. If you’re creating something with another person, there should be a conversation before the phone comes out.
What are we doing? What can be filmed? What stays private? Is your face okay? Are tattoos okay? Can voices be heard? Where will this be uploaded? Can clips be used elsewhere? What happens if one person changes their mind before publication? None of that sounds particularly sexy.
Neither does a condom wrapper. Still useful. And once something goes online, controlling every copy of it can become impossible. Screenshots exist. Screen recording exists. Piracy exists. People are people. Which means the best time to think about your boundaries is before the content leaves your phone.
The stigma is fucking weird Here’s another thing I’ve noticed since becoming comfortable with the words sex worker. People already consume sexual content constantly. Porn. Thirst traps. OnlyFans. Cam sites. Strip clubs. Erotica. Hook-up apps. Sex sells fucking everything.
Cars. Perfume. Underwear. Music videos. Nightclubs. Advertising. But somehow the people actually making sexual content are still expected to pretend we exist in some shadow category society doesn’t discuss at dinner. That contradiction fascinates me. We want the content.
We just don’t always want to respect the people making it. That’s exactly the kind of shit I want to pull apart. Because shame thrives when everybody participates privately and judges publicly. Fuck that. Then Anthony messaged me The Kennel Club conversation helped me recognise the label.
Anthony from MSWI came later. He had seen something I’d written. He read some of my work. Then reached out to me on Instagram. Which developed into conversations about sex work. Men. Consent. Sexual health. Harm reduction. The stuff we don’t talk about properly.
And eventually he asked me to come onboard with MSWI. So now there are two slightly different versions of this Woulf running around the internet. Here, you get Woulf Ryder . My life. My stories. My sexcapades. My opinions. The chaos. The mask. Whatever uncomfortable subject I’ve decided we’re dragging into daylight this week.
At MSWI, I write as Woulf — Resident Writer & Content Contributor . Same voice. Different job. There, lived experience gets turned into something practical. Education. Harm reduction. Information. Better conversations. Less embarrassment around asking for help. And that feels like a pretty fucking natural place for me to be.
Because I know what not knowing feels like There have been things in my own sexual life that I didn’t understand properly when they happened. Things I was embarrassed about. Things I didn’t ask anyone about. Things I dealt with alone because I didn’t have the language.
Some of those experiences took years before I understood them differently. I can’t go back and give younger me better information. But I can help make sure somebody else doesn’t have to spend eighteen years wondering whether the thing that happened to them even counts.
That matters to me far more than having a respectable job title ever did. So if my job now involves talking openly about sex? Good. If it involves saying words that make people uncomfortable? Even better. Because discomfort usually means there’s a conversation sitting underneath it.
And apparently I’ve made a career out of starting those. If you work in the industry You don’t owe anyone your story. You don’t need to announce what you do. You don’t need to use the same label I do. You don’t need to be publicly proud before you’re allowed to ask for information privately.
If you’re a male sex worker or trying to understand the industry, MSWI has information around work, sexual health, safety and harm reduction: https://mswi.net/ And if you’ve experienced sexual harm and want information about legal options in New Zealand, Tika provides a free legal service for adults: https://www.tika.org.nz/ You’re allowed to ask questions before you have everything figured out.
I certainly fucking did. One more thing… There’s another unexpected consequence of all these conversations with Anthony. You’ll hear the Woulf howl soon. I’m heading onto radio. I’m not dropping all the details yet. But I’ll be talking about something that sits right at the intersection of sex work, men, consent and the law in New Zealand.
And it’s a conversation I wish somebody had put in front of me years ago. For now? I’m getting comfortable saying the words. Writer. Creator. Pup. Sex worker. Woulf. None of them cancel the others out. Arwoooooooo 🐺