The More I Worked, the Less I Felt, the Better I Got
January 31, 2023 3:24 AM Subscribe
What at first seemed empowering — siphoning money from men who would see women as nothing more than customized pocket pussies — became clearer to me as feeling returned to my body. There were, of course, a small minority of men who saw their monetary exchange as one for a woman’s subjectivity — those who paid to feel dominant and make an object out of someone. And then there were the rest. ... It was a time of isolation, a time where people had lost family members, friends, and communal events. It was a time where people wanted to connect and feel alive in their bodies, and had found a relatively simple vehicle for doing so. Even if they were connecting with me, who hid behind a facade of images and persona. Even if I ultimately could not give them the connection they bought. from my year as a hot girl for hire by Eliza McLamb
Guessing the site is OnlyFans?
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:51 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 5:51 AM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
Guessing the site is OnlyFans?
That's what she drops big hints for, certainly.
The situation she describes sounds terrible for everyone involved except for the influencers who are able to successfully cash in. I hope the clients at least feel like they are getting something out of the deal for what they are spending. And I appreciated her point about how the current system isn't great for individual sex workers either.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:03 AM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
That's what she drops big hints for, certainly.
The situation she describes sounds terrible for everyone involved except for the influencers who are able to successfully cash in. I hope the clients at least feel like they are getting something out of the deal for what they are spending. And I appreciated her point about how the current system isn't great for individual sex workers either.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:03 AM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
So, sex sells, but it doesn't pay.
posted by floppyroofing at 6:38 AM on January 31, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by floppyroofing at 6:38 AM on January 31, 2023 [11 favorites]
To be in the top 1% of earners on the platform, one only has to make $1,200 a month — not enough to sustain a single person in any U.S. state.
I know a few very hot women who use OF, and they’re only pulling a few hundred a month. And unlike this woman’s clients, they do actual nudity and more. Now, if you really enjoy making this content and it’s a fun side hustle, more power to you, but if you’re doing this for an actual income, it seems pretty fucking grim, especially since this is something that could hurt your chances of a career change in the future (even though it shouldn’t).
I find this all a pretty depressing aspect of capitalism, especially when you have all these stories in the media from the handful who get really rich.
posted by vanitas at 9:30 AM on January 31, 2023 [7 favorites]
I know a few very hot women who use OF, and they’re only pulling a few hundred a month. And unlike this woman’s clients, they do actual nudity and more. Now, if you really enjoy making this content and it’s a fun side hustle, more power to you, but if you’re doing this for an actual income, it seems pretty fucking grim, especially since this is something that could hurt your chances of a career change in the future (even though it shouldn’t).
I find this all a pretty depressing aspect of capitalism, especially when you have all these stories in the media from the handful who get really rich.
posted by vanitas at 9:30 AM on January 31, 2023 [7 favorites]
Now, if you really enjoy making this content and it’s a fun side hustle, more power to you, but if you’re doing this for an actual income, it seems pretty fucking grim
Unsurprisingly a huge percentage of cam/online sex workers seem to be based in countries where $1200 goes a lot further than in the U.S.
posted by atoxyl at 9:48 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]
Unsurprisingly a huge percentage of cam/online sex workers seem to be based in countries where $1200 goes a lot further than in the U.S.
posted by atoxyl at 9:48 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]
What? 12,000$ USA a year is exactly how much my disabled girlfriend used to get, and I was under the impression that it was considered fairly generous. And I've certainly lived off of slightly less. It's not a very secure life, but it's absolutely possible to have food and shelter in the states for that amount.
posted by Jacen at 9:50 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Jacen at 9:50 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, Jacen. Given the absolute nightmare of people living off disability payments, I can imagine not hope so.
Anyways, I hadn’t expected to be surprised by how quickly onlyfans’ economics have cleaved to the same path as Uber, Etsy, etc but of course it has.
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:04 AM on January 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
Anyways, I hadn’t expected to be surprised by how quickly onlyfans’ economics have cleaved to the same path as Uber, Etsy, etc but of course it has.
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:04 AM on January 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
I think debating how far $1200/month can go is besides the point when that’s the amount that lands you into the top 1% of earners on the platform; the average OF content creator is earning far less.
posted by vanitas at 10:17 AM on January 31, 2023 [15 favorites]
posted by vanitas at 10:17 AM on January 31, 2023 [15 favorites]
This is mostly just an argument of technicalities. $1200/mo is a bit above the federal poverty line for a single person in the U.S. ($12,000/yr would be just under). So yes, one can literally survive on that, and it does start to look better if it really is your side gig, but it’s not much, especially for a top 1% result. There are a lot of parts of the country where it really is not a living wage.
