Meet Girthmasterr: The Aussie bloke winning over Gen Z on TikTok and OnlyFans
How does a boy-next-door type in his late twenties find himself making six figures a month on the internet? It probably doesn’t take the biggest stretch of the imagination to work out ... but this content creator is a very unusual case.
![“I’d say my gentle approach is appreciated by both [sexes], but mostly by women.” Picture: Justine Walpole](https://content.api.news/v3/images/bin/b60b601465a5783bae3738be326647ba?width=650)
How does a boy-next-door type in his late twenties who hails from the Australian suburbs find himself making six figures a month on the internet? It probably doesn’t take the biggest stretch of the imagination to work out, in this day and age, that it has something to do with the murky world of pornography.
But this adult content creator – as those plying their trade online are known nowadays – has turned out to be a very unusual case. His work has attracted mainstream media attention, from Rolling Stone to celebrity bible Interview, and led to mainstream internet stardom as well as a lucrative trade on adult sites.
His unique selling points? First, a demonstrably kind, considerate on-screen persona (we’re keen to see if this translates to real life). And then there’s his other, well, key attribute. All you need to know at this point is that he goes by the hilarious if thought-provoking moniker Girthmasterr – but more on that later.
This potent combination of sexiness and gentlemanly conduct could explain why he has double the female audience usually found in porn – women make up 40 per cent of his viewers – and the $US140,000-plus per month he earns on the OnlyFans subscription platform.
While sharing some physical characteristics with the fictional Dirk Diggler (the wildly egotistical male porn star from the film Boogie Nights), his relaxed and unassuming manner could not be more different.
“Help! I think I love the Girthmasterr?” read a recent headline on New York Magazine’s Gen Z offshoot, The Cut. The article praises the Aussie’s penchant for wearing grey tracksuit pants and his charming personality: “He seems nice! Normal even!”
So, is the fellow as genuine and down-to-earth as he seems? You bet.
“Thank you,” he laughs when I tell him he has certainly tapped into an appetite for a different, softer representation of masculinity in porn. “I appreciate that. I just want to come across authentically to my followers.”
He says he first discovered he offered a different package to most men when he was a student at an all-boys high school. In a display of pubescent masculinity, he and his mates started measuring themselves and comparing their stats (as a mother of a boy I find this slightly horrifying).
“It kind of snowballed,” he says, into doing a job he “loves”. Before stardom, Girthmasterr had first worked as a tradie, and then as a baggage handler. He says he still can’t believe the money he pulls in. “I don’t think I’d ever earned more than $60,000 a year in my life.”
And it’s not just the videos and photos that are making him money. Three months ago he started selling replicas of his most famous body part, and while he won’t reveal his sales figures, “they’ve been selling out internationally… I believe it’s their most popular product at the moment”. Indeed, a quick check of sites selling the $187 product (which offers users a “fulfilling experience”) shows they’re on backorder.
He began his career posting whatmay be deemed suitable-for-work pictures on the social media platforms Tumblr, Reddit and Twitter, where he developed a substantial following. He then created the Girthmasterr moniker as a take on the MixMaster kitchen appliance and began creating X-rated content for the subscription-only site OnlyFans, wherein creators publish (often pornographic) videos behind a paywall. Users pay a monthly fee to watch them. OnlyFans, which launched in 2016, has upended the adult industry. Creators have been able to take control of their careers by dealing directly with fans, often tailoring their content to meet requests. In doing so, they are keeping all the revenue for themselves.
About three years ago he headed to the porn capital of the globe, Los Angeles, where his career took off. But he mostly went about this work unrecognised in the wider world until he gave an interview on TikTok in March about making money online. While spilling the beans on his huge earnings, he also came across as a nice guy, acknowledging that life in the sex industry is far less confronting for men than for women. “Not many people judge you [as a man] for being a content creator,” he said. “It’s handshakes and high fives.” The interview was shared around the globe.
In the torrent of media interviews that followed that TikTok apperance he declined to disclose his real name, and The Weekend Australian Magazine has chosen not to reveal it because, despite his easy-going appeal, he has received three death threats in the past two years and is now cautious about disclosing any private information.
“There are mentally ill people that are in love with the girls I work with,” Girthmasterr says during our Zoom interview. “I got a message a couple of days ago saying ‘If you work with this girl again, I’ll shoot you in the head with my Glock 9 … hollow-point round.’ Crazy stuff. You just have to ignore it.”
Most of Girthmasterr’s followers – women and men, gay or straight – very much like what they are watching. He makes his extraordinary salary performing on-camera – often in collaboration with other porn stars, usually other OnlyFans personalities such as fellow Australian ‘Blue Eyed Kayla Jade’ – to his 11,000 subscribers paying $7.99 per month for his videos. On top of that there are extra fees and payments.
“He has fun, and seems to care about the women he’s performing with,” says heterosexual offshore subscriber Jon. “You don’t usually want to know the guy, and only really care about the girl, but he breaks through. You want to know him.” Jon says men are also drawn to his friendly Aussie nature: “He comes across like an ordinary bloke doing extraordinary things without being smug about it.”
The Aussie entertainer’s stratospheric success also tells us something about the post-#MeToo era of sex and relationships, with its strong focus on consent, body positivity and female empowerment. And it has coincided with the backlash against violent and misogynistic pornography. In this new sexual revolution, men respect women while at the same time finding them attractive, and aim to please between the sheets.
