Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

After years of following Aella’s online outrages and unexpected insights, I wanted to meet her for myself—to understand her unusual occupation as a cam girl turned sex researcher, and to hear her perspective on what the internet has done to human sexuality. But my first IRL encounter with her, one day last spring, involved staring at a closed front door.

Aella had invited me to her home in Austin, but then slept through our designated appointment time. Even my frantic knocking and texting didn’t rouse her. Eventually, though, once she had woken up and been for a swim in the local springs, her assistant let me into the house and made me a mushroom coffee. Explaining that she was gradually bringing order to Aella’s life, the assistant opened a closet to reveal a rail of neatly hung bras. This was a first in my journalism career—being invited to appreciate an interviewee’s underwear. Not that Aella would mind, because her entire appeal is based around her lack of filter. Polaroids of her, masked and topless, were stuck to the fridge.

[Jane Coaston: The nudes internet]

“I can’t really get canceled,” she told me when I finally met her, “because what are you gonna do?” By then she was sitting with her legs curled up underneath her on a chair, wearing only a robe and underwear, next to a giant, curved monitor of the type beloved by crypto day traders.

Aella is her longtime pseudonym; the 33-year-old keeps her birth name private. Describing precisely what she does for a living is difficult: Her X bio describes her as a “whorelord” and a “vexworker,” by which she means that she is an OnlyFans star, occasional escort, and organizer of sex parties. She is unabashedly a nerd, once describing herself as “a gremlinesque neckbeard who found himself in a hot woman’s body.” And she has turned her experience of selling sex into a large-scale research project.

Thanks to her talent for virality, she has been able to create huge online surveys that, despite the limitations of the medium, provide some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s. More than 700,000 people have responded to her “Big Kink” survey. She has learned, among other things, that “pigtails” are a more popular fetish than “armpits.” She is as uninhibited about asking inflammatory questions as she is about posting nudes: She has written about whether penis size is correlated with race (“We haven’t had a good, high-n study”) and asked her followers if they would support the creation of realistic child-size sex dolls for pedophiles (77.4 percent said no).

One of the biggest problems in sex research is recruiting participants who can be induced to answer questions honestly. This is where Aella’s experience of capturing the internet’s attention gives her an advantage. The Big Kink survey takes about 40 minutes to complete—long enough to weed out trollish and spam responses. But how could she expect to keep unpaid respondents interested for that long? Her solution was to promise them a freakiness rating at the end, like a classic BuzzFeed personality quiz.

Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist who serves as the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, sees Aella as the young-Millennial version of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex educator whose grandmotherly charm made her a disarming advocate of sexual liberation. As Dr. Ruth understood, many Americans’ lives were once blighted by their inability to articulate, much less confront, their relationship needs. Even today, people withhold details about their sexual interests from their partners, their doctors, and academic researchers. Yet they’ll spill quite a lot to a sex-positive internet personality, and all those revelations add up to a huge body of information.

Like much American social-science research, Aella’s sample skews white and college-educated. Liberals are overrepresented in her data; most of her followers are men, but most of her survey respondents are women. Online polls like hers have limitations, Garcia told me. “But,” he added, “they do tell us what people are thinking about.”

Aella was raised in Idaho in a fundamentalist-Christian family that was so socially conservative, her parents showed her and her two younger sisters a censored version of Titanic. Her father is an evangelist and a radio host who used to be flooded by hate mail from atheists and other Christians. That turned out to be a preview of Aella’s own experience of threats and abuse, and good practice for life online. On a recent seven-and-a-half-hour episode of the podcast Whatever, she was part of a panel of 10 women who were hectored and mocked by Andrew Wilson, a fellow guest and self-described Christian “bloodsports debater.” When he insinuated that she didn’t understand science, she kept her cool and calmly explained basic statistical methods to him. His argumentative tactics, she said afterward, reminded her of her father’s.

She always felt like an outsider, she says now. She remembers writing in her teenage journals that “everybody else has access to a secret script that I don’t know what it is.” She left home at 17 after an argument. Once she started seeing flaws in her Christian beliefs, her faith crumbled quickly. “I have a tendency to take things to an extreme,” Aella once told Playboy. She flipped from devout teenager to libertine 20-something, barely passing through the dull span of vanilla dating and low-key Sunday churchgoing.

After dropping out of college in northern Idaho, Aella became a cam girl—because streaming explicit content for money couldn’t be worse than her day job on an electrical-equipment assembly line, she reckoned. She both enjoyed and excelled at it, and she soon started researching what made some girls more successful than others. Her findings surprised her: Viewers liked idiosyncrasy and theatricality as much as nudity and straightforward hotness. And so she began to stage surreal scenes—dressing up as a mime, pretending to seduce a chair, doing a “dinosaur moonwalk,” playing the accordion. On an internet filled with horny nerds, the juxtaposition of weird and sexy can be lucrative. She earned more than $100,000 in her best month on OnlyFans, and has thousands of paid subscribers on Substack.