Though it’s a little hard to say exactly what those percentile stats mean, because it would be a reasonable assumption that a lot of people have made accounts without investing any real effort into making a business of it. But the more effort one has to put in, the less it’s a side gig. And I’m pretty sure that even looking within the top 1%, it’s a basically a power law distribution.
posted by atoxyl at 10:28 AM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
Though it’s a little hard to say exactly what those percentile stats mean, because it would be a reasonable assumption that a lot of people have made accounts without investing any real effort into making a business of it. But the more effort one has to put in, the less it’s a side gig. And I’m pretty sure that even looking within the top 1%, it’s a basically a power law distribution.
posted by atoxyl at 10:28 AM on January 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is so strange, I don't know if I even understood what it was about. But I could feel a lot of sadness.
posted by mumimor at 10:37 AM on January 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by mumimor at 10:37 AM on January 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
Now, if you really enjoy making this content and it’s a fun side hustle, more power to you, but if you’re doing this for an actual income, it seems pretty fucking grim, especially since this is something that could hurt your chances of a career change in the future (even though it shouldn’t).
This is the depressing part, to me: the way that rhetoric about "sexual empowerment" is used as a disingenuous way to sell the same exploitative games that Uber and Airbnb play with their employees, only with higher stakes and less of an actual payout.
The relationships between sex, money, and power are endlessly fascinating, and it's hard to draw one singular conclusion about them; I know people who've worked as sugar babies and found the connections they made there more healthy and rewarding than what they encountered while dating, to pick one anecdote among many. You can certainly interpret the mostly-binary one-way flow of money from men to women as empowering for women. But you can also look at it as an instance where men more-often have both the financial means and the sense of entitlement to women's bodies, and where women are often forced into financially precarious situations where the prospect of riches through sex work begins to seem, not only enticing, but like the only possible option. Which makes it even sadder when sites like OnlyFans open that as an avenue to so many would-be performers that it winds up radically diminishing the chances that most of them will make anything meaningful off of it at all.
On the flip side, there really is a loneliness and desperation among men that runs deeper than just the awful incel/MRA/red pill toxicity. I recently had a conversation with a long-term acquaintance of mine, a man about my age, where he sincerely asked me questions about the OnlyFan performer he'd been paying for conversations as if there was a chance of a relationship developing between them. He shared a few conversations with me, in which the performer in question was probably being sincerely friendly but also was clearly operating as a detached professional. And it broke my heart, because he's far from the only man I know who's been so isolated and disconnected from contact with... well, not just women, but with anybody... that even the kind of friendliness you get out of a chat with someone you know is there for your money is more than you've experienced in years, if not ever.
But that was one of the more wholesome instances of something like that happening, with a woman who wasn't acting particularly negligently towards him. There are absolutely places where that bubbles over into something worse, and people let themselves be conned because they literally don't have enough experience with human contact to recognize the warning signs. (That's not a sex-work-specific thing, obviously. But it's connected, I think, to why the sugar babies I've known sincerely enjoyed their work: they said that there was something stabilizing about having someone openly state what they were looking for, both to cut back on the corrosive influence that money can have on relationships where that exchange isn't explicit, and because so many of those people simply wanted more human contact than they were able to readily find. Not sex per se—just connection.)
I guess my point is, as someone who is both sex-positive in general and supports sex work in particular, the ethics and power dynamics surrounding OnlyFans absolutely makes my skin crawl. It can be used ethically and healthily by both performers and consumers, but there are so many ways in which it winds up being grody and degrading, and in different ways to the people on either side of the screen. Mostly in ways that are a synecdoche of our society in general, but if anything, that makes it more heartbreaking, not less.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:55 AM on January 31, 2023 [21 favorites]
This is the depressing part, to me: the way that rhetoric about "sexual empowerment" is used as a disingenuous way to sell the same exploitative games that Uber and Airbnb play with their employees, only with higher stakes and less of an actual payout.
The relationships between sex, money, and power are endlessly fascinating, and it's hard to draw one singular conclusion about them; I know people who've worked as sugar babies and found the connections they made there more healthy and rewarding than what they encountered while dating, to pick one anecdote among many. You can certainly interpret the mostly-binary one-way flow of money from men to women as empowering for women. But you can also look at it as an instance where men more-often have both the financial means and the sense of entitlement to women's bodies, and where women are often forced into financially precarious situations where the prospect of riches through sex work begins to seem, not only enticing, but like the only possible option. Which makes it even sadder when sites like OnlyFans open that as an avenue to so many would-be performers that it winds up radically diminishing the chances that most of them will make anything meaningful off of it at all.
