Offline with SIRI DAHL
Updated: Oct 25, 2022
INTERVIEW BY MOLLY SIMMONS
Siri Dahl rose to fame between 2012 and 2015 as one of porns breakout bombshells. While we rarely see this kind of meteoric success, the landscape of her career was anything but a straight shot to the top. This season, Petit Mort got the privilege to talk to Siri about how she started, why she retired, and the reasons for coming back to the job she loved—this time with a twist. She is a bonafide gamer on twitch who self produces porn with her partner and independently collaborates with adult studios in LA. She is an inspiration for all who seek the independence to follow what makes them happy.
PETIT MORT (MOLLY SIMMONS)
First of all, thank you so much for being here, we’re so excited to feature you in the issue. Where I’d like to start is your work as both a porn performer and a streamer—which is really unique and is something that we’ve not yet featured in Petit Mort before. Can you share a little bit more about how you became a streamer, your relationship to gaming, and how your audiences intersect or differ?
SIRI DAHL
To start off, I always regretted not starting Twitch streaming in 2013 or 2014 when my fans were constantly asking me to do it. I think I resisted because I was worried I would have imposter syndrome, because I’ve never been a hardcore gamer. When Twitch was becoming a thing around that time, it was just super duper hardcore gamers that were on there. I was intimidated by that, honestly. So I never attempted it. But I always had the temptation, it was sort of a bucket list thing. I thought “oh, one day I’ll start streaming video games.”
Then that Sunday came when I was stuck at home during quarantine early on in the pandemic. I launched my Twitch channel in May of 2020. Since then I’ve been continually growing my brand as a streamer and developing the type of content that I like to stream. I’ve invested so much money in really good equipment for streaming.
It’s very funny to me, because it’s not really a business yet – it’s incredibly challenging to build a loyal audience. Even though I already have hundreds of thousands of followers as a porn star, it doesn’t necessarily translate directly into streaming or streaming income. The income is nice, it encourages me to stay online longer when I stream, but it’s pennies compared to what I make doing my adult content. That’s a little bit of the fun part for me—it not being a huge income generator gives me more freedom because I don’t rely on streaming. Therefore, when I stream I do whatever the fuck I want.
My audience for Twitch is mostly my existing fans of my work in porn. A lot of European fans like to come watch my streams. I’ve noticed that and I thought that was interesting, especially because I don’t stream on European friendly times. They’re up at 4am to watch my streams. And I’m like, well, this is crazy. But I love you. Thank you.
The type of content that I stream is really just whatever I want to do. I could change the content of my streams to gather a larger audience on Twitch, but that wouldn’t be as much fun for me. I pretty much exclusively stream RPGs – I’ve done several, beginning-to-end role playing game streams. Not in one sitting, of course–But I feel like I sat there for a week.
I generally only stream one game at a time. Right now I’m playing Mass Effect. So every stream that I do when a game comes on, it’s Mass Effect, and that will be the case until I finish it and then I will play a different game. A lot of streamers don’t do that, though, they’ll jump around. But again, that’s a style of streaming that is different from what I do because for those people it’s probably their primary source of income. So they’re doing things to continually expand and grow their audience. And I’m just over here like, I will stay at 75 concurrent viewers forever if it means that I can continue making just a tiny amount of money, but doing whatever the fuck I want on here–like if I want to play Mass Effect until I finish it.
There is another stream category called just chatting that I do a lot. And that is literally just what it is. It’s just chatting. My fans really enjoy that too. It’s like a cam show without any of the nudity or adult content. It’s literally just me sitting there like we’re doing right now. And I’m just talking, but it can turn into a Q&A.
PM
Do you do those as an adult performer too – non sexual cam shows?
SD
Twitch is extremely safe for work. So I do really keep it safe for work. I got suspended once for 24 hours for wearing a bikini while I was cooking in my kitchen. Twitch has very specific wardrobe guidelines that say you have to wear “situationally appropriate” clothing for the activity you’re doing. I know that you’ll find this funny – my response to that 24 hour suspension for wearing a bikini when I was cooking was wearing head-to-toe long sleeves in the hot tub and pool stream. It’s another popular category on Twitch, which is basically a thing because people want an excuse to wear swimsuits on Twitch. And it’s not “situationally appropriate” to wear complete head to toe long sleeve clothing in a pool.
PM
And you really did that?
SD
Oh, yeah, that’s what I did as my very own very quiet form of resistance. The most situationally inappropriate clothing that I could possibly think of wearing in a pool. And surprise, surprise, did it get me suspended? No, of course not. Because that’s not breaking the rules.
THE CONTEXT OF FANS ASKING ME TO PARTAKE IN THEIR SEXUAL FULFILLMENT IS REMOVED. THEY ARE YOUR PEERS IN THAT MOMENT.
