Who's Afraid of Bardot Smith

Ripley Soprano
Nov 11
10 min read

RIPLEY SOPRANO in CONVERSATION with BARDOT SMITH PHOTOGRAPHY by PENELOPE DARIO STYLING by BRENDA DAVIS

Meet the woman who rewrote the rules of sex work, built the marketing playbook everyone now copies, and told women everywhere to stop asking nicely and start demanding money.

The struggle over women’s labor has always been a struggle over visibility, ownership, and survival. Italian activist and theorist Silvia Federici has traced this back to the witch trials, when women who held land or communal power were criminalized, stripped of resources, and recast as threats to the emerging capitalist order. The tactic was simple: privatize the commons, criminalize women’s autonomy, and declare their survival strategies—herbs, midwifery, helping your neighbor—illegal.

Decades later, Bardot Smith emerged as one of the first sex workers of her generation to circulate ideas widely online and to insist on direct payment—not just from those explicitly seeking erotic services, but from anyone who consumed her work, her persona, or her ideas. In 2015, alongside the other women tweeting under #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, she reframed what many dismissed as “just whores trying to get paid” into a universal demand: girlfriends should get paid, mothers should be paid, women everywhere deserve compensation for the labor that underpins both private and public life.

In doing so, Bardot pulled Federici’s materialist feminism, Marxist feminism and demands for Wages for Housework (the 1970s international women’s movement calling for recognition and payment for all care work) into the digital century. She made the politics of wages visceral and personal for those of us who grew up as girls online, collapsing theory into every 140 character Tweet, with much provocation. Her intervention paved the way for what we now take for granted: OnlyFans as a multi-billion-dollar industry, teenage girls around the world posting CashApp handles in their bios, and an entire culture reshaped by the expectation that visibility itself can and should be monetized.

But as this interview makes clear, with every new strategy of survival comes a new wave of backlash. What Bardot names is a modern witch trial—where sex workers and women who monetize their visibility are cast as dangerous, shut out of payment processors, and forced into increasingly surveilled and precarious systems. The parallels to Federici’s framework are uncanny: every time women discover new ways to maximize the value of their labor, new mechanisms appear to strip them of agency.

Our conversation traces this history in real time—from the early internet hustle, to the viral resistance of #GiveYourMoneyToWomen, to today’s data-driven capitalism that thrives on sex workers’ labor while erasing them from the platforms they built. It’s a reminder that nothing about the current digital order was inevitable. Like the witch trials, it is a deliberate foreclosure—and like the witch trials, it demands resistance.

PETIT MORT (Ripley Soprano)

I’m so nervous, I have been following your work for over a decade. I distinctly remember watching your Tweets as a Domme rub up against those of Indigenous and Black women theorists, journalists, activists and being like, “Oh damn, it’s about to go down, there’s about to be a real intersection of conversation around not only thought production but fundamental questions about the whole system of value production and compensation for that labor.” For those who don’t know, can you tell our readers about what went down with the globally viral hashtag #GiveYourMoneytoWomen back in 2015?

BARDOT SMITH

Since we’re going back to the classics, we can go back even further… I had been dabbling in less formalized forms of sex work before that, because it was what was available at the time. There were a few forums, some proto-sites being developed, but no real central conversation. You were on your own if you wanted to figure it out. I had tuition to cover and bills, so I had to make it work. I’d already done phone sex and other things accessible to me when I was younger. Now the internet was here, sites had developed, and I thought: let me just go after it. I started noticing a big split between how people were using social media then. This was before OnlyFans, right at the beginning of that era. People were using their social media to direct traffic to sites like Nite Flirt or Clips4Sale—very explicitly adult-coded corners of the internet. I thought: how do I bring my profile out of that category and make it visible to people who aren’t already looking there? Because only people on Nite Flirt are going to find you, right? If you just post a link, it ends there. There had to be something else that pulled people in, made them curious, and eventually got them to activate some form of payment. Now it seems like basic digital marketing, totally the norm.