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Sandra was in her mid-60s and contemplating retirement when she began putting on live online sex shows with her husband. The now-71-year-old great-grandmother—who performs under the name Sandra with her now-53-year-old husband, Christopher (last names withheld for anonymity)—never dreamed of becoming a star on Chaturbate, a website where performers engage in sex acts for tips. She didn’t even know that such a place existed until seven years ago, when the pair saw a segment on TV about a couple who cammed on the platform. It was then that Sandra turned to Christopher in their Northern California home and said, “We could do that better.”
Six months later, in late December 2018, the couple, who had been together for 21 years after bonding over their love of the Grateful Dead, performed their first cam show from their bedroom. Sandra and Christopher, who is slender with a bushy beard, engaged in a variety of sex acts requested by viewers who would offer them “tokens”—Chaturbate’s currency—for each one.
As the tokens tumbled in, Christopher and Sandra figured they were raking in the cash. Then they got their final haul: $40. They learned that each Chaturbate token had been worth a mere 5 cents. But they continued camming because they enjoyed it.
They stood out from the other performers. Sandra is not plumped up with fillers or frozen with Botox. She looks like the grandma next door, albeit one who is inexplicably performing in a dorm room. The couple’s bedroom/performance space features a pot-leaf wall tapestry, a pink pillow with the words Bimbo Doll written in the Barbie font, and a half-empty bottle of KY. They started camming five days a week, usually from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, and began making real money. While they perform, users can leave comments and submit requests with them via a chat window. The most popular ask: anal, an act Sandra enjoys.
Within a few years, the money they earned was so great that Sandra left her lab tech job and Chris his union teamster job. They prefer camming to their previous work because it gives them more agency. “We’re the boss,” Sandra said. “If anybody’s given us crap, we can silence them.” She added, “You do have a lot of control.”
Sandra isn’t the only adult content creator who feels this way. Though porn is often stereotyped as exploitative, older people are increasingly entering the industry so they can enjoy perks uncommon to mainstream jobs, which frequently are underpaid, have inflexible hours, and can thwart work-life balance. Stony Brook University professor Angela Jones, the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, says autonomy is the most cited reason for entering camming. “People say, ‘I am tired of clocking in 9 to 5 and letting some boss reap all of the profit.’ ”
Sandra and Christopher are just two of hundreds of older people raking in cash on sites like Chaturbate and OnlyFans. According to a December 2024 report by SWR Data, a sex work market research firm, cammers over 35 account for 54 percent of performers, and that number has more than doubled since 2022.
The adult industry’s ASN Awards, an event sponsored by an adult magazine and given out to legal sex workers in the porn and brothel industries, will hand out its first GILF Performer honor next year. “We’ve noticed a real increase in representation and popularity of older performers across platforms like OnlyFans, Chaturbate, and others,” CEO Michael Ramos told me. “More fans are recognizing and celebrating the unique talent, confidence, and charisma these performers bring.”
As society ages, some boomers are refusing to age out of online sexual culture. They are showing that older bodies can be sexy and that people continue to have sex in their 50s and beyond. Feeling desire “can be super affirming” for older content creators, Jones said. In a patriarchal society in which older women are nearly invisible, a porn economy that celebrates their beauty has its upsides. For her, Sandra said, doing porn “just makes you more confident.”
The absence of a strong social safety net makes gig work appealing for retirees. According to an AARP report, 26 percent of people 50 and over are doing gig work. Online sex work can be more appealing than driving for Lyft or delivering DoorDash because it can be done from home and is safer, at least for women. It’s also more creative than other gig options. Chaturbate performers can create characters and play around with makeup and styling.
But online sex work is less stable than other types of gig work, according to Sebastiaan Gorissen, an assistant professor of digital media and communications at Saint Michael’s College. Sex workers “are consistently threatened with being removed” from platforms, he told me. “It makes their existence far more precarious than traditional non–sex worker gig workers.”
Being a successful online sex worker is a lot more work too, according to Gorissen. “Every aspect of their day is something that they try to monetize. If they’re stuck in traffic, they’ll have a phone sex appointment,” he said. Fans can also develop parasocial relationships with content creators but don’t often seek those connections with Uber drivers, he said.
Despite the drawbacks, online sex work is appealing to older people who are newly getting the opportunity to join the industry. Historically, when studio porn was all that was being shot, “older performers really did get aged out” of the business, Jones said. As OnlyFans and other online sites have democratized porn, older performers are getting—and keeping—a space in the spotlight.
Some of the people I spoke to said they wouldn’t have done traditional porn, even if they’d had the opportunity. A cammer in her early 50s who goes by the name Lavishlynn52 told me, “I would not have worked in the porn industry. What I do now is completely different from porn—it’s content I create on my own terms, in my own space, with full control.”
She began camming in January 2024, when her retail business was struggling. She initially debated other forms of gig work but found camming more appealing. “I wanted to pick up a side gig, and this felt like a safer route for a woman than driving Uber or Lyft because I’m working from home and fully in control of my environment,” she said. “There’s no risk of being in a car with a stranger, late at night, in unfamiliar areas.”
Soon, she was making enough money that she began to work full time, while her partner ran the shop. “What started as a side gig has really become my main focus,” she said. “I typically make between $2,000 to $3,000 a week from content, and it’s still growing steadily.”
