LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyAdult film star Willow Ryder didn’t immediately recognize the man who entered the Miami party she was at earlier this month, but she knew he wasn’t part of the sex work industry.
He had an entourage and what appeared to be a hulking bodyguard. Her friends told her it was Clavicular, aka Braden Peters, a popular Kick livestreamer known for “looksmaxxing,” or resorting to extreme measures to improve his appearance.
Ryder says she didn’t know exactly who Clavicular was or what he talked about on his stream, but she knew that he had a massive following. And as a content creator herself, she felt it would be beneficial to her to appear on his stream, so she introduced herself to him. When she returned to her friends, she says they told her that “he's known for talking shit to women and embarrassing women and that he talks shit about people that do sex work.”
After Clavicular insulted the woman, Ryder says, she approached Pillow Talk host Ryan Pownall to talk to Clavicular, saying he was making sex workers uncomfortable. She says Pownall dismissed her concerns, claiming he had invited Clavicular as a way to promote the show, which regularly interviews porn stars and has 1.8 million followers on Instagram. “He said I was bringing a bad vibe … and Clavicular was the most famous person in the room,” she says. Pownall did not respond to a request for comment.
From there, the party got out of control.
As Clavicular was livestreaming from the event, other aspiring streamers and hangers-on flooded in. According to Ryder and Austin King, a reporter at the industry website Porn Crush who attended the party, a fight broke out, with partygoers screaming and running in various directions after someone allegedly pulled out a gun.
Though it appears that none of the attendees were hurt, on her way home an irate Ryder publicly called out Pownall and Clavicular on social media, posting on X: “I don’t care how famous a guest is—allowing women to be disrespected, screamed at, and put in an unsafe environment for clout is lame. Do better.” Her post got more than 817,000 views, prompting other sex workers and OnlyFans models to chide Pownall for putting their safety at risk so a large streamer could exploit them for content.
Pownall ultimately issued a public apology on Instagram, expressing remorse for the women in the industry who felt “disrespected or unwelcome” because of “certain guests” at the event. He also canceled a planned appearance at a club Clavicular has promoted, Bacara, in Miami Beach.
But the fallout from the Pillow Talk party has prompted a wider conversation within the adult content industry about livestreamers and podcast bros objectifying and humiliating women and sex workers in their content and compromising their safety. Many called out the hypocrisy of men like Clavicular, who allegedly runs his own OnlyFans agency and features models on streams, for directly profiting off sex workers while publicly excoriating them. A source close to Clavicular confirms he has explored starting an OnlyFans agency but has concerns about publicly promoting it due to his audience’s dislike of sex workers. Clavicular did not respond to requests for comment.
Misogyny and anti-sex-worker hate have always been a major issue on the internet—but with the rise of the “manosphere,” the term used to describe streamers and podcast bros who often demean women, it’s arguably gotten much worse. Social media abounds with clips of young, white men interrogating women about their body count or prying them for explicit details about their sex lives. This trend applies doubly to content creators on platforms like OnlyFans, who must maintain some form of a public persona in order to garner a following and who invariably attract hate from men as a result.
“I think it's pretty hard to be online as a sex worker and not on some level engage with” the manosphere, says porn performer and content creator Ophelia Fae, who made a viral video in response to the Pillow Talk debacle calling out Pownall and Clavicular. Fae says she has only interacted with the manosphere accidentally, in the context of misogynistic influencers stitching her content and adding whorephobic commentary. But many adult performers willingly appear on massive podcasts like Fresh and Fit, Whatever, and Off the Record With DJ Akademiks, all of which have at least a million subscribers and regularly produce viral clips of men berating adult content creators for profiting off of sex work.
“The whole premise of these podcasts is bringing on various adult workers to shame them, humiliate them, get sound bites off of them, or in some cases for those girls to troll them back and get kicked off of the podcast,” explains Fae, summarizing the genre as “rage bait.” “And those clips get a ton of views and engagement.”
Even ostensibly sex-worker-friendly podcasts like Pillow Talk and Plug Talk, hosted by OnlyFans creators Adam22 and Lena the Plug, can veer uncomfortably close into sensationalism for the purpose of creating content. “The old-school [porn] agents and the studios hate Ryan,” says King, the adult industry blogger who broke the Pownall and Clavicular story. “They think he makes the girls look bad on camera.”
The economics of the adult industry, however, create major incentives for women to appear even on the most misogynistic podcasts and streams. As the infrastructure of the online porn world shifts away from the traditional studio system and more toward an individual subscription model, the onus is increasingly on performers to promote themselves rather than rely on agents or managers to do it for them. And in the incredibly saturated OnlyFans space, participating in “rage bait” is often seen as among the most effective ways to do that.
Ryder experienced this when she appeared on the influencer BenDaDonnn’s stream last November. At one point, Ben called in the streamer Deshae Frost, who peppered Ryder with questions about whether she has sex with her boyfriend after filming a gang-bang, calling him “gay,” and making crude jokes about her anatomy. In the comments, “it brought all the men who hate women out of the woodwork,” she says. Nonetheless, after she did the stream, her Instagram followers “shot up,” and she says she earned more on OnlyFans that month than she ever had before.
“I try to do things strategically,” she says. And many streamers “are connected with famous people, which means they have a lot of eyes.”
Perhaps no streamer is more aware of that than Clavicular. Though he has only a little more than 7,500 average viewers on his streams, he has ascended to viral infamy in part via the “clipping” industry, where independent contractors are paid to cut down short excerpts from his streams that go viral on X, Instagram, and TikTok. Clips featuring Clavicular can rack up millions of views, making the prospect of appearing in one of them extremely alluring to those trying to accumulate online influence, regardless of how they may be treated on camera. Clavicular has even created an app, Clav’s List, for women interested in appearing on his Kick stream, which reportedly has a 2,000-person waiting list.
But criticizing one influencer for giving another a platform to harass women does little to detract from the central issue at hand, says Fae, which is that this is the reality of what attracts engagement now.
“There’s always gonna be another Clav,” says Fae. “This is not just an isolated incident.”
