What is Life For Sex Workers after OnlyFans?
With technology disrupting every aspect of our lives, it is unsurprising that technology is disrupting sex work. Otherwise known as the oldest profession, the idea of a woman “selling her body” in exchange for goods and services goes all the way back to biblical times. However, with societal changes around sexuality, it is unsurprising that ideas around sex work have also changed.
Sex work is an all-encompassing term that includes not only prostitution but also caming, phone sex operating, and a plethora of other activities that have a sexual component. Currently, the most popular digital platform for sex workers is OnlyFans.
Before we can discuss the meteoric rise of OnlyFans, we first have to understand what the service is. OnlyFans is a subscription site that enables content creators to monetize their influence. Unlike other social media platforms where the content is available to the public, OnlyFans hides its influencers’ content until their fans are subscribed for a monthly price.
OnlyFans had steady growth until two major events: COVID-19 and Beyonce. The site was mostly used by sex workers because it allowed them to monetize their content behind a paywall. The site’s popularity increased after the passage of FOSTA, a bill that made it possible for websites to be held accountable for sex work-related content posted on the site. This lead to the shutdown of other popular websites used by sex workers such as Backpage. Therefore, sex workers had to find a new way to reach clients and OnlyFans met the demand. When COVID-19 hit, a generation of young and vulnerable women had to find new and creative ways to make money while social distancing. OnlyFans presented an opportunity. Then, something major happened: Beyonce, the crowd queen of feminists, talked about it on her new song with MegTheStallion, Savage Remix. Further expanding the reach of OnlyFans to a new set of creators.
The sex workers on OnlyFans post a variety of content ranging from nude pictures to pornographic videos and everything in between. They also take requests from clients for specific content in exchange for “Tips”. There are referral codes to get new “content creators” on the website. Currently, the largest sex worker on OnlyFans is Jem Wolfie. Also, sex workers on OnlyFans are diverse. Due to the low barrier of entry, women of different races, ethnicities, body types, and sizes can find clients willing to pay for access to their content. On YouTube, you can find videos of girls talking about how they got into OnlyFans and how much money they make. An entire ecosystem has been built around digital sex work.
I wonder what will happen to the young women and girls when either OnlyFans has a hack or they want to leave the industry. By simply even asking the question in a popular OnlyFans subreddit, most of the replies had to do with staying in the industry and doing “MILF” or “granny” porn. An OnlyFans hack would devastate the lives of young women who joined. When I say hack, I do not mean just their sexual videos being made available to the public. I mean the OnlyFans servers being breached and information such as their ID verification and credit card info being made available to the public. A similar hack has happened to another controversial website, Ashley Madison.
However, the reality is that we don’t even need a hack to happen. Often, the clients of OnlyFans creators already do the job of leaking their content online. From my understanding, OnlyFans creators can get legal support after a person leaks their content. However, I do not know how tenable that is for a site with thousands of creators.
To imagine what life would look like for young girls after OnlyFans, we can look at life for pornstars after they left the industry. Three examples that we can investigate: Mia Khalifa, Riley Rains, and Belle Knox. All these women were college-aged women when they got into the industry and could be a good representation of the demographic that we want to analyze.
Mia Khalifa was briefly a porn actress that garnered major attention for appearing in a sex tape wearing a hijab. Years after leaving the porn industry, she finally spoke out about the dangers in the porn industry. Prior to joining the industry, Mia describes herself as having “low self-esteem”. She struggled with weight and “never felt attractive or worthy of male attention”. However, Khalifa began to lose weight in her first year of college. Subsequently, she got breast enhancements to adjust the damage done to the breasts by her weight loss. At this point, she begins to get attention from men, a feeling that she was unaccustomed to. After receiving the validation from men, she felt as though she had to do what was expected of her or else the attention would leave. All this was discussed in her BBC interview.
Once her now-infamous porn tape became public, she started receiving death threats. Her Instagram was hijacked by ISIS sympathizers who used it to post propaganda. In the interview, Mia Khalifa talks about the damage that the industry has done not just to her personal life but also to society at large. She talked about how porn changed the dynamic within heterosexual relationships. She also spoke about how her family disowned her once they found out about her video. She is also trying to change her online presence. However, she is radically aware of how difficult that would be.
In another video, Riley Reed talks about how her profession has impacted her relationship with her family. She mentioned how her father’s new wife doesn’t want her near their family. Also, her father told her that he was “ashamed to be in public with her”. She talks about being “shamed every day of her life” and how “she does not want to have children because of porn”. She breaks down the 10-minute mark of the video and advises young girls to not get into the industry.
