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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Thanks for this. Really appreciate the advice. I’ve never been very good at thinking about long term consequences so this is really helpful.

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.

🌻

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.

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...

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.

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😉”

@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.

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.

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?

Quite!

I would pay my auntie/mum/nan/sister/daughter to help me out with some cleaning work, but I wouldn’t offer any of them cash to help me wank, nor to assist me in wanking off someone else.

So it’s utterly stupid to say ‘sex work? No different to cleaning work!’

I don’t know if this has already been mentioned in the thread but the truth is there is only a very small percentage of creators on OnlyFans who actually make money sufficient to live on. This top earning % promote the idea that it’s a great and easy way for girls to make money and encourage them to sign up using their referral code- meaning they make a cut of earnings these new creators make. It’s a total pyramid scheme.

You can Google the statistics but I believe it was something like 80% of creators only make something like $4 per month. OnlyFans was heavily promoted during the pandemic as a great way for girls to make money from home in “safe” sex work - I saw a lot of comments about how great it was for fat and disabled women, and women of colour as it enabled them to “find an audience”. However the top earners are almost all conventionally attractive white women.

Another thing worth mentioning is that OnlyFans nearly closed down all it’s porn accounts because of an endemic problem with child sexual exploitation on its platform.

Previous posters are correct, it is a digital pimping service.

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.

It makes me angry that the sex trade has successfully packed this as being 'sex positive'. The sex trade and sex work isn't sex, its a performance. An act. It needs a completely different name.

And now many poor girls, and those with low self-esteem, will fall into this at university and it will be very difficult to emerge from the trap.

This should be a women's issue,not a feminist issue.Everyone single one of us should care about the degradation of women.

When are feminist issues not women’s issues or vice versa?

It shouldn't be left to feminists to speak up on issues like this, but here we are. this thread is on the feminist board, not AIBU.
I don't get why women are so passive or uninterested. Onlyfans and prostitution have been pushed at young women going to university as a way to pay their fees, but the only women I've seen speaking out are feminists.

Some great points here, but I also wanted to add the knock on effect it has to all women who have nothing to do with OF.

Men watch this content. They watch women‘s content become more degrading as the need to sustain an income and normalise it. They pay for the content to become more degrading. And the women have no choice but to put on a performance that they’re enjoying it. So men take that as affirmation and put those expectations in their relationship, asking their partners to do it too (“loads of other women do it and they love it. You’ll love it too, if you just try it…” and so on). And that’s if you were ‘lucky’ enough to be asked.

Not to also mention the many women ‘empowering’ themselves by making less than NMW. In any other vocation we’d call that slave labour, especially when a company is taking their cut regardless. Put that same women in a brothel and leave her with less than NMW whilst the pimps take their cut and we know it’s a problem. Make the pimp an online company and we can call it ‘empowering’ instead.

There could start to be the unspoken expectation that single mothers don’t need increases to benefits because after all they could do OF.

Women are not commodities. Purchasing any aspect of them is not feminism

Sadly I think this is a clear consequence of "SEX WORK IS WORK" as an ideology.