A Q&A with Siri

Aug 16, 2023

A Q&A With Siri Dahl

This month we’re here with Siri Dahl, a multi-award-winning adult film performer and content creator with a background in writing and podcasting. As one of adult's most recognizable independent models, Siri collaborates with dozens of content platforms and film studios in the industry, and has been an ambassador for the Adult Time studio brand since 2021. She's an outspoken advocate for the rights of sex workers, as seen most recently in Netflix's "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story."

The documentary follows a scandal around non-consensual pornography on Pornhub (with some videos featuring children), and how the aftermath affected adult performers. In the film, Siri shares how the backlash hurt performers, rather than the platform itself.

We spoke with her about what it’s like to be a voice of justice for adult performers, and how attacks on porn performers become attacks on everyone — our rights to free speech and identity expression in particular.

Can you summarize Money Shot for the new readers in the room?

The documentary is about the current iteration of what we’ve been calling “the war on porn.” The two sides are 1. The adult industry and people like me, performers who make our living independently as business owners within the industry, and 2. These far right, religiously-affiliated organizations like Exodus Cry, which have been on a decades-long mission to censor the porn industry or intentionally classify porn as sex trafficking.

The documentary came into being because of a huge bomb of a New York Times op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in 2020, The Children of Pornhub, which documented cases of under-age sex abuse and nonconsensual material that had been uploaded to PornHub. In response to that op-ed, the anti-porn orgs filed a class action suit against PornHub, saying Pornhub was profiting from trafficking.

How did the PornHub suit affect your business?

After the suit was filed, Visa and Mastercard stopped allowing payments on PornHub, which meant that I lost a consistent several thousand dollars a month. That was never the bulk of my income but it was a good chunk — and that revenue stream has never come back.

Pornhub still doesn’t have a functional way for models to sell their content.* Your best option is ad share revenue for the clips you share, but a clip is effectively a free video, which I avoid since I don’t like to give myself away.

This problem should not have impacted me and my colleagues in this way. At its root, it was an issue with the platform’s content moderation, but the only people who ultimately suffered from the resulting policy changes are the performers — the models, the independent workers, the working class people of the porn industry. It doesn’t hurt executives.

*Ed note: Since our interview, Pornhub has launched a new clip sales platform called Uviu, which is intended to reboot models’ ability to share and sell exclusive adult content via Pornhub. Siri is on it, but she says it's still so new that it’s not clear whether it will be a viable replacement for the income she used to receive through sales on Pornhub’s original model content platform, Modelhub.

Why did you decide to lend your voice to the film?

When Nick Kristof interviewed me, I shared a lot of nuanced thoughts and observations, none of which he included in the hit piece on PornHub. That didn’t feel great for me.

When Suzanne Hillinger, the director of Money Shot, reached out to me, she said she had thought it was weird that he only talked to one porn performer and cherry-picked my quote. She imagined there was probably more there.

She was right, of course. It only took me a 15-minute zoom call to feel like I could trust her with my story.

How has your appearance in the movie changed your relationship with ‘big porn’?

I feel a lot more seen since the film came out. I’ve always been pretty vocal politically, and also about my desire to protect the industry. People didn’t always notice that before, but since the doc came out, people will stop me at an industry event and be like, “Hey, thank you so much for being willing to appear in such a highly visible thing, and for doing this issue justice the way you spoke.” People tell me I’m their favorite porn star because of it. That’s the porn star I want to be.

That kind of response has also helped me accept my role as an activist within our industry. I hadn’t identified with the term before since I’m not really an organizer, I’m just willing to be vocal. But I’m now encouraged to do more. I’ve kept in touch with Mike Stabile from the Free Speech Coalition, who also appeared in the documentary. The next time they do a lobbying trip to DC, I want to go with them. I want to be more involved on that level, in the halls of Congress.

I would be passionate about these things even if I didn't do the work that I do. I’m queer and in a poly relationship, a lot of my friends are queer. A lot of my friends are trans or nonbinary also. If it has anything to do with gender, sexuality, bodily autonomy or sex as a concept, it touches the industry and also my personal life. And living with that fear in Louisville, Kentucky, where I’m based, it’s all really scary.

What’s unique about your political voice as an adult performer?

