When my editor told me that Stormy Daniels was doing a stand-up tour with Father Nathan Monk at City Winery locations across the country (including Pittsburgh on Jan. 14, 2025) and asked me if I wanted to cover it for my column, I jumped at it. I love going to comedy shows, but more than that, I have long thought of Daniels as a woman in my industry who has refused to let sex work stigma, or threats from powerful men, stop her from speaking her truth.
As I said in a piece I wrote earlier this year about her Peacock documentary, when Daniels stood in front of press conference mics and proclaimed, “[Donald Trump] has never thought that women like me matter, and that ends now,” I badly wanted to believe that she would have the last word.
Women like us — women who have been discredited by our involvement in the sex industry, by our femme presentation and overt sexuality, and by our willingness to stand outside of respectability — but also, all women, know what it is like to be silenced by men in positions of power. I hoped that if a feature dancer and porn star from Louisiana could stand up to the President of the United States, there would be hope for the rest of us, regardless of our particular battles.
(Plus, anyone who has spent even a short amount of time in the sex industry knows that what we encounter at work often brushes up against the absurd; if she had even one comedic bone in her body — and her Twitter/X presence suggests she does — I knew the show would be good.)
What didn’t occur to me — given her fame and the subject matter — was that she would be concerned about ticket sales. When I emailed Daniels to request an interview leading up to the Pittsburgh appearance, I was surprised when she emailed back herself, saying, “I’m willing to do [the interview] … just losing hope that anything I do will overcome this shadowban. So much for free speech, eh?”
For those unfamiliar with shadowbanning, it refers to the practice of social media companies (or, potentially, entities that may influence them — it’s largely unknown) either algorithmically or manually hiding or taking down creators’ posts without telling them, making it difficult for them to connect with their friends and fans, and making it harder to promote events and businesses.
PJ Patella-Rey, assistant teaching professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (and my spouse) wrote their dissertation based on interviews with adult content creators, many of whom talked about this phenomenon. “Over the past decade, social media companies have increasingly relied on shadowbanning as a mechanism to curate and moderate content for users,” they told me. “I think social media companies are motivated to employ shadowbanning for three reasons: 1.) they are under increasing government pressure to look like they are doing something to reign in problematic content, 2.) they are trying to create the social environment that best facilitates ad sales, 3.) they fear punitive action from 3rd-parties, like being removed from Apple’s App Store [link added] or being denied service by payment processors.”
The sex work community has long talked about the impacts of shadowbanning on their businesses (I wrote about it in Pittsburgh City Paper as long ago as 2019), but it’s notoriously hard to prove. While many marginalized creators such as sex workers, people of color, fat folks, and others feel its impact in the dramatic declines of their online engagement, a report published in 2022 by the Center for Democracy and Technology (full disclosure: I am one of the interviewees) says that “social media platforms are designed in a way that makes it practically impossible for users to know for sure” if they are just being paranoid or if shadowbanning is a common practice that they are being targeted by.
I went ahead and interviewed Daniels as if the show would go on because, despite my experience with shadowbanning, I found it hard to believe that Daniels’ tour was in danger of being canceled. After all, who wouldn’t want to hear her tell her story on stage over wine and a charcuterie board?
Daniels didn’t get into stand-up comedy out of any intrinsic desire. Over a long Zoom call in late December 2024, she tells me of her initial misgivings, “It’s a running joke when I go on stage that I’m terrified of speaking in public, [even though] I’ve seen my butthole on a jumbotron.” Her entry onto the comedy stage came only after her book Full Disclosure transformed from a book of short stories to a more traditional autobiography. Originally, she intended to write a book called Why Me? In her words, it would have been a “collection of short stories, funny things that happened in strip clubs and on set as an adult performer in my life. And yes, the Orange Hobgoblin [Trump] was going to be mentioned, but it was going to be like a page. It was a collection of funny things, and encounters with celebrities.”
With many of her stories cut from the book, her publicist at the time suggested she tell them on stage. Her first response was, “I would rather set myself on fire than get up and talk.” Famous last words; in March 2019 she did her first comedy show in Houston, Texas. “It blew up much bigger than they thought,” she reflects. “The press was all over it and it sold out.” After that initial show, word got out, and other venues started to book her.
Rather than stand-up comedy, which has its own culture and set of norms that Daniels admits to being outside of, she describes her show as comedic storytelling. “Everything I say on stage is true,” she says. “It’s a true story of something that I’ve been through or experienced.” When I ask her how she would characterize the show, she pauses and responds thoughtfully: “I think that it is comedic storytelling from someone who has lived a very strange and complicated life, [who] is comfortable telling it in a frank, honest way.” What’s more, Daniels takes audience questions at the end of every show.
