If you are making money that is because you are meeting the demand of the market. If you have control over men then why not get them to give the money to charity and get on with their day without watching porn?

Two points from me:

1 Onlyfans gives sullen, resentful young men who spend their lives on incel/red pill forums another reason to hate women. They consider it actively unfair that it's so "easy" for women to make money from porn. This is all women's fault of course.

2 I'm really sick of the comparison of prostitution with "unempowering" low paid menial work. I've done some shit jobs in my time, including cleaning toilets. The point is, civilisation NEEDS toilets to be cleaned, bins to be emptied, bums to be wiped etc. No man NEEDS a new face to wank over every day.

@AuntSallie I think this is a really important discussion to have, because as you've said, the issues run deeper than the tip of the iceberg which is someone choosing to flash their boobs for cash.

Its been interesting to consider the points you raise but I still think you are missing the key point: sex work is never going to be the same as any other gig for money, because whoever is doing it is the product. The relationship to the punter can never be the same as the cleaner and her employer because of that glaring difference.

I think it's disingenuous to compare it to other jobs. As others have said, it misses the key point that women are vulnerable because of our sex. Because we can be penetrated, made pregnant and (usually) more easily be physically subdued than the men than would do that to us. None of that is a relevant factor in most jobs! Pretending all jobs are equal is to ignore the massive elephant in the room.

You have moved the goalposts by arguing that we don't necessarily expect respect for doing other kind of work. That is true. However, other kinds of work don't tend to generate the disrespect (by punters and wider society) that other jobs do. That disrespect and judgement can follow you for the rest of your life, and it's naive in the extreme to say that other employers shouldn't be swayed by or judge sex work activities a woman may engage in. Of course they will! My point was that even if we could get rid of this judgement as an issue, as others have said, the root problems of sex work remain: most workers being vulnerable and abused , and ALL sex work shoring up the idea that women are objects to be used. That is a wider issue for all women as a class. It is also a specific issue for individual women involved in sex work - rightly or wrongly you will suffer consequences.

As another poster said, the only choice,which many do not have - certainly as a completely free choice - is to engage in sex work in the first place. You don't get a choice once you're doing it - if you don't give the punters what they want, you don't get paid. There is no dignity at work policy, no equality policy, no HR department and no grievance procedure. You're just getting fucked, literally and metaphorically.

The entire premise of OF being “empowering” seems to rest on the fact women are “choosing” to relieve men of their money on their own terms, and that the punters are mugs. The OF influencers say this. “I made X thousands of dollars last year, so who’s the mug being exploited? Not me!”

But the men don’t care.

Scenario one: “empowered” woman choosing to expose themselves, man wanks off and walks away satisfied.

Scenario two: exploited/trafficked/on brink of poverty woman forced to expose themselves, man wanks off and walks away satisfied.

More money just equals more men who’ve done this.

It’s not a reversal of power dynamics, or change of control in any way. The punters get what they want regardless. They laugh at the idea the woman has the power or control over them.

“Yeah ok love, whatever makes you happy😉”

For all those that do this and think they are really doing what they want with their bodies, you can only realistically get any money by doing what the punter wants you to do, so you have relinquished control. There goes any feminist ideals you might have had.
Think about it; just how many men are going to pay to watch you sitting reading a book & having a coffee (granted there might be 1 or 2 weirdos out there!).
The idea that anything you might do now could in some way be used against you in the future doesn't bear thinking about.

full of leftbro types insisting that they'd just love to be in a relationship with an OF or former OF woman who's probably got the evidence of her OF work floating all over the internet - they're lying

I don’t know, I think there are quite a few who would - but what they envisage would be the same sort of relationship (he dictates, she performs) just in person and without payment. And what excuse does she have for objecting when he has pictures of her having done it before...

Any prostitution, including on only fans, means men see women as objects they can purchase. If you think men can purchase you to masturbate over on only fans and then meet you the next day in a professional meeting and think of you as an professional human of equal standing, and they will be listening to and giving equal weight to your opinion as the man next to you, then you are deluded. Or teenage boys who see that they can pay a woman to do things will treat their girlfriends as equals in sex, or consider a few gifts ‘payment’ that entitles them to certain sexual acts? And this attitude extends beyond the personal to how women are viewed in general - as subservient and there to pleasure men. I fail to see how any could conceivably consider this feminist.

Koke, it seems such a good idea doesn't it? When you're young and broke and would like to see the electricity meter not be in the emergency and have some food in the fridge for a change.

