Having big breasts is a good way to be treated as a sexual object — even when you have no desire to be one. Growing up in Philadelphia, Rae says, her adolescence was marred by constant reprimands handed down by scandalized school administrators who ordered her to dress more modestly — that is, to hide her burgeoning bust. But her best efforts were never enough to satisfy the adults in her life. She dropped out of high school before graduation because, she says, she couldn't take the pressure anymore. She felt isolated by her own body.
She got a job at Walgreens, but even there she wasn't safe. One day, an apparently boob-crazed man whipped out his dick in the checkout line while Rae was working the counter. She stayed at the job three more years, enduring regular sexual harassment from customers.
In 2010 she set up her own webcam channel. Her entrance into the world of porn was inspired by her then-boyfriend, who frequented a blog with ads for cam girls.
"It struck me," Rae says. "I had hated what I was doing before, and it seemed like camming would fit me better than dealing with stuff out in the real world with my huge boobs."
Porn brought its own challenges, but in this world Rae discovered her boobs could attract $1,000 a week. And although she must send 65 percent of her earnings to Streamate0x000A.com, the online webcam network that hosts her channel, she can easily take home $100 an hour performing for legions of anonymous users. (Her biggest hourly take, she says, was a $700 session on Thanksgiving.) Getting started was as simple as turning on her computer's webcam.
"At first, of course, I thought it would just be easy money, that it would just kind of be getting paid for laying around in bed naked. But then I got into it, and it's pretty much like every other job," she says. "You put the customer first."
That meant improving the quality of her video stream, changing up her outfits and rigging better lighting. It also meant that Rae had to learn to accommodate her viewers' various fantasies, even when those fantasies seemed to be untethered from the limits of human anatomy and the laws of physics.
"I had one guy that was obsessed with Willy Wonka," Rae recalls, "and he wanted to watch me paint my nails. He was wearing a body suit, and he kept telling me that he envisioned us as Oompa Loompas floating in the sky together and holding hands. That was kind of weird."
Telling this story, Sarah Rae is sitting in a restaurant with her boyfriend, waiting for their pastry order to arrive. The sun streaming through the window sends blonde streaks through Rae's brown hair. A necklace with the YesBoobs logo as its pendant rests against her collarbone. It's the same of shade of pink as her deep-necked T-shirt.
"What do you want your name to be, baby?" Rae asks the boyfriend. He's a pockmarked 27-year-old who wears a dark button-down shirt and looks older than his age.
"I'm The Dude," he says.
The Dude, who assists Rae with filming, customer service and the website's general upkeep, will only say that he works at a "very professional job" in the St. Louis area. Rae, who moved to Florida and New York before landing in St. Louis, met The Dude in person for the first time in 2013, during the Porcupine Freedom Festival, an annual libertarian get-together in the New Hampshire mountains. They moved to St. Louis together in March.
But before that, he was merely a Twitter avatar, a commenter floating around Rae's blog — just another guy online who likes big boobs.
"I was familiar with her work," The Dude deadpans, explaining that he had seen her clips featured on another website. Rae laughs as he struggles to tell the story of their relationship without actually talking about the porn.
"She's gorgeous," he finally blurts. "She was the best-looking model on the site they'd ever had. I never got creepy with it; I wasn't messaging her dick pics. I have a membership to this one site that she was on, but I never gave her money. I never crossed that line from fan to customer."
Their connection progressed from Rae's blog to Twitter (where she boasts more than 30,000 followers) and then to email. When Rae's father died, the two exchanged phone numbers. Their conversations deepened, as did their mutual attraction. Eventually, The Dude suggested they meet in person at the Porcupine Freedom Festival.
By then, Rae had been camming for three years.
There's no better teacher of the quirks of human sexuality than porn, and Rae had proven herself a quick study. She says a good chunk of her higher-paying viewers are men asking her to verbally humiliate their penises, or to make fun of their girlfriends' flat chests. Others want Rae to play the role of a mother or sister in incest scenarios. That's all fair game.
But even she says no sometimes.
"If they don't listen, I just block them. I just had this situation the other day, this guy wanted me to punch my boobs, to beat them up. And it goes from that to some guy on cam holding a knife and rubbing it against himself, asking me if I have a friend in the room because he wants us to watch him castrate himself."
The majority of her viewers display fairly common kinks, though, and they're more than willing to shell out increasing amounts of cash to join her premium and private cam shows.
What she won't do is have sex on camera. She doesn't perform with men.
"I feel like that devalues me," she says, "because now everyone has seen what they wanted to see. There's really no backpedaling after that."
Hardcore scenes would bring in a big one-time paycheck, she says. But models who get into stuff like that — especially young, naive models attracted by the high payouts for anal sex or double penetration — tend to burn out with alarming speed.
"I've heard a lot of bad stories, and I've noticed that a lot of girls were getting taken advantage of in the industry," Rae says. "But from professional modeling, I learned that anybody can do this. It's really a simple thing."
Last year, Rae launched YesBoobs.com. More an R-rated version of an American Apparel ad than its Victoria's Secret counterpart, she envisioned the site as a softcore destination for big-boob lovers, a place where models would be treated fairly and paid promptly. Rae was also determined not to Photoshop her models into airbrushed caricatures.
The Dude fronted the startup cash to pay for camera equipment and server fees.
"The way I like to look at it," says The Dude, "is she knows everything about being a model, and I know everything about looking at tits. We're combining and getting the best of both worlds, really."
