6 ms·

Jobless, Selling Nudes Online and Still Struggling

36 points by jaredwiener 6y ago

mnskym 6y ago
who cares? stop complaining, take your time to develop valuable skills and get a real fucking job. maybe then you won't have to participate in a whoring contest and cry wolf
silexia 6y ago
Articles like this are pretty misleading. There are tons of employment options available right now, just a lot of people see those options as beneath them or as just too hard of work. And online porn is not a very good career option as its winner take all. People only want to see the very best content and most of the money chases that.
- dontbeevil1992 6y ago
  > just a lot of people see those options as beneath them or as just too hard of work. This might be true for some people, but don't forget that many of the available jobs are also very low-paying. People may not want to settle for the subpar quality of life that US minimum wage jobs afford them.
  - peterwoerner 6y ago
    One of the traps of minimum wage jobs is that they take up so much energy and time that it makes it difficult to go do things which improve your life (especially if you have a young family). Additionally, many give you unpredictable, inflexible and difficult hours which furthers the difficulty of improving your situation.
    - dontbeevil1992 6y ago
      I highly recommend to everyone who is curious about this to read Nickel and Dimed. I read it for a college course and it opened my eyes a lot to the reality of life for people who our society does not allocate enough resources to, and who we are encouraged to consider lazy and to blame for their own predicament even when it's not true.
      - ykevinator 6y ago
        Second, great book
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  > And online porn is not a very good career option as its winner take all. Wasn't the entire point of stuff like OnlyFans that this wasn't the case and that there was decent money to be made from have a small but loyal follower base with "personal" customer relationships?
throwaway888abc 6y ago
https://archive.is/bjptA https://archive.is/bjptA
albroland 6y ago
I found this quote from the article a bit confusing: "wiping out parts of the economy where women dominate: retail businesses, restaurants and health care." Specifically the claim that the health care industry was wiped out. Am I missing something? Anecdotally, I have friends who became travelling nurses during the pandemic, going from hotspot to hotspot under contract making SV software engineer money. ACA enrollments appear way up this year and insurance carriers all appear to be doing well. Hospital staff are definitely being stretched but hourly workers are looking at more money as a result. I know initially hospitals cleared most elective surgeries, leaving surgeons + their support staff in a pickle, but all the surgeons I know are back to business as usual on both the east and west coast. I suppose admin staff who'd otherwise be sitting at the desk answering phones for more typical primary care operations might've been squeezed as well, but I've been making ophthalmologist, dentist, GP appointments throughout the past year talking to humans so that doesn't seem to match either.
- foxyv 6y ago
  A huge part of the health care economy is elective procedures which have been severely impacted. This has reduced income for these procedures and hospitals are instead being overloaded with costly but non-lucrative emergency care. A lot of health care staff are being furloughed. NPR did a piece on it: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-revenue-thousands-of-health-care-workers-face-furloughs-layoff https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-r...
  - albroland 6y ago
    Thank you for the link. This definitely mirrors what I had seen last year and if that didn't come across it was a failure on my part. That said, I believe a lot of those furloughed employees have since returned: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/9-hospitals-bringing-back-furloughed-employees.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/9-hospitals-... It's really hard to find any hard data about rehirings, hence my wondering and wild speculations based on personal experience ;)
- fred_is_fred 6y ago
ajcp 6y ago
What an unfortunate title. Not only because for decades now there are those whose job it has been to "sell nudes online", but also because it outright communicates a moral equivocation between desperate circumstances and sex-work, with such implied debasement STILL not garnering a payout as some kind of "I told you so/what did we learn" moment. It really takes the agency out of those sex-workers who do so for any myriad of reasons outside of desperation, and is the stupid rhetoric that seeks to rollback any strides -albeit in North America limited though they may be- we've made toward the field itself.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  "Equivocation" is like prevarication or evasiveness. The word you're looking for is "equivalence."
  - ajcp 6y ago
    Perhaps you're right. My sense was that an "equivocation" is creating a false equivalency between two things by hiding behind a word(s) ambiguousness or multiple meanings. In this case I'm saying they're trying to use _moral_ equivocation: creating a false sense of equivalency between two things (jobless and sex-work) by playing on the perceived moral ambiguity of sex-work.