She works from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, posting content, messaging fans, and jumping on video calls. On the weekends, she creates content and communicates with regulars.
Her clients range in age from 18 to 74, but most are in their early 30s to early 40s: “younger guys who are drawn to the ‘experienced woman’ fantasy, and older men who like connecting with someone closer to their own age,” she said.
Older content creators say that online sex work allows them to spend more time with family, something many other side gigs would not. Cherry Anne, a 52-year-old married British mom, wanted flexible work she could do while raising her daughter and running a horse stable.
She got her start selling used underwear seven years ago. “I thought it was an easy way to make money,” she said. She soon realized she was wrong. Customers asked for more: pictures of her with the panties on, live video calls. And she delivered. She marketed herself as a MILF and GILF, even though she has no grandchildren.
She first sold her content on the messaging app Kik, then moved to adult platforms like OnlyFans and ManyVids, and used the encrypted messaging service Telegram for networking. Within a few months, she was making enough that she quit her horse business. She now makes about 50,000 pounds a year (roughly $68,000) but takes home only half of that after currency-conversion bank charges and the platforms take 20 to 30 percent of earnings. She notes that her husband is supportive of the work, but only if she performs solo or with other women.
Her daughter, who is 17, is aware of what she does. “She’s cool with it and also doesn’t ask any questions,” Cherry said. “I’m glad she doesn’t.”
She films in her office or in her garden studio, but only when her daughter is away. Her fans, who range in age from 18 to 75, all ask for stepmom role-play. “All men want to have a mummy,” she said.
Cherry told me she is willing to do stepmom–stepson content because it’s one of her bestselling genres. But although her fans frequently ask her to do mother–son role-play, she always declines. (It’s also against the terms of service.) “As much of a sort of can of worms that is to open up psychologically, [stepmom content] made [porn] commercially viable for older performers,” Gorissen said.
But for Sandra and Christopher, it crosses a line. “We just don’t do it because we have kids and grandkids, and it just feels weird,” Christopher said.
Unfortunately, their content has been labeled as “mother–son” by pirates who have recorded their shows and uploaded them to xHamster. This was upsetting to the couple, and they contacted xHamster to get the videos taken down. “There’s a couple dedicated websites out there that do nothing but hack models every day and steal our stuff,” Christopher said. However, their livelihoods haven’t been too affected by piracy. “We put our logos [on pirated videos] and repost them,” he said. “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
These aren’t the only obstacles older creators face. Like all content creators, they have learned that they are beholden to algorithms, most of which favor the young. Older people are “much more harshly judged algorithmically,” Gorissen said.
A fiftysomething woman who goes by the name “MILF Southern” started an OnlyFans in September 2020 after her cat got sick and she struggled to afford a $1,500 vet bill, despite working 70 hours a week. “I’ve been sexualized my whole life, and if I can make some money from it, why not?” she thought.
After downing some cocktails, she posted pictures of herself in lingerie to OnlyFans. “The next morning, I woke up to over $400 in tips!” she said. “Along with the tips were some very kind and encouraging messages.”
Driven by the positive response, she uploaded topless pics. Within three weeks she’d made about $7,500. “I tried to take a leave of absence so I could work on OF full time, but they wouldn’t give me the time,” she said. So she resigned from her job.
She ended up making over $10,000 the first month. She continued to make five figures a month for several months. (Jones says that this rate is unusual: “Most people are lucky if they’re pulling in a few hundred a month.”)
But, she said, after OnlyFans changed its policy and no longer allowed the word MILF to be used in a creator’s name, her income tanked. (However, MelRose Michaels of SWR Data said that, to her knowledge, MILF isn’t a banned term.) The crackdown on “MILF” names might be connected to the general ban on anything “incest”-related. That’s why only stepmom fantasies are allowed. A fan suggested she sign up for Chaturbate.
Though OnlyFans has become a household name, the platform is still stigmatized, particularly for older people. Most people don’t want to think of their grandma having an OnlyFans. Sandra decided to get ahead of the game by telling her five children and her adult grandchildren about her new profession. “I just told them, ‘I don’t want you to find this out from someone else,’ ” she said. After the shock wore off, four of the kids accepted Sandra’s work. Though one son disapproves, his 26-year-old daughter is proud that her grandma is slaying in the camming world.
Despite the increase in older performers, ageism lurks on cam websites and OnlyFans, as it does in the rest of society. Christopher and Sandra get hecklers in their cam rooms who mock them for their age gap. And the prejudice is coming not just from viewers. When Christopher posts videos of Sandra, sometimes the algorithm autogenerates the tag #saggytits.
Yet Sandra takes pride in her age. When she and Christopher upload their Chaturbate sessions, they give them titles like “Black Shiny Dress Bimbo GILF Granny.” She’s one of the pioneers of the hashtag #GGILF (“great-grandma I’d like to fuck”).
The strategy is working. She and Christopher have over 71,000 followers on Chaturbate and have been nominated for 16 awards from AVN, XBiz, and AltStar. They won the 2025 Altstar Awards Best Cam Duo. She has no plans to stop anytime soon. “You’ll see me with my walker,” she said.