DD selling her body online

[Throwaway966846]

Throwaway so it isn't linked to my account.
HELP please
My DD19 has informed me that she has been making adult videos and 'camming' to help pay for uni living.

I feel so let down. I no longer know the strong young woman I raised, I'm sure she's been influenced by uni friends that 'sex work is work' and empowering to do.
I don't know what to do, I don't want to alienate her but I can't stomach the thought of her selling her body online. How can I persuade her to stop? I feel like I've failed as a mother

OP, you’ve had some excellent and compassionate advice here. I can only imagine how upsetting it must be.

It’s very unlikely that cam work will follow you around as you don’t use your real name or put face pictures anywhere. So don’t get worked up about that.

This is just not true. It may be, if a woman has an uneventful life, she can do cam work and change her life trajectory and people close to her will not find out.

Data collection, especially the harvesting of compromising material that can be used for blackmail, is a massive international business.

This is not just about cam work. If you are an activist and pose a threat to the serious organised criminals and powerful actors whose business interests include blackmail then you had better not have any nude photos or other photos or films you don't want to see on line.

You even need to be aware about things like picking your nose whilst gazing into your android phone or computer.

The blackmailers are like a beefed up, corporate version of the school bully who steals your diary full of secret crushes and private fantasies and then runs around the playground showing it to everyone, screaming your adolescent love poems out loud and pointing and laughing at you and encouraging others to do the same.

Anyone who does cam work and who later goes on to make anything of their life is likely to be blackmailed at some later point if they make something of their life or enter a serious relationship with a person of influence.

This is something that I would advise the OP to discuss with her daughter.

Anyone who is making enemies of criminals needs to think about how they would handle the situation should they be blackmailed at some point. Ovaries of steel and honesty with serious life partners are a prerequisite of managing such a situation without being compromised and dragged into terrible criminal situations.

Ultimately there’s bugger all you can do, you can earn far more for less effort doing that than you can in min wage/zero hour jobs.

It is true that young women can make more money doing sex work than working in retail or in a minimum wage situation. This is unforunately one of the things that makes it hard to leave.

It is also very difficult to change the trajectory of your life once you work in sex work. You get used to the money. Your social circle is limited to people who think it is "cool", very often thay work in the sex industry themselves.

It can be done of course, I have done it, but for many women the direction of their life changes completely and the whole idea of working hard for very little to secure a challenging and rewarding professional / academic life is undermined. Which is a shame IMO

It is also very difficult to change the trajectory of your life once you work in sex work. You get used to the money.

I do agree with this and think this is the biggest issue. Women turn to this sort of work as a short term solution but the money is great and you get used to it coming easily. I know someone in her 40s still doing it, she started stripping at 18.

In December last year, the University of Leicester released a toolkit that claims to be aimed at supporting “students who are already sex workers” but reads more like a guide to getting into the sex industry. Worryingly they have secured funding to roll this out to universities and colleges around the UK.

Nordic Model Now! has set up a petition calling on them to revoke it and return to the drawing board.

PLEASE SIGN AND SHARE THIS PETITION. We believe that only the pressure of public opinion is likely to get them to change their minds, so please encourage everyone you know to sign and share it too. Thank you!

www.change.org/p/university-of-leicester-revoke-the-university-of-leicester-student-sex-work-policy-and-toolkits

Bumpity bump

[quote annadjinn]In December last year, the University of Leicester released a toolkit that claims to be aimed at supporting “students who are already sex workers” but reads more like a guide to getting into the sex industry. Worryingly they have secured funding to roll this out to universities and colleges around the UK.

Nordic Model Now! has set up a petition calling on them to revoke it and return to the drawing board.

PLEASE SIGN AND SHARE THIS PETITION. We believe that only the pressure of public opinion is likely to get them to change their minds, so please encourage everyone you know to sign and share it too. Thank you!

www.change.org/p/university-of-leicester-revoke-the-university-of-leicester-student-sex-work-policy-and-toolkits[/quote]
This petition has so few signatures. This is the constant battle we face with the violation of women's rights, it's never reported on so no ever knows about it. Please everyone share this petition, it's barely got 500 signatures currently.

It's actually got 853 signatures in just two days. But yes, we really need to get a massive number. So do please share widely and consider writing personal messages to friends and colleagues asking them to sign. Numbers are really important for this.

[quote FannyCann]Here you are OP: A DIY guide to feminist cyber security.

hackblossom.org/cybersecurity/[/quote]
That's amazing, thanks for posting this, very useful. 🙌

[quote FannyCann]Here you are OP: A DIY guide to feminist cyber security.

hackblossom.org/cybersecurity/[/quote]
Techie here with a special interest in security.

That's an excellent resource with uniformly sound advice throughout. Everyone should follow their recommendations for everything online, camming or not.

I'd be more than happy to explain/help others who want to start doing so.

Do you know what she's doing? These videos have such a broad range it may be less drastic than you think?
The poison that's being sold is that cam work is sex work in the same way full contact is sex work. It's not. It creates a false solidarity that's to the advantage of the porn and prostitution industry

I think there is a huge campaign which targets very young women entering university for recruitment in to the sex industry, espicially online 'work'.
I wonder how haveing a generation of women proffessionals who have this material online will play out in society?
There will be a whole cohort of people possibly in influencial postions who can be blackmailed.

