Stella Barey Is the Anal Princess of OnlyFans. Now She’s Making a Foray Into Tech.

Stella Barey (aka @ana1princ3ss) is sort of like the Emma Chamberlain of OnlyFans: Gen Z, makeup-free, and somehow able to make shoving gummy bears up her ass or getting canceled by the crazy ex she met at a homeless shelter seem relatable, even endearing. Controversies aside, Barey is also an amateur sexual scholar, having recently published a personal erotic philosophy reader (sold out, of course) containing excerpts from Foucault, The Marquis de Sade, and Camille Paglia. Looking at her desk, one would imagine she’s majoring in gender and sexuality at a crunchy liberal arts college. But like any modern woman trying to get her bag, Barey has recently made her first foray into tech. So, in this week’s installment of Search History, I went where many have gone before (head first into @ana1princ3ss’ DMs) to discuss her latest business endeavor, hidden.com, essentially TikTok for porn. The platform is designed to enable online sex workers like Barey to ditch rage-baiting and censorship-driven social media sites and algorithmically deliver their content straight onto a users’ NSFW FYPs. And though the concept of making porn even more accessible and addictive sounds a little dystopian, my exchange with Barey left me wondering if, in her words, it might be time “to watch the sluts win and society burn.”

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JULIETTE JEFFERS: To start off, A/S/L?

STELLA BAREY: 28/female/Los Angeles.

JEFFERS: And what’s in your system right now?

BAREY: Coffee and Celsius.

JEFFERS: Truly the purest fuel.

BAREY: I don’t wanna self-diagnose, but caffeine really calms me down.

JEFFERS: What’s more calming: caffeine or Adderall?

BAREY: I’ve never done Adderall, so caffeine is my version of it.

JEFFERS: Same here. Wait, what’s more calming: caffeine or anal?

BAREY: Haha, anal for sure. That’s a taste of heaven. That’s actually sedative. It’s grounding.

JEFFERS: Right, kind of primal. I saw you put out a book on anal and sexual philosophy. Do you have any sexual philosophy book recs?

BAREY: I wish I could say I wrote that book–someday l’d love to–but I just collected all my favorite excerpts from my favorite authors on philosophy of erotism and taboo and made a booklet for my in-person readings. And then so many people couldn’t make it to the reading in person, so I released the booklets online, so at least everyone could get a taste of my book recs. I have too many recommendations. I’m already compiling a 2nd volume of excerpts.

JEFFERS: Oh, I love that.

BAREY: Erotisme by [Georges] Bataille is an all-time favorite. The Nude by Kenneth Clark explores the nude as an art form through history and is an amazing book. I also love anything by [Marquis] de Sade (father of sadism) and [Leopold von Sacher] Masoch (father of masochism). A fun one that everyone should read on anal is The Surrender by Toni Bentley. I met her in person, she’s older now, but in the 90s she started writing a book about her transcendental experiences of anal.

JEFFERS: You should start a reading group.

BAREY: I’d love to… in a way these readings are my version of that. I read Volume 1 in a bookstore in L.A. and a literary bar in NYC. I think I’ll read Volume 2 in 3-4 locations this time. The in-person events are just so moving. I have probably 200 unread books on sexuality filling my house. These are my most recent purchases. I am really focusing on sexual psychoanalysis texts right now. l’ve been reading What is Sex? by [Alenka] Zupančič, which is so dense, but blows my mind on every page.

JEFFERS: Speaking of psychoanalysis, do people often accuse you of being trapped in the anal stage?

BAREY: I’ve attempted to accuse myself of that.

JEFFERS: Great answer.

BAREY: But sex and our relationship with it can be so many different things at once. It’s a lot simpler than we think. In that book, What is Sex?, she talks about how the brain’s activity during sex is the exact same as any intellectual experience, like having a stimulating conversation with another person. But social ideas around sex make us think those are totally separate things. And yet we treat sex as so much “worse” or more “loaded.”

JEFFERS: That makes sense. We are always trying to separate the mind from the body. On a more lowbrow note, can you send a favorite meme?

JEFFERS: Speaking of WFH, what do you think the future of OnlyFans/online sex work looks like?

BAREY: I could talk about this forever; it’s my main focus right now. I’m focused on making sure that I secure a seat at the table to make sure this industry is better than it is now in 20 or 50 years. Currently we don’t have any control over the direction it is going. I started a new platform recently. It’s the first sex worker-owned platform ever, called hidden.com. We need to start owning our own platforms, our own banks, and take control of how we are perceived and have a say in the policies that affect us. So l hope we can come together and make sure the future of sex work is sex worker-owned, uncensored, and liberating for the future hypersexual girls like me that get into it. I want to make sure our sites are held to high standards, and protect us from leaks, chargebacks, and the overall anxiety of getting censored 24/7.  It’s an industry with so much room for innovation, filled with increasingly independently wealthy women, so there’s no reason we can’t begin to take charge of how we want our websites to work for us, rather than living like outlaws on social media platforms that don’t want us there.

