This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Kaytlin Bailey of Old Pros. I wanted to let you know that I’ll be in Prague for the TES affiliate conference September 12th through the 14th. This is one of my favorite shows and I think everyone in the adult industry should attend. We’ll be sponsoring the event as usual. You can find us in booth L17. If you go to our event section on adultsidebroker.com we have a discount available on badges for the show. And if you’d like to get together and discuss buying and selling websites, send me a message on our website once again adultsidebroker.com. I’m looking forward to seeing all of my adult family there. I’d like to invite you to check out one of our projects that we’re very proud of, the WarOnPorn.com. You’ll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry’s plight in the War on Porn and the numerous attacks on us. Go to thewaronporn.com and check it out. Finally just a reminder, we’re always looking for buyers and sellers of adult sites. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about either selling your site or buying one. Please feel free to contact me at adultsidebroker.com with any questions you may have. Now let’s feature our property of the week that’s for sale at adultsidebroker. We’re proud to offer a growing free porn gaming site with adult sex games. The site is owned by one of the top entrepreneurs in our industry. This niche site is designed with a streamlined, user-friendly HTML structure that speeds up load times. What makes this site unique is its hands-free operation. It runs on autopilot, so no daily management is required, making it ideal for someone who wants a passive, reliable revenue stream. The only ongoing effort involves uploading new games, which takes no more than 10 to 15 hours per month to add hundreds of titles, ensuring a continuous stream of fresh content. The site is perfect for someone looking to enter or expand in the adult gaming space. The total number of adult games live to date is 3,397. 93% of the traffic is direct or organic. There’s an extensive network of high authority backlinks built over several years. Many of these links come from permanent guest posts on respected high authority domains, offering sustainable SEO strength that requires no ongoing maintenance costs. This strategic backlink portfolio boosts search engine ranking and organic traffic that newer sites can’t match. Only $1.2 million. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Caitlin Bailey of Old Pros. Caitlin, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to have you. Caitlin is a sought after globally recognized leader in the sex worker rights movement. She’s a writer, comedian and performer. She’s the founder and executive director of Old Pros, a non-profit organization for sex worker rights and the host of the oldest profession podcast. She’s currently touring her critically acclaimed show, the oldest profession, a comedic mad dash through a 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective. Last year she went to 25 cities in 10 countries with the show. Her work has been featured on US TV networks. She’s been quoted in and written op-eds in numerous publications. She’s been a guest to discuss sex worker rights on national broadcasts and at universities. She founded Old Pros in 2020 using history and humor to try to reach a mainstream audience and persuade the persuadable. That’s not always easy with this profession. After spending two years as the communications director for decriminalized sex work, it became clear to her that they weren’t going to get good policy on this issue unless they changed the stories they tell about the oldest profession. Caitlin, what got you into sex worker rights advocacy, sex work and comedy? Goodness. Well, it didn’t all happen all at once. I started in the reproductive justice arena. So I grew up on military bases in North Carolina and that’s where I came of age during George W. Bush’s "Absidents Only" education program. So I watched leaders from the evangelical community or George’s people being sent to public schools, funded with taxpayer dollars to give us all pretty aggressive misinformation about our bodies. So volunteering for Planned Parenthood and getting familiar with the long multi-generational fight for medically accurate information and the right to make choices about my body is where I started from an advocacy perspective. I’ve always been a performer and I got into stand-up comedy shortly after college. And one of my first jobs after graduating was being a community organizer. So I spent a lot of time ping-ponging around different states, building coalitions and communities, knocking on doors, standing on streets, getting people to give us their email address and often credit card information to further various causes. But I started doing stand-up comedy full-time and then I got back into advocacy pretty quickly after the disastrous Cesta Fosta law was signed, yeah, in 2018. So yeah, that’s when I started working for decriminalized sex work and then two short years later I started old pros. Okay. Have you actually done sex work? Oh, yes, absolutely. I’ve done sex work a couple of times. So the first time I did hourly escorting work in