this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I know a lot of sex workers and the "abusive pimps" narrative doesn't ring true to me. They're doing it coz it beats driving Uber.
Uber is abusive as fuck and the gig economy shouldn’t exist either.
I think it’s problematic when the hate is directed at sex workers. They’re doing something for money, just like a brick layer, because they’re desperate to eat and find shelter just like all of us but the sex industry is abusive and extremely exploitative and it shouldn’t exist. Meanwhile the brick laying industry definitely should exist which is an important distinction that gets lost.
If Uber and onlyfans cease to exist then the world is a better place, and using the humanity of sex workers as a human shield to defend their existence isn’t right.
The distinction one should make when analyzing these things are the relationships between the workers and employers; some pimps look after there workers and provide fair compensation, others go to impoverished 3rd world countries, go to the villages with suitcases of money and buy women for 500 dollars a person paid to the family and come back every year, then keep them as slaves.
Ubereats and other associated apps all pay people below min wage and rely on a similar model of importing slavery to the 1st world; they are essentially sanatized servant apps.
What's your objection to OnlyFans? I mean, apart from objection we can make to anything under capitalism.
It's safer and more lucrative than most sex work. I know a lot of people who've switched from other kinds of sex work to Only Fans.
OnlyFans is the pimp. They take a cut out of earnings and yeah, that makes them pimps.
Most "creators" (that's what the platform calls them) make 10 bucks a year. Only a few ever make enough money to live on it. It's like that on most of these platforms, we see the top creators but most people toil forever without seeing any revenue.
The high-end, top earning "creators" are also no different from petty bourgeois earners. Those don't want onlyfans or our attitude to porn to change bc their entire livelihood is based on the revenue they make there. To which I say, welp, tough luck when the revolution comes. The brick and mortar petty bourgeois will see his store seized and so will the onlyfans account.
Creators also make custom content (maybe not all of them do idk) for clients. They become prostitutes by proxy of a phone screen, but still prostitutes.
The screen proxy kind of obfuscates the nature of onlyfans but it's still prostitution, albeit perhaps a bit safer because it happens on the internet.
We've seen also with the Amouranth situation (though I only heard about it when it came out, idk what came of it) that some "creators" are trafficked into doing this. I assume there are many, many more trafficked "models" on onlyfans than the platform lets on.
A lot of Instagram 'models' or whatever are escorting on the side, using their social media to promote their work.
I actually looked that up for this comment, but not for Instagram specifically, and it seems most were escorrs/prostitutes before doing it on social. However it seems they also switch to OF if they can make enough money on it and ditch the escorts once that happens.
This isn't emphasized nearly enough. Again, when people talk about sex work they gotta be more clear about who they're talking about.
We gotta make the distinction between sex workers and sex bourgeoisie in these conversations because mainstream liberal society just casually lumps the latter into some big tent where both the views of the pimp and their sex-slave are held on equal footing.
Like I said in another comment here, there are some grey areas that add nuance to the discussions around this, but when it comes to who is exploiting and who is being exploited -- that part is pretty damn clear.
What percentage of OnlyFans models receive 100% of their profit?
Sex trafficker and rapist Andrew Tate forced his victims to perform on his OnlyFans. How many similar stories are there? Is OnlyFans really a crowdsourcing platform for self-employed sex workers, or is it a pimp's paradise hiding behind the facade of the former?
I found a Google AMP link in your comment! I've removed Google's spyware for you! :3
The way i see it OnlyFans is basically crowdfunding for porn, predating on lonely people. OnlyFans creators are hustling lonely people out of their money, and the platform encourages them to do it by taking a cut.
Personally I dont have an objection with OnlyFans in concept or execution, aside from it doing that predatory youtube thing where it sells an idea of material abundance that is only actually avilable to 0.01% of users on the app; most onlyfans creators (90%+) make less than 700 dollars a month.
Its the same issue with the music industry, it only rewards a tiny few people and gives scraps to the rest while selling a false idea of social mobility and monetary abundance.
Basically onlyfans needs to unionize
More power to em, I’m genuinely glad that they enjoy that line of work, in a perfect world ONLY people that consent to that occupation would have that job but unfortunately that isn’t the case nearly enough. I just feel that too many are forced into it and the perpetrators of the industry are too disgustingly exploitative to justify the industry’s existence. Not doubting your personal experiences with talking to these people, just giving you my 2 cents on the issue.
I just view it the same way as any type of injurious manual labor. They are workers who are in part selling their bodily well-being for money, so the goals should be harm reduction, alternative employment, and demand reduction. I'm not sure if it is possible to eliminate completely at this stage of development, but carceral policies should not be used. Also, there are plenty of trafficked sex workers who aren't doing it consensually.
I can't help but feel that too many communists don't actually listen to sex workers and base a lot of their misgivings on some moral, conservative, patriarchal attitude towards sex, women and culture.
Not everything under the umbrella of "sex work" is prostitution or porn. In general (and I say in general, because I'm aware that this is a complex issue) we should be letting sex workers guide this conversation.
This is it.
None of the SWERF takes on here are listening to the relevant stakeholders.
Personally, I don't take people who use "SWERF" in these conversations seriously, let alone someone who accuses an ML instance of harboring those ideals... whatever those ideals are.
Thinking of? I've never seen a genuine "SWERF". Every take I've seen here has been rather adamant regarding the necessity for those in the sex trade to be at the forefront of these conversations.
We've had this struggle session before. Financial extortion for sex = rape. The anecdote of your friendships is well and grand. It doesn't ring true for 99% of all victims of the sex trade.
Hit me back when you talk to some emaciated 14 year old Peruvian girls trapped within it, offering sexual favors for 5, 10, 15 USD. Hit me back when you talk to some 60, 70, 80 year old Korean women, who also work 50+ hour jobs, trapped within it. Hit me back when your partner is being assaulted almost daily, and she agrees that she is, yet says "we need the money" anyway. Empowering. Ha.
Perhaps it is puritanism, perhaps it is moralistic argumentation, idk. I do know that every successful socialist revolution eliminated prostitution. It is, 99 times out of 100, one of the most exploitative financial relationships that can exist. Good for you if you wind up a top 10% OnlyFans creator by your bootstraps or whatever. That doesn't matter much to the thousands of people being trafficked and raped every goddamn day.
"SWERF". Where are the voices of those aforementioned Peruvian youth? Those elder Koreans? The 6.3 million people trafficked for sexual exploitation in 2021 alone? I don't care about the feelings and opinions of sexual hobbyists nearly as much as I care about victims, and I don't think anyone should. 🤷♂️
Thank you for writing this.
This only means that sex workers you know are Westerners like you, and had the option to drive Uber or do any other legal work instead. This is not true for people illegally trafficked into your country. I'll just paste the comment I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
I used to think this is simply, “sex workers are the ones carrying all the risk and harm, so only their opinion matters. sex worker organisations call for full decriminalisation. /thread”
Until I learned decriminalisation of sex work in the first world leads to increased human trafficking from the Global South: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12001453#s0045
To put it bluntly, brown women who would otherwise lead their normal lives, are kindapped and smuggled to be raped by white men, in large numbers, whenever a first world country decriminalises prostitution.
This works both ways - criminalising prostitution reduces human trafficking, as shown above in the case study.
People trafficked from the Global South are completely marginalised and poweless, they don’t have a voice. The voices we hear, calling for decriminalisation, are mostly from self employed Westerners. And while I genuinely do care about their right to safer work conditions, for me it doesn’t trump the right of brown women to not be kidnapped and raped by white men.