She’s a born hustler, and has been since we met in middle school - something she attributes to her mother, an immigrant who worked at grocery chains and mall stores to support their family. Marie - whose name, like that of many sources in this story, has been changed to protect her from the potentially severe consequences of being identified for performing online sex work - has more than 100,000 Instagram followers thanks to a stint on a popular reality show. “I thought this person was going to have this ridiculous conversation with me and screenshot it and put it all over the internet. “I thought he was fucking with me,” my friend Marie told me a few months ago, recalling her first messages from a stranger who propositioned her for paid, virtual sex work. When it happens for the first time, it can take you by surprise. Let’s call it Rule 43: If you exist visibly enough on the internet, someone will want porn of you. But there is another, less-discussed rule, one that essentially amounts to its inverse and has only become more apparent over the past decade.
There’s a maxim on the internet known as Rule 34, which posits that “if it exists, there is porn of it.” Rule 34 is typically cited in cases of bizarre noncanonical cultural pairings - smutty fanfiction about, say, Hagrid the half-giant from Harry Potter falling in love with Harry’s owl Hedwig.