36 points by jaredwiener 6y ago

who cares? stop complaining, take your time to develop valuable skills and get a real fucking job. maybe then you won't have to participate in a whoring contest and cry wolf

silexia 6y ago

Articles like this are pretty misleading. There are tons of employment options available right now, just a lot of people see those options as beneath them or as just too hard of work. And online porn is not a very good career option as its winner take all. People only want to see the very best content and most of the money chases that.

dontbeevil1992 6y ago
> just a lot of people see those options as beneath them or as just too hard of work. This might be true for some people, but don't forget that many of the available jobs are also very low-paying. People may not want to settle for the subpar quality of life that US minimum wage jobs afford them.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  One of the traps of minimum wage jobs is that they take up so much energy and time that it makes it difficult to go do things which improve your life (especially if you have a young family). Additionally, many give you unpredictable, inflexible and difficult hours which furthers the difficulty of improving your situation.
  - dontbeevil1992 6y ago
    I highly recommend to everyone who is curious about this to read Nickel and Dimed. I read it for a college course and it opened my eyes a lot to the reality of life for people who our society does not allocate enough resources to, and who we are encouraged to consider lazy and to blame for their own predicament even when it's not true.
    - ykevinator 6y ago
      Second, great book
klmadfejno 6y ago
> And online porn is not a very good career option as its winner take all. Wasn't the entire point of stuff like OnlyFans that this wasn't the case and that there was decent money to be made from have a small but loyal follower base with "personal" customer relationships?

throwaway888abc 6y ago

https://archive.is/bjptA https://archive.is/bjptA

albroland 6y ago

I found this quote from the article a bit confusing: "wiping out parts of the economy where women dominate: retail businesses, restaurants and health care." Specifically the claim that the health care industry was wiped out. Am I missing something? Anecdotally, I have friends who became travelling nurses during the pandemic, going from hotspot to hotspot under contract making SV software engineer money. ACA enrollments appear way up this year and insurance carriers all appear to be doing well. Hospital staff are definitely being stretched but hourly workers are looking at more money as a result. I know initially hospitals cleared most elective surgeries, leaving surgeons + their support staff in a pickle, but all the surgeons I know are back to business as usual on both the east and west coast. I suppose admin staff who'd otherwise be sitting at the desk answering phones for more typical primary care operations might've been squeezed as well, but I've been making ophthalmologist, dentist, GP appointments throughout the past year talking to humans so that doesn't seem to match either.

foxyv 6y ago
A huge part of the health care economy is elective procedures which have been severely impacted. This has reduced income for these procedures and hospitals are instead being overloaded with costly but non-lucrative emergency care. A lot of health care staff are being furloughed. NPR did a piece on it: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-revenue-thousands-of-health-care-workers-face-furloughs-layoff https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852435761/as-hospitals-lose-r...
- albroland 6y ago
  Thank you for the link. This definitely mirrors what I had seen last year and if that didn't come across it was a failure on my part. That said, I believe a lot of those furloughed employees have since returned: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/9-hospitals-bringing-back-furloughed-employees.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/workforce/9-hospitals-... It's really hard to find any hard data about rehirings, hence my wondering and wild speculations based on personal experience ;)
fred_is_fred 6y ago

ajcp 6y ago

What an unfortunate title. Not only because for decades now there are those whose job it has been to "sell nudes online", but also because it outright communicates a moral equivocation between desperate circumstances and sex-work, with such implied debasement STILL not garnering a payout as some kind of "I told you so/what did we learn" moment. It really takes the agency out of those sex-workers who do so for any myriad of reasons outside of desperation, and is the stupid rhetoric that seeks to rollback any strides -albeit in North America limited though they may be- we've made toward the field itself.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
"Equivocation" is like prevarication or evasiveness. The word you're looking for is "equivalence."
- ajcp 6y ago
  Perhaps you're right. My sense was that an "equivocation" is creating a false equivalency between two things by hiding behind a word(s) ambiguousness or multiple meanings. In this case I'm saying they're trying to use _moral_ equivocation: creating a false sense of equivalency between two things (jobless and sex-work) by playing on the perceived moral ambiguity of sex-work.