On the flip side, there really is a loneliness and desperation among men that runs deeper than just the awful incel/MRA/red pill toxicity. I recently had a conversation with a long-term acquaintance of mine, a man about my age, where he sincerely asked me questions about the OnlyFan performer he'd been paying for conversations as if there was a chance of a relationship developing between them. He shared a few conversations with me, in which the performer in question was probably being sincerely friendly but also was clearly operating as a detached professional. And it broke my heart, because he's far from the only man I know who's been so isolated and disconnected from contact with... well, not just women, but with anybody... that even the kind of friendliness you get out of a chat with someone you know is there for your money is more than you've experienced in years, if not ever.
But that was one of the more wholesome instances of something like that happening, with a woman who wasn't acting particularly negligently towards him. There are absolutely places where that bubbles over into something worse, and people let themselves be conned because they literally don't have enough experience with human contact to recognize the warning signs. (That's not a sex-work-specific thing, obviously. But it's connected, I think, to why the sugar babies I've known sincerely enjoyed their work: they said that there was something stabilizing about having someone openly state what they were looking for, both to cut back on the corrosive influence that money can have on relationships where that exchange isn't explicit, and because so many of those people simply wanted more human contact than they were able to readily find. Not sex per se—just connection.)
I guess my point is, as someone who is both sex-positive in general and supports sex work in particular, the ethics and power dynamics surrounding OnlyFans absolutely makes my skin crawl. It can be used ethically and healthily by both performers and consumers, but there are so many ways in which it winds up being grody and degrading, and in different ways to the people on either side of the screen. Mostly in ways that are a synecdoche of our society in general, but if anything, that makes it more heartbreaking, not less.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 10:55 AM on January 31, 2023 [21 favorites]
only-fans-but-a-performer-coop seems a little better. idk how that could even begin. capitalism is hardest on women, anywhere you go.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:05 PM on January 31, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by j_curiouser at 12:05 PM on January 31, 2023 [4 favorites]
My gut is saying "this is totally fake,using small truth as support of a story."
Or at least, lots and lots and lots of dodgy shit not described.
posted by porpoise at 10:12 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
Or at least, lots and lots and lots of dodgy shit not described.
posted by porpoise at 10:12 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
My gut is saying "this is totally fake,using small truth as support of a story."Do you think these agencies don't exist or Eliza is lying about working for one?
Or at least, lots and lots and lots of dodgy shit not described.
The agencies themselves and how they catfish customers have been previously documented elsewhere and I'm not sure why you'd lie about working for one for clout.
posted by zymil at 6:12 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is yet another reason to just get off social media. Instagram is one or two posts from people I know, followed by a never ending stream of videos of scantily clad twenty-somethings who all have "link in bio" as one of the phrases in the caption, and the few i've traced have all taken me to OF.
Facebook is similarly driving people down the same path. 90% of the marketplace suggestions are for twenty-somethings selling fashion or sports wear by modelling it while wearing no underwear. If you look at their main pages, its all posts of similar things to the marketplace, and one or two public posts that are unrelated. And their webite links? They're just links that are just redirects to OF..
Social media that you don't personally control is just exploitation.
posted by Snowflake at 7:45 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Facebook is similarly driving people down the same path. 90% of the marketplace suggestions are for twenty-somethings selling fashion or sports wear by modelling it while wearing no underwear. If you look at their main pages, its all posts of similar things to the marketplace, and one or two public posts that are unrelated. And their webite links? They're just links that are just redirects to OF..
Social media that you don't personally control is just exploitation.
posted by Snowflake at 7:45 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is yet another reason to just get off social media. Instagram is one or two posts from people I know, followed by a never ending stream of videos of scantily clad twenty-somethings who all have "link in bio" as one of the phrases in the caption, and the few i've traced have all taken me to OF.
Facebook is similarly driving people down the same path. 90% of the marketplace suggestions are for twenty-somethings selling fashion or sports wear by modelling it while wearing no underwear.
Uh...You do know that your social media algorithm is based on what you feed it, right?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:50 AM on February 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
Facebook is similarly driving people down the same path. 90% of the marketplace suggestions are for twenty-somethings selling fashion or sports wear by modelling it while wearing no underwear.
Uh...You do know that your social media algorithm is based on what you feed it, right?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:50 AM on February 1, 2023 [10 favorites]
Uh...You do know that your social media algorithm is based on what you feed it, right?