Signed

Signed too.

I see it didn’t take long before the “sex work is work” brigade popped up

Minor league drug dealing, petty theft, all sorts of fraud, writing fake exam coursework for profit, exploiting migrant workers for agricultural labour at below minimum wage are all “work” too, so that’s ok then?

You lot really need to actually read some Marx and think a bit harder about work and exploitation.

I could make a mint online (quite legally) helping people cheat their professional and degree examiners - I don’t; because it’s immoral and wrong on many levels, and I have both self-respect and a fully functioning moral compass.

OP I’m sorry - hopefully she will find it’s not so great after all and drop it. She must feel ambivalent or odd about it or she wouldn’t have told you, and your opinion must matter to her. There are some times when expressing great parental disappointment is not a bad thing. She may well be looking for some clear boundaries from you to help her stop doing it.

Bumping thread for that petition.
Hope you and yours are doing OK OP.

Some great comments and hopefully useful support for the OP.

Looking at those guidelines - who'd have thought that university life is now about grooming teenagers into prostitution as a career choice? So many creepy men must be thrilled.

You should look into the tax position. I have no idea how that would operate in these situations but I imagine she should be paying income tax.

Signed.

If her face has ever been visible on screen, she’s setting herself up to be blackmailed, doxxed or possibly stalked or worse. She has no control over the use other people make of her image.

Not your fault, OP. But do remind her that anything put on the internet should be considered permanent, whether you delete it or not.

Sex work isn't work. Anything that requires you to use your body to benefit others for money is abuse in my opinion. I have brought my son up this way. I would say the same to my daughter. I would never cut a child off. But I would be clear about how I feel and would try to have an honest conversation.

If she is an adult she is old enough to have an adult conversation. I wouldn't baulk at expressing my disappointment either. I would make clear that the love is always there, but that disapproval can also be there.

It is the continuation of the parental boundary. The reason the culture is the mess it is, is parents have stopped parenting

@walkingthedog1

Do you know what she's doing? These videos have such a broad range it may be less drastic than you think? The poison that's being sold is that cam work is sex work in the same way full contact is sex work. It's not. It creates a false solidarity that's to the advantage of the porn and prostitution industry

Even if cam work is safer than standing on street corners, there remains a very real risk of being stalked or being exposed in years to come with consequences upon your career.

At least one woman has died while doing 'camwork'
so its not really that safe is it?

She sounds like a pretty amazing, independent.amd confident young woman to me.
What you do is support her and her choices. It's her body to do with as she pleases. She's not hurting anyone.
My motto is 'do what you want so long as you're not intentionally, maliciously hurting people'.

@WelliesandWine88

She sounds like a pretty amazing, independent.amd confident young woman to me. What you do is support her and her choices. It's her body to do with as she pleases. She's not hurting anyone. My motto is 'do what you want so long as you're not intentionally, maliciously hurting people'.

Don’t you think actively contributing to and perpetrating porn, porn culture and all the misogyny and sexist attached to that is hurting people? Like all girls and women for starters? And quite a lot of men?

That’s akin to saying about someone taking up small time drug dealing that it’s okay because no-one’s getting hurt or exploited. If you’re not just participating in but actively colluding and helping perpetrate a damaging capitalist quasi-“industry” with its roots in violence and oppression, you are not “not hurting anyone”. You’re actively collaborating in your own oppression and that of many many other people in a system that is much wider and more violent and coercive than you like to think.

So no, I don’t think that the OP’s daughter is a wonderful young woman for doing cam work; I think she’s a young woman colluding in her own oppression, but I also think she’s choosing to participate in the fringes of a systematic “industry” which revels in and perpetrates violence and oppression to women and girls all over the world. And that this directly harms me, and my small daughter, for example, to start with.

We rightly condemn men who look at child pornography, even if they haven’t actively abused any children themselves. We do this on the grounds that by creating a market for imagery like that, they help perpetrate its creation. Small time porn and sex work does help create a market for porn and the exploitation of women. It isn’t innocent and women who pretend that it is just all good capitalist empowering fun are lying to themselves about the nasty and illegal markets this actively helps create.

There’s a thin legal line between someone else filming and camming an under-18 and a girl 18+ doing it herself; but what difference does it make to the men who just want live porn of teenage women? Do you think they have moral scruples about the imagery they’re watching or the markets for sex work they create or fine distinctions like that?

The “sex work is work” mantra is morally twisted and disingenuous. Not the least because if you pretend that selling porn or sex is just like working at Sports Direct (only better!), then you’d have to conclude that it wasn’t by any means “empowering”. No-one thinks the waitress in your restaurant is “empowered” because she brings the customer what he wants, even if she’s the waitress at The Ivy.

I was looking for this thread! Thank you so much for posting the petition @annadjinn I have signed and sending to my daughters.
I'll be circulating to other dd friends off to university this autumn too and I'm going to be making sure they are on the look out for signs of infiltration at their university they are going to, displays at freshers week (if they have one) for instance.
Well done Nordic Model Now for sterling work on this toolkit and the petition.