Onlyfans - good or bad for feminism?

[JustGraduated]

Hi all - I’m new here so not sure if this is the right topic for this forum. Sorry if it isn’t but would love to hear your opinions! Also sorry for how long this is!!!

I recently graduated from uni & one of my housemates (and best friends) had an onlyfans page. It was the cause of disagreement between her and our other housemate (and friend) who is a really strong feminist.

She is stunning and loved doing it, so regularly posted on it & did really well (like insane well). She made enough to cover tuition fees, rent, bills & a whole lot more beside. And don’t get me wrong she works hard on it.

Our other housemate was strongly against it. Saying that it was demeaning her as a female & that she should stop it if she respected herself.

The three of us all get on really well and besides a few little arguments between the two of them it never caused anything serious.

I just want to know what you guys think. Can you be a feminist and on Onlyfans? I often play with the idea of starting my own, especially when I look at my student loan debt and how well my friend did!

Somehow women have convinced themselves since they are earning money,degrading themselves is completely ok.
How sad that's where we are today.

It depends what kind of feminist you think are. If you think that sex work is work, which means you support all the trafficked and coerced women, as well as the miniscule minority who think of it as 'empowering', or if you find it empowering to become male wank fodder then you're looking at a different kind of feminism than me.

I do not agree with the sex industry as on the whole it is detrimental to women.

It is all about the objectification of women's bodies, which I am against. Regardless of the few that say they enjoy it.

I agree. As a feminist I despise OF

When this question comes up I always think of Mark from Peep Show, when he gets dragged to the strip club:

"This is awful. This is exactly what men want and we shouldn't be allowed to have it." (or something like that).

My son goes to school with a boy whose mother is(was?) on OF, of course everyone knows and bullies him endlessly, my heart breaks for that poor poor boy.

Onlyfans is neither good nor bad for feminism, it doesn't have anything to do with feminism. A thing is not automatically feminist just because a woman is doing it.

Generally the feminist viewpoint on the sex industry is that it is bad for women as a class, and puts the individual women who participate at risk. It changes the way men think about women. We are not commodities to be purchased.
In the real world, many women don't actually have a choice. The benefits system no longer provides a safety net. Pay and employment opportunities are not equal between women and men. Women are often disadvantaged in the workplace once they start having children, and their careers rarely recover.
Feminists generally don't castigate other women for needing to earn money. We're pragmatic.

If you have the luxury of choice then inform yourself about what you are getting into. The majority of women don't make a fortune, the average earn an estimated $150. The demands made by your private clients will escalate.
Men will steal your image and your content, and distribute it for free, and the photos will be online for the rest of your life which can make it harder to leave the industry behind you if you change your mind.

I'll do it in emoji form so I don't get banned😶😕🙁🤐😡

Jeez, it’s the bright and breezy tone that depresses the most.

Nothing empowering or feminist about being sexually degraded for money.

She’s an idiot. Imagine in later professional life, up pops some guy who recognises you from Only Fans? I’m assuming that she’s heading for some sort of career, having been at university.

That aside, from a feminist point of view it is perpetuating the objectification of women. Besides validating all forms of sex work. Sex work is known to involve trafficking of women and girls and just about every form of abuse in the book. I wouldn’t want to do anything to support that, even if Only Fans pretends to be innocuous.

This 💯

It's not good as a concept that a feminist movement trying to find out what a fair society would look like would support. There are other types of feminist movements which would argue differently, but I disagree with that.

Almost all sex-related work is done by a majority of female people and consumed almost entirely by male people, and this makes the sex work industries among those which require specific monitoring and analysing and critique. As things currently stand, pushing sex work as a form of female empowerment supports an unequal sex-based world.

This does not mean that the workers in it wouldn't need full protections and workers' rights. But it does mean looking at who it is who is really making the profits from that industry, why sex trafficking of women seems to be linked with that industry etc.

Take it from someone old enough to be your mother (God I want to weep at that comment...I was 25 once with pert tits too).

Please don't do this. You will lie awake at night in years to come tearing yourself up over it.

No amount of money is worth the degradation you will feel one day.

I used to be a manager and once, someone sent me a snippet from a porn mag of one of my team.

I shredded it immediately.

I cannot imagine the thought of appearing at a conference or gathering and random people in the audience knowing what my private parts looked like.

This generation have no fucking idea what fire they are playing with. And that's without the degradation factor.

Of course it's bad for women. For all the reasons already stated. I despair of women who choose this type of work and don't see the harm it does. Of course some women genuinely don't have a choice, but those that do? No, just don't.

Hello OP, welcome for FWR 🙂

I used to be very much of the opinion that things like this were a matter of choice - if a woman was doing it of free will then no problem. But the issue for me now is that while there is a relatively small number of women working in the sex trade voluntarily (although I’d argue that that choice is being made within the framework of societal expectations for women, e.g to be pleasing to men) the vast majority of women in this trade are trafficked and exploited.

When women sell sex or sexual services voluntarily, it gives credence to the idea that a woman’s body is a commodity to be bought and sold and creates a society where this becomes acceptable to a degree which, in turn, creates a market for the involuntary sex trade. A market = money to be made and there are always those who will exploit at at any cost to others.

Julie Bindel’s book “Feminism for Women” has an excellent chapter on this.

Apparently my comment was somehow breaking the rules by going into detail. 🙄

I guess no freedom of opinions when it comes to porn either

That's why I did it that way..I needed a moment to gather my thoughts.

Can you be a feminist and on Onlyfans?

No.

It's not difficult- do you want to sell your body for money.

End. Other people sell their brains. Feminists would say that brains are the right choice because men regard women principally as sexual creatures and nothing else.

The good thing about feminism is that it's made a world where you can ask this question.

*welcome to

Bloody autocorrect!

Can you be a real feminist and be on Onlyfans, no, because Onlyfans is a willing part of the structures that uphold patriarchy.

Can you pay lip service to feminism and be on Onlyfans, sure, but your feminism is not going to improve things for women and so it's not real feminism.

From a personal point of view it's also a terrible idea that creates some significant risk for you, now and in the future. Professional consequences, lack of control over the images and video, potential for obsessed fans, encouraged to see yourself as a commodity for use by men - no amount of money is worth that.

I think most feminist theories wouldn’t support working in the sex industry. At a push the Marxist feminist model could be used to argue that a woman benefits from having control over her working situation within online pornography. If the woman earns plenty of money and has agency over her working life then it’s not exploitative…The argument’s dicey because ultimately this is serving the patriarchy and the exploitation is there in terms of nudity and dealing with online abuse/privacy issues.

Women have more value to themselves and society than to be wank fodder for men who can't relate to them in the real world.
Feminism tries to help them realise that value.

If you see feminism on only fans then your idea of feminism is very different to mine.