Raleigh, North Carolina for a couple of years, I went now in retrospect, feels like the golden age of sex work when you had message boards and flip phones and very little surveillance. Before Fosta Cesta. Before Fosta Cesta, exactly. So and I was connected to this really amazing community in North Carolina and like the thousands and thousands of generations that have come before me. It was older women in this work that like sat me down and helped me avoid some of the mistakes that you can make early in your career. And then, yeah, later I came back to sex work to subsidize my early career in comedy. I bet. Which at the time was paying in exposure and drink tickets and other things that people die from, frankly. Yes. Yeah. Oh, that’s crazy. I can just imagine stand up comedians. You don’t make a lot of money when you’re first in it. No. Yeah. It’s absolutely. It’s very funny. You know, as a sex worker rights advocate, I often sit through many, many lectures on the horrors of exploitation and I always have to pinch myself and remind myself that they’re talking about the bill. I was paid hundreds of dollars an hour for and not the one where, you know, I was washing dishes for the privilege of opening for five minutes. You know, it’s insane. Entertainment is wild. Exactly. Yeah. And it’s really sad that these organizations out there, and I say organizations very loosely are out there misinforming people about what sex work is, suggesting that it’s all sex trade, it’s all, you know, slavery. And it just couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, we’re just doing the white slave panic over and over and over again. And the language changes and the technology changes, but the fundamentals really don’t. And it’s fascinating to me how many otherwise intelligent people lose their ability to put information together or to like basic cognitive function goes away when the words sex or especially sex trafficking are introduced to the conversation. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the every year with the Super Bowl, they just go crazy. And I mean, look, if you were a sex worker, that’s where you want to be during the Super Bowl is in that city because all the high rollers come into town and you can make a lot of money. Now, is there trafficking going on? Of course there is. There are always going to be pimps out there that are going to traffic girls and it’s very sad and those guys should do long prison stints and hard time. That’s my feeling. I think they’re the worst form. But this is just a bunch of people looking to make money. Yeah, absolutely. People are trying to get their bills paid. It’s not. Hello. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah. It’s wild. It’s like being upset at food carts for coming to fairs. It’s like guys. Exactly. How much of your advocacy stems from being a sex worker? So I always lead with personal experience. I think it’s really important for folks to understand that I’m not there speaking for sex workers, that I am a sex worker. It’s interesting being in the position of often being the first out sex worker that someone will meet. Sometimes in my more optimistic moments in this work, I believe that we are really where the LGBTQ community was in the early 1970s and that everyone knows a sex worker, but not everyone knows that they know a sex worker. So leading with personal experience can be very disarming, especially with my background in comedy and storytelling and then following it immediately up with the history. Not many people know that the first woman to run for president in the United States was a sex worker. First woman to run for president. Who was that? Victoria Woodhall announced her candidacy in 1870. She was the first woman to open up a brokerage firm on Wall Street, the first woman to address Congress on the issue of suffrage. She ran a newspaper for years and she was a sex worker. That’s amazing. I got to spend more time on your podcast because I already find it fascinating. Thank you. That’s very flattering. You do an amazing job over there. I got kudos. It sounds like we’ve been doing this about the same period of time because I’m in my sixth year as well. So there you go. Why do you think sex worker stories are so important? Well, we’ve done what we can with the data. Every organization that has looked at this issue with integrity knows that the only policy that reduces violence is decriminalizing sex work. We know what prohibition does to markets. It doesn’t make them safer. Criminalizing the buying, selling, or facilitating of sexual services drives up STIs. It drives up violence against women and it drives up exploitation in the sex trade. So if our goal was-- And sex and sex trafficking. Yes, absolutely. All of those things. People, members of a criminalized class, are not less vulnerable to violence and exploitation. However, people still get caught up on this sticky narrative. And you hit the nail on the head earlier in our conversation. It’s the white slave narrative. This idea that nobody in their right mind would ever voluntarily exchange erotic labor for something as tawdry as money, which is fascinating to me because we, of course, live in a society and in a global economy where we accept that people do