The normalisation of OnlyFans and porn

[mistea]

I graduated from uni about 5 years ago, and still keep in touch with my course mates via a WhatsApp group chat. Recently, one of them was asking if anyone knew of any openings in our field, someone suggested that she open an OnlyFans account, and basically everyone else (it was a very male-dominated course) chimed in about how that was a great idea and that they had friends who did that and made 5+ figures a month.

Fair play but I personally know of a friend who went down that route, made a decent amount in the first few months, only to be pushed to show her face and do more and more extreme acts to retain her subscribers who all ended up leaving anyway. She has now quit but her videos are stuck on free porn sites and reposted on forums from time to time. Her case isn't a rare one.

Is it just the people I surround myself with? Or is this really how the world is today? After my last relationship broke down because of a violent porn 'addiction' on my exDP's part I feel just feel like it's all hopeless now.

I'm on a local FB page which is for women and it is a young group, it's a university town so mostly 18-30 I'd say.
I've been really shocked by the posts.
'Anyone know how I can get into sex work?' If anyone says a word against it they all start saying
'Sex work is work'
Pages of young women giving tips on getting into porn and how great it is.

Makes me sad.

@mistea

She just brushed it off. Unfortunately I've heard from way too many men that women are 'lucky' they have this option because men would do that in a heartbeat if they felt like they could make money from it.

Men could too if they wanted to. Plenty of customers for gay porn. But for some reason, straight men dont see that as an option because they arent attracted to other men. But it doesnt matter whether women are attracted to their creepy clients.

@LiberatedWoman

As I keep saying. Before everyone jumps to conclusions of being coerced, exploited, manipulated, please read from the other side. From the woman actually work:www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/

What they're saying, and what mumsnet believes, quite simply doesn't match up.

Some women SOME women, genuinely do find sex work profitable and non-damaging to them. They are a very very small minority of women who are in general coming from a much more privileged position than the majority of women involded. I dont judge them for sex work. I do jusdge them for trampling over more exploited women in their effort to make sex work seem cool.

Besides which, a lot of reddit Sex Workers is men cos-playing as female prostitutes because thats a kink. Its not exactly a reliable sample.

LiberatedWoman's posts sound so astroturfed. Even the username, like her whole identiy is organised around realising the merits of OnlyFans.

@NiceGerbil

What was your field?

I mean wtf.

EG studied maths.

Hello old maths mates, anyone know of any opportunities on the maths front?

Men: have you thought about taking your clothes off and selling the pictures to strangers in the internet?

I mean what the hell?

I hope she told them to fuck off.

That would be hilarious if it wasn't tragic.

The sex worker argument always gets too caught up in binaries - empowered businesswomen at one end, trafficked victims at the other.

I would recommend the book Revolting Prostitutes, written by two sex workers, which really brings home the fact that if you care about women's safety then you have to listen to sex workers when they campaign for their own rights (and yes, this means legalisation).

The authors don't call sex work empowering and make it clear that's not the point - it's simply a job, and it's not the only job that has risks or that some might find unsavoury. Again how unsavoury you find it is not the point - sex workers exist no matter how much you turn your nose up, and as such they deserve protections and rights like any other worker.

As for the reasons people do it, the book is also very good at making the point that choice is a matter of degrees. Not every woman has the total freedom to have her dream job, particularly not when you factor in those fleeing abuse, those who have to factor in childcare and those who are unable to work because of many country's hostile immigration systems.

So if you don't want women to choose sex work, you need to be fighting a capitalist system in which sex work - for a huge variety of reasons - is the best option for some women. That means fighting against the current immigration system, for a better welfare system, for workers' rights all round, and more.

Interesting essay by Dr Em on how society grooms women for objectification by men, including through the deployment of compliant 'liberal' women: https://uncommongroundmedia.com/self-objectification-objects-dont-object/

@LiberatedWoman er...have you really read that reddit you keep posting links to? Here's a selection of titles from the last seven days:

Women are so tired of sexual predators this is what being a woman feels like (meme image of spongebob in front of a huge, muscular roaring monster)

I’m SOOOO sick of the Scammers. I’ve been doing this for a while but I feel as the amount of guys trying to get free stuff for me has DOUBLED.

First you insult me, then ask for free content. Make it make sense

Advice Please! (post from someone who performed, did not receive the payment agreed and is now worried they'll be blackmailed)

Ive Had 8 Cosmetic Surgeries For Work, AMA!

