Stephanie Matto, a YouTuber turned adult content creator who claims to have made upwards of $200,000 selling her farts in jars.
Matto went viral on TikTok in December by documenting her lucrative fart-selling business, garnering hundreds of thousands of followers with “day in the life of fart-jar girl” content, such as videos showcasing her diet (lots of protein shakes and cabbage stews). As an adult content creator who launched her own OnlyFans-esque platform, Unfiltrd, Matto receives dozens of requests for custom content per day, ranging from photos of her uvula to vials of her own poop. Yet she’s been shocked by just how high the demand for her jarred farts has been, as well as surprised by the reasons her clients cite for purchasing her fart jars for $1,000 a pop.
“People really like the idea of spending an exorbitant amount of money and kind of being — I don’t want to say ‘swindled,’ but it’s like a financial domination thing for a lot of men,” she says.
As a self-described “fartpreneur,” however, Matto may have girlbossed a little too close to the sun. On Christmas, she says, she went to the ER with what she describes as heart attack-esque symptoms, which doctors promptly diagnosed as severe gas pain as a result of her diet. Matto’s visit to the ER, which she recounted to a journalist from the U.K. outlet Jam Press, was aggregated across news outlets across the globe, prompting fervent social media debate as to whether Matto’s fart-selling enterprise was a savvy business move or a cultural death rattle resounding from the bowels of late-stage capitalism (pun very much intended). Yet Matto is unruffled by such critiques, and has harnessed her newfound virality into promoting her newest venture: selling fart jar NFTs for 0.05 ETH (a little less than $200) each, though she has significantly reduced sales of her physical fart jars following her ER visit.
Eager to learn the inner workings of a thriving fart jar business, Rolling Stone called Matto up at her home in northwestern Connecticut to discuss online sex work, the economics of selling a smell, and whether or not she plans to pivot to selling her queefs. She also threw in a plug for what is, in her educated opinion, the best flatulence-inducing pastry on the market.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So can you start by telling me why you decided to sell farts in jars?
For years now, I’ve been getting a lot of requests from guys saying that they just want to inhale my farts. And I always thought it was kind of a joke. I never took it seriously. I thought they were just blowing smoke up my ass. So I’d laugh it off and just let it go. But one day I was thinking of different ways of making money and boosting my income with my platform, and I decided to try to actually sell fart jars as a joke. But then they actually started selling. So it kind of snowballed from that point forward. I mean, it’s just one of many weird requests I’ve gotten. I get weird-ass requests on a daily basis on my platform.
What kinds of requests?
There’s one guy who routinely pays me to make videos of me squishing my face. So there’s that. There’s one guy who has a uvula fetish, the little dangling thing in your throat. He pays me for pictures of my uvula. People have asked me for panties, bras or lingerie, toenail clippings, all sorts of things like that. But farts are a big fetish online — there’s sites that are dedicated to that specifically. So I always knew it was a thing. I just couldn’t believe that people actually wanted to smell my farts.
But I think there’s a lot of different elements in buying a fart jar. It’s not just the scent. People really like the novelty of it. Some of them do have fart fetishes, and a lot of them asked me to make videos of myself farting in the jar before I send it out. But I think a lot of them just want the full experience. They like the idea that they’re receiving something that’s just from me, that I took the time to write a letter for them, I include a photo. I leave a nice little kiss on the photo for every customer. With the packaging and everything, I take a lot of pride in it, and I do put a lot of effort into making everything look and feel special for the people who are ordering it.
Why do you think so many men are willing to spend so much money on your fart jars, if it’s not about having a fart fetish? What’s the appeal?
A lot of men like financial domination. They want to feel like they’re being taken advantage of. Even though I don’t feel like I am, but they’re like, “Oh, that’s so much money, but okay, I’ll spend it on you. Just bleed me dry.” So I think a lot of that is the financial domination aspect for men…. There’s also the ones that just do it for the novelty. It’s like, “Oh, look, what I bought. I have so much fuck you money that I could buy this reality TV star’s jar farts.” So, you know, I think there’s various reasons. Maybe some even just want the girlfriend experience, where they want that close, intimate feeling without the actual commitment to a relationship.
How did you actually end up in the ER?
I bit off more than I could chew the week before Christmas. I had a lot of orders I promised a lot of clients that I was going to fulfill. I was basically following my protein diet, the beans and protein shakes. One day I really, really, really overdid it. I was feeling kind of weird all throughout the day, but it got really bad when I lay down in bed that night. I had this squeezing tightness feeling around my heart. And it was so uncomfortable and it was getting worse. I would breathe in and I wouldn’t be able to breathe in all the way because it would feel like a tightening around my heart. I also have a preexisting condition. I am in remission, but I did for three years have a very severe case of aplastic anemia. So I’m always paranoid and overly cautious.
I called up my friend. She brought me to the emergency room and I told them my symptoms. I was also on birth control for the first time in three years, so I thought, “Maybe I’m having a stroke, and maybe that’s why I’m feeling like this.” They admitted me right away. They gave me my own room and they ran an EKG and did a blood panel. They asked me if I just started taking any new medication, if I had changed my diet recently and I told them what I’d been eating. And they kind of like, looked at me like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” I didn’t really mention the jars because I thought that was a little bit embarrassing. I told them that I work out a lot. They didn’t really push any further than that.
So a couple of hours went by. I got the blood test. EKG results came back perfect. I was relieved. Then they told me, “this honestly sounds like you just have really bad gas pain, so just try taking the gas suppressant and avoid these foods that you’ve been eating.” So I was just like, “Okay, cool, avoid the foods that I’ve been eating for months for my business.”