horrific things for much smaller amounts of money, thinking of Uber Eats delivery drivers to say nothing of agriculture, domestic labor, or the textile industry. We have real examples of violence and exploitation almost everywhere you look across labor sectors. However, prostitution has become a symbol of violence against women and exploitation. And so it’s sort of become a vessel, almost a symbol of all of these things that we can’t bear to face. And so people will put a lot of energy, time, talent, and treasure behind trying to eradicate the oldest profession rather than deal with either gender-based violence or either economic or violent exploitation. And I’m sure there are a lot of statistics in places where prostitution is legalized that show that it eradicates those problems. New Zealand decriminalized prostitution in 2003. There is excellent research in English proving the causal relationship between that law change and sex workers’ increased confidence reporting crimes committed against them, their ability to access the basic healthcare services that they need to both prevent and treat their entire cells, but of course STIs, and also reduced violence within the sex industry. Why? Because when people are no longer committing a crime, they can advocate for their own safety and health and do. How did you come to start the oldest profession podcast? Sure. Well, I was a stand-up comedian at the time, so I was involved in a lot of podcasts. We were certainly early adopters of the corrupt. And I kept, again, I kept being told by seemingly intelligent, proudly free-thinking individuals that nobody in their right mind would ever do this work voluntarily, and that anyone who had engaged in this work voluntarily or otherwise met an untimely and tragic end. And I just happened to have an undergraduate degree in history, and I happen to have written my college thesis and done quite a bit of research on sex workers in Charleston and sex workers in other places. And I know for a fact, right, based on the empirical evidence that we have and the things that you can actually find in the historical archives, if you go digging for them, that in Charleston from 1890, leading into the 1920s, if you were a woman working at a textile factory, you were way more likely to die young from some unpleasant disease of the lungs than you were if you chose to work at the brothel down the street, where you were more likely to get a diet rich in protein, have access to better medical care, all kinds of things that actually extended both the quality and the longevity of people’s lives. Tell me about the types of guests we can find on your podcast. Sure. So normally, I talk about old pros from history. So these are people who have died. But this season, we’re doing a lot of documentary style episodes where we actually talk to sex workers that I met from all over the world. So we have one episode looking into the end demand issue where you can hear from sex workers from Sweden, which adopted the criminalization of clients in 1999, and sex workers from Norway who adopted the same policy in 2009, and Iceland. Yeah, the Nordic model. The Nordic model, exactly. So we sought out Nordic sex workers and asked them how it’s going, and you can hear directly from them. What are they saying? I mean, in general? Yeah. I mean, the criminalization of clients has made it absolutely impossible to do basic reference checking or to advocate for your safety at all. So sex workers in Scandinavia are taking way bigger risks in order to meet their clients where they are, and their clients are terrified. And it’s absolutely impossible for sex workers in Sweden and Norway and Iceland to tell the difference between a genuinely nervous guy who’s afraid of being arrested and a predator who’s posing as a client, who’s trying to get them into a vulnerable position. Yeah, that’s sad. That’s really sad. And for some reason, governments seem to think that that’s the ideal type of law. Right. Yes. No, it is frustrating that so much bad public policy in this issue has been framed as a way of helping vulnerable women and children when we know that these policies have absolutely the opposite effect. Yeah, definitely. How did you develop the oldest profession, the live show? Sure. Well, as I’m sure you can imagine, it came after I’d been hosting the podcast for several years. So I was doing a show in New Hampshire on December 17th, which I’m sure many of your listeners will recognize as the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. And it’s, yeah, it’s the day that we mourn our dead, right? We read the list of names and we think about, we talk about the people that we’ve lost that year. And that was in the immediately after Cesta Fosta had passed. So this was 2018, 2019. And I was mad. I was doing a headlining comedy set. And sort of instead of sticking to my hour, I ventured off on this rant that was really informed by many of the figures that I talked about on the podcast that had inspired me, right? Figures like Victoria Woodhall. I’d love to see this. Oh, and we’ve had on the director of the Woodhall Freedom Foundation. Oh, Ricky is amazing. Yes, absolutely. Ricky is a doll. Yes. Yes, an inspiration to us all. The work that Woodhall is doing