Creator's Spicy Tea Interview
1) The Creator's Spicy Tea website is an absolute treasure trove of information, especially for people starting out as adult content creators. Your output is prodigious! You're publishing so much excellent content. Where do you get your ideas for topics for new articles?
Thank you so much for the acknowledgement of everything we put out. We have a overreaching goal of getting out every bit of information we can to help as many new or even veteran creators so it is always so good to hear things like this.
We tend to find new ideas for resources from our communities. We want to prioritize resources that the community is in need of in the moment. Often we will have requests coming from the Patreon, Creators Resource Chats, the private Patreon members only Telegram Group, and more often than not we will creep across the creator based online communities on Reddit to find what people are currently struggling with. Another way we come across ideas for resources is by all team members being heavily involved throughout the selling communities such as moderating for r/fetishhaven, r/FetishWantAds, and the affiliations we have with other selling communities. With that back end access, where we are helping run, or are affiliated with teams helping run these selling communities we are able to identify any misinformation or patterns right away and put out any information that we can to try and help.
2) One of my blog posts "How to Get Started as a Male Sex Worker" ranks high on the first page on Google for certain search terms so I get WhatsApp messages every day from guys wanting advice. The thing is, most of them (a) don't say "please", (b) haven't bothered to use a spell checker, or Google Translate or Gen AI to construct a coherent sentence, and (c) give me no indication that they have made any effort whatsoever to do any research, or inform themselves in any way. They've read the title of that blog post, clicked "contact" and sent me a crudely worded message just blurting out their demands like a grumpy toddler. I'm also a mod on /r/sexworkers and I remove dozens of posts every day of a similar genre to the above. I've looked at your keywords on Ahrefs and I know you mod subreddits so it seems likely you get these kinds of messages too? If so, do you respond to them? What do you say?
This is a really really tricky question and actually is something that I personally am working on defining my own boundaries around. In the past when anyone reached out for help, regardless of context or apparent effort, I would do my best to stop what I was doing to help. Eventually that led to folks tending to abuse or not acknowledge the time given.
Nowadays, when I get a request for information or when we see posts for information that are very clearly by somebody who has not taken their own time to do their own research, my response to them is always going to be a disappointment and likely piss them off. My response to a very generic question is very often to tell them to start researching, and I always make sure to link in a couple of resources for them to start with.
It is import for those who have been in the industry a while to remember it is not always the intent of someone to 'be lazy' and just ask for information spoon-fed to them. Sometimes folks just don't know where to go to find the information they are looking for. So if I can at least direct them to where information can be found, I can sleep better knowing that they have somewhere to start.
That said, if somebody comes with a more pointed question that demonstrates that they clearly have taken the time they need to do base research and then reach out, it doesn't matter what I'm doing, I'm stopping and I'm helping. I have incredible levels of respect for people who have done their research, who have done the bare minimum, who have taken the necessary steps and then can still acknowledge that they need more help.
3) What kind of questions do you think content creators should be asking content sale platforms regarding their privacy policies and what kind of responses would you expect? At what point is a platform too lazy, corrupt and incompetent to be entrusted with users' identity documents?
When I hand a platform my ID, I want plain-English answers to a short list of non-negotiables.
1. Where are my documents stored,
2. which country and which cloud,
3. how long are you retaining them, and what triggers deletion.
4. Who sees them, including the exact vendor and any sub-processors, and is everything encrypted throughout the process.
5. What are your breach response timelines, do you notify creators within x amount of hours, and do you publish annual transparency and security audit results.
6. How can I submit a data deletion request, and will that also purge backups.
7. Finally, how do you minimize data, for example can you verify age without storing a full passport photo forever.
If a platform cannot answer those in writing, links me to a vague FAQ, or asks me to email my ID to a generic support inbox, it is too lazy or too risky for my legal identity. My expectations are specific, transparently named vendors with contracts, dated policies with versions, documented retention schedules, audit trails, and security procedures creators can escalate to. I take privacy seriously because my content is face forward while my legal identity stays private, and that line does not get crossed. If a platform even hints at not being capable of managing that, im not giving them my data.
4) While I was writing these questions an email from FSC https://www.freespeechcoalition.com/
dropped into my inbox with 3 items of good news. Paraphrased.
New Policies for Deepfake and NCII Removal
Last year, the President signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which provides criminal and civil penalties for the distribution of revenge porn ("non-consensual intimate visual depictions") and deepfakes ("digital forgeries") involving intimate conduct. It goes into effect this May.
Actual Recourse for Banking Denials
In August, President Trump issued an Executive Order limiting the denial of banking services on the basis of "lawful business activities." While rules are still being promulgated as to how this will affect our industry's access to banking, early signs are positive.
Tipped Income Exemption
In July, Congress passed a law exempting much tipped income from taxation, a potential boon for adult creators.
I'm far from being a Trump supporter. I think the man urgently needs a history lesson. Imperialism doesn't work out well for imperialists. e.g. the British Empire, Hitler, the USSR. Him invading Venezuela and wanting to annex Greenland is a disaster. USA should be a peacekeeper. Being incapable of learning from history due to arrogance has a name. The name is hubris.
What do you think about those new laws and their implications for content creators?
I could never be a fan of Donald Trump either and will absolutely outwardly oppose him every step of the way. However, in his bumblings and wake of chaos, some of the changes made could potentially trend positive for creators or at least be utilized for a net positive by creators.
The tipped income change can be meaningful if your revenue genuinely qualifies as tips on the platform you use. On any platform, if you provide anything in return such as content or services, it is not a tip. If a portion of your earned income does actually count as a tip, the new deduction cap matters for budgeting and quarterly estimates for sure, but creators should absolutely make their lives easier and track tip type separately, retain platform statements, and confirm everything through a CPA before changing withholdings.
The new federal deepfakes and NCII Removal law gives folks real leverage, and it forces platforms and sites to remove flagged content quickly under oversight from FTC. That is just overall a net positive if enforcement targets the bad actors. But, there needs to be care taken that things like AI moderation doesn’t over-remove legal adult content. From my understanding there is healthy criticism from some digital rights groups about collateral censorship, so creators need tight documentation regarding their ownership of their content, and any licensing or rights to others content.
On banking access, the Executive Order is encouraging, it tells regulators to push back on de-banking of lawful businesses, but the real gauge is going to be how agencies and banks implement it. The morality codes etc that this EO are making unlawful benefited these businesses. I would not put it past some corporations to re-word it, tie a new bow on it, and keep trucking forward the same. I won't be restructuring my financial practices based on these headlines just yet until we see implementation practices and real-world use procedures.
5) What do you foresee as the future for adult content creators? I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Cory Doctorow but he's something of an expert on tech and where big tech's worst inclinations meet with society's right to use tech in ways that suit us, not to have our digital rights trampled all over. He's recently proposed https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
that (I paraphrase again (probably badly this time)) the reason it's illegal to jailbreak an iPhone, or Android phone and run whatever apps you want on it rather than just apps approved by Apple store or Google play, not just illegal in the USA but illegal everywhere in the world, is because USA has always threatened the rest of the world's governments with tariffs if they don't make it illegal in their own countries. And now that tariffs have happened anyway, there's no incentive to comply. So those laws will inevitably change. They have already started to change. I'm excited about the implications for sex workers. A social media app that openly supports us, or even one designed by, and specifically for, us could exist. An "Uber for escorts" type app that enables trust ratings for clients and providers could exist, a Gen AI assisted sex worker search engine could exist where clients could enter natural language queries explaining exactly who they'd like to meet, what they'd like to do, how much they want to spend, where and when, describe past experiences positive and negative and find their perfect match. All as apps. Not Web apps. Actual apps. What do you think?
I share the excitement that mobile ecosystems are loosening. Even if they are finally doing so due to, again, an entitled man's stupidity. If phone gatekeepers lose the ability to ban entire categories by policy flat out, we will finally be able to see creator-first apps that are not at the mercy of over restrictive and exclusionary adult content rules from the likes of Apple and Google. Though we are starting to see the possibility of this happening because of this loosening ecosystem, it is important to remember this isn't the final hurdle. It does not erase financial rails and local law constraints. But, damn am i excited with the concept of open paths for safe marketplaces, creator friendly discovery, community, and more direct ownership of our expression and autonomy.