PM
How frustrating that Twitch is just yet another stream that has a lot of misogyny and whorephobia in it. That’s disappointing.
SD
Yeah. I don’t even get that much into it. Because again, at the end of the day, it’s stupid but at least Twitch is somewhat welcoming. They’re extremely into censorship, happy and safe for work – they are owned by Amazon, which I don’t love either – but as far as mainstream social media platforms go they’re okay. At least they allow me to exist on their platform. And they do give you warnings and they’re very clear about their guidelines, which I appreciate. And they verified me after a year and a half. I finally got Twitch partner status, which is essentially game verified, you get a blue checkmark. It’s just recognition that you’re contributing something of value to the community on Twitch to make that partner status, and I really wanted that. So actually getting it after 18 months was a huge deal to me. That’s more than I’ve gotten from any other platform. All I get from the other ones is shadow banning.
PM
What did you do to get the blue check? Do you have to show a certain number of followers?
SD
Essentially there’s like a path to partner that everyone who streams on Twitch has the opportunity to get, but it’s really hard. It’s basically a combination, but the biggest factor is maintaining a certain number of viewers on average for every stream and you also have to stream a certain amount of hours within a one month period.
PM
So it’s based on averages from your audience and those numbers are meant to prove that you have a consistently large enough audience.
SD
Yeah, absolutely– to warrant their partner status.
PM
So you mentioned that because Twitch isn’t your primary income stream you have a little bit more freedom. In your adult performing, is there a type of content that you really love that you don’t get to do all that often because it’s not popular?
SD
Most of my job at this point is creating my own content. That’s where most of my business is happening – I make my own clips, photo sets, etc, for fan platforms. I’m OnlyFans, Fansly, ManyVids, things like that. To a degree, that is really demand driven–I want to make a good living, so I make the content I know will sell the best with a large part of my fan base. And sometimes that leads me to create content for fetishes, or interests that I don’t necessarily have a lot personally invested in. But the majority of my scenes that I shoot are just me and my boyfriend doing whatever we do normally sexually. So that’s actually fantastic. I still do a lot of studio work, though, I fly out to Los Angeles for a week every month, and that’s when I’m doing work for mainstream porn studios.
To me, there’s some missed opportunity there, because I don’t get to do a whole lot of acting roles. I am a little sad that I don’t get to do more of that but I’m not based in LA. So people don’t know how to hire me and I also don’t have an agent who’s putting my photo on their website. So directors don’t immediately think of my name when they’re casting for things. I actually got nominated for Best Actress in a vignette scene for the AVN awards this year. I didn’t win it, but I always wanted to be nominated for Best Actress. And that was fucking cool to have that. Just having that nomination this year made me realize I want to prioritize that type of work more when I’m doing studio work. I want to do more projects that are very plot heavy, and story driven. It’s rare these days for porn companies to shoot a feature film. Vignettes are more common, which is like one hour with one sex scene, but it is very story driven. A big goal for me in 2022 is to do more acting roles. I find them very fulfilling.
PM
Personally I think the story is so interesting, and it adds so much investment into the sex when you get there. You’re like, I’m excited to watch this sex scene. And it’s super hot.
SD
Exactly.
PM
I think it’s interesting when you mentioned that a lot of your content is just you and your partner doing your normal thing. It’s so funny. There’s really no end to the customer’s desire for pretty basic B/G content. Which is amazing because I guess at the end of the day people are not necessarily subscribing because your content is so wildly different from anyone else’s, but because they’re invested in you as a person.
SD
I joke about this all the time. Another type of content that I do a lot of are solo JOI videos–jerk off instructions. It’s me, sitting in front of a camera, talking to the camera as though I’m talking directly to the audience and I’m instructing the viewer on how I want them to jerk off. There’s different tint you can lay over that–you can do a femme domme jerk off, you can do a roleplay. I have one that ‘s a roleplay where I’m doing a mommy role. You can do all kinds of different flavors of that but at the end of the day, every single JOI video I do is just me talking to a camera, telling someone how to jerk off. Not that different from each other, and still that’s the number one thing that I can never make enough of. It doesn’t matter how many I make, I’m always getting messages all day that are asking me for more. So it’s fun for me because it only takes a couple minutes. Most of my videos like that are five minutes long. So I’ll change my outfit, do my hair slightly differently. It doesn’t have to be wildly different, and people really love it. It makes sense, though, because it feels more personal to watch those types of videos than just two people having sex. I’ve had people message me asking for JOI but also asking me to just make conversation the first few minutes. Because they just want to know you as a person.
PM
Do you find a huge difference in your audience on Twitch? You said that your Twitch audience is a lot of your adult performance audience, but do you find the way that you interact with people on different platforms is very different? Obviously, Twitch doesn’t have the sexual component, but do you joke around more or give more of your personal self when you’re streaming?
