B.C. sex worker GoAskAlex likes to lure men to her online profiles with thirst traps — and then pepper them with social justice content.
This helps spread her “leftist politics” to her followers, who she says are mainly men from the eastern and central U.S.
The strategy is working — as of this summer she’s built a following of 2.5 million subscribers on platforms like Tiktok, Twitter and Reddit plus the folks who pay to view her content on OnlyFans and Suicide Girls. The Tyee has agreed to use GoAskAlex’s first name only in order to protect her safety.
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“Maybe I’ve got a fan who works in the oilfields who doesn’t otherwise hear about environmental issues,” she says. “I’m exposing them to totally new ways of thinking and hopefully radicalizing them.”
Roughly one-third of Alex’s posts include some form of advocacy, like raising awareness about being an ostomate due to her ulcerative colitis, neurodivergent and Métis.
But she’s also outspoken against Amazon, is working to improve workplace safety for sex workers and spent time at the Fairy Creek blockades protesting old-growth logging.
“I feel like if I chose one niche to focus on it’d be better for my brand,” she says, shrugging. She also knows moving to Los Angeles or New York would be good for her career, but says she’ll never leave her home province of B.C. with its mountains, ocean and cloudy skies.
“I don’t want to live in a city. I want to go live by the ocean with six dogs,” she says.
Alex says she was raised with strong social and environmental justice values but her childhood and work in the non-profit sector was regularly disrupted by her ulcerative colitis, a type of inflammatory bowel disease where your immune system attacks your colon.
Inflammatory bowel disease affects around one in 150 Canadians and 25,000 British Columbians and is an incurable disease that inflames the lining of the gastrointestinal tract, disrupting the body’s ability to digest food, absorb nutrition and perform normal gastrointestinal functions, according to Crohn’s and Colitis Canada.
Alex says throughout her life she spent a lot of time in the hospital, trying different treatments and sometimes ending up back at the hospital due to the side effects.
Before she started sex work, she struggled to manage her pain and energy while working eight-hour shifts and “had eight roomies with eight cats and still had to ride my bike to the food bank to fill up a backpack with noodles and beans.”
Then a roommate recommended camming, a type of online sex work where you perform in front of a webcam for paying clients.
“I gave it a try and the rest is history,” she says. “The earning potential was greater than anything I’d experienced. I could log on and earn a couple hundred in a couple of hours.” The flexible schedule also allowed her to rest when she had a health flare-up. Because she made her own hours, she didn’t need to request time off or bank sick days for future illness.
The job had its ups and downs. It allowed her to afford necessary medication, travel internationally for the first time and buy herself a hybrid car. But she also spent up to 12 hours a day interacting with people online alone in her room, which she found isolating and emotionally exhausting. “I ended up very burnt out, but I remember it fondly,” she says.
Nowadays Alex focuses more on her OnlyFans website than camming.
‘People with disabilities do have sex, consume porn and are sexual’
By 2019, Alex’s health had taken a turn for the worse, sending her to hospital every couple of months. This was her “breaking point,” she says. She told her doctor she wanted to get surgery.
Patients need to be young and healthy to reduce the risk of potential complications from this kind of surgery, says Dr. Brian Bressler, co-founder of the IBD Centre of BC and clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia. Bressler is not Alex’s doctor.
Doctors will “try to align treatment with how a patient would like to live” and around one in seven will choose surgery, Bressler says.
Alex had a total abdominal colectomy. Surgeons removed her entire colon and created a small opening in her abdomen where she now has an ileostomy appliance on her lower abdomen.
Recovering and getting back to work had the added challenge of adjusting to living with a visible disability. While the adjustment was “difficult,” Alex says sex work helped her dive into body acceptance.
“My career up to that point had been being naked on camera,” she says.