Sex workers of Reddit, what is a red flag when making a new customer

Just need words of encouragement (desperately unhappy person)

Growing numbers of women turning to sex work due to ‘desperate poverty’ during Covid-19

why are people so weird? (screenshot of a text convo where the client wants the sex worker to wear his daughter's school uniform).

These men exist to annoy me

Do (obviously fake)posts like these drive anyone else crazy? People really think OF is SUPER EASY to profit from

Aggressive high-end clients

Can't get scammer to stop using my pictures

And yes, that's cherrypicked, but it's not even all the negative ones. There isn't a similar range of positive ones; most of the others are advice, technical questions or posts from clients.

@IAmFleshIAmBone

Porn and sex work damages women. It's disgusting. It's becoming normalised and I hate the world we are currently living in.

Sums it up for me too.

The group chat has now devolved into 'jokes' about how if reasonably attractive women in their 20s don't get sugar daddies and make use of OF to earn 'phenomenal amounts of money', they're stupid. Maybe it's time for me to get a completely new group of acquaintances/friends.

“Porn isn't new, but society has never been saturated with it before. Even as recently as the 90s when I was in my teens, being known to seek out porn was more likely to make you a laughing stock than anything else. Now 14 year old boys are demanding that 14 year old girls send them naked photos 'because that's what you do when you have a boyfriend'. And then before they know it, their photo is everywhere. Forever. Whether any one individual woman feels liberated by doing sex work is irrelevant, the damage is to other women.”

This is the point for me too. The saturation in porn and the accompanying huge level of entitlement among young men.

I’ve got 2 teenage DDs and I already worry about them finding decent male partners (assuming they want male rather than female partners). The sense of entitlement in young men seems huge. My elder DD was kissing a boy at a party and he started pushing her to give him a blow job. She walked away. But the very fact that he thought it was okay to expect that and press for it appalled me. And I know of countless similar stories. And the normalisation of rough sex and choking. It’s horrifying.

Onlyfans is clearly very empowering for sexist men. Not only is there a wide selection of young women getting naked and performing sex acts for them online, but they can also tell their female Uni mates to go prostitute themselves when they ask for job suggestions and no one thinks it's sexual harassment.

“Maybe it's time for me to get a completely new group of acquaintances/friends.”

Or educate them. They are seeing this through young men’s eyes. As is said on here - men worry their lover will laugh at them. Women worry their lover will kill them. For men as a whole, porn raises very few issues. It doesn’t lead to them being exploited. It doesn’t lead to them being expected to shave their genitalia. It doesn’t lead to them being pressed to engage in sex acts they don’t want to do. It doesn’t lead to them being accidentally killed because a female partner squeezed too hard in a choking session. Now might be a good time to point these things out. Oh - and ask if they like the thought of their mum/sister/daughter earning money that way.

Name change for this. I was a stripper when I was 18-19 and it was the most damaging to my self esteem, my self worth, that no one would love me. I spent years ans years worried people would recognise me, tell my family. No one, not anyone cant tell me its not damaging because it was. I carry it around 15 years later. I work for the government and if they ever found out I would be fired for not declaring. I have a daughter and I with the five fires of hell wont let her go near any thing like fans Only. So anyone on here who has read a reddit forum and says it doesn't effect women can fuck right off, you know nothing of what I went thru and what the industry is like.

[quote MaudTheInvincible]Interesting essay by Dr Em on how society grooms women for objectification by men, including through the deployment of compliant 'liberal' women: [[https://uncommongroundmedia.com/self-objectification-objects-dont-object]]/[/quote]
Great articulate article but I imagine way over the head of someone who reads the stuff on reddit and comes away saying how great the porn industry is

Few people also mention what is a big factor- greed! ‘Many ‘ (and who do have other options) see it as easy and very good money whilst still having plenty of time on their hands. It’s a very materialistic culture out there and having a nice flat, good clothes, hair extensions etc doesn’t come cheap. A good many (of even intelligent girls) in order to show off or keep up with mates turn to this stuff out of sheer greed rather than earn ordinary money down at Starbucks 5 times a week. It’s their choice I guess but personally I find it rather sad and then they wonder why young men have the weird attitudes they have