Her first moment of virality outside the camming sites came in 2013, from a series of photos that showed her undressing, before being dragged off camera by garden gnomes. The “Getting Gnaked” set was viewed more than 2 million times within a year. Aella also found that, contrary to many of the stereotypes about online porn, a physically submissive woman was not what most straight men wanted. Instead, her customers fantasized about scenarios in which they were essentially passive—a “basic hot girl” just fell into their arms. “Like, Oh, we’re the last people on Earth, right?” she told the podcaster Lex Fridman. In a conclusion that might unsettle some feminists, she finds that the proportion of women who are interested in feeling submissive is greater than the proportion of men who want to feel dominant. Perhaps my favorite Aella claim is that she can arouse her escorting clients just by expressing enthusiasm as they explain high-level concepts to her. (Her current rate is $4,000 an hour.)

During her early career, she bounced around the U.S., living in Boston, New York, and the Bay Area, as well as Portland, Oregon. She gravitated toward a scene known as rationalism, wherein self-professed nerds apply a coldly rational lens to subjects that are often clouded by emotion or dogma, such as the heritability of intelligence, whether you should altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger, and whether it’s acceptable to have sex with your sister. “once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked,” she wrote on X in 2021, during the pandemic. “Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks … and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.” Her bracingly unfiltered posts put her in my peripheral vision years ago; while I am worried about the potential for abuse and exploitation in sex work, her originality and openness have always intrigued me.

Last February, somewhat infamously, she enrolled 42 men to have sex with her en masse via a Google Form, then rented a venue, recruited eight women to act as fluffers, and asked the men to put on matching commemorative bathrobes. The resulting Substack post is a masterpiece, starting with an epigram from Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” (She detailed how two of the attendees, waiting in line, bonded over the fact that their start-ups had received support from the same venture-capital fund.) This was how she managed to have sex on so few days last year, but with so many different people. It is also one of many, many incidents in Aella’s life that most people would regard with awe, horror, or both.

[Helen Lewis: The outrage over ]100 Men only goes so far

Aella originally felt drawn to sex research because her own sexual interests are outside the mainstream. She practices polyamory and freely discusses her fetish for “consensual nonconsent”—which is to say, scenarios in which she pretends to be taking part against her will. If she were “super normie” about sex, she told me, “I don’t think I would have the need to dissect it.” This places her in the grand tradition of American sex researchers who defied convention in their own personal life and, whether they acknowledged it or not, became advocates for greater sexual permissiveness. Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the field in the 1940s and ’50s, was married to a woman but had sexual relationships with at least one of his male students. The biologist shocked the country with his first book about human sexuality, which claimed that only half the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout adulthood. “I suspect that Kinsey’s great project originated in the discovery of his own sexual ambiguities,” the author of a 1972 Atlantic article hypothesized. Kinsey’s ostensibly objective scholarship was a concealed polemic: He wanted to expand the scope of “normal.”

In the 1960s, the gynecologist William Masters and and his research partner (and later wife) Virginia Johnson also defied prim scholarly norms by serving as consultants to Playboy, reasoning that the magazine was a good way to reach young men, and they supplied female “surrogates”—therapeutic escorts—to single men with sexual inhibitions, erectile disorder, and other conditions.

Throughout the 20th century, sex researchers willed themselves to suspend moral judgment. Kinsey had a saying, Justin Garcia told me, that is often quoted at the institute that bears his name: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Yet the field still has taboos, just different ones. The feminist commentators Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose work is highly influential on university campuses, have argued that pornography is inherently harmful to women. Some of Aella’s findings challenge that view. She finds that men who watch online porn, rather than being desensitized to what real-life sexual partners want, are better at guessing what women want in bed.

Aella is not familiar with the academic traditions that have shaped modern sex research. When I asked her about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, she told me that she hadn’t read their work. This irritates some mainstream researchers: J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor who studies sexual orientation and arousal, told me he was “annoyed” by what he saw as her casualness, and denied being merely territorial. “She hasn’t bothered to learn things,” Bailey told me. “Sex research is not just asking a few questions to a lot of people. If it were, we would know a lot more than we know.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t fire people for making pornography in their spare time]

Nonetheless, Bailey said, “she talks about things without worry, and we should all be doing that a lot more.” He thinks that some mainstream academic sex research has suffered from “the encroachment of ideology,” becoming queer or feminist activism by other means. (Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which argues that some gender transitions are sexually motivated, prompted some transgender activists to accuse him of research misconduct—claims that a subsequent investigation did not substantiate.) Bailey invited Aella to join an email discussion group he runs, and he asked her to promote a survey on sadomasochism that his graduate student was running. If he thought her work was worthless, he said, “I wouldn’t have asked for the help.”

