LOS ANGELES—Veteran performer Rachel Steele is approaching the 20-year mark, having begun her career in 2006. "I got started quite by accident," she recalls. "I was playing around with my boyfriend at the time, in the backyard by the pool in the backyard. It was in Florida, it was a hot day, we were having drinks, playing and swimming and having a good time. I went in the house and put on a white tank top that said LIFEGUARD with a little red X. I jumped in the pool and then jumped out, I flipped my hair and I said, 'Take some pictures of me, I'm like Bo Derek in 10."
A week or so later, the boyfriend asked her if he could enter her pictures in a website hotwife contest with a $600 prize. "I said yes, and I won the contest. And I thought that was really nice, because I was working hard to make that kind of money. So I went down the rabbit hole, started webcamming and gave myself a stage name. In Florida there were a lot of fetish producers and I got hired to do fetish shoots. When I saw how they were doing it and what it took to do it, I wanted to do it myself and I started my own company, Red MILF Productions. I've been doing it ever since."
Starting a fetish webcam site in the early 2000s was "a little crazy, a little dangerous..."
"But it was all that we had," Steele, who is represented by OC Modeling, said. "I was taking out ads on Craigslist for men to work with. I didn’t have any interest in mainstream porn, I wanted to do my own productions, my own way: be in charge of everything, so I could control the kind of content I was putting out. And I was the first woman to put out taboo MILF content on the internet. Family fantasies. It came from a fan who wrote in and requested a custom video, a stepmother/stepson scene. It shot up right to the top on Clips4Sale and stayed in first place for over a decade.
"We didn’t have social media. We had cell phones, but they were nothing like they are today. We put out ads on Backpage or Craigslist saying 'If you’re attracted to older women and you're a younger man, this age range, this height and weight, contact me for film production.' I'd go to FetishCon and meet people, write their phone numbers down and call them to set up things. It was very different."
Doing it her way involves "from a filmmaker's point of view, starting from the minute you walk in the door until everyone packs up and leaves, I want to be in control of. I want the set design a certain way, I want the costuming, directing, the storyline, the casting, I've been in charge of all of that. My scenes are 30 minutes and longer, so there's a whole storyline. You get to know characters. Some of the stories are continuing."
A native of Portland, Maine, Steele estimates that she's made "more than 5000 scenes, and the majority of them—until the last couple of years—are all with amateur men. I never worked with any professional mainstream talent. I do fetish, I do pro Dom, I do superhero—like Lynda Carter Wonder Woman—and MILF."
She's looking to "grow my brand and my presence" by expanding into mainstream commercial work. "I've never really pushed that, and now I am waking up and realizing that. I'm open to all opportunities, and I'm in San Diego so I'm close."
She's proud of her accomplishments over the years: "Personally, I climbed Mount Everest, that was a feat. My family is right up there—before Everest. But I'm proud of keeping this company going and me going for some 20 years in the industry as a woman, starting out early and being able to manage it all and continue to grow and scale."
Steele's plans for the future? "I want to keep scaling. I'm interested in writing a book about my life, and maybe do some kind of TV series, if that's possible, with Netflix or some company. Not a reality show, but a series about the life of me: How I came from a New England family to a porn empire, by accident. No intention that this was what I was going to do. It sort of just happened.
"It would be inspiring for a lot of women. I went through a lot in my life, a lot of abuse, and drugs and alcohol around me. I've come up and out of situations, and I'm really proud that I was able to do that. I'm grateful to be where I am."
Photography by @kogafoto