I thought that too, but as i'm not feeding it a desire for hot nude chicks, I don't know how it's targeting me with them. My only guess is that they've identified me as a middle-aged white male, and as that's the main demographic for OF it's trying to recruit me.
posted by Snowflake at 9:55 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I thought that too, but as i'm not feeding it a desire for hot nude chicks, I don't know how it's targeting me with them. My only guess is that they've identified me as a middle-aged white male, and as that's the main demographic for OF it's trying to recruit me.
posted by Snowflake at 9:55 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
Facebook definitely knows I'm a middle-aged white male. My feeds don't match your description in the slightest. (Lots of ads, but currently for, let me check Facebook.... some local arts and media organizations, a Facebook group related to a hobby of mine, Wired magazine, Wordpress.)
No idea why that is, no value judgements. (I mean, I like looking at the kind of thing as much as anyone, I guess. Though I'm glad it's not cluttering up my Facebook feed.) Just a warning that these things are highly personalized and that generalizing from your own experience is difficult.
(But do look for "hide post" options on anything especially annoying. Might help.)
posted by floppyroofing at 10:22 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
No idea why that is, no value judgements. (I mean, I like looking at the kind of thing as much as anyone, I guess. Though I'm glad it's not cluttering up my Facebook feed.) Just a warning that these things are highly personalized and that generalizing from your own experience is difficult.
(But do look for "hide post" options on anything especially annoying. Might help.)
posted by floppyroofing at 10:22 AM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think one problem is when they can't identify you. I play a lot of solitaire on my phone when I am anxious or sleepless, because it seems to distract me enough to calm down. But obviously I NEVER click the ads except by accident, and I only rarely use my phone for searching stuff on the internet or for social media, except searching routes, and something is "wrong" with my cloud settings, so the algorithms don't know what I'm doing on my computers or the iPad. They rotate between "thinking" I am a 40-something male builder and a 70-something person with health issues. When they are in the male builder mode, I get sexy ads along with all the tools for construction and safety gear. When they are in the retired person mode, I mostly get ads for drugs and beds. Both get me ads for financial stuff.
Another thing: I use Safari for private stuff and Chrome for work. This was originally because my workplace intra-thing didn't work on Safari, but I discovered that it meant that I never get embarrassing stuff in my searches when I am using it at work, often with students looking on.
posted by mumimor at 10:44 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
Another thing: I use Safari for private stuff and Chrome for work. This was originally because my workplace intra-thing didn't work on Safari, but I discovered that it meant that I never get embarrassing stuff in my searches when I am using it at work, often with students looking on.
posted by mumimor at 10:44 AM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
One word to the wise: When my son was 13 I discovered he had an app on his phone that was some kind of virtual (animated/anime style, well-endowed) girlfriend.
It was pretty basic but it absolutely floored me.
We'd had discussions about porn (not saying these were perfect, just that I had thought of that) but I hadn't thought about the robot relationships much. I wasn't horrified that he was curious or anything but it was suddenly just so complicated and I could see the pipeline from middle schooler to web cams to catfishing just...open up before our family like that.
I would prefer that my son not pay for "relationships" like that, particularly when he's young and those things feel so hard and then there's this - alternative that you can pay for instead of muddling through with real human beings. (That's kind of the conversation I had and then my husband had some more.)
It really slammed me up against gaps between my desires for my kids and my thoughts on sex positivity and sex work and just a lot of stuff. Anyways, if you have kids do be talking to them about this. I think I'll share this article with him (he's 17 now), although I'm a bit worried it gives a message that the workers are making out fine. :P
posted by warriorqueen at 12:05 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
It was pretty basic but it absolutely floored me.
We'd had discussions about porn (not saying these were perfect, just that I had thought of that) but I hadn't thought about the robot relationships much. I wasn't horrified that he was curious or anything but it was suddenly just so complicated and I could see the pipeline from middle schooler to web cams to catfishing just...open up before our family like that.
I would prefer that my son not pay for "relationships" like that, particularly when he's young and those things feel so hard and then there's this - alternative that you can pay for instead of muddling through with real human beings. (That's kind of the conversation I had and then my husband had some more.)
It really slammed me up against gaps between my desires for my kids and my thoughts on sex positivity and sex work and just a lot of stuff. Anyways, if you have kids do be talking to them about this. I think I'll share this article with him (he's 17 now), although I'm a bit worried it gives a message that the workers are making out fine. :P
posted by warriorqueen at 12:05 PM on February 1, 2023 [3 favorites]
Y'know, teen dating requires one or both to have some money to spend. Either job or allowance or parental funding. One way or another somebody has to foot the bill for you and your SO to go to that movie or out to the skating rink. Unless it's like Girl Next Door or Family Friends or something.... it takes a bit of funding.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:24 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by zengargoyle at 2:24 PM on February 1, 2023 [1 favorite]
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