Every week, there’s a new main character on the internet. And last Monday, that main character was a good-natured Australian himbo with an eight-inch-long, seven-inch-circumferenced penis.
The aptly dubbed Girthmasterr (technically it’s with two “Rs” at the end) went viral after being interviewed in a man-on-the-street TikTok segment promoting a job search app called Getahead, which advertises itself as a Tinder of sorts for employment seekers. Though the video is fairly standard TikTok fare, it got massive pickup due to the Girthmaster’s devilish good looks and the figures he cites when asked about his income: Somewhere in the neighborhood of between $40,000 and $80,000 per month. The response was nothing short of widespread salivation, with one tweet of the video racking up more than 87 million views as of publication.
Then people started Googling him, and were able to visualize his impressive measurements firsthand. “Everyone, clicking onto the profile of today’s twitter main character,” reads the caption to one viral meme, showing an aghast, open-mouthed Pikachu, the shadow of a giant phallus looming over him. Even Cardi B got in on the fun, tweeting (then deleting) a photo of a giant worm from SpongeBob. “It’s been a crazy 24 hours,” the Girthmaster said when I reached him via Zoom on Tuesday.
The Australian, who is 30, has been creating content on OnlyFans full-time for about two years — primarily, boy-girl videos, though that is not for lack of requests from his gay followers. He says he doesn’t have any interest in shooting with another man, at least not yet. “I only want to create things that I enjoy and that I kind of have a vision for,” he says. “I kind of feel like [if I shot gay content], I’d be ripping [gay fans] off. It would kind of be a cash grab in a sense. And I just wouldn’t feel ethical.” (Shockingly, the Girthmaster says that while his audience is majority male, he estimates only about 15 percent of that audience identifies as gay in real life — “though I think there’s some flexibility there” in terms of their orientations, as he puts it.)
It started when he was 18 and started “showing off online, just for fun — kind of like a digital exhibitionist” by posting a nude mirror selfie on Tumblr, though he did not show his face at the time. The photo went viral, with many commenting on the proportions of his member — the first time, he says, that he realized his penis was “out of the ordinary.” He continued to post anonymously for a few years on a throwaway Reddit account using the name Girthmaster, which he says was inspired by the KitchenAid Mix Master. “Funnily enough, that name has now actually does mean a lot of favors in marketing, because it really stands out,” he says. “People see it and they kind of want to investigate to see if I can actually live up to the claim or not.” (Reader: he does.)
For years, the Girthmaster held a number of jobs, from pizza delivery boy to baggage handler to furniture builder; he was struggling to make ends meet, he says, to the point where he had to borrow money from his mother and sister. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when a woman he was dating suggested that he start his own OnlyFans account, that he considered doing sex work full time. “They told me to stop giving it away for free, because people would pay for it,” he says. “Honestly, I thought it’d be just a little bit of beer money. But it kind of snowballed.”
Almost immediately, the Girthmaster says, he started making “serious money on OnlyFans,” though it hasn’t been until the last six months that he has started pulling in the $40,000/month figure he cited in the viral video. (According to screengrabs provided to Rolling Stone, he has made considerably more than that over the past 30 days.) He was able to pay his mother the money he owed her, which led to a conversation with his family members about how he had started earning a living.
“We grew up pretty poor, and one of my sisters said, ‘I’ll be many things, but I’ll never be poor,'” he says. “So I took her out for dinner. I said, ‘Remember that time you told me you’ll be many things, but you’ll never be poor? Well now I’m making porn on the internet. And I’m not going to be poor.'” He says that after answering a slew of initial questions about his safety in protecting his identity online, his family was “very cool with it,” as were his male friends. “Men get so excited when they find out what I do,” he says. “They shake my hand. I’m kind of the envy of my friends. Whereas women, I feel, get judged a lot more harshly.”
Indeed, in assessing the general reaction to Girthmaster’s viral moment, it’s hard not to contrast it with the extreme stigma surrounding those who do sex work, particularly if they are women, people of color, or LGBTQ-identified. Though the vast majority of the reactions to the video are very much in line with the one Girthmaster describes from his male friends, that is not at all the case for many online sex workers, who face harassment and doxxing when they discuss their work or their income publicly. “At the end of the day, what [trolls] are trying to do is revoke your ability to consent and revoke your bodily autonomy on the internet,” one sex worker, Isla David, toldRolling Stone last February, regarding being subjected to a 4chan-led effort to use AI to “put clothes on thots.”
Many of the reactions to the Girthmaster’s video came from sex workers who had been subject to such treatment online, or had been cut off from family members and friends as a result of the work they do. While he acknowledges such reactions were “tough to hear,” he also concedes he has immense privilege as a white male cisgender sex worker to be received mostly positively by mainstream culture.
“The outrage is definitely valid,” he says. “Women should be upset they get treated differently to the way I get treated. It doesn’t make sense, and I completely understand why they’d be upset by that.” He attributes this double standard in terms of the treatment of sex workers to “Andrew Tate-type figures online who say OnlyFans creators are low-value women, that women should be modest, and that sort of thing. It’s insecure men who don’t like the idea that women can be independent, and can do all these things themselves and might not need a man in their life.”
Though the Girthmaster has soared to internet fame due to the proportions of his member, he says he is trying not to let it get to (either of) his head(s): “I try not to fall into the trap of making my penis my entire personality,” he says. (He is aware of the parallels between himself and Mark Wahlberg’s character from Boogie Nights, which he says is not representative of the current adult industry but which he does see, to some extent, as a “cautionary tale.”) He continues to casually date women both in and out of the industry, though he says he is not currently looking for a serious relationship due to the demands of his busy shooting schedule; he has also worked with such adult luminaries as Kazumi, Angela White, and Joanna Angel, who he says recently told him that he had the thickest penis she’d ever seen. “Coming from someone that’s worked with everybody, it kind of sunk in that this is something actually exceptional,” he says.
In his off-time, the Girthmaster enjoys sailing and dreams of getting his pilot’s license, retiring his mom, and buying her a house. “My goal at the moment is so I can do that before I take my foot off the gas, and just focus on doing all the little things that I’ve wanted to do and picking up new hobbies and becoming a generally more interesting person,” he says. Because after all, as he points out, “there’s only so much penis talk that the regular people in my life can handle before they get sick of me. I try to keep myself interesting enough in other aspects that if people do like me, they could like me for more than my penis.”
That said, the Girthmaster is very much aware that all of you are bookmarking his viral tweets and gawping at his content. Nor does he have a problem with it. “My name is the Girthmaster. I am there to be objectified in a way,” he says. “It doesn’t bother me. Feel free to objectify the Girthmaster all you want. He’s there for your entertainment.”
Correction April 24, 2024, 9:24 am: A previous version of this article misspelled the adult performer Kazumi’s name. It also incorrectly stated the Girthmaster’s mother is single.
