[false_kermit]

Just want to give a shoutout to the author for giving a fairly unbiased take here. Sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be, and with places like OnlyFans making it a (relatively) safe option there's a lot of people who are able to make money while maintaining autonomy. I've noticed especially among people working in tech there's quite a bit of sex-work shaming that goes on. Hopefully this article helps break some of that programming.

[jbirer]

I personally am not against sex work but I am against giving the illusion of a personal intimacy and manipulation of lonely socially unsavvy guys who pay for this. There is nothing wrong with sex work but a lot wrong with emotional exploitation and preying on the vulnerable.

[nkrisc]

You're taking about these guys like they're children who are incapable of fending for themselves. They're paying for nudes over the internet, I'm sure most of them know that and are fine with it. If they delude themselves into thinking it's more, maybe they do need someone to watch their wallet for them after all.

[jbirer]

This is not treating them like children but more like focusing on the fact that a lot of them are naive and emotionally desperate guys who are not aware that it's all a game and are vulnerable to be preyed on by somebody who is willing to give them fake personal interaction and affection for their cash.

[twalla]

Anyone who thinks they’re getting actual intimacy from some sort of transactional relationship is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. However, I think it reflects more poorly on the people who raised these guys than the guys themselves.

[ve55]

I see how one can come to this point of view, but I think there is a perspective missing here about just how lonely and miserable some people are.

When you have never had a partner, when you have never been hugged and told you're loved, when you may also not even have friends or co-workers, and much more, things... are much different. I've met many males on the Internet where all of this applies, and they have a very easy time getting addicted to things that provide social comfort, whether is is Twitch, OnlyFans, Youtubers, and many other things. They want so badly to feel comfort, friendship, affection, and so on, that it is very easy to be tricked into thinking you're attaining it when you are in fact only attaining many strong correlates of it.

[twalla]

I think a lot of this ends up at it not being socially acceptable for men to show emotion or to seek emotional support. I imagine if that were the case most of these people would realize what they're paying for doesn't even approach being a shadow of the real thing. This is a group that would benefit a lot from some sort of self love/self care messaging but I don't even know what that would look like if it were tailored to this group.

I also kind of feel for all the people who signed up to sell nudes on onlyfans thinking they'd make a quick buck and ended up playing therapist for a bunch of lonely maladjusted dudes.

[cultus]

Sex workers are exploited much more than they exploit their clients. I think most people know what they are getting into.

[jbirer]

How so? The way I see it is that they rake in thousands while not giving anything permanently, on the other hand there are people who risk financial and emotional ruin from predatory sex workers (I am not saying all of them are that way, I have met honest ones myself).

If you are talking about pimps, Onlyfans has mostly indepenent workers AFAIK.

[toomuchtodo]

What permanence would you expect from transactional intimacy? It’s like going to the movies, you’re paying someone for a temporary escape from reality.

Permanence would be a sex worker on retainer or a committed partner.

[chii]

Permanence, as in friendship after the fact. And some people might mistaken transactional intimacy for real friendship.

[cultus]

They are giving quite a lot permanently. Their images will always be out there on the internet and in the world, and could be used against them when applying for future jobs, etc. The sex worker generally doesn't have XXX footage of their clients. It's the other way around.

Sure, some people give them more than they can afford. Sometimes car dealerships sell people dumb cars they can't afford too.

edit: Regarding pimps, there's plenty of women who are forced by pimps to perform online. It's extremely common. I imagine moreso with COVID.

[jbirer]

I would argue that the normalization of virtual sex work is in the process of being socially accepted because a lot of sex workers are forced into it due to unemployment and the current COVID-19 situation, and due to the sheer amount of girls getting into it. It seems quite trivial compared to people losing their wealth and emotional health because they "don't know what the world is really like".

[cambalache]

Please exploit me buying from me a $20.00/month subscriptions of my semi-naked pics.

[jrnichols]

and exploit us of the relentless (and devious) spamming of websites like reddit, dating apps like Tinder, POF, etc.

OnlyFans creators have quickly started to use very underhanded self promotion techniques, and unfortunately many of them are straight up emotional manipulation.

[gauravphoenix]

two wrongs don't make a right.

[jbirer]

"A hurts me, so it's ok to hurt B" mentality is destructive indeed.

[cultus]

No, but exploitation of the type of man that thinks the stripper is actually into him is not among the most pressing issues surrounding sex work. It's an extremely strange thing to focus on. It's like focusing on anti-white racism. Sure it exists, and it is bad. But it has nowhere near the consequences of anti-black racism, so there is no equivalence between the problems.

[EricDeb]

Suicide is one of the top causes of death for people under 55. Suicides are overwhelmingly male (4:1). I think exploitation of lonely men absolutely has consequences. None of this downplays the consequences for women in online sex work however

[jcims]

I wouldn’t say it’s extremely strange. For example folks that have been through an issue themselves or know someone that has are likely to be more attuned to it’s effects.

