Sex work is awesome! Except for all the parts that suck. There are a lot of hoops to jump through just to be able to sell videos to people who want to pay for them. No one knows this better than Stella Barey, and she might just have found the hidden key to making it easy.
Hidden, founded and co-owned by Barey, aims to be the antidote to the woes of the modern sex worker. Imagine the best parts of TikTok, Clips4Sale, SextPanther and OnlyFans rolled into one app without all the bullshit. It’s run by sex workers for sex workers and Barey and her dream team of women all have real experience as performers so they know what works and what doesn’t.
From the beginning, Barey knew she didn’t want Hidden to be like the other adult platforms. It’s her passion project, not just a company she’s building up to sell and turn a profit. She knows what matters to performers and she’s willing to climb and die on the hills others might not even think to defend. Instead of prioritizing user experience, creators come first and Barey is not afraid to lose some profit if it means more fair pay and avoiding burnout for workers.
Sex on the Brain
Barey is proof positive that you don’t have to be desperate to start sex work. In fact, she had a world of possibilities open to her when she chose her path. Back in 2020, fresh out of college, she was on her way to medical school, but something just didn’t feel right. After grinding through two years of pre-med with no breaks, she couldn’t bring herself to apply. It was early 2020, the world had ground to a halt due to the pandemic and all she could think about was exploring her sexuality.
“I’ve always been in love with sex,” Barey shares. It’s not just for the reasons you’d think, either. She’s horny as hell, she admits —she is the “Anal Princess” after all— but it’s always been about more than pleasure.
Blessed with a gynecologist mother and sex positive undergraduate education, it was easy to develop a fascination with sexuality: anal, yes, but also STD tests, bacterial vaginosis, the origin of taboo, psychoanalytic theory, and philosophy. As she describes it, “sex is rooted in who I am as a person and speaks to me on such a humanist level.”
Even with her passions and physicality, she never expected to make porn. She knew the risks and the doors that could close from being a publicly sexual woman. But at the end of the day, logical reasoning didn’t matter: porn had chosen her. She half-jokes now that she had to start an OnlyFans for her own mental survival. “I wasn’t interested in anything else,” she says. “I just did not give a fuck anymore.”
Naughty on the Net
Barey picked one hell of a moment to start doing porn. It was April 2020, the beginning of the COVID upheaval that would change the industry forever. Bored men with disposable income were spending their days in the privacy of their homes and creator platforms were suddenly skyrocketing in popularity. Soon, everyone and their mom would have an OnlyFans. She was ahead of the curve of what she now calls, “the golden age.”
It wasn’t just OnlyFans that she got into early. In fact, she started out making TikToks showing off her brazen personality. As a self-proclaimed “child of the internet,” she took to the new platform with ease. While she was “going crazy during COVID” she’d share intimate details about her sex life, fantasies, and yes, anal sex, with her rapidly growing audience.
The algorithm was legendary, funneling just the right people to her page. Plus, she was one of the first TikTokers to get on OnlyFans, or vice versa. Like so many in that era, the young influencer started making more money than she knew what to do with. And then it all went to hell.
TikTok Blocked
Unfortunately, the golden days soon tarnished. Barey built her OnlyFans following naturally by sharing her sexy thoughts on TikTok—an easy conversion to make when so many of them happened to be about getting fucked in the ass. The realness is something she’s always cherished. It protects her from feeling alienated from her work and it’s proven profitable.
“I know what people want,” she states confidently. “I know authenticity and connection are the cornerstones of good sexual connection even if it’s through screens.”
But TikTok couldn’t handle her authentic self, at least not for long. Little by little the guidelines tightened until almost anything got her in trouble. Before long, all she could safely post was her makeup routine or disingenuous ragebait. Other social media platforms were no better. Still, with OnlyFans having no internal traffic, she couldn’t just give up—she’d have to spend hours and hours each week on neutered content she didn’t enjoy making just to help potential fans find her.
Smaller creators would reach out for advice and she wouldn’t know what to say. Suddenly, adult content creation was harder than ever and even her spunky (in more ways than one) self wasn’t feeling it. Looking back now, she says, “I was burning out and I’m the most passionate person I know about this!”
A Tantalizing Team
The first time she did double anal on camera she remembers thinking, “Oh my god I’m made for this! This is my calling!” For a performer so ravenously creative, watching the internet get more hostile to sex workers wasn’t just a bummer; it felt spiritually perilous. She loves sex work. She loves sex workers. And all she could think was, “What the fuck am I going to do with my life if this is gone? This is what I care about. This is what I think is beautiful in the world.”
A ray of hope came in the form of a trusted friend from high school. Despite having no personal connection to adult, he dreamt of starting a new platform. For the passionate creator, it was exactly the opportunity she needed— he had the business smarts and team-building skills and she had insight into adult and deep love for sex workers. Together, they were a perfect team that quickly grew with others from the adult community, including Hidden’s current co-owners Lana Rhoades and Ari Kytsya.
It can feel absurd existing in an industry so paradoxically powerful and oppressed, popular and demonized, where some workers are millionaires yet still exist at the whims of external corporate actors. Barey watched as many performers became independently wealthy in the past few years— but “independent” felt like the operative word. Post-pandemic, the rise of internet sex work saw almost everyone get atomized.
Seeing adult creators work together with Hidden makes the young businesswoman feel like a bright future could be on the horizon, despite the grim present. Her app could fix some major issues within the industry, but even problems it can’t fix feel solvable when sex workers team up to gain structural power. Barey envisions a future where entrepreneurs like her and MelRose Michaels conquer even the payment processing issue. Might sex workers start a bank one day?
“We have an opportunity to come together, build community, and then build fundamental building blocks and own a lot of our own industry,” Barey says hopefully. “It will be so cool if we take advantage of this.”
Why Hidden is Hot with Young Creators
- A TikTok-style discovery page where fans find you. The internal traffic means less time posting on constantly deleted Instagrams and more time actually engaging.
- The lowest commission in the industry— only 18% compared to the standard 20%.
- Passive content sales are easier than ever with the storefront that runs in the background.
- Every chargeback is investigated and the unfair ones are disputed by Hidden. Even if the user’s bank gives them a chargeback, Hidden covers the cost for you up to a monthly limit, assuming no one was actually scammed.
- There’s no comment section. If fans want your attention, they can pay to message you— simple as that.
- A livestreaming feature is in the works and new updates come out almost every month.
(All photos in this story courtesy of Stella Barey)
See more at hidden.com/stellabarey