While reviews of her show have been positive, Daniels has received blowback from those who claim she should stay in her lane. “You’re not a comic, you’re a whore” is a refrain she’s heard more than once. That her history in the adult industry precludes her from other opportunities is upsetting to Daniels. “I can do both; no one is one thing,” she comments. But also, she points out the hypocrisy of this stance: “So you call me a whore, and you think porn is bad, and you want to ban porn,” she says. “You don’t want us to do porn, but you won’t let us do anything else. Explain that to me!”
This standard seems to only apply to sex workers; other folks can move between different roles without the same backlash. “I actually just responded to somebody on [X] a little while ago that said [in response to] a flyer for a comedy show, ‘You’re not a comedian, stay with what you know: spread your legs, you whore.’” she tells me. “And I retweeted it and said, ‘I promise to do that if the reality TV host goes back to what he knows and stays out of the White House.’”
Though just a few years ago she didn’t imagine herself on stage at all, she certainly wasn’t going to let haters push her off it once she got going. But here is where things got tricky: What if it wasn’t haters pushing her out, but algorithms?
Sometime at the end of August 2024, Daniels picked up that she was getting less hate on social media than normal. “I didn’t notice at first because I was already on tour, and my shows were sold out and I wasn’t promoting anything, and it was busy and things were good,” she says. But then things took a dramatic turn. She went from selling out several shows in New Orleans, her hometown, to having trouble filling seats and having people ask her when she was coming, despite the fact that she had just been there.
She says, “They’ll tell you all day long that you’re not shadowbanned, but the numbers speak for themselves.” Indeed, a quick glance at her analytics showed her that on Oct. 7, posts about her show reached an audience of 41k, and a similar one on Oct. 8 reached 307. And this is true not just of Daniels’ social media, but also of the people who are working with her. Indeed, Father Nathan, who appears with Daniels, recently wrote about the impact of shadowbanning on their joint tour in his Substack.
Certainly, a process that is intended to be deliberately opaque is impossible to prove. It is certainly possible that folks just stopped being interested in what Daniels has to say and no longer want to buy tickets to her shows or engage with her social media. But is it likely to happen that dramatically without any impetus to cause the change? As of September, shows were selling out within 24 hours of the tickets becoming available. On Tuesday morning, Daniels texted me to let me know that “[all City Winery tour stops have] decided to just cancel and not reschedule.” She added, “I can’t believe this is happening.”
I reached out to City Winery for comment and could not confirm the reason for the cancellation or whether it’s final. Pittsburgh’s guest service department responded via email, saying, “We have not been given much information on why the show was canceled in the Guest Services department yet! Apologies! But I do believe that they want to, and will try to get it rescheduled sometime in the next few months!”
Whether this is the product of shadowbanning or some other force, Daniels feels defeated. “The worst part about it is that I went through all of this for so long,” she says. “They took my job or [my film directing career] away from me once before [as a result of the intense publicity during the last Trump election and the crushing legal fees that were a result], but they couldn’t silence me. And now, after all of this, they have figured out how to take my voice. And it’s fucking terrible because I’m screaming into the void and nobody can hear it.”
This is certainly a familiar feeling to anyone who has experienced shadowbanning (and I do not know any sex workers, myself included, who do not feel like they have). It is often said that sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine; in other words, what happens to everyone happens to sex workers first. In this regard, the cancellation of Daniels’ tour can be seen as a cautionary tale of what can happen to anyone. While the internet was once a place for relative unknowns to build an audience and a career — indeed, I built both my writing and my sex work career on Twitter/X), this democratization of the internet may be in its last days (or perhaps it is already over given that just a few extraordinarily wealthy tech bros now control all of social media.
Of course, there isn’t a lot we can do, on an individual level, about an algorithmic system that is entirely opaque to its users. However, from Daniels’ perspective, she has fought too hard to be silenced now.
When I told her on the call that I felt like she did an amazing thing by standing up for women and articulating so many of our experiences with coercive men, she said, “Well, now I need [women] to stand up for me. After everything I went through, I feel like I stormed the castle, and I’m through the gates, and I’m like Braveheart saying, ‘Let’s charge.’ And then I turn around, [asking], ‘Where did everybody go?’” She goes on, “Just because the trial is over and just because the election is over doesn’t mean it’s over for me. It’s not even just a Stormy and Trump thing. It’s the women in a time of uncertainty and misogyny where we need to support each other.”
Certainly, if and when City Winery reschedules her tour and she comes to Pittsburgh, we can buy tickets, show up, and make it clear that she didn’t storm the castle in vain.
This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2025.