“I’d say my gentle approach is appreciated by both [sexes], but mostly by women. For my market, it hasn’t been a detractor in any way, only a positive,” the Girthmasterr says. He adds that he ignores any OnlyFans requests to “get rough” and will only go “harder and faster” if there is “enthusiastic consent” led by his co-star.
Indeed, parts of the adult entertainment industry seem to have cottoned on to the shift in societal expectations. When ’90s lads magazine Loaded relaunched in May, it featured a glossy cover shoot with 50-something Elizabeth Hurley in an unbuttoned shirt, and the brand tagline had been tweaked from “For men who should know better” to remove the “should” (now it’s just “For men who know better”). New editor Danni Levi told journalists she wants the magazine to create a “safe space” between the politically correct “attitude that no one can say or do anything” and the torrent of online pornography that is “giving youngsters a warped idea of sexual normality”.
Much has been written about the rise of violent porn and the harm its consumption causes to young people in particular. It could even be linked to our poulation decline. According to the US National Institutes of Health, while the consumption of pornography has increased astronomically since the year 2000, the regularity of sex people have in real life is in decline. And a recent study led by Professor Debby Herbenick, a former president of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, showed a drop in all forms of partnered sexual activity rom 2009 to 2018. Those findings aligned with similar studies from the UK, Australia, Germany and Japan.
Broadly, Herbenick called for more research into the increase in “rough sex behaviours” as a possible reason for why sexual activity had declined. “What we see now in studies of thousands of randomly sampled college students is choking or strangling during sex,” Herbenick told American Scientist. “For many people, it’s consensual and wanted and asked for, but it’s also scary to many people.”
The popularity of OnlyFans, which has low barriers to entry for creators and consumers, could be helping to replace subversive extremes in pornography with something more “normal”, says Professor John Scott from Queensland University of Technology. A criminologist with expertise in the areas of gendered violence, sex and masculinity, he believes that because OnlyFans features “rational consenting adults” and cuts out any middleman, “there is less of a power dynamic operating”.
Scott also observes that on OnlyFans the performers look, at least sometimes, a little more like the rest of us. “If you looked at porn back in the days when it was all industry controlled, you’d have a fairly stereotypical woman with large breasts and a certain hairstyle and then a stereotypical type of male,” he says. “With OnlyFans that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
Certainly the Girthmasterr is keeping it real. He’s fit-looking, with a 1.98-tall frame, but he’s neither ripped nor hairless. “I don’t feel any pressure to get the six-pack abs,” he says. “That’s a classic look for porn, but nowadays people want a more realistic representation so I try to present myself as the type of guy that somebody could go home with.”
Home, but perhaps not church. He was recently recognised doing just that with his grandmother and admits that she doesn’t know what line of work he is in.
As for his mother, she is on board now. It took him four months to ’fess up what he was doing for a living, after borrowing $10,000 from her and heading off to the US to find his fortune. He initially told her he was in the “adult industry” without going into specifics, and didn’t share his stage name until he was featured in Rolling Stone magazine. “I wanted to show her I was in Rolling Stone, so that also involved telling her my username and her finding out a whole lot more about me,” he says, looking a tiny bit bashful.
That “whole lot more”, you’re probably dying to know by now, is his celebrated penis, which is eight inches long (20.3cm) with a circumference of seven inches (17.8cm). “Her main concerns were: Am I safe? Am I doing right by people? Is my reputation good? Things like that.”
There is no question the adult entertainment industry has cleaned itself up since the Boogie Nights era. Girthmasterr says performers test for sexually transmitted diseases every two weeks and that “there is a protective bubble around everybody in the community as long as no one deviates from that”. It means casual sex is not on the agenda during filming season, particularly for a cautious Australian lad who is mindful of the risks. “I will shoot every day for a couple of months and then take six months off … and I will wear protection.”
Curiously, his fastest growing audience is on TikTok, where X-rated content is not tolerated and it is his personality that’s on show. “I have a lot of followers on TikTok that have never seen my adult content and just enjoy watching my social-media-friendly videos,” he says.
But as his fame has skyrocketed (he now has 1.2 million followers across Twitter, TikTok and Instagram), so have the downsides. After attending this year’s Oktoberfest in Munich he posted a video on TikTok asking people not to grope him. “Please don’t feel entitled to help yourself to a handful,” he shared. “I don’t enjoy it. Touching somebody’s intimate parts without consent is pretty much assault, and it’s the type of thing that makes me anxious and apprehensive to go into crowds by myself.”
How long will he keep up this lucrative career? “Part of the reason I started is because I really enjoy having sex,” he says. “I think once my mum’s retired and I have a house … if I find myself becoming jaded, I’m happy to give it off if that’s what’s going to make me happy.” In the meantime, he is “excited” to be house-hunting for his mother this weekend.
Asked where his career might take him, he laughs and says: “There are no career advisors for porn. It’s a lot of learning and studying. I’ll watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts and watch interviews that other porn people have given, taking notes with a pencil and paper, to see how they have become successful and how to follow in their footsteps. I’ll be learning everything I can, then putting that into my own work and making that my brand.”