There’s also statistically a rather large reduction in initiation and frequency of sexual activity for young adults in the us, particularly young men. Things like this could be causal factor.

Lastly young adults are killing themselves at record rates and young men 4x as much as young women, again things that feed into depression and detachment are worth considering.

I’d say it’s ok to be concerned about both.

[jbirer]

The exploitation of lonely socially disabled men is not something insignificant. It's actually quite big on the severity scale compared to the exposure of the material of the performer as Onlyfans is in the process of being normalized to society.

[k__]

Is it really?

I don't know, but I have the feeling that "lonely socially disabled men" are just very vocal about it.

[leftyted]

How am I supposed to feel about a sentence like this?

> "Like there was one guy who paid me to make a reaction video about his ‘appendage’ and it took me like seven takes to sound like I was excited by it."

To me, that's just deeply sad. Paying a woman to act as though she's interested in you is the commoditization of an innate yearning for companionship. It's turning something that poems are written about into mere transaction. And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.

[maxerickson]

It is sad.

Is the solution to ban selling the reaction, or is the solution to work towards a society where fewer people are inclined to buy it?

It's probably not the case that the availability of the reaction is the thing that leads to the hollow transaction.

[dragonwriter]

> And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.

People that are against capitalism on the left tend not to be against volintary exchange of labor for money but the power relations between capitalist and laborer in capitalist industry. That's not an issue with individual sales of labor on the marketplace direct to end consumers of a service, which seems to be the issue here. The fact that the kind of service involved is sexual is beside the point.

[leftyted]

Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally. What bothers people on the left about capitalism is, from the article:

> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.

[cambalache]

And ironically, same its happening with sex and intimacy. Let's listen to Houellebecq one moment:

“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

[chii]

> Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.

It's a trait of a natural darwinian systems imho. Look at how it works in nature - a pride of lions would have 1 alpha male who dominates most, if not all females.

I have no reason to believe that humans don't have the same innate behaviour as lions.

[orwin]

In fact i've read on some forum focused on prehistoric events (Neandertalis and sapiens "cohabitation") that the theory of humans having wolf/lion pack type of behavior (Alpha male with multiple females, beta couples leaving the pack during hard time, stuff like this).

[dragonwriter]

> Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally.

It's true of a lot of the non-Marxist Left, too.

> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.

Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

[leftyted]

> Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

I'm "struggling to see" how you interpreted my post this way.

As long as we're both struggling here, please explain how sex work doesn't entail massively imbalanced power relations. I wasn't just talking about OnlyFans: the post I responded to says "sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be". But even if we're only talking about the internet, I think you're extremely naive if you think physical separation means there's no coercive power involved. The money comes from somewhere. And don't forget, there's a middleman between the performers and the audience.

> Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

I can't parse this. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem or "the problems of capitalism".

I think that general revulsion toward capitalism has very little to do with Marx and much more to do with unfairness (perceived and real), cutthroat competition that seems to reward dishonesty, the dispossession of the losers in that competition, and crass materialism. To me, all of those things clearly apply here.

[diffrinse]

I dunno about unbiased, seems pretty concerned about 18 year old girls specifically might be "at risk" but then wants to say "well maybe that 18 year old comes from an abusive household and so she could use the money", like come on

Women profiting from OF is not some bubble-like behavior that might sabotage American society down the line if we're not 'careful', sex work has existed since the beginning of time and in much much more liberal forums than American society, and will continue to exist to a non-trivial degree wherever urban populations exist. Like no shit, lotta single people stuck in front of their screens so its a gold rush at the moment; who cares.

The more concerning problem is the growing puerility of hetero men for lack of a better term and porn trends in America tend to confirm that. These women aren't putting a gun to anyone's head, and Jordan Peterson had a very big audience for a reason

[oceanghost]

This completely... sort of.

OF is a cynical take on relationships and love. I don't know how anyone could be taken in by this fantasy. It's a hollow thing. Still, if that's what you want, that's fine.

I happen to be single, and I'd say 95% of my interactions on dating sites are these gals who are "selling."

This is my main problem with the thing-- I am looking for a wife, and I am bombarded with insincere people on these sites.

[titanomachy]

Damn, that sucks! I think the only non-genuine messages I got on dating apps were from obvious spambots, so it never wasted too much of my time to filter through them. But it's probably gotten worse in the last few years.

[lumberjack]

Ah yes, nothing like exploiting teenage girls and pretending to be feminist liberal progressive while doing it! There is no physical pimp in this case, but lots of viral marketing duping immature teenagers into believing they can make it by selling their dignity. I don't care if some 30 year old person wants to make a life out of camming, but don't come here pretending like Onlyfans is some force for good. And then you dare criticize people like me who call a spade a spade, instead of criticizing the people profiting from this scam.