is so important, along with the Free Speech Coalition. It’s so important to have these folks. But you were saying? Yeah, so I was thinking about and talking about all of these fantastic sex workers throughout history that not only survived, but were able to achieve incredible things, not in spite of the fact that they were doing sex work. It wasn’t like an obstacle that they overcome, but because they were doing sex work. Veronica Franco is an incredible example of this. Veronica Franco is one of the first published women, poets and essayists and editors in the Western canon, because in her lifetime, her economic peers, the married women, the respectable women of Venice, were not allowed into libraries. They were not allowed to read. They were not allowed to participate in the public discourse. But because she was a courtesan, she was allowed to not just read, but also write and become published and build a public name for herself, which she did. Did courtesans in those days get a lot of respect? Courtesans throughout history have always represented the upper echelon of the sex industry. And yes, they did get a lot of respect. And they were very influential historically. They’ve been incredible philanthropists and often artists in their own right. Sex workers overrepresented in artists communities. We wouldn’t have jazz music without the brothels of women. Oh, now you’re talking. See? That’s my music. That’s my music. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that’s my music. I got to get to New York one of these days and spend some time at the clubs there. Oh, yes. I spend a week out in LA every year listening to jazz when I go out for the X-Boo show. That’s when I see Ricky every year. Yeah. Give me a-- It was beautiful. Yeah. Give me a snapshot of what the show’s about. Sure. So as you can imagine, it’s an hour-long show and I cover 10,000 years of history from a sex worker’s perspective. So we move pretty fast. And I also kind of start with monkeys. So technically it’s a million years, but really there’s a lot of hand waving until we get to the temples of Ishtar and Babylon and the Assyrian Empire. And then I take the show all the way to the modern age and throughout that, I weave it back and forth with my own life experiences and also my father’s experiences as a soldier who joined the army at 17, served two tours in Vietnam and one tour in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, when I was in kindergarten. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, soldiers certainly know a lot about sex workers. Yeah, for sure. And he shared stories with you. He did. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. What surprised you about performing your show the oldest profession worldwide? It’s been really incredible getting to meet with other people that do this work all over the world. And even though we speak different languages and we have different cultural and often legal technicalities, so much of what connects us is the same. I can relate to an old pro anywhere in the world. It was beautiful watching folks bring the people that they love to come and see this show. So many sex workers, especially when I was doing multiple nights, I did a full run at Edinburgh, which is like 28 shows. And there were people that would come and see my show and then bring their mom or their aunt or their friend to help the people in their life that loved them, see them from a different perspective to help reclaim the legacy of being a proud old pro as opposed to this being something shameful or more difficult to think about or talk about. Yeah, absolutely, as it should be. And I think history is very powerful in that way. When you bring up sex work, people often think about their daughter or their sister or somebody involved and they get very nervous for them. There is a lot of, there is a horphobia, there is stigma. We are vulnerable in a lot of important ways to think about. But when people think about their grandmother doing this work, it’s always a cool story. People are so proud of what their ancestors have done. I think it’s easier for us to see the folly of moral panics that happened 100 years ago than it is for us to see the problems with the moral panics we’re in right now, even when they’re so similar. Yeah. You know, something we were talking about before we started recording is the whole idea that now the term sex work is accepted in the porn industry, which is where I live for the most part, brokering websites, and that people in our part of the industry now accept the term sex worker. When do you think that happened and what impact has it had? Sure. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. I think that’s why we’re talking about the term sex work. In person sex work, but it’s become this broad umbrella term that includes everyone who faces, I think, the stigma of this work, which is why I think it’s perfectly appropriate for porn stars and strippers and phone sex operators and erotic laborers of all kinds to adopt. The creator economy is huge now. Yes. Absolutely. To adopt the phrase and pick up the cause and think of yourself as a member of this global multi-generational community. How much stronger can we be as sex workers politically? I think that we are just getting started. Sex worker rights movement’s origin is, people often point to June 2, 1975. June 2, of course, is celebrated all over the world as International Horse Day. It’s an optimistic and defiant affair that celebrates the occupation of churches all over France by women who were protesting their criminalization. There was also a serial killer that the police refused and the fines had gotten out of control. They hung a banner outside of the church of St. Nizier and Lyon, which is where it started, but read, "Our children do not want their mothers in jail," which is still a very powerful framing of this issue. Shortly thereafter, the International Horse Congress met for the first time. Coyote starts around that time. A lot of sex worker advocacy groups all over the world just get started. Obviously, the AIDS epidemic really impacted our movement as it did so many. But in 2003, people started organizing around reducing violence. It’s the same year that, I’m sorry, I get my history stuff. I feel like sometimes I quarter people at parties, but these names and dates, and sometimes I feel like I have my red yarn connecting things together. But sex workers have never been more visible, and it’s never been easier for sex workers all over the world to connect and to realize that we are part of a shared global interconnected struggle. I think that for those of us who are able to, we can really take a page out of the LGBTQ organizing book. If you can live and operate as an out sex worker, if you can come out to your friends and family, if you can tell the people in your life that you have lived experience doing this work, it will become harder for these old stories to persist because people will think of you instead of thinking of taken or sound of freedom or any of the other terrible media trying to frame this issue as inevitably violent or inevitably exploitative. How hard has it been to book venues for the live show? And have you had pushback from local communities where you performed? We’ve been very blessed with a warm response. We’ve had a ton, we two are best shows, our most sold out shows in rural venues where there’s less competition for things going on. But yeah, we haven’t had a hard time booking or filling venues. I think that there was a little bit of pushback from somebody who came to see the show in a festival context and despite the name and clear description was still shocked at what happened. But this really is a show that you can bring your mom to. It’s an art history lecture with personal stories. This feels more like a funny lecture than it does a provocative or edgy piece. And I’m sure you work a lot of comedy into it. Of course. That’s your nature. I am a more experienced and credentialed comedian than I am a historian. I have an undergraduate degree and I work with real historians, but I would not claim that title for myself. Tell me about some of the people you’ve met along the way. Give me some stories. Sure. There’s one woman who stands out. I met her at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia, which is part of South Australia. So it’s part of the continent that has not yet decriminalized or legalized prostitution, despite it going so well in New South Wales and Queensland and now Victoria. But she came and saw the show. She was with a couple of girlfriends and she waited to talk to me afterwards and she could sort of hardly speak. But she said, "Thank you." And then nine months later, she sent her daughter to see me perform in Edinburgh. Nice. And it turned out that the woman that I had met had been able to, like many of the folks I talk about in the show and many people throughout history, escape a violent and abusive marriage because of sex work and had raised her daughter as a single mom because the flexibility and financial freedom that this work gave her. Yeah. And that happens a lot. A lot. It happens a lot. People should probably be focusing more on abusive men and marriages than on arresting sex workers. There’s certainly more of a correlation, I think. Oh my God. You’re not kidding. Who are the sex worker advocates that inspire you? There have been so many. Of course, in history, I looked to my Margot St. James, Carol Lee, Cecilia Gentile, even Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera and Candida Royale and the really badass women at the height of the porn wars that were like, "No, we are feminists and we are making porn and we are making feminist porn." Yeah. Yeah. But today, I do a lot of work with the New Moon Network, which of course is run by Savannah Sly who has been on my podcast. Who’s an excellent advocate. She’s fabulous. She’s so good. Yep. Yes. I’m also really inspired by the sex worker advocates that I met that have both achieved decriminalization and are also struggling under the Nordic model. I met some badasses in New Zealand and New South Wales, folks from the Scarlett Alliance in Australia and the NZPC in New Zealand. Yes, Dame Catherine Healy and the folks that made it happen, but also this new crop of sex workers that have never worked under criminalization that just expect that when they report a rape or when they report a crime committed against them or when they report bad behavior on the hands