#poli elective girl with catholic values takes on...someone's else's opinion on sex work! haha

[cats-pray-too]

I love you for providing a different perspective to the discourse surrounding this post, but I found myself disagreeing with a few things you said, so I thought I'd write a response to your response! Forgive me for the wordiness :

I do agree that OnlyFans is a step up in terms of safety compared to the traditional pornography industry! It's undeniably better for creators to have more control over the type of content they make, their audience and have the internet as a shield between them and potential acts of violence.

(normalization, lack of info) However with that said, I think the impact of OnlyFans on normalizing sex work is quite concerning!! Since sex work is known for being particularly mentally harmful in that it changes self perception and causes social exclusion even when compared to other "body-labor" industries----and added in with the fact that most people aren't in sex work for enjoyment but necessity--influences vulnerable people to turn to it for an "out" due to how accessible it has become instead of a traditional career. And this happens often without enough knowledge on the negative aspects of the lifestyle, since the glamorized "successful empowered OnlyFans creator" narrative has become so...prevalent in online media in the last decade that many creators often only start talking about the downsides when they reach a certain amount of fame/retire in fear of losing customers....which goes back to the consequences of self-objectification. Ahh!

(digital footprint, permanence) OnlyFans being of a digital medium (idk!!) also makes it so that what happens online can be preserved forever instead of transactions that happen during face to face sex work---I'm not a fan of either, but with digital footprints being so important nowadays, I feel like the platform is to blame for a lot of young people feeling like they can't opt out of sex work if they change their mind---how can they! Their online presence is already tied to it. The generally affordable costs of subscriptions (since OnlyFans is cheaper than, say, hiring a prostitute) likely means that more people have "consumed them". The social-media marketing that is almost mandatory for OnlyFans creators also likely means that they have spent time and energy crafting attractive personas they can sell that might feel too intrinsically linked to themselves by now. Again...normalisation and loss of identity. It just seems to come back to this.

(audience demand) Also I don't think we can definitively say that what sex workers post on OnlyFans is what they would have been doing anyways. That assumes most posters just post regular, semi-frequent (depending whether a person is in a relationship, I guess) content of them having sex without consideration of audience demand. Nowadays (of course this depends) doing OnlyFans seems quite demanding! Collaborations! Request from high-paying patrons! Consistent posting! Appealing to niche "kink" communities! It is incredibly difficult to sell the same product forever and maintain a certain income---so it feels like a natural development that vulnerable people with economic needs will seize the opportunities to make more, skewing how consensual and typical the whole thing is.

(general whataboutism) Finally I also don't think OnlyFans needs to surpass the evils of other worldwide epidemics to be notable or critiqued.."whataboutism" seems to often be a tool of evasion that assumes only so many topics can be talked about at once. The mass availability of porn can be bad! Systemic disempowerment of women is also bad! Child rape is evil! Perhaps these issues are related! (And genocide is decidedly worse, being classified as a crime against humanity and all. I don't think anyone or even any institutions perceive it as worse than porn availability. The pope!!! has also not spoken about porn to nearly the same extent and gravitas he used to speak about genocide. I hope--and think--that this is an attempt at hyperbole instead of a false made in bad faith just for the sake of disagreeing with the original posters.)

Putting everything aside though, I'm glad we got the opportunity to discuss either way! This post is also mostly based off my own observations (being on twitter, reading feminist theory for class, watching interviews with former sex workers ect etc) so do let me know if I'm getting any facts wrong. I also know there's an urge to automatically align these discussions with "right-wingism" due to the current political climate, political figures identifying as christian making decisions to limit women's rights and polarisation but I think everyone in this space is coming from wanting better for women (whatever this means lol) so I hope we can have more dialogue without assuming the worse of one another. Haha. Hebrews 10:24-25 and everything~

Onlyfans has melted the brains of both men and women to an astronomical level