Lastly, we have Belle Knox. She gained media attention when she was ousted as a pornstar by her classmate at Duke University. According to her, she got into the porn industry because of the cost of college and her hesitation to take out student loans. Sex work provided a lucrative way for her to make money quickly. Of all the girls that we have talked about, Bella is the only girl who describes her experience as “empowering”. However, she is the only girl who has completely left the public. From the lifetime movie inspired by her, from Straight A to XXX, Belle confesses that she was a “major league cutter”. Apparently, an ex-boyfriend of hers that cheated on her told her that she was fat. So, she carved the word into her thighs. As of 2018, she was enrolled in New York Law School under a new name.
With all this in mind, what would happen when these girls either decide to or are forced to quit OnlyFans? What options for meaningful employment will these girls have? How do we expect a generation of women in their late teens and early twenties to fully understand the societal and economic ramifications of being in the sex work industry? I ask this question because I realize that I could have been one of those girls. I was equally as impressionable and our culture is set up to deceive women into situations of false empowerment. What if these women want to have careers outside of sex work? what options do they have? I do not think that society is ready for a teacher or doctor that has naked pictures all over the internet.
Young women and girls do not fundamentally understand that other women could exploit them. We have been socialized to easily spot the coercion and violence by men but not the nefarious and unintentional persuasion by women. There are dozens of videos on YouTube with girls talking about their OnlyFans experience while conveniently leaving their referral code for impressionable women to use when they set up their own accounts. Large portions of these videos are spent talking about how much money they earn from OnlyFans but not enough is spent on the time, effort, harassment, and fraud that they experience on the site. Conveniently, a lot of the girl’s family members are fine, or at least ambivalent, about their occupation.
There are thousands of girls on OnlyFans and not every one of them is making a lot of money. For some women, they will be able to quietly leave the industry and do other things with their lives. For others, they will be branded with the permanent scarlet letter. Some women will permanently remain in sex work. They will either transition or be forced into other forms of sex work. Some will have to rebrand themselves as younger and more eager women enter the industry. This is an issue that even older pornstars in the industry have faced. Other women will begin to recruit young girls into this industry.
Often when I write articles like these, I try to take an objective view. However, for the rest of the article, I will provide my own opinion. I know it is obvious that everything that I have written is in some sense “my opinion”. However, in the digital age, it is very easy to misunderstand opinions as facts. So, I want to make my intent clear. I do not think that ANY woman who does sex work in empowered. I think we all do work to get paid and afford a good life for ourselves. This is the same for doctors, engineers, and lawyers. However, something that empowers you cannot simultaneously push your boundaries, prevent access to certain jobs, and strip you of ownership of your image. With the market becoming saturated, young girls have to provide discounts code to get clients. There is something particularly dystopian about women literally pricing nude pictures of themselves as though they were items in Walmart under the guise of “female empowerment”. We literally have turned the female image into an object.
We live in a generation with highly insecure women and choice feminism has misled young girls into pursuing the intoxicating but fleeting power of male attention and validation. Women have rights that our female ancestors could only dream off, yet we still do the same work that they were forced into. For a lot of women, male attention and validation are the greatest forms of power that they have imagined for themselves. It is unfortunate because beauty is the first form of power that women are exposed to. However, that power is so tightly coupled with youth. So women are put in a situation where beauty is the only power we know of yet we lose that power every day.
We have a collective of celebrities that can sell us “Luxury Beliefs” but we never consider the implication of those ideas on regular people. Luxury beliefs are ideas held in order to signal your social class and education. Prior to the rise of social media, people used luxury goods such as expense designer bags and watches to signify status. With the proliferation of more affordable luxury goods, members of the upper-class had to find new ways to showcase their status. This is what led to the rise of luxury beliefs. An example of a luxury belief is that all family structures are equals, which we know is false. From numerous studies, we know that children from married two-parent homes fare the best, with regards to life outcomes. However, affluent, educated people are more likely to believe that monogamy is outdated in favor of other forms of unconventional relationships such as polyamory. Polyamory is a viable option for the wealthy since they can afford not only protection both in the financial and physical sense but also because they have enough resources to raise children in non-monogamous situations. However, young people seem to forget that when they listen to celebrities.
I bring up luxury beliefs to highlight the hypocrisy of the elite and how celebrities have misled an entire generation of young girls. For every Kim Kardashian, Cardi B, and Amber Rose that was able to build undeniable wealth from their pasts, there are thousands of women who have been forgotten and deal with the repercussions of their past.
Of course, Beyonce, a married multi-millionaire mother of three, would be telling us about OnlyFans. She clearly is the demographic that makes us the app. NO CELEBRITY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT YOU. They have a team of managers, execs, marketing, and salespeople who watch trends in order to capitalize on them. I have always found it strange how people give celebrities an almost God-like reverence. These people are fundamentally detached from the reality that working-class people face. Of course, Beyonce can promote OnlyFans. She can afford to do whatever she wants. Regular people on the other hand cannot.
I hope this article discourages a woman from going down that path. There are occupations such as software engineering that can be leveraged into a long career and also have a low barrier of entry.
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