Mistress India on Her AVN Stars Persona & Sex Worker Activism

AVN Stars creator Mistress India says that she got into online sex work when she was in college, either her freshman or sophomore year. She’s not sure, exactly, but, “You know, you’re in college. You’re broke,” she says. Right away, she discovered that she had an affinity for performing on camera.  “I really liked the idea of camming. It was really fun. I knew I had a personality that would be great for camming. I was really good at it,” she told AVN. “It was exciting.”  But it didn’t take her long to come to a realization, both about camming and about herself. “I’m not a fan of being told what to do, basically,” she says. “It was fun, being sexy and vanilla. But when I was camming, I got introduced to some more submissive clients. And the first one I had who was interested in FinDom, I was like, ‘Oh, this is real? I can have it like this?’ I loved it. I love BDSM. I love kink.” That realization led her to move away from camming to other platforms, and last year — in the midst of a global pandemic — to AVN Stars, even though her initial expectations were that the COVID-19 crisis would cause her business to “tank.” Instead, the opposite happened. “Of course, everyone’s at home. Everyone’s horny. It was a lot of fun. I got to take a little more time, be more creative. There wasn't that much else to do!”  India also says that she enjoys the “diversity” of the performers on AVN Stars, saying that she finds, “a lot of young, just super hot women from all walks of life on AVN. You can find the girl who’s vanilla and wants to get naked for you, or the girl who wants to dominate you and humiliate you, and play with your emotions, play with you a little bit. It’s got a lot of variety — and we all look great!” India describes her own online persona as “bratty, bitchy, seductive — the Instagram model you secretly want to dominate you and call you a loser.” But she says that while her online persona is very similar to the “real” her, there are some important differences. “It’s not an entirely Jekyll and Hyde situation,” she says. “My personality shines through in everything I do. My humor shines through in everything I do. I try not to take myself super seriously, even in my dom persona. Obviously, I’m not as vicious of a person, when I'm just casual, and not in a kink mindset. But some things are the same. I’m just as assertive, just as confident. I can be catty, but not needlessly. I think everyone gets a taste of the real me, regardless — and everyone outside of my sex work career gets a taste of the ‘dom’ me.” India at the time of this interview had planned a “big, live show” on Valentine’s Day, but otherwise, she says, she has no major events planned for her AVN Stars page at the moment. “What I’m hoping is to get out of this pandemic as quickly as possible, so that I start real-time sessions, and filming my real-life interactions with my subs. I think people love that. It’s one thing to see me solo, doing my thing and talking my shit. It’s another thing to see another submissive there. And you think, like, ‘Oh my God, I wish I was there. I wish I was in their place.’” How quickly the country will be getting through the pandemic remains unclear at this point, but outside of her AVN Stars activities, India has another, more serious side to her career — advocating for the rights of sex workers. She was a political science major in college, and while entering politics herself, she says, was never one of her goals, her “focus is in public policy, and using policy to make people’s lives easier.” Since she became a sex worker, the center of her policy work has been on improving the lives of her fellow sex workers.  “It’s not necessarily that my priorities have changed,” she says. “But the people who I have an interest in making their lives better have changed. For me that is sex workers and the policies surrounding sex work." The sex worker cause, India says, has taken on a new urgency in recent years because “it’s not just affecting full-service sex workers, it’s affecting online sex workers. It affects everyone. It’s a huge free speech issue. It’s a huge workers’ rights issue.” She says that she has seen close friends in the sex work industry “on Twitter getting their accounts taken away, getting suspended, gettng things deleted. It’s happening all around me.” While she has yet to work directly with sex worker advocacy groups, she has focused on issues that would clearly be of concern to the industry, such as criminal justice reform and “prison abolition,” working with the advocacy group No New Jails. “Where I am as a sex worker right now, I have a lot of privilege,” she says. “I work primarily from home. That’s a privilege. I don’t have to interact with real-time clients if I don’t want to, and I think that’s a privilege. I think the people who really should be leading the movement and heard the most are full service sex workers and survival sex workers. I feel an obligation to give them a platform and uplift their voices as well.” Photography by Victor Von