Ari Kytsya said in a TikTok video that she was flying to Harvard to give a speech, setting off a wave of mixed reactions online and criticism of the university’s invitation.
“Guys, I’m flying to go speak at Harvard,” Kytsya said in the video, which quickly circulated beyond her own followers. She added that people had once told her that, when she first started as a mattress actress, she would one day be speaking at Harvard, and she said she would have assumed those people “have something very wrong with them.”
Kytsya pushed back on the idea that she was trying to persuade college students to join the adult entertainment industry. “I see so many comments of people assuming that I’m going to these schools and going to try to convert people and teach them how to be a BOP. And those are the exact people that I wish could come listen to these talks, because maybe hearing my perspective would change their mind a little bit,” she said. She said she had built everything she had done on being very authentic and added that wearing a suit was not really her vibe.
She also said she was grateful that schools were allowing people from the industry to come share perspectives, calling adult entertainment a huge industry with many misconceptions about it. Harvard representatives had not commented yet.
The invitation fits into a broader conversation about whether schools should host speakers from the adult entertainment industry, and Kytsya framed the trip as part of a larger effort to change how that world is seen. She said she has visited universities on many trips, and cast the speech as a chance to speak from experience rather than to recruit anyone. The backlash, though, showed how quickly that line gets blurred online. In the end, the episode is less about one video than about who gets a campus platform and how much that can still unsettle people.