JEFFERS: I totally get that. All of the biggest platforms are owned by like, middle-aged male billionaires who definitely don’t have your best interests at heart.

BAREY: Or fully built by two dudes in Tampa or Ireland! They’re so janky. I can’t hate on most platforms though because it is our culture to have eight different income-producing sites. The thing is, we can innovate in order to make this job way less exhausting. Right now, we have to promote on social media where we are forced to subvert the censorship and algorithms. We increasingly have to rage-bait to get a ton of views, in order to convert a small portion of that into porn sales. 

Where ideally, we just have sites that cater to porn fans who want to buy content and we can just promote there, and then use our social media to actually represent our real selves. This is the main reason I see girls burning out these days. They get into this industry because they have a special relationship with their sexuality, and then soon realize the job is now 2% making porn and 98% social media. And it doesn’t have to be that way. Porn is over 85% of internet traffic, so if we just have sites built with algorithms that work for us, we don’t have to rely on social media platforms.

JEFFERS: I’m looking now, and hidden.com looks exactly like TikTok, but just for porn. That’s insanely clever. 

BAREY: Exactly. It’s all about simple additions to the porn world that we are already familiar with! An FYP that doesn’t censor you and promotes your old and new content equally. Also hidden has the ability to put PPV [Pay-Per-View] posts on the FYP, so fans can find you and purchase content from you without all the run-around that currently exists. Right now they have to find you on one app, click 50 times to find your purchasable content, message you and wait 24 hours to get more content. We could be so much more efficient. We just don’t have sites built with the understanding of the creator experience. It’s impossible to understand what fans want and what would make a site function best, unless you are a creator in this industry.

JEFFERS: Genius. You’ve also had some viral TikTok experiences that weren’t directly related to porn. Did those give you insight into rage-baiting and the algorithm, as well?

BAREY: Absolutely. When I first started sharing on TikTok there was so much less censorship. I would do storytimes about the anal l was having and be very explicit and it would go viral. And that was before I even knew what OnlyFans was. I was just going insane. And over the last six years, I’ve had to shift farther and farther away from my natural modes of communication, first to code words, then to nothing at all…

JEFFERS: Right, that’s a bygone era of TikTok.

BAREY: I hardly even post on TikTok anymore because my entire sense of humor and what I care about, whether it’s vlogging my STD test or talking about erotic philosophy, is banned. I’m so thankful I shared online when I did, because now we are so limited. Now, in order to survive, we have to get the same views, but our content isn’t necessarily determined by what we want to share, but anything we can share. It’s just not sustainable. A lot of us want to have nuanced conversations around sex, but the spaces to do that on the internet are disappearing.

JEFFERS: Yeah, it all speaks to larger hypocrisies in our culture. When did you create your Instagram handle?

BAREY: I just checked. October 20th, 2021. It was my fifth or sixth IG account. Every time I’d get deleted, I’d ask my fans what my next username should be, and if I used it, they’d get a free year of my OnlyFans. And someone said “analprinc3ss,” and it just stuck.

JEFFERS: Iconic.

BAREY: Fun fact: it was the handle of my favorite TikTok account I ever had, too, long deleted now.

JEFFERS: Somehow it’s escaped the Instagram censorship.

BAREY: It’s been flagged a few times, but I always seem to get away with it.

JEFFERS: It’s just coded enough. Speaking of where we’re all spending our time online, what were your last three Google searches?

BAREY: It’s funny how it’s all just work lol. And Ancient Aliens, which is my favorite show right now. 98% of my phone time is spent posting, editing my link aggregation sites to post links, and checking hidden for bugs.

JEFFERS: Girls who code! I’m assuming you believe in aliens?

BAREY: Actually, I don’t know. But I love that show because you learn so many facts about the planet… and then they start telling you why it’s because of aliens. 

JEFFERS: Like the pyramids?

BAREY: 1,000%. But once you get to season 20 episode 300, they are grasping at anything. Like the reason we invented mayonnaise has roots in extraterrestrials. 

JEFFERS: I need to know how aliens gave us mayo.

BAREY: Hahaha I’m waiting for that one. Their theory is aliens came down and gave us the keys to consciousness and tool building and social structures. So they made us what we are. Not sure where I stand on that, but I love the creativity.

JEFFERS: Actually, OnlyFans was invented by two aliens in Tampa.

BAREY: Literally hahahah. They wanted this for us. They wanted to watch the sluts win and society burn.

JEFFERS: End times indicator. My final question, very ASKfm vibes, but what are you wearing?

BAREY: Booty shorts by Cou Cou intimates and a green vintage Russell hoodie (no shirt under), aka my pajamas.

JEFFERS: Hot.

BAREY: Baddie uniform.

JEFFERS: Exactly. Grown-up Brandy Melville.