And for an hour of your time and £50 in your pocket what's the harm, you'd have probably been having sex with someone that night anyway, might as well get paid for it.

With not a thought to the fact that hour, and the others that come after it, will play on loop in your head in the dark hours of the middle of the night. For decades afterwards.

It's not our shame @Kokeshi123 it belongs to the men that saw our struggling and youth and thought it fun to subjugate us for their sexual pleasure for the cost of a cheap meal.

🌻

Sorry but some of this one has to have bigly letters

rule of thumb for feminism is that if it’s something that men eagerly want and it gives them a boner, then it isn’t feminism.

all of the above post.🌷for@TheClogLady

I want to bold it all and put it in big letters. But I won't. But this bit especially jumped out

I promise you that there is nothing feminist or empowering about making men cum for cash.Would you want your mum to cover a shift for you? Your sister? Your daughter?
Fuck no!

My rule of thumb for feminism is that if it’s something that men eagerly want and it gives them a boner, then it isn’t feminism.

It may also interest you to know that adverse social media/ digital footprint checks using sophisticated AI is now a growing part of pre employment screening in a lot of industries. I work for a company which conducts social media screenings on behalf of enormous hedge funds, international law firms, investment banks, universities, pharmaceutical companies, accounting firms and retailers. More and more HR departments are asking for social media checks to be added to their background screening packages and they will find OnlyFans if your friend was stupid enough to promote her profile on public social media like Instagram or Twitter. I know for a fact this has resulted in job offers being rescinded.

Digital prostitution is a bad long term strategy for health, wealth and happiness.

Hi OP,
I've done a few things in the past I'm ashamed of now (not as dicey as prostitution or sex cam stuff, mind you) - luckily camera-equipped phones were not as ubiquitous as they are now.

Even if you aren't swayed by the feminism related arguments here, I'd say that doing Onlyfans is basically only a good idea if you are OK with someone out there basically holding film footage and photos of yourself doing "whatever."

As others have said, it's not a career and has the potential to damage your future prospects in terms of both work and proper relationships (social media is full of leftbro types insisting that they'd just love to be in a relationship with an OF or former OF woman who's probably got the evidence of her OF work floating all over the internet - they're lying).

Please don't do this. I wouldn't interfere with this other woman, but if she asked my opinion on the subject, I'd give it freely and repeat what I say here.

Only Fans is MLM pyramid scheme with your image as the product. You are way to late in the pyramid to make any real money from it.

OF is a digital pimp.

I did all sorts of dodgy shit for money in the 90s but thankfully the ‘tech’ of sex selling was different back then and I could truly leave if behind me (I did premium phone lines and ‘table dancing’, aka stripping for city bankers with corporate credit cards).

I don’t regret it exactly (can’t change the past so no point dwelling on it) but if I had a do over I would run a fucking mile in the opposite direction.
Fleecing men for money fucks with your head, it destroys your ability to trust and gives you a really warped and unhealthy relationship with money (it made me feel weird and dirty so I would spend it on utter nonsense or even just give it away - I paid for a boy I liked’s MA fees! Just gave him a grand in cash in carrier bag, a desperate attempt to restore some of my self worth).

I’m really lucky in that this was way before camera phones were a thing and there is absolutely no evidence of anything I did out there for anyone to find. I never used my real name for work purposes, just a ‘stage’ name, as was the norm back then, I couldn’t find any of the women I worked with now even if I wanted to.
There are no photos to come back and ruin my life, only a handful of people know and that’s largely because I’ve had the same best female friends for over 30 years. I don’t have to worry about whether the man on the job interview panel has seen me naked/someone anonymously sending old nudes to my husband.

I promise you that there is nothing feminist or empowering about making men cum for cash.
Would you want your mum to cover a shift for you? Your sister? Your daughter?
Fuck no!

The women who are sucked into this kind of stuff are largely survivors of childhood sexual abuse or had very unhealthy relationships with their fathers (often both) Personality disorders and substance abuse are rife and the young women/older girls who do it accidentally groom their friends into doing it to, simply by ‘normalising’ it (as is happening right now with you and your friend). No one currently doing it wants to think about the bad stuff, let alone warn their friends about it, because the only way you can get through your days is by dissociation and lying to yourself, like the ‘This is fine’ meme with the cartoon dog sitting in a burning house. It’s only in hindsight with lots of distance that you can allow yourself to truly see how fucked up it all was.

It’s shit, don’t do it.
Get a normal job, any job. A job where age and experience means your earnings go up, not down.

Sex ‘work’ isn’t work, it’s organised crime.

