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I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your

by ayngg 5y ago

I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run. Social media in all forms grooms young naive women into feeling these types of careers are lucrative (which they can be) and even empowering, but I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply. I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, or of rebranding sex work in western society. While things like onlyfans have helped with issues of exploitation, it has really changed the game into one that is not well understood yet.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
All valid points. I guess it’s difficult to simultaneously de-stigmatize and urge caution. Instead what happens is we encourage new people to try it, and then some of the people who have tried it share their experiences with the community. That’s how people end up learning about problems with it. Since it is an experimental phase there are more failures (went poorly for some folks). We might say the same thing happens with bad crypto schemes. Young people get excited and they can lose a lot of money. Though the stakes are potentially higher when you lose your reputation.
- sebmellen 5y ago
  And then the cycle of stigmatization begins again… Almost as if there is a purpose to it. Is stigmatization always an objectively bad thing? I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. I don’t think any person should be stigmatized for what they do, but certain activities may well deserve it. I suppose that’s also a recurrent theme in the New Testament. One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction. Similar with porn and “sex-work adjacent” things (on the consumer side).
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    I was 'cured' from videogames by meaningful interesting job. Once they kicks in, games become much less attractive. I still play some titles sometimes that feed my SciFi or History interests, like MassEffect or Ck2/TotalWar, but I don't enjoy them like I used to.
    - wussboy 5y ago
      I experienced something similar, but never realized anyone else might as well. Thanks for writing this.
  - belorn 5y ago
    Every thing that is used by the lower class to escape reality get stigmatized, and the more effective it is the more problematic society view it. The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I also personally prefer people who are addicted to games over those addicted to alcohol, and long term it is much safer for everyone involved.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      I have never heard about such a link. I gotta go dig around. Thank you for the hint.
    - watwut 5y ago
      > The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I have never seen this. Like, this is literally first time I see this attribution being made.
      - belorn 5y ago
        Interesting, I have seen the link being discussed several times on national news, in particular to the decrease in teenage drinking. Some people also link this with lower amount of sex. There is also studies showing that heavy investment in gaming reduces the risk of excessive alcohol use and alcohol-related harm. While I have not seen a study on it, I would expect to see a correlation between the need to escape reality and the use of tools that allow escaping. With this follow also a link with social status and class. It is why alcohol use traditionally was associated with the lower classes, and laws directed at consumption of alcohol was basically laws direct at the lower classes.
brazzy 5y ago
> A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run. This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen. But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?". I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.
- tinco 5y ago
  The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they're automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren't even remotely in the video. It's become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it's just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame. Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.
  - toyg 5y ago
    >the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.
thinkingemote 5y ago
> not well understood yet I would say every culture around the world before the last 20 years or so understands this perfectly well. It's just the conclusions that this vast majority have come to do not agree with the current society. That leads us now to express misunderstanding and bewilderement.
stared 5y ago
> there are mental health costs that are often not talked about On the contrary, everyone is talking about mental costs, implying that they do not know what they are doing. I know a person who changed her work from being a cashier at a supermarket to a sex worker. Mentally, she benefited a lot. In one job, she felt like an automaton serving people. I other she had personal relationships with her clients. You can guess which is which. Or another one, also from a sex worker: "We don’t ask the barista, the plumber, or the mail person whether they really like their job as a measure of whether their industry should be criminalised. Imagine criminalising the whole clothing industry because of bad working conditions in some factories. Or health care. No, we understand that people who work under bad conditions need labour rights. That that is going to help them much more than criminalising their jobs. Why is this so difficult to understand when it comes to the sex industry?" https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart.com/i-love-sex-work-should-not-matter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart... To make it clear - yes, there are risks, short and long-term. I guess some underestimate long-term risks (e.g. revealing one's face online, which is a point of no return; or if they ever do unprotected sex). Yet, "sex workers don't know what they are doing" is a patronizing approach.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  My wife who is a sex worker is in therapy provided by her camsite because the work is so toxic. She was as pro-sex-work as you can be when she first started five years ago. It's majority trauma and I have to hear the stories every day. The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usually it's just singulars as imperatives), cum, then leave. She's started keeping a list of clients who say thank you. Almost none. The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. Mostly what they're getting is trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
  - belorn 5y ago
    I don't see how you are replying to the above comment. When has ever an exploited work force been thanked for their job? When there exist no labor protection, the traditional approach when someone died on the job was to replace them with a new desperate person. Livestock in, livestock out. Becoming a sex worker today in most countries is like becoming a coal miner of