When we say the coronavirus impact to the economy is hitting everyone – we mean everyone. And we mean hitting.
It’s not just your local small business that has been crippled by everybody “staying the f*ck home” over the last month, but also your local sex worker.
One dominatrix, who has worked in New York for more than six years, recently shared her story with the New York Post.
Aviva Diamond, as she’s called, specializes in slave training, humiliation and foot fetishes. She’s learning that a pivot to online sessions as a result of the coronavirus lockdown is turning out to not quite be the same as in-person work.
She said that her clients started to get concerned in mid-March, questioning whether it would be safe to meet and whether their pre-planned business trips to New York were going to happen.
Since then, she has suffered from “thousands of dollars of cancellations” and has no physical sessions scheduled for the foreseeable future. This represents a large delta from the eight to 15 hours of in-person sessions she was taking in a week prior to the virus outbreak. Those in-person sessions made up 90% of her income, she told the Post.
Diamond confessed:
“It’s been a challenge for me to make this shift from mostly in-person sex work to exclusively operating online. I am producing more femdom videos, adding content to my online subscription platforms like Onlyfans, promoting and expanding on social media, and offering phone and Skype sessions.”
But she bemoans the fact that online sessions are sold at a fraction of the rate of her physical sessions, so she has to “hustle harder” to make less than she was making prior.
And then there’s the obvious: there’s no real substitute for physical contact when it comes to being a dominatrix.
“I’m concerned about the long-term economic effects this will have on me. Luxury experiences are one of the first things people stop paying for during a recession, so my work is likely to be jeopardized for many months,” Diamond concluded.