Garcia noted that, because sex research is a prime target for political scrutiny, institutions like his take great care with study design, researchers’ conflicts of interests, and gaining approval from review boards. “Aella, her work blurs those boundaries,” he told me. “But they were created by a field to protect itself, and add rigor and protection from political attacks.”

Unconstrained by such concerns, Aella has spelunked through the extremes of modern sexuality. Among them is vore, a rare fetish “around swallowing someone whole or being swallowed whole, typically by a much larger creature,” as she put it. Researching the phenomenon is tricky. Trying to find, say, 300 people who like vore within the results of a bigger survey would require a huge initial number of respondents. Recruiting participants on a vore forum solves that problem, she has written, even if it does introduce some sampling bias: “Maybe these people are less ashamed about their fetish; maybe they’re lonelier in real life; maybe they’re much more into vore than the actual population of people into vore,” Aella argued. Or, of course, they could be lying.

[Helen Lewis: Nobody should care about a woman’s ‘body count’]

Still, as Aella and others have shown, the universe of niche sexual interests is enormous. And really, this is the big change that the internet has brought to sexuality itself—not just the study of it. Anyone who grew up with a latent vore fetish 100 years ago, or even 30, might have gone their whole life without meeting a fellow enthusiast for being swallowed whole. Bailey published research on people who both desire amputees and fantasize about becoming amputees. “What’s wonderful is that, today, people with these weird sexualities find each other online,” he told me. “It’s really a heyday for studying unusual phenomena like that.”

That raises some obvious follow-up questions: What if the internet is not just connecting people with weird sexual interests, but creating them? Should there ever be a time when sex researchers say, Hang on, that’s far enough?

Aella, who considers herself a libertarian, had come to Austin in the hope of meeting like-minded people, away from the default leftism of the Bay Area. But even in America’s supposed heterodoxy capital, she felt shunned. She joined an invitation-only society for freethinkers called Based in Austin, but was quickly kicked out of the group by fellow anti-woke warriors. Her offense was to post, in a chat thread about venue suggestions, a recommendation for a space where she had once held an orgy. She also didn’t last in a support group for OnlyFans creators, because other women—who she said were “very, very, like, social justice, very leftist”—objected to her provocative posts.

Aella thinks that America still has a deeply hypocritical attitude to sex. “It feels like we simultaneously have a culture where we say sexual liberalism is good, but in action, we find reasons to not allow individual expression to happen,” she told me when I caught up with her again over Zoom, a few months after my visit to Austin. She cited PornHub’s refusal to host videos of sleep fetishes. But there was a good reason for that policy, I said—the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other French men revealed that Pelicot had recruited men to rape his unconscious wife under the pretext that the couple were indulging a consensual fetish about “sleeping beauties.”

My main point of disagreement with Aella is that she has a much sunnier vision of human nature than I do. While some people do like consensual nonconsent, others clearly relish actual violation and sadism in and out of the bedroom. Aella’s blitheness about the risks of her job—she wrote a guide to escorting, in which she describes one client aggressively biting and choking her—seems to be born from the same off-kilter approach to life that makes her such a good amateur anthropologist. In Austin, I was surprised that she invited me, a total stranger, to meet her at home. Eighteen months earlier, a man had appeared at her door and attempted to kidnap her. (Police later found a garrote at his home, alongside a knife, duct tape, and the names of two other sex workers. The man took a plea deal and is already out of jail.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Ultimately, she left the Texas capital after a different episode of personal turmoil. She had hoped to have children, only to discover in August that her primary partner wasn’t interested in starting a family. When she revealed the breakup online, a predictable storm of schadenfreude ensued. For “posting publicly about being devastated from a breakup,” she wrote on X, her reward was “people laughing how you deserved it.”

She packed up her belongings and moved back to California. Her new housemate is one of the fluffers from her orgy—a woman who was also dating Aella’s boyfriend but broke up with him too, in solidarity. “We were both dating my ex, and then we’re both not dating him,” she told me. With her living arrangements sorted, Aella wants to work on a book and co-author some scientific papers, both of which might allow her to gain the respectability she needs to attract more funding. She might seek out what she calls “performative credentials.”

In the meantime, though, she still embraces the queasily intimate dynamics of internet celebrity—an openness that provides rich fodder for cruel armchair psychologists. Isn’t she just getting back at Daddy? How will she ever find love? I find something endearing about her refusal to be bowed by this kind of jeering. Aella bravely voyages to the frontiers of American sexuality, collecting data on people’s darkest desires, uncovering the hidden economics of the online sex trade, and refusing—despite all the mockery—to filter herself.