Meet the sex workers behind Doxy, ‘the magazine for the working girl’

“This is literally a labour movement,” says Stella Barey, known online as the “Anal Princess”. Doxy is a magazine about sex workers, told by sex workers who are turning tables in the industry. Issue three of this “mag for the working girl” launched last week with a soirée at The Slipper Room in New York hosted by its editor Celina Reboyras, and it’s the total inverse of a top-shelf mag.

The name Doxy comes from 18th-century slang for sex worker, but for many readers it doubles as an abbreviation of Doxycycline: an antibiotic commonly used to treat STIs. Sex work is having a pop culture moment, with Euphoria having catapulted it into public discourse. “It’s so cool to see sex work represented on such a large scale,” says Reboyras. “But it feels important to have stories come from actual sex workers, rather than a man who’s never had to deal with the stigma.”

You won’t open its glossy pages to see a voyeuristic naked pin-up. “It’s not to say I don’t love that stuff, but it’s not what Doxy is about,” says Reboyras. The golden age of men’s mags came back when nudity still carried a shock value. Nowadays, the girls tell me, shock value lies in authenticity. Doxy is a literary third space, a relatable tome about girlhood, with horoscopes, erotica, paintings, interviews and personal essays. The goal is to humanise themselves and “rope in allies in a way that tugs on their heartstrings,” battling the idea that sex workers are “either a victim or a whore.”

By demystifying what outsiders often see as an underworld, Doxy closes the gap between non-sex workers and creators. “We are the backbone of society and in your immediate circle,” says the magazine’s graphic designer Maxine Cahill. The editorials in Doxy are sensual but not fully nude, and unmistakably for the female gaze. “It wouldn’t feel right if I featured nudity in Doxy then turned a profit. It’s not a cash grab,” says Reboyras.

Mainstream pornstars, strippers, pole dancers, sugar babies, online content creators, dominatrixes and full-service escorts alike all banded together for the launch, dismantling hierarchies between different types of sex work. “The coolest Brooklyn strip club [Pumps] was empty that night because all its girls were at Doxy,” laughs Reboyras. Barey read from the 90s book Defending Pornography – which she says felt fitting, because the author’s ideological rival Gloria Steinem (leader of second-wave feminism, firmly on the other side of the sexual revolution debate) had passed away the day before. A sultry performance by burlesque group The G-Strings followed.  

Doxy’s cover girl is Ari Kytsya. Google lists her occupation as “Internet Personality”, but she would say otherwise. The adult content creator is co-owner of Hidden, an 18+ website that turns the concept of OnlyFans on its head, which she runs with Lana Rhoades and founder Stella Barey. Essentially TikTok for porn, it describes itself as the “most pro-sex worker platform in the world”. It was born from a frustration with sites that are built for the user experience, treating the creator as an afterthought.

Hidden’s name refers to censorship, a recurring theme throughout the magazine. “Even when I share informational content about the industry’s pros and cons, it gets censored,” says Kytsya. One Doxy feature by the newsletter Stripper News discusses the impact which getting banned from Instagram has had – its trendy name once rolled off the tongues of mouths everywhere, but it has since lost support and visibility. 

Offline, they face the same discrimination from banks and landlords. But it’s that same rugged terrain that they are turning to their advantage. By building their own platforms while the space is unregulated, they pre-empt a corporation stepping in who “doesn’t give a fuck” about them. “We’re so lucky to live in the Wild West of an industry right now – the music and movie industries are completely corporatised,” says Barey. “Ours, on the other hand, is still the Wild West – of increasingly wealthy women.”

Learn more about Doxy, and get your hands on the latest copy, on their website