Updated to reflect the comments from the mods of r/JOI.
Earlier this week, TikToker and adult performer, Charm Daze, took to the platform with a “very urgent message” for her fellow creators and livestreamers – those countdown requests aren’t just for proving you know your numbers.
“If you are especially not a shmex worker[sic], please, when you are live, if you do one thing, do not count down,” Charm Daze – better known to her more than 300,000 TikTok followers as @cgetsnakey – explained in her now-viral clip.
“If somebody in the comments gives you a number and is like, ‘Hey could you please count down from this number’ do not under any circumstances count down while you’re on that live,” she warned. “DO not count down for anyone who asks.”
So why, exactly, should creators avoid descending numbers while livestreaming? These seemingly innocuous asks are allegedly being used for pornographic purposes, according to Charm Daze, especially by those with Jerk Off Instruction (JOI) kinks.
Defined by a performer “‘instructing" the audience how and when to stroke and how/when to ejaculate,” per JOI’s 2019 Urban Dictionary entry, the act of counting down, presumably until one is “allowed” to orgasm, is a crucial element of this kink. Considering its innocuous connotation – on the surface, it’s just counting – some members of the JOI community have been purportedly convincing unwitting TikTokers to help them get off, sometimes even screen recording the resulting clips and posting them to the kink’s designated subreddit, r/JOI.
“What I’m talking about is people using your footage from your live videos for JOI porn on Reddit,” Charm Daze, who makes JOI content as a part of her OnlyFans page, later elaborated in an Instagram story detailing how she discovered this startling trend.
“What I was realizing when I was messing around on the JOI community because I love doing JOI content, is that users are screen recording videos,” she continued. “They’re going into live videos, requesting that people count down, they’ll comment ‘can you please count down from ten,” they’re screen recording that and they’re going and reposting it in JOI communities.”
Though Charm Daze told eBaum’s World that most of the offending posts under which she had left concerning comments – and her Reddit profile as a whole – had been removed from r/JOI as of 4 pm on Friday, May 26, she still expressed several concerns in regards to consent.
“This is a huge issue when it comes to consent,” she elaborated in a voice message, noting that she, too, had encountered these strange requests in the past, though she chose not to partake. “I am pretty positive that these people know that they’re doing something wrong by not making these creators aware that that’s why they’re asking for these things in these videos.”
As such, she said she shared her sympathies for the creators unknowingly caught in the kinky crossfire.
“It just scares me when they’re asking these people who are not sex workers to do sex worker tasks that they’re not consenting to,” Charm Daze continued, describing the above as “scary,” “gross” and “sad.”
Despite Charm Daze's claims, the mods of r/JOI maintain that videos like these are not within the realm of their subreddit's regularly-approved content.
"A short clip of someone just counting down from 5, 10, etc., is not something that would fit on this subreddit, as it doesn’t meet our definition of a JOI video, even if the person in the video is aware of the meaning," they wrote in a message to eBaum's World, noting that these types of tricky videos are "not the type of content are users are looking for when they visit r/JOI."
"if a JOI video is posted and the person appearing in that video requests it to be taken down, then the mods remove those posts as well," they reiterated, noting their "good relationships with a number of adult content creators." "We definitely don’t encourage people tricking others into participating in JOI, or any fetish for that matter, and we haven’t set up a community that encourages that behavior either."
So take it from Charm Daze – why coerce randos into fulfilling your kink when you could hire a sex worker who consents to and enjoys, telling you how to get off?
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