In terms of being an erotic artist, Goofy Toof takes inspiration from an unexpected place: animation — particularly online fan art and the less censored days of pre-moral panic Tumblr.
“I’m trained as an animator, that’s what I went to school for,” says Goofy Toof, who, due to her other gig as a sex worker prefers to go by her stage name for the sake of privacy. “So I was looking at a lot of sexy cartoons as a kid. And one of the first pieces of porn I ever looked at was Sonic the Hedgehog furry fan art.”
She describes her work — a combination of filmmaking, performance art, and other mediums melded into an outrageous vision — as a “very silly” cartoonish style complete with “funny proportions” and “dramatic, over-exaggerated movements,” using Betty Boop as an example.
That approach led to her winning Best Comedy at the 2020 London Fetish Film Festival for Creampie Gloryhole, a short she directed and starred in. It shows Goofy Toof in all pink, from her lingerie to her ski mask, as she shoves a cream pie through a hole in the wall.
The work makes for a cheeky play on words, with “creampie” used, not as a slang term common to hardcore porn (those curious can Google it in incognito mode) but as a literal dessert.
Under all the avant-garde weirdness, however, exists a mission to advocate for sex workers’ rights. Goofy Toof says that when she first began to pursue her art FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law. Enacted in April 2018, this combination of two federal bills originally sought to crack down on illegal sex trafficking on websites like Backpage.com. According to advocates, it has instead made it more difficult for sex workers to safely apply their trade and make money, and puts them at risk of retaliation.
FOSTA-SESTA has also resulted in more stringent censorship on social media websites like Instagram and Tumblr — where nudity and sexually explicit imagery had been more permitted — and not just for eroticizing Sonic the Hedgehog.
Goofy Toof says this, along with other factors, made it difficult to share her work.
“I can’t just share my erotic art online, I get banned,” says Goofy Toof. “I can’t really just talk about what my art is like when I apply for jobs because they’ll think that I’m scum or something. I can’t apply to a lot of galleries because … an erotic, sexual video is something that’s not acceptable even in the art world.”
As a result, she says she posts her work on cam and custom video sites like OnlyFans and ManyVids, where viewers must pay for access.
While it relates closely to her art, Goofy Toof explains that sex work has also enabled her to tackle health care expenses not covered by her full-time job. She attributes her signature missing tooth — she recalls that it “just fell out one day” — to a degenerative disease requiring jaw reconstructive surgery.
Still, she embraced the missing tooth enough to make it a major part of her artistic identity.
“When I lost the tooth, I loved it,” she says. “I thought it fit me really well. I was like, oh my God, I look so much cooler, and more like myself, missing a tooth.”
But her “tooth problems” are also a source of serious debt that she says will follow her for the rest of her life.
“My sex work and my teeth have become intrinsically tied to each other for that reason, not just because I’ve given myself the name Goofy Toof, but because the only way to afford paying off my medical debt is now through the extra money I make on the side,” she says.
Looking back, Goofy Toof says she assumed sex work would be easy, but changed her tune when she came into the industry right before FOSTA-SESTA went into effect.
“The safety nets that were built up in these communities just got ripped away in an instant,” she says, explaining that Backpage provided sex workers a way to vet clients. She says this motivated her to help change certain perspectives on sex work and improve life for people in the industry.
Part of this includes joining up with Lena Chen and Maggie Oates for OnlyBans, an interactive game described as allowing players to experience “sex workers and erotic content creators battling censorship, shadowbanning, and other threats to their digital freedom.” Created by sex workers and allies, the game debuted in 2021 as part of a program at Kelly Strayhorn Theater, through which Goofy Toof helped lead the workshop Naughty Nudes & Thirsty Traps: A Selfie Science Workshop.
In October 2022, Goofy Toof returned to KST as part of Fail-Safe, described on the venue’s website as an opportunity for artists to “present new work that is experimental, in-progress, improvisational, or open-ended.”
Goofy Toof sees her work as deriving from a lifelong love of erotic imagery, not necessarily from a love of sex. She identifies more closely with being asexual or demisexual, a term used to describe someone who values emotional or intellectual connections above physical attraction.
Moreso, she wants her work to help destigmatize sex by depicting it as fun, ridiculous, and vibrantly colorful.
“I would like people to relax a little bit,” says Goofy Toof. “Laugh at yourself a little bit. Recognize that it’s okay to feel a little weird and gross. It’s kind of funny, actually … Everyone is dealing with this little bit of ickiness in ourselves. You don’t have to torture yourself dealing with it and I would prefer that we also not torture everyone else when dealing with our own stuff. That’s kind of what has gotten us here with how people treat sex workers.”
Goofy Toof. goofytoof.com