SD
I would say I’m actually a little bit nicer to my fans on Twitch than I am to my subscribers. I know that sounds weird because they’re paying to subscribe to my OnlyFans, but I think that’s partly why. I think it’s applicable to mention here I don’t have a persona. Some performers actually choose a persona – not pretending to be a totally different person, but you might enhance some personality qualities or take on more of a quality you don’t normally really have as your off-camera self. I’ve never had that approach. It would be too goddamn hard for me – I’m already a Gemini!
I’m very much myself, I just stream of-consciousness say shit on stream. And that’s exactly how I am in every other context. A lot of the videos that I make with my boyfriend have weird blooper moments and stuff. I’ve always been the type of performer where I just let everything be–I do not project a level of grace or elegance, I do not have those things. With that being said, I think that I am a little bit more friendly on a platform like Twitch because I am interacting with fans, just as another person on a gaming platform and the people realize that they’re just there to watch me game–the context of fans asking me to partake in their sexual fulfillment is removed. They are your peers in that moment.
I’m very specific about following the rules on Twitch. I do get guys who will come into a stream and ask me to stand up and show my outfit. They’ll ask me to do things as though it were a cam show, and I can tell that they’re doing it because they’re finding it titillating sexually. That’s the only time on Twitch where I’m like, “go away”. On my only fans, I’ve always run it myself, which is really, really demanding to do. So that’s why sometimes I might be a little less nice to my subscribers, because I have very little time. If someone joins my OnlyFans, even though they just paid $7 or whatever and then they start messaging me constantly without ever tipping and they’re asking for super specific stuff–I will get annoyed. But it’s because that boundary is now there, you know? Now you are asking me to do my actual job, and you are being extremely demanding and not compensating me for my time. So there’s a different attitude that comes out of me in that context. Whereas on Twitch this isn’t my job, I don’t make any money doing this anyways, so we can all be chill.
PM
Because you are so authentic, how do you decide what things not to share with your fans and what things to keep to yourself?
SD
I don’t talk about like, deeply personal things, and if it’s not directly related to my work as a sex worker I’m not going to share it anyway. I don’t really talk about my family. I’ll talk about my family a little bit on Twitch when people ask – people are aware that I have parents. But I don’t get too detailed with that stuff. Then obviously in the context of communicating with fans as a sex worker I do not really entertain questions that are deeply personal.
As far as with my partner, we do whatever we want I would say. We do have our own personal boundaries in our relationship, and those also extend to the stuff that we shoot together. I think most of the boundaries when it comes to filming are my specific boundaries, and most of those are around certain fetishes. For example, people ask me all the time for fart content. And that’s a pretty severe boundary for me. And I just say, no, thank you for asking. I do not make that type of content.
PM
One thing that I’m really interested in is what it’s like being a woman on Twitch or even a porn performer on Twitch. You mentioned at the beginning that you didn’t feel like you were a legit, hardcore gamer was part of that because you were a woman and Twitch was very male dominated.
SD
100% that was part of it. GamerGate was also happening actively in 2013–when I was reaching the height of my career in porn. It was also the fact that even though I knew I loved gaming, I never had an opportunity to become a serious gamer. I didn’t get to play console games when I was growing up. All the games that everyone else played for hours and hours and hours–I didn’t ever have access to those. So I was starting at Ground Zero. But that’s one of the things that’s cool about my trajectory. I retired from porn for five years, from 2015 to 2020. In that five year gap I just worked a desk job as a civilian, I had so much free time that I got super into gaming.
I JUST WANTED TO RUN AWAY AND JOIN THE CIRCUS.
I WANTED TO BE IN PORN AGAIN
BECAUSE IT MADE ME HAPPIER.
PM
What brought you back into the industry?
SD
I realized that I missed it. The reason I came back is also slightly tied to the reason that I left.
One of the biggest reasons why I left–and there were a couple–was that my career in porn strained my relationship with my immediate family. My parents really did not support my decision, and they didn’t understand it. So for the three years when I started doing porn from 2012 to 2015 I saw my mom maybe once a year for lunch or something. It was just really hard, because I always had a great relationship with my family growing up. My parents are still married, and they also had a really hard time understanding me not being a sexually monogamous person. That alone wouldn’t have caused me to retire, but I was also married for a time and that relationship was very, very toxic and I needed to get away from it. Because of all these things, and just my own biological situation, I was very depressed. So that’s what led me to want to retire.
But after I retired and moved out to Kentucky from LA, and worked different jobs out here I started to really internalize a lot of sex worker stigma. That was interesting because I had never felt that before. Obviously, I felt stigmatized, but I had never felt shame for wanting to be a porn star. Then once I became a porn star, I never felt any shame about any of that. Even with my parents not liking what I did, I still didn’t feel shame. I was very proud of my career. When I retired, though, it was this weird thing – I also didn’t hide the fact that I had done porn.
