Kamryn Kirkham: ‘Why are you sexualising me hiking?’

When Kamryn Kirkham AKA Kamryn35, a 22-year-old woman from Ohio, set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in March, she couldn’t have known the internet discourse she was about to unleash. With a pink backpack, dedicated skincare and make-up routines, and coordinated pink outfits in tow, the nature-loving OnlyFans creator hiked the trail stretching from the northern Mexican border, through the United States, and to the southern Canadian border, documenting it on social media as she went. 

Along the 2,650-mile trail, she crossed rivers, climbed mountains, filtered spring water, relied on “trail angels” for travel into the next town, slept on forest grounds, bonded with other hikers, and was helicoptered out of Mount Whitney after experiencing a norovirus infection at 12,500 feet of elevation. Prior to taking on the PCT, she had been no stranger to hikes (although nothing longer than 10 miles), marathons and the outdoors. She spent a year living in her car exploring the US, and found inspiration after viewing the 2014 film Wild.

Hiking 25-mile days in pastel-colored outfits and blush-dusted cheeks, Kirkham received encouraging and critical messages alike, alongside 200,000 more followers over the course of the six months. She was dubbed “the princess of the PCT” by Interview magazine and applauded by some for demonstrating that hyper-feminine young women can present however they want and still do hard things. Others viewed her content as both infantilising and oversexualised, pointing to her suggestive tent photos, branding her as naive for her lack of preparedness, and criticising her for making trails less safe for women in the future. Her reply? “I don’t mind being controversial,” she tells Dazed.

Kirkham grew up playing sports alongside three brothers in the Midwest United States, an environment that didn’t always allow for a person to exist across contrasting spaces. “I was in a lot more masculine energy-dominated spaces, but have always been a very feminine person. I used to really not like that about myself because I felt it made people not take me seriously or look down on me. I would try to lower my voice or dress differently to be respected, but I wasn’t happy and I found that people still didn’t take me seriously.”

As a result, she decided she might as well lean further into her femininity, and now she refuses to occupy any space that seeks to define her rigidly. If she enjoys dressing up in pink and also hiking 20 miles a day, there is no reason she can’t do both, simultaneously. “Maybe it’s not the norm or whatever, but I’m allowed to do it. There’s no rule of how to be.”

Kirkham’s trail vlogs usually begin in a GRWM-style including hair and make-up. “I would always have at least lip gloss, blush, eyebrow gel, maybe some liner. The last couple days I also had a bunch of glitter because hikers were passing it around on the trail [leading up to] Canada, to celebrate.” Adhering to the ‘look good, feel good’ mentality, she says these routines boosted her morale and played a crucial role in her mental fortitude while navigating the ever-changing terrain. “I would just be so sad if I didn’t have my outfits, skincare or my lip gloss,” she says. “I feel my strongest when I feel like myself, and I needed to be my strongest when I was on the trail. [But] I never wanted to put the idea out there that this is how you should hike.”

Kirkham funded her six-month journey through her work as an OnlyFans creator, her primary source of income since she first started three years ago. Her desire for creative and literal freedom was the motivation – she wanted a job where she could control her time and energy, travel freely and express herself as she wishes. “I grew up in a very repressed and conservative kind of environment. I felt a bit suffocated in that. Everyone is sexual. That’s the basis of life. It should be more normalised. There’s also a big misconception that if you do OnlyFans you’re super male-centred or only doing it for men’s attention.” The way she sees it, it’s an opportunity to express and explore herself, for herself. “Men just happen to be the people who typically buy the content.”

Pandering to male fetishism has certainly been a criticism directed towards Kirkham, something she says she feels “really weird” about – particularly the accusation she infantilises herself. She matter-of-factly states that her voice has always been her voice (although previous interviewers have noted she sounds far more confident and “strong-willed” in person than the girly, giggly drawl of her videos) and that her choice of hair, which often featured combinations of pigtails, was due to her awkward journey of growing out a pixie cut. And while maybe she does wear skirts to feel cute or sexy, “I don’t wake up in the morning and think ‘I’m gonna wear this really short skirt [in the hopes of seeing] a man in the wilderness today.’”

She finds it bizarre that once people discover a woman does sex work, it becomes the lens through which they view everything she does, as if she doesn’t have a life and hobbies outside of work like every other human. “For some reason that negates everything else in my life. Everyone else on the trail has a job, and no one is telling them that what they do takes away from the trail, or that it’s impossible for them to be a hiker because of it.”

“It’s a great job for me, but that doesn’t mean that everything I do revolves around that. I’m not going on this hike just for OnlyFans. If that was the reason I was going on this hike, I would not finish it. When people are saying stuff like ‘Oh she’s sexualising hiking,’ I’m like, ‘Why are you sexualising me hiking?’ On OnlyFans, everyone can be as sexual as they want because that’s the space for that. But when I’m hiking, my content is about my hiking.” 

It’s unclear whether Kirkham is genuinely unaware of how the sometimes revealing or suggestive nature of her hiking clothing and posing choices complicates this narrative, or if this naivety is part of the performance – it’s hard to imagine not knowing that close-crop photos of a T-shirt reading ‘I love books and sex’ with nipples showing through might be sexualised. Can it be true that her actions are purely for her, and also that they happen to fall within a standard, male gaze-approved gender presentation? It raises the question of how important it is to consider intention versus impact, and whose responsibility it is to hold the weight of how actions are interpreted. Is this an unfortunate, unasked for and yet somehow necessary piece of labor women must undertake when considering how we show up in the world? 

While the debates online rumbled on, Kirkham says that in person she was having fruitful conversations with the women she met on the trail about femininity and autonomy. Many of them expressed admiration for her unapologetic presentation of self just as she admired how fearless and independent they were in their solo journeys. “A lot of women in the outdoor space want to embrace [different aspects of masculinity and femininity] too, but the space is not marketed towards women in particular,” she says.

In her interactions with other hikers, the most frequent comment she received was, “Oh my god, you’re actually real.” Many people on the internet were convinced she was AI or just filming content and then heading back to a hotel with an imaginary male companion in tow. Kirkham says it felt affirming when people realised that, regardless of how she presented, she was still sleeping outside, searching for water sources and climbing mountains like the rest of them. Other realities of the hike included organising trail angel rides in groups, recording and sending identifiable information to loved ones (such as licence plates), and carrying a personal knife – all precautions she took against the danger she was most wary of: “I hate to say it, but the biggest fear for me, honestly, was men.” 

Now back from the journey, having successfully completed the trail, Kirkham says the challenging experience made her realise she is a lot more capable and stronger than she had thought. “There’s a lot of times when you have to do something because you don’t have a choice. Maybe there’s a strong river you have to cross and you’re really scared, but you’re 60 miles out from a town in both directions and you’re gonna run out of food if you turn around. It forces you to move forward. It showed me that I can do hard, uncomfortable things, and also reminded me how many people underestimate women or people who are more feminine. Femininity is seen as weak but I didn’t care. I thought, ‘I’m gonna keep hiking, do it my way, and I’m not gonna change.’”