of clients that their complaints are taken seriously and they are changing the culture in the best way. Sometimes I say that if we could just get college kids to act more like porn stars when it comes to negotiating boundaries and consent, we wouldn’t have as many problems. And then, you know, stateside, there are so many advocates that have blown me away with their bravery and candor and effectiveness testifying in front of their elected officials, presenting themselves to legislators as constituents and demanding their rights. And recently, you know, decriminalized sex workers and sex workers have had some victories winning immunity rights in Rhode Island. And then the immunity bill just passed unanimously through the House and Assembly in New York state. And what’s that all about? So what that means is it offers limited immunity from prostitution charges if and when people report crimes committed against them or that they witness. So it’s like the Good Samaritan law for drug laws, right? And recognizes that, you know, we want folks to feel comfortable committing crimes that they witness or, you know, I mean, think about the Long Island serial killer or the serial rapist that targets sex workers. Like it’s so important that we be able to go to law enforcement. It makes all of our communities safer. And these immunity laws allow that to happen. And that was hard one from sex workers going to their legislators’ offices and sitting down and telling them about the reality of this work. Well, you also need protection sometimes from the police too. Yes, absolutely. They’ve always unfortunately been our top predator. Yeah. Very sad. Who are some of your heroes past and present? I mean, I have the great privilege of calling in my heroes and my ancestors when I performed this show. You know, as I mentioned, folks like Margot St. James and Carol Lee and, you know, I travel with mementos from these folks. Yeah. And I, you know, I’ve already told the story about Victoria Woodhall and Veronica Franco, who feature prominently in the show. But I just feel like wherever you see like an artistic community or, you know, a community of like early adopters for a new technology, you’re going to find sex workers. We have been literal pioneers throughout history. And I often think about, you know, some of the women here in the US like Lou Graham, who was a German immigrant who settled in Seattle, became one of the most successful madams in the 1880s, 1890s. And then when the state faced bankruptcy, she funded the Seattle school system for a year. Yeah. You know, she’s, you know, one of our foremothers and like, yeah, she’s- That’s amazing. There are so many towns across the US and really all over the world that are full of these kinds of stories of sex workers not just making it in business, but also sharing their wealth and directing their, you know, philanthropy towards projects that really elevate their communities. When are you going to write a book about all this? I would like to film the show for distribution first. That’s a full time job, it turns out. But I’m working right now with the, an incredible team of researchers and research assistants at the new school. And we are building a digital, searchable, global map and timeline of notable old prose throughout history. And so on the other side of that project, once we’ve really mapped that out, I will sit down and I will try to write that book. But I’m such a talker, I love performing, I love doing bits. It sounds, it sounds like your live show could be something that maybe Netflix or someone like that would pick up. Speak it into existence. Let’s do this. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I’d be all for that. What are some of the challenges you see facing the movement? You know, I think there’s a lot of new technology, right, which comes with both opportunities and also new dangers, right? It’s never been easier to get started. It’s never been easier to connect to other sex workers. But also it’s never been easier to have like facial recognition technology or be stopped at the border. That’s scary. Exactly. And so it is harder to maintain anonymity in this work, even when you’re doing the safest version of it, right, which of course is like creating content. And I think one of the main ideological challenges is this old alliance between what I describe as prohibitionist feminism, right, and more traditional chauvinistic or more obviously misogynistic movements, right, that just want women to sit down, shut up, keep their legs closed and keep their head out of a book. And so that coalition has really been present with us since the beginning. The start of the feminist movement, many people think about the Seneca Falls Convention and like 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, these are the women that wrote Victoria Woodhall out of their history because she was a sex worker. That sucks. Right. And then you fast forward, like Gloria Steinem is one of my heroes. Sure. Yeah. And spent too much, I think, of her one and precious life trying to outlaw porn and eradicate prostitution when so many sex workers could have, should have been allies in that movement. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, you talk about prohibitionist, feminist, I remember being at a show, an ex-busy show in London and I came back from where I was. I was like, I don’t know, I was like taking, I think like a horse drawn carriage. Or whatever, just for fun. And there was a big protest of feminists in front of the show hotel that were protesting us and it was just like, oh my God, don’t you guys have done something better to do? Now maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. I mean, it’s so disappointing to me. Maybe we would have been able to save Roe, right? Maybe we would have been able to protect access to abortion and contraception if we hadn’t spent so much energy trying to get women to stop having the sex for reasons we didn’t understand. By the way, how does this new administration play into this? So yeah, Project 2025 isn’t great. I know a lot of OnlyFans content creators, people that have their face online who are genuinely nervous about border crossings, right? Really nervous about this surveillance state that we built. To say nothing, of course, about platforms. They’re talking about criminalizing pornographers. They’re talking about putting people in jail. They already have in some states. Yes. Yes. And the age verification laws, I think are terrifying. We were talking about taking freedom of expression away from the internet. First Amendment. They’re talking about... These are First Amendment issues, and it doesn’t seem like this administration believes in the First Amendment. They absolutely do not. And no authoritarian government ever has, right? And this is certainly not an issue unique to conservative circles. The Democrats have a lot of sex worker blood on their hands as well, but this administration, I think, is uniquely shameless when it comes to... Which is kind of a crack up since Trump’s probably of all politicians. He probably is the biggest consumer of sex workers. Sure. I mean, I think that that is possible. And also, yeah, I wish we could come together on this. I remember not too long ago, and we were pretty confident that Stormy Daniels was about to save America, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Yeah. Well, exactly. Yeah, she didn’t exactly do that. She didn’t save herself either. What brings you hope? I think something that brings me hope is looking back and seeing what our ancestors were capable of, also suffering, criminalization, and stigma, with way fewer resources, way less connectivity. So something that brings me hope about the future is knowing what we’ve been capable of in the past. Yeah. Yeah. Strong women can do a lot. Yes. Yes, we can. I was raised... We always have. I was raised by one. Yeah. Strong woman. Amazing. Amazing. Where were you raised? I was raised near San Francisco in Daly City. So as far as LGBTQ+ rights, I’m all in on that as well. Of course. Yeah. Strong women are capable of anything, and my late mother, she was able to raise me and I think do a decent job. But that’s for other people to say. If you could advise a younger version of you or young advocates today, what would you say? I would pass on a piece of advice that I got early in my career as a standup comic, which is it is impossible to make an audience or anyone more comfortable with something than you are. And so I think that anyone who chooses to do this work, speaking both of sex work, but also more specifically of sex worker advocacy, is you have to do the internal work to own your own work, to stand confident in your own skin and your own choices. Because going into this arena, looking for validation from others, it’s not going to work and it’s going to poison what you’re trying to do. Yeah, absolutely. By the way, your standup comedy career, tell us a little bit about that. When did you get started? And who are some of the people we’ve heard of that you worked with? Sure. I’ve had the privilege of opening forward working with a lot of folks. I don’t really want to tell stories. Oh, please do. Not all of them are flattering. That might be fun. I had the great privilege of getting to smoke Margaret Cho’s weed while I was in Atlanta. That was really fun. She’s fabulous. She’s so good. I can tell you some of my heroes. I love Eddie Izard. I love Sarah Silverman. Oh, God. She’s my favorite. I love that. She’s the best. She’s another pro. She’s a Jew. She’s a Jew. So, you know, there you go. Oh, was she a sex worker? She was, yeah. That does not surprise me at all. I worked very closely with Carol Montgomery, who has women of a certain age on Showtime, which is a really incredible and also very feminist showcase of post-menopausal women telling the truth. Let’s see. Yeah, I got started in comedy shortly after college. So in the 2010. You’re so young. And then I moved to New York. Yes, it’s, I’m starting to meet like adult sized people at the bar who were born after 2000. It doesn’t matter. So I started doing stand-up shortly after college and then moved to New York in 2011 and did the club scene there and the alt scene and toured the country with this really amazing group of women with the cake comedy tour. I’ve done, yeah, I’ve done comedy and laundromats and basements and restaurants against people’s will. And I’ve also had the great privilege of performing for thousands of people