@gannett
I do see the point about making it safe for women, and that simply criticising sex work doesnt address the root cause of what drives women into it. HOWEVER, the rising popularity/normalising of sex work is doing the opposite of that. The OP is describing a situation were a woman looking for work in her field is instead advised to take up sex work. The current economic catastrophe that is Covid has disproportionately caused women to loose there jobs. Rather than address this, many women are being encouraged into Only Fans as an alternative - that is the real reason so many new women have signed up this year. I live in the Netherlands and have friends who, when they applied towards employment benefits, had working as a "receptionist" in the seedy-as-fuck red light district in out town recommended to them. Sex work is NOT an alternative/panacea to female unemployment and it is seen increasingly as exactly that. "How can a woman fleeing DV be helped to find a job/helped to feed her children?" "Oh, dont worry about that, she can get a job as a cam-girl". It is a narrative you see increasingly in America as a reason that the state doesnt need to support single mothers etc - if they were that desperate to feed their children there are avenues open to them. Its a nonsense anyway because as others have said, OF is not particularlyrenumerative, but even if it was its not a fucking solution.

And I used to live in a "tolerance zone" in Liverpool. What this meant was that the police would not harrass the women working there or their clients, and the theory was this would make it safer because women would be able to call the police if they were in trouble. In reality, I heard a woman screaming for help one night. I couldnt see what was happening so I phoned the police, they thought i wanted to make a noise complaint. When we established i was actually concerned about the welfare of the woman screaming the operator said they would send someone - it tok over an hour for a police car to arrive. SO I dont think the reality of legalisation lives up to the hopes.

All I can say is that it's not in any way normal amongst people I know, we graduated 20 odd years ago.

I really hope it will self-implode soon. I am in no way a prude and enjoy sex but all this online stuff, still 95% women, just sets back decades of women trying to be treated as equal and not as sex objects for male pleasure.

Besides which, a lot of reddit Sex Workers is men cos-playing as female prostitutes because thats a kink.

This. Theses people are AGPs and so of course they are going to say it's liberating, they get off on it.

In reality, I heard a woman screaming for help one night. I couldnt see what was happening so I phoned the police, they thought i wanted to make a noise complaint.

That is absolutely chilling.

@TheChampagneGalop

In reality, I heard a woman screaming for help one night. I couldnt see what was happening so I phoned the police, they thought i wanted to make a noise complaint.

That is absolutely chilling.

I actually experienced exaxtly the same reaction years later in a different country when I phoned because my neighbours were having a (very one sided) arguement with a lot of thudding. Sigh.

@minchinfin

All I can say is that it's not in any way normal amongst people I know, we graduated 20 odd years ago.

I really hope it will self-implode soon. I am in no way a prude and enjoy sex but all this online stuff, still 95% women, just sets back decades of women trying to be treated as equal and not as sex objects for male pleasure.

I think, unfortunately, when it does self-implode it will be in a way that is further detrimental to women. E.g. feminism = encouraging porn/sex work because it "empowers" women so lets go back to more traditional gender roles. Even though lots of feminists dont think like that obviously.

Definitely a danger of us as a society swinging back to the Madonna/Whore polarisation, I agree.

As a mid forties woman I finally feel likely I have escaped all this shit. the men I know of a similar age have grown up and wised up a bit and respect women a bit more (on the whole) - especially as they see their wives and girlfriends eclipse them in career and earnings, in some cases. Men at work are more used to women as equals.

It's depressing to hear how much worse it is for women in their twenties and early thirties.

@mistea

I graduated from uni about 5 years ago, and still keep in touch with my course mates via a WhatsApp group chat. Recently, one of them was asking if anyone knew of any openings in our field, someone suggested that she open an OnlyFans account, and basically everyone else (it was a very male-dominated course) chimed in about how that was a great idea and that they had friends who did that and made 5+ figures a month.

Fair play but I personally know of a friend who went down that route, made a decent amount in the first few months, only to be pushed to show her face and do more and more extreme acts to retain her subscribers who all ended up leaving anyway. She has now quit but her videos are stuck on free porn sites and reposted on forums from time to time. Her case isn't a rare one.

Is it just the people I surround myself with? Or is this really how the world is today? After my last relationship broke down because of a violent porn 'addiction' on my exDP's part I feel just feel like it's all hopeless now.

A simple answer to suggestion would have been pertinent;

"I asked about opportunities in this field".