Yahoo Lifestyle 
OnlyFans creator dishes dirt on dating: ‘They just want to film with a porn star’
Nova Hawthorne made $30K last week but there is a cost to her career no one talks about
One of Australia’s top OnlyFans stars has pulled back the curtain on balancing her private life with her career, as she details the “difficulties” of dating as someone who works in the sex industry.
From a webcam streamer on Reddit in 2018, to a stripper while she was studying at uni and then 2023’s best porn newcomer in Australia, Nova Hawthorne has forged an illustrious career that saw her earn $30,000 last week alone.
But it’s not without hard work with the 29-year-old woman revealing to Yahoo Lifestyle that last week’s pay cheque was the result of 80 hours of live streaming on just one website as a ‘cam girl’.
“That was just being in front of a camera doing shows for groups of people with short-lived, crazy bursts of energy, and shows with toys, oil, stripteases and dancing,” explained Hawthorne, who was the platform’s second highest earner that week. “I also spent a lot of time in one-on-one video chats with members which are billed at up to $18 a minute.”
Since earning the big bucks, the content creator has been able to pay off all of her student loans, buy an apartment just to set it up as a studio to film in and purchase a block of land.
But somewhere along the way, Hawthorne said she lost her sense of sexuality.
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Separating the woman from the name
In an attempt to live up to her stage name as an adult entertainer, the woman who grew up in a tiny town in Gippsland, in Victoria’s southeast, has struggled to balance her competing personas.
“I was going through this period where I didn’t feel in control of my own sexual identity or my sex life, that every encounter I had was for work,” Hawthorne said. “And so I thought, ‘Okay, I need to just drop the persona and go enjoy my personal sex life’.
“And it's hard because you do enjoy your professional sex life at times, so I needed to kind of make this distinction. That this is not business, there's no cameras, this is like a totally wild experience that is just for me, and I'm not going to share this with my online audience.”
So Hawthorne, who identifies as bisexual, went to a lesbian night at a sex club.
“Within the first five minutes, we were all naked, we were sitting in hot tubs, and I was going to be introducing myself by my actual legal name,” she explained.
“But before I even got a chance to do that, someone shouted across the hot tub at me and said, ‘Are you Nova Hawthorn?’. At that moment, I realised that I wouldn’t be able to relax or switch off, and I felt that I had to continue to be Nova because I'd already been recognised and I didn't want them to be mixed together.”
For Hawthorne, it’s still confusing at times.
“I do feel like I have to always be ‘on’, but since that night, I’ve moved to mix my personal and professional lives a bit more, rather than separate them completely. It’s simpler for me that way.
“Plus, I do really want to be authentic with people. I mean, the only thing really fake about me is my name.”
Men on ‘fetishising’ her lifestyle
It comes as no surprise that Hawthorne finds dating a bit tricky while working in the industry, but it’s not why you might think.
“I have been on dates where people have said, yes, they're quite okay with it [her line of work], and they're welcoming and accepting,” she explained.
“But then it gets a little bit down the track when they start to realise what my work actually entails and the facade drops when they realise that I actually do take this really professionally, that it's not glitz and glam, that I'm not a hyper-social being at all moments of the day, that I don't always look really sparkly and lovely, that I do like to just be a bit of a gremlin on the couch sometimes, and that I don't just always have orgies with my sexy friends.”
In a harsh reality for the 29-year-old OnlyFans star, it’s when dates stop “fetishising” her lifestyle that they lose interest.
“I think that's my biggest concern when I'm dating, that someone's only dating me because they want to film with me,” she said, explaining that followers often comment on her videos that they would “have no problem” filming with her if they were dating her.
“I was like, I actually don’t film with men at all, but they just want to film with a porn star and to boast about it to their buddies.
“So I date less and less these days because I have such a strong vetting process.”
Granny’s approval
One thing that Hawthorne hasn’t had to struggle with, however, is finding approval from her family, especially her 70-year-old grandmother who cracked jokes when the OnlyFans star filled her in on her success.
“Since I first got a job at a strip club, I’ve always been open with both my grandma and my mum about what I was doing,” she explained. “There’s never been any hidden things... And when I told them I was starting porn, they took it on the chin and saw that I was safe, well, happy and successful.”
For Hawthorne, who grew up with a single mum on a disability pension living in government housing, the money she now makes is “intangible” to her mother, “who doesn’t really understand the gravity of it”, but that she couldn’t be prouder.
“My mum is always excited when I do a new photo shoot,” the spicy streamer said. “She asks me to send her some of the photos so she can show her friends and show me off.”
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