Once I went back into “civilian life,” this thing kept happening where well-meaning people who I would consider friends would make the automatic assumption that I left porn because it traumatized me. Or that I was abused in some way by the industry. And the tone that people would take when they found out I had done porn and left, it was like, “oh, good for you. Wow, that must have been so hard.” It was almost like they’re trying to tell me that they’re sorry my pet died or something. It was very weird and subtle and I think that I really started to internalize it over time.
I still never felt shame about it but I stopped wanting to tell people about it because their responses misconstrued so much of the context. And I ended up having to constantly explain to people that the porn industry isn’t like that. I actually fucking loved my job, my job was the one thing that I was always happy about. I retired because of all this other crap around my job that I couldn’t control that needed to change. Ultimately for me, the five years that I was in retirement was sort of a journey of figuring out how to navigate things in my personal life so that I could have the good healthy relationships that I wanted to have and that I deserve to have while also returning mentally to the place where I realized actually made me happy and what I actually want to be doing with my life.
Ultimately those five years led me to realize that I want to be a sex worker. That was the strongest calling I felt in the first place, and that’s why I chose to do porn when I was 23 even though I had to step away for some time. I also look at it as a coming of age, because I was so young when I started. It’s funny because 23 years is older than when most women in the porn industry start. I’ve always been kind of a late bloomer too, so I had less other life experience at 23 than I think a lot of women do who enter the porn industry, even at younger ages. I feel like all my other life experiences in that five year retirement period also led me to realize that I definitely don’t like doing all those other jobs. Definitely not. I finished college, and I got my degree. I explored so many things, and every single one of them would end up disappointing me.
So I definitely got to a place where I wanted to be in my early 20s, I just wanted to run away and join the circus and I wanted to be in porn again because it truly made me happier. A huge component of that is the way that I do my porn career. It’s not this way for everyone, because some people choose to have more management or agents or whatever. But I’ve always been independent and I am 100% my own boss. That is one of the biggest draws to me is that I get to do my business the way I want to do it. I get to make my own schedule, which is great, because I’m not a morning person!
PM
Honestly, the freedom over your time in your life is so invaluable. It’s just so amazing. Do you have any upcoming projects that you’re really excited about? Is there a new game coming out that you really want to try? What is on the horizon for Siri Dahl?
SD
I have some exciting projects coming up in 2022! I always have stuff that I’ve shot that hasn’t been released yet. I’ve auditioned for some stuff – I don’t know where that’s gonna go yet but I’m really hoping to get some cool roles in a vignette or feature or more acting-based scenes. So I’m looking forward to that. Mostly I’m working really hard on my own content, really scaling it up and doing more in general–trying to solidify what I have created as far as my content and my fan base. As far as games – anyone who’s as much of an RPG nerd as me is probably super excited about the new Horizon Zero Dawn game that’s coming out super soon. That’s one of my favorite video games ever. I played the first one and immediately got a cosplay outfit. The main character is amazing. I’m actually very excited because I’m going to do my big cosplay photo shoot in a couple weeks that I’ve been waiting for for a year.
Part of my gaming nerdery also includes cosplaying when I can. Cosplay for me is sort of like Twitch, I don’t really make an income doing it but I enjoy it and it’s still content. Even though I’m not a professional cosplayer, my fans get excited to see that content. Just last night I ordered a wig. Originally when I was going to do the Aloy cosplay I had actual red hair, so I would have been able to use my own real hair on my head. But now with this pink hair it doesn’t work. So I bought a human hair wig, which was so expensive, and I’m going to have to figure out how to style it myself. I’ll probably end up streaming it live on Twitch – that’s my intention. The next thing will be to do a wig styling stream – that will be fun.
PM
I love it. Is there anything that you want people to know about you or that you want to share?
SD
I think I’ll throw up one thing that I’m super excited about–I did my first ever bisexual threesome in porn, which is funny because I’m a bisexual woman. So arguably, every fucking threesome I’ve ever done is a bisexual threesome but of course that’s not how the porn industry labels these things because of heteronormativity. So my first bisexual threesome with two men who are also fucking each other just came out a couple days ago and I’m so proud of it. It was one of the only times I’ve ever gotten an opportunity to do a scene where I’m experiencing something truly for the very first time in my life in front of a camera. I’ve had lots of threesomes, even off camera in my personal life, but never with two bisexual men who are completely into each other.
PM
You’ve hit the Holy Grail!
SD
Yeah, I’m very excited about it. I’m also doing a brand collaboration with Adult Time – they’re the company that produced that scene. I don’t know when this interview comes out but that brand collab will probably be over because it ends in March. But it’s very exciting. And all my fans can go to adulttime.com If they want to watch that scene. It’s pretty been amazing. Thank you.
SIRI DAHL INTERVIEWED BY MOLLY SIMMONS PHOTOS BY NATASHA INAMORATA