and on some of the, you know, we got to perform at the Purple Onion in San Francisco and. Oh, wow. That’s a famous place. Yeah. So, you know, there’s been home town, incredible highlights and also a lot of sticky floors, you know, all part of it. I bet. Yeah, well, yeah, that’s like that’s like adult theaters. They have they have sticky floors. Last question. What misconceptions do people have about sex workers? I think when people think about sex work, the story that we tell ourselves about what that is and what that means often overrides people’s experience or their ability to hear the story of the person standing in front of them, you know, there’s deep misconception that people hold on to very, very tightly that anyone doing this work must be some kind of victim, right? Either to their own addictions or to like a violent person or some horrible circumstance. Yeah, they’re being pipped out probably. Exactly. And the overwhelming majority of the people, but especially the women that I’ve met in this work have been some of the most independent entrepreneurial free thinking people, which is incredible. And again, the work that I’ve done and the archive that we’re building and the stories that come out throughout history, that’s not unique to this age. We’re just like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I’ve got to say that also goes for people in the in the adult entertainment industry. Some of the most bright people that I know shoot porn and are involved in our industry. And I’m just so proud to be a part of it. It’s an incredible industry. They’re incredible people. It’s really why I’m doing this podcast more than anything else with the exception of a little shameless self promotion. That kind of helps as well. But I mean, getting people on this podcast and getting them to talk about themselves, there been really some fascinating stories, probably no more so than today. And I just got to tell you that it’s really a labor of love for me as I can tell it is for you. Yeah. It’s so interesting. I’m in love with the people that are called to this work, right? The sex industry, the happy go lucky fascination with the underworld. Like we’ve, it’s a bit of a shadow space. I love that. We’re certainly not go along to get along people, but especially the people that choose to do advocacy on this podcast. We’re really something. Really cool community to be a part of. Oh, hey, you know what? As I said, I’ve had Savannah on, I’ve had Ricky on. I’ve had multiple episodes with Mike and with Allison from the Free Speech Coalition. And we are a proud sponsor of the Free Speech Coalition, also a pineapple support, which you probably heard about. So it’s like, you know, advocacy is like my mental name. I mean, I definitely, I think if anyone’s a part of this industry, they need to get back to the industry. And one of the ways I do is with money, but more so, I think is with the podcast. I think the shining a light on the people that are working so hard for us, including yourself is just very, very important. Yeah. I do think it’s important. I think it’s important for us to talk to each other. I think it’s important for us to be platformed. And I think it’s important for folks to listen. And capturing these stories, right? The people that are making sex worker history right now. That’s important work because I can guarantee you that, well, that history has a history of being erased. Yes. Absolutely. Caitlin, it’s been a pleasure. I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on an outside broker talk. And I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure, Bruce. Thank you. And I’ll give you a new tip today as part five of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week, we talked about new ways to monetize your site. Next, eliminate unneeded expenses. Constantly make sure you’re not spending money you don’t need to. Make sure there isn’t duplication in your staffing. From time to time, check services you pay for like hosting and see if there are better and less expensive options. Take it from me. I’ve done this and saved a bunch plus got higher quality hosting in the process. Again, ask us for recommendations. Along with this, make your profit and loss statement show more profit. Increasing sales and reducing expenses obviously does just that. Make sure your P&L statement accurately reflects your company’s actual costs. Not a bunch of personal expenses you put in. This will cost you money when you sell. It may help you with the tax man to put that stuff on your tax return, but it hurts you if you show that stuff on your profit and loss statement when you sell. Remember, every dollar in profit increases the value of your website as much as three to four times. This is why you need a good experience broker to help lead you through the process. We’ve gotten people thousands of dollars more on their sale just by adjusting the P&L statement to reflect actual business expenses as opposed to a bunch of BS. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Charlie Cross of Adult Creative. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Kaytlin Bailey of Old Pros. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
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