“He would often say things like, ‘Why don’t you come to my room?’" Nickie, who like other sources in this story asked to remain anonymous in order to protect her privacy, told us in a phone conversation. She often flirted with his propositions but ultimately rejected them. Then, one night, she agreed to a date.

Years ago, in her early 20s, Nickie became friendly with one of the regulars where she was tending bar. He always came in with money to spend and would often banter with her, testing her limits in ways that she both welcomed and found exciting.

The one-time transaction by a bartender dabbling in sex work with a regular customer offers a stark contrast to the idea, now fixed in our public imagination, of a thriving market for worn undergarments from anonymous women. Movie scenes of “panty raids,” stories of vending machines selling underwear worn by schoolgirls in Japan, subreddits dedicated to buying panties, and even entire purpose-built websites for panty sales all encourage us to believe that used panties are widely-sought fetish objects—detached from the context of a specific person or relationship.

Even years later, Nickie’s excitement is palpable over the phone. “After I sold him my pantyhose, I felt beaming and proud, I felt like I won something,” she said. “I was like, wow, my pantyhose… someone gives a fuck about them?”

They ate at an expensive sushi restaurant before moving on to a jazz club. Nickie worked at similar places before, but never imagined herself being a patron. After a few drinks and a set spent surreptitiously touching each other under the table, he asked—or, maybe, dared—Nickie to sell him the pantyhose she was currently wearing. With some negotiating, she slipped away to the bathroom and returned with the pantyhose now in her purse. There at the table they made the exchange: the balled up pantyhose for $300 in cash and cab fare.

Charlotte Long decided to find out. Over the phone, she told us how she started selling panties: She was a single parent and educator in California, which didn’t quite pay the bills.

When you add the fact that the internet makes it possible for these transactions to be anonymous, between strangers, some women are beginning to muse about cashing in on their own panties. Could there really be such an easy and low risk way to get your hands on the same money as pornstars dancing in rap videos or strippers holding those stacks of cash on Instagram?

“Honestly, I don’t know when the first time I sold panties was, but it was definitely related to camming." Canadian cam model GoAskAlex told us over the phone. "It would have been at the request of someone from cam.”

“I think I wore them for three days once and then I was like, man, I really don’t think I can do this any longer.”

While Nickie and Charlotte both jumped into sex work by selling used undergarments, many established sex workers started selling panties as an extra product, only after customers repeatedly expressed interest.

“The education business is killing me, I am selling panties to buy groceries,” she admitted. This admission turned out to be an opening: To Charlotte’s surprise, the friend replied with a confession that the PR firm was a front, and that she was actually working as an escort. She offered to teach Charlotte the ropes.

After some initial success, however, Charlotte lost the “new girl attention boost” and sales slowed. It appeared that selling panties alone would not be a sustainable side hustle. In a moment of panic, she reached out to a friend who worked in public relations, and told her that she needed help.

As she interacted with potential customers, she quickly discovered that most wanted panties that were worn for two or three days, so she began layering them under her jeans to maximize her output.

Charlotte set up an ad on Pantydeal.com, a website dedicated to buying and selling used underwear, and sold five pairs of panties in the first week, tripling her grocery budget.

“This is so cliché, but I saw Orange is the New Black, and there as a season where [the main character] Piper was selling panties from the prison and making bank doing it,” she said. “I saw that and wanted to do it [too].”

In addition to online sex workers, some full service sex workers also see panties as an opportunity to upsell their services. Secondhand Rose , a current phone sex operator and retired escort said she sold panties for the first time during an appointment: “When I was escorting, I had a client who asked me for [panties] awkwardly at the end of our session, more or less in the phrasing of a souvenir of our time together. When it was broached that way, it didn’t seem weird to me, it was flattering.”

Clip producer and cam model Princess Berpl told us that she started selling panties after talking to regular clients about their desires. She recalls asking one of her clients “What can I do to make this special interaction even more special?” She said he responded, “I really, really like panties.”

Charlotte’s background in education did not prepare her for the constant client negotiation of sex work. “I kept falling into these [time-wasting] traps, and I didn’t really have a sex work mentor to teach me these things,” she said. “I had to figure that out the hard way.”

Despite widespread media representations suggesting that sex work, in general, and selling panties, in particular, is a source of easy money, the reality is that this work only seems easy because most of it is invisible.

Few panty sales, then, are truly anonymous. To the degree that customers exist who might be willing to make these sorts of anonymous transactions, panty sellers still must compete with other kinds of sex workers who have established brands and clientele. Women seeking to exclusively sell panties may have to do comparably more work per sale than their established counterparts. But what, exactly, goes into making a sale?

Whether part of a dare, a brush with fame, or a keepsake of an experience, panties are often symbolic of something larger—most often, a moment within a relationship. That’s the exact opposite of anonymous encounter with the body of another person. In fact, even on Reddit, Craigslist, and dedicated panty sites, customers often crave interaction. These transaction are an opportunity for clients to express and seek validation for fantasies, or to feel valued. When sales are done locally, there is often an expectation that the seller will meet buyer in a public setting, serving as a de facto date (or, at least, an opportunity face-to-face interaction).

It isn’t simply worn panties that the clients want. They often want them to be worn for a certain number of days, or to be cum in, or to be a part of a video that they also buy. Most of the sex workers that we talked to described wearing the panties for multiple days to be one of the hardest parts.

Despite the fact that many customers are time wasters, getting any sales at all requires engaging with everyone. “In order to get successful and consistent sales, you have to jump on every enquiry,” Melody said. While in the past she has asked her viewers who asked about panties to send her an email that she can follow up on when she gets off cam, she has found that this isn’t very effective. Instead, she needed to stop her show, get their email, and make sure to follow up on those requests. “There is no such thing as easy money in this industry,” she commented.

“The customers have this desire for panties, but they don’t actually want the real thing,” Berpl said. “A lot of it is time wasting.”

Berpl tried advertising on Reddit, but said that a lot of the interactions there were would-be customers just “bullshitting.”

Many of the interactions she had with potential clients didn’t lead to any sales at all; she had to learn when to back out. On the message boards on pantydeal.com, she said that “there were a lot of guys who just wanted to chat all day, and you would do it in hopes of making a sale.”

“Some would ask me to wear them for three to five days,” Alex said. “I think I wore them for three days once and then I was like, man, I really don’t think I can do this any longer.”

Melody said, “I try to be flexible but I have my own rules to abide by so that it doesn’t get out of control. If they want me to wear them for seven days, I tell them it's a hygiene risk.”

Even just finding time in a seller's schedule to wear these panties for clients can be tricky. “Finding a strategic time to wear them long enough so that they are to the liking of my customer is the hardest part for me.” Melody said. “Between shark week [when she is on her period] and finding comfortable times to wear them, the scheduling of this is the hardest part.”

For Rose, scheduling is a big part of the reason that no longer takes orders from customers who she doesn’t already have an established relationship with. “It is all a bit hectic to me. The way it works best for me is through clients.”

Nine year veteran MyFreeCams model Miss Lollipop, who has has only sold panties in conjunction with camming, says that she will often make videos of herself cumming in panties prior to shipping them off.