About Strapped

My name’s Jaina Rodríguez-Grey, I’m trans, I’m a career journalist, and I’m also a sex worker. I’ve been writing professionally for most of my adult life and I’ve been a sex worker off and on for a lot longer. Yes that means what it sounds like it means. Let’s not get stuck on it, yeah? 

For years I covered civil litigation for Westlaw, filing daily summaries of every lawsuit filed in the state of Oregon, plus San Francisco County and LA County. After that I pivoted to tech journalism, covering PC hardware and gaming for Digital Trends. Then finally I ended up at WIRED, where I was hired to cover PC hardware and laptops but ended up pitching and building out broader and more inclusive sex tech coverage. 

Now I'm freelance, and this project is sort of home base for the time being.

Why Strapped? 

Because I’m a dirty little pervert who loves a triple entendre. Strapped can mean either wearing a strap-on, being fucked by one, or, as is often the case as a freelance writer: being broke. There’s also the connotation of being armed which in the context of wearable silicone phalluses is really funny to me. 

So it’s just like a sex blog? 

Yes and no. Like I mentioned, I’ve covered civil lawsuits, PC hardware, music, gaming, coffee, sex toys, even patents at one point. My coverage areas are vast and strange but overlap in a lot of surprising ways. 

The tech industry has always been terrified of queerness and sex, and fascists are taking advantage of that opening. They see a pathway to erase queerness by criminalizing explicit content. Payment processors are censoring access to it, and there’s a war against pornography in the American South. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And one way to stand out in a crowd of mealy-mouthed centrist techno-optimist Substack bloggers and an ever increasing glut of AI slop is to get positively, fearlessly fucking filthy. 

Who pays for it?

I don't do ads, I don't do affiliate links, this project is entirely reader-supported.