How a Chilliwack woman built a career out of online sex work

Haley Perechy gets compliments on her feet all the time.

The comments are nothing new. Trips to the beach or nail salon have been accompanied by admiration her entire life.

“People would joke, ‘You should do foot fetish work because your toes are so long…And then one day I was like, ‘Wait, so why don’t I?”

So, one day, Perechy dipped her toe into the water of adult entertainment. She pulled out a camera, snapped a few photos of her feet, and posted them online.

Now, five years later, adult entertainment is Perechy’s full-time job. Her career lives in a corner of the wider world of online sex work between the world’s oldest profession and one of its newest: digital content creation. She writes erotic literature, voice-acts for animated porn, sexts, sells used clothing, and creates custom pictures and videos for clients. And she loves it.

It comes, like any career, with its own set of problems and solutions. With no physical proximity to anyone, it’s safer than many other parts of adult entertainment. But the online and independent nature of her work requires stickhandling her finances through a web of institutions that refuse to work with her.

Creativity and freedom

Perechy is not your typical pornstar.

“When you think of a cam model or a pornstar, you think thin and busty and in their early 20s,” Perechy said with a laugh. “I’m 34. I weigh over 300 pounds.” She does call herself “busty” and many of her clients appreciate her appearance. Many also appreciate her mind, coming to her for original stories or audio content.

She also works from home, setting her own hours and playing video games while she messages clients and takes orders.

Perechy’s career started with a few pictures of her toes on social media. When paid requests for custom work started rolling in, she accepted them and began to watch a new and creative career path roll out in front of her. The types of work expanded as she tried out new formats—after photographs, she posted a short erotic story on social media and quickly started fielding custom requests for those.

“People started messaging me, asking me if they could pay me to write a story for them with certain characters or something like that,” she said. “I wasn't even trying to do anything. I just posted a couple of things online and suddenly I was doing it for money.”

Perechy was already a creative person who loved to write. In adult entertainment, she gets to use those skills and exercise that creativity in new ways.

“It's awesome…I love writing. I loved finding out that I'm a voice actor. It was really fun. I have complete freedom and independence being my own boss. I absolutely love it,” she said.

And, as the years passed, she got more and more opportunities to use that creativity as clients.

“I have a couple clients who've been around for years and years and years,” she said. “At this point, I know everything they like and they completely trust me.”

A returning client, she explained, will get in touch and ask for something she knows they’ll like in the range of what they typically spend on her work.

“[Then] I get to come up with something fun that I know they’re into and have total control over it. That’s my favourite thing to do,” she said.

Perechy uses social media to post free content and connect with fans, some of whom (but not nearly all) become clients who pay for custom work.

Though she loves her work, Perechy doesn’t necessarily relate personally to the concept that sex work in the modern world is a form of empowerment. She thinks empowerment is a good word in the industry as a whole—but she doesn’t apply it to herself.

“I've always kind of been the way I am,” she said. Bubbly and open-minded, she speaks easily and openly about her work. It’s something that, like any other career, she excels at because it fits her skills and passions.

“I almost started out like this. And then I found [adult entertainment] and was like, ‘Oh, this is what I meant to do.’”

Few financial options

There are plenty of creative pursuits that don’t pay enough to become careers. In Perechy’s case, the disconnect between creativity and financial success is very different: people are willing to pay plenty for her work, but financial institutions are rarely willing to recognize its legitimacy even though it’s entirely legal income that she pays taxes on.

“The hardest part is not the stigma socially but the stigma financially,” Perechy said. “I can't get a mortgage through a bank because of what I do.”

She doesn’t mind if a person on the street thinks her career is bizarre. But when banks think the same way, it becomes a problem.

Financial institutions, Perechy said, consider handling the proceeds from adult entertainment or sex work money laundering. “I think it’s just an excuse to discriminate against sex workers,” she said.

Others in her profession have complained recently about similar financial holdups.

In Canada, specifically, the financial details of online sex work are even more complicated when it comes to taking payments from clients. Independent online payment options like Cashapp or Venmo don’t exist like they do south of the border.

“Sex-work-friendly online payment methods are almost non-existent,” she said. After years of trial-and-error, she’s resorted to using OnlyFans, a popular app for online sex work, to take payments. Perechy doesn’t use the app for any of her work, and instead directs clients to “tip” her account the cost of her custom work. But the app still takes a cut.

Safety and technology

The tricky online payment system that Perechy needs to use is a small price for the safety of online sex work. There are no crisp bills passed back and forth in her line of work, no production company controlling her wages, and no need to meet anyone face-to-face.

Porn has been on the internet since the internet was invented. But the commercial adult entertainment industry has an infamous host of dangers (from physical violence to trafficking to sexual assault) that independent online sex workers—many of whom are freelancing alone or running a small business like Perechy—can avoid. 

Adult content creation is becoming more accessible with the safety that independence and the internet can add.

“It's just so much easier now to get into that, especially because it's generally a woman-centric career—being able to do things online is a safety thing.”

Screens can mediate almost all physical risk involved and cut out money middlemen, but Perechy still gets the occasional creep online. But those interactions can pale in comparison to what women face online regardless of their work, lives, or choices.

“Realistically, I have more creeps message me in my personal life—on dating apps and stuff,” she said. “As a woman, especially as a woman online, you get that no matter what.”

Appreciating the alternative

Online sex work extends that metaphysical safe space to clients, Perechy says.

If Perechy doesn’t fit the typical description of a sex worker, neither does a lot of her work. Some of it is fetish work, which Perechy describes as simply “more specific than regular vanilla sex.” For her, that includes but isn’t necessarily limited to online domination and, of course, the foot photos that started her career.

And the men (her clientele is largely if not entirely male) who make up her business, she said, shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

“The guys who message us and purchase from us are not creepy, perverted losers,” she said. “These guys are…so insecure and so scared and the sweetest guys you'll ever meet in your whole life. They're just afraid of liking what they like.

“They're totally respectful. And they need to stop being shamed for some of the things they like.”

Perechy’s defence of alternative tastes extends beyond adult entertainment and into her plans for the future—which include a different business entirely with greater potential to lift up and empower others.

She wants to open a “cupcakery” (or a cupcake bakery) in Chilliwack in the next few years—before, she hopes, someone else does. She loves her job right now but knows she can’t do it forever.

Perechy is currently testing recipes, saving up, and planning the shop’s rockabilly aesthetic: involving large amounts each of pink glitter, skulls, leopard and zebra prints. She hopes that, in making an alternative space, she can empower other people with different personal styles, tastes and perspectives to be who they are and be accepted.

“I want to hire alternative style employees—people [for whom] it's been an issue [that they have] piercings and visible tattoos and colored hair, and have had a hard time getting certain kinds of jobs,” she said. “I want to empower women to be who they are. And I want that to show up in my cupcakery.”