LOS ANGELES—Last year, Britain’s Countess Diamond decided to take “a big leap” in the middle of the global COVID pandemic. In July of 2020, she moved off of a competing site and took her content to AVN Stars. Now, in less than one year, the dominatrix has climbed into the platform’s roster of most popular creators. And yet, the word she most uses to describe her online persona is “effortless.”
On Tuesday, March 2, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, noon Pacific (and 8 p.m. GMT in the United Kindgom, where she is based) Diamond will discuss how she did it, and how other online sex workers can make the same career move, in a Clubhouse panel titled, “OnlyFans to AVN Stars. Migrating, Marketing & Making it Big.” Panel participants and further details will be announced on Countess Diamond’s website and Twitter account.
“I joined Clubhouse recently and was delighted to see such a strong sex worker presence on the platform, empowering creators all over the world by sharing knowledge and experience,” she told AVN. But she says she noticed a “gap” in the Clubhouse conversations among sex workers. “People are not talking about AVN as a viable platform for sex workers, and I believe it needs to be part of the conversation.”
Clubhouse is a voice-only social media app that allows for invite-only, real-time conversations among users. To access Countess Diamond’s March 2 discussion — which will feature a panel of AVN Stars creators as well as questions from listeners — visit this link.
On the panel, Diamond says, she and other AVN Stars creators will “share their experiences on the platform, the merits of it that put it head and shoulders above other subscription sites/clipstores.”
On the panel, Countess Diamond is likely to reveal how she created her “effortless” online persona — which of course, does not mean that she exerts no effort in creating her AVN Stars presence. “Effortless” is the feeling she hopes to convey to her fans.
“This is not a ‘sign in, enjoy the content, then leave’ type of thing. They’re here for the long haul,” Diamond told AVN in a telephone interview from her home in England. “When you create great work, sometimes you just turn the camera on and press ‘go.’ Sometimes, although I say my work is effortless, I do put a lot of time and attention into the things I know work for me.”
Her elaborate, and detailed plans for her AVN Stars presence in 2021 is a testament to the effort that she does, in fact, devote to creating an immersive experience for her fans on the platform. She has events and themes pre-planned for each month of the year. February, for example, is “Love Month,” which is “where I dial into what I would consider my biggest kink is… LOVE!”
Next month will be “March Madness,” which she told AVN originally meant something very different in the United Kingdom than in the United States. But on learning that stateside, the phrase refers to the national championship college basketball tournament, she made a few adjustments.
“With the concept initially intending to be a dive into a rabbit hole of odd kinks of all kinds, we decided to turn it into a very kinky version of the American basketball phenomena of the same name,” she said. “Each day throughout March I will put two kinks/fetishes/sexual activities/body parts in a head to head tipping contest. The winning 'team' with the most tips will make it to the next round until a winner is crowned on the 31st.”
She also has “Monopoly month” coming up in April, when fans will “roll the dice and move along the virtual Femdom themed monopoly board,” and in May, fans on her AVN Stars page will be treated to “the A-Z of kink, going through each letter from ass worship to Zelophilia.”
Zelophilia, for those unfamiliar with the technical term, means the fetish of becoming sexually aroused by feelings of jealousy — “the gateway to cuckolding fetish,” she explains.
In other words, she puts a significant amount of effort into her AVN Stars page. Her “effortlessness” is, instead, her way of conveying her individuality, rather than creating an elaborate artifice behind which she can hide. That’s also what enables her to thrive in what has become a highly competitive environment for online dominatrices and other can performers.
“I never really positioned myself as somebody who is into a specific thing. I’ve only ever marketed myself as myself. There is no one else in the world who can compete with me, because I am entirely unique,” she says. “I don’t really position myself as a brat, or a princess. I’m just effortlessly me. I don’t try too hard. I don’t push. I don’t really try to compete.”
Along with that “effortless” persona, she says, her fans will see a character in Countess Diamond who is not much different from the “real” offline person behind the screen name.
“Of course there’s a difference,” she says. “But it’s only marginal. The, quote, ‘real me,’ and her — as it were — they like the same things. Of course I keep some things private, but it’s never been a concern of mine to, say, show my face online because I come from a really supportive, I would say sexually open and liberal family. They all know what I do, and have always accepted it. There was never a question of hiding my true self.”
While, for a dominatrix, it might be expected that she takes some sort of pleasure in being mean to men, another quality that sets Countess Diamond apart is that she designs her work to empower her fans not simply to demean them as “submissive.”
“I’m a feminist. I believe that men and women and those of every gender or of no gender at all are entirely equal. There is no one on this planet who has more of a divine right than every single person,” she says. “There are lots of people who, perhaps, approach me and see me as a sexual object. And they go, “Mistress, I want to be lowly and pathetic for you!” And I’m just like, ‘I just can't. I don’t see you as that. You have this beautiful life. The fact that you’re alive is wonderful. And the fact that you have the spare income to spend it on someone such as myself, let’s celebrate that! What are you into? Let’s explore your mind a little bit.’”
She says that she intends her work to be “empowering to everybody involved.” In the case of fans whose “consensual interests” run toward “humiliation.” In those cases, she says, “I’ll go on that journey with them. That’s fine. But I’m not a man-hater at all. No way.”
Nonetheless, Diamond says that she sometimes finds herself wondering “where the blend between persona and reality really lies. I don’t feel that any strong and empowered woman should belittle, or ridicule, or essentially take from someone just because of their gender assigned at birth.”
Photography by @hear_and_yield