This really is daft though and hilariously naive - so it’s judgment that’s the real problem? Women will stop being abused, exploited and raped by men if everyone just stops being so judgy-pants about everyone else’s choices? Oh yeah! (You know that bridge I mentioned…? It’s still for sale!)

You are missing the point that some choices are simply unethical. And here’s a problem: if I believe the way women are represented by the sex industry is harmful and unethical, why shouldn’t I judge it? I judge plenty of people’s choices to make a fast buck doing lots of other unethical and harmful things: selling arms, owning puppy farms, working for a tobacco company, selling drugs, flogging unnecessary cosmetic surgery to vulnerable people; writing for essay mills; selling vapes; being Scientologists; dealing in derivatives; making anti-vax conspiracy videos — we could go on and on!

What you are arguing is arse about face - at best it’s naive; and at worst it’s in knowing bad faith. But thinking that everything goes as long as nobody “judges”, and that’s the real problem, is turning a blind eye to the perpetrating of wilful harm by pretending that somehow the systematic exploitation and degradation of women is all down to essentially a few gossips at the gate, rather than deliberate choices by men to use women as objects — well that’s farcical, really.

Parliament. Lloyd Russell moyles had a big rant and finger jabbing go at Miriam Cates who had just described being intimidated by a man in the ladies toilets. After shouting at her Lloyd cross the floor and sat in the opposition seats right near Miriam and glared right at her. Another male saw him and positioned himself between Lloyd and Miriam and then escorted Miriam from the chamber. It was appalling.

😁You might not of been I was, I was feeling snarky!

Thank you, but no need to apologise, I wasn’t playing oppression Trumps anyway…so didn’t even think you were talking about me with that bit. I mostly saw you got my point about earning money doesn’t have to be empowering.

Im not sure what happened in Parliament that you are referring to but can understand how certain news stories can be distressing.

Yes, I do believe that the real problem is the judgement from all sources (not just men).

We could have women doing sex work without the stigma and negative judgement. All sorts of work has cycled through different views. Women doing medicine was called witchcraft and they were executed by state sanctioned murder. Women being actresses for centuries had the exact same stigma as women on OF today, but that’s not how we view actresses today is it? History is littered with examples of society harshly judging women and even killing them to keep them in their box that society’s moral code dictated as acceptable occupations.

The only reason you think that the root cause of the judgement is the sex work itself is because of your moral code telling you that the harsh judgement is correct. Therefore, to you, in order to solve the problem of harsh judgement of women on OF, all sex work must be eliminated. If women can’t do OF, then men won’t view women as sex objects, oppress us and view us as lesser beings. I’m not at all convinced that would be the outcome. It seems to be blaming the actions of women for their oppression and argues that if we stop women going on OF/doing sex work, then men will just stop and we will be equal? Will they stop? I don’t have faith in that.

I only have faith in what I’ve seen and what history tells us and that is removing the stigma and negative judgement from choices is what has resulted in advancing womens rights and status. There’s not one single freedom of choice that we have taken away from women that has advanced us.

@AuntSallie and I apologise for my sarcasm in my previous post the decapitate Terfs LRM in parliament and the male rapist wearing woman like a disguise and getting way with it has frayed my last gives a fuck.

What do they actually do on Onlyfans? I’ve never been on!

Shove dog toys and dragon dildos up themselves in exchange for money and male approval empowerment.

Id keep it that way. All sorts of people doing mundane hobbies for payments. Then the other 99.9999999999% sex work from little cleavage to shoving who knows what up your anus. And things I've probably never even imagined.

I may have misunderstood. I saw she was moved off the client team, but I do wonder with this rumour/knowledge circulating and the comments made whether she will be quietly managed out.

I don’t see Victorian judgement in most of the replies either, only a few.

I think those clauses are loopholes and do not view them favourably when used retroactively.

Yes, there is plenty of judgement from 360degrees towards women making such choices. It’s not limited to any demographic.

Respect is an interesting issue, does any gig to earn money have to also command respect from the consumers/customers/clients for you as a person? I don’t think it does. None of them know you as a person, so how can they be expected to respect you? It shouldn’t matter really, because respect based on what a person did or does to legally earn money is just a form of biased judgement.

Which was to be honest a damn sight better than the clip round the ear used to get at 4years old if I didn't clean the men's toilets quickly enough in the offices my mother cleaned in at night. The mens toilet with playboy magazines stacked in each cubicle, will thumbed, and well used.

Yay. Let's play oppression Top Trumps.

What do they actually do on Onlyfans? I’ve never been on!