My lived experience is a part of why people listen to me. I’m not a typical porn star. I was older than the average age when I started in 2012. Then I left for 5 years and came back. I’ve had a different perspective because my experience in sex work has been pretty varied. If anything, that gives me a sense of relatability. Like, I was working at a job where I made $28k a year four years ago and I left that to come back to porn, and I still live in Louisville, KY. I can speak in a way that people find relatable, which creates a sense of trust that makes people more eager to listen to me when I say, hey, we’re all in danger, but especially sex workers.

What does the industry need in terms of advocacy?

There’s our union, APAG (the Adult Performer Actors’ Guild), but I don't know that there’s as much membership as there should be. FSC (the Free Speech Coalition), our trade association, doesn’t have nearly as many individual content creators as it should.

The big thing missing in my mind is direct labor organizing. I don’t know how far off something like that would be. But the median age in the industry is pretty young and there’s a lot of people who come in and don’t intend necessarily for it to be their lifelong career. They just want to make money for a couple years and leave and do something else — for a lot of people, this is a good way to save for grad school or something. The industry is somewhat transient, which works against us when we try to organize and take back our power.

We should have been able to organize better by now around financial discrimination. A huge wave of stars had had their bank accounts closed with no notice by Wells Fargo and Chase banks. It keeps happening for no reason other than stigma; being an adult actor means you own a legal business. The discrimination is insane.

It’s a classic example of when you have a population of workers who are too busy working because we’re all working on contract — where is a 22-year-old going to find the time to campaign politically for being able to keep a bank account? The executives don’t really suffer those problems.

“Porn is really the canary in the coal mine for free speech.”

Are you looking at the SAG strike as inspiration at all?

A strike would be wild. One of the things I've seen spurred by WGA is people asking when SAG is going to start including people in the adult industry. The only reason we can’t get SAG credits is because of stigma and discrimination.

Not to mention, in my personal interactions with mainstream producers and actors, I've seen and heard about a lot more exploitation happening behind closed doors than anything that's currently a part of the mainstream adult industry in the US. Sex is always above-board in the adult industry, because it's literally our business.

What’s it like to be in the industry right now at this moment in technological history?

There’s a whole new era of anti-porn legislation that’s putting everybody’s free speech at risk, and it’s terrifying how ill-prepared people are who don’t work in this industry.

For instance, Utah* just passed a mandatory age verification bill with the stated intent of protecting children on the internet (and there’s a similar one getting a lot of support at the federal level). In addition to an age gate, which is standard for porn sites, the Utah law requires the user to submit their legal ID to access the site. Think about submitting your ID somewhere online: makes you kind of nervous, right? You should only share personal information like that if it’s secure.

Case in point: Louisiana had already passed a nearly identical bill, but there, they have digital wallet technology that acts as a safe database for that personal information. Utah doesn’t have that. So in effect, Utah made it illegal to access porn at all, since they’re requiring compliance without offering any infrastructure for sites to get compliant.

To make matters worse, Utah also has a copycat clause saying it goes into full effect when 5 states adopt the same legislation.

*Aside from Louisiana, states passing age verification laws are largely leaving it up to individual platforms to verify/store/report user ID information in third party databases — a significant security and surveillance risk. Recently, Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas have passed age verification laws. Texas's law could be the most impactful, because it's just as technologically illiterate as Utah's, but the huge population of Texas occupies a much larger share of porn consumers.

How does that impact free speech for everyone?

As we’re already starting to see, statutes are restricting access to porn sites in the name of protecting children. Blocking porn is blocking free speech, and if you’re allowed to block free speech somewhere, that opens the floodgates to block it more broadly.

To be clear, it is very reasonable for parents to not want their kids to find porn accidentally. But these bills are too open-ended to be serious about preserving anyone’s freedom of speech. Their ulterior motive is censoring queer communities.

Case in point: a lot of states are starting to classify any content online of trans people existing as pornography. Which means that governments will try to block the expression of being trans. This will have a direct impact on queer communities and marginalized communities of any kind. If, by law, you can’t express your transness, what else can you not express?

Porn is really the canary in the coal mine for free speech. When our industry is facing challenges with being able to do our legal business safely and openly, when we’re being censored so heavily, that doesn’t bode well for anyone else. They’re just coming for the pornographers first.

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A Q&A with Siri

A Q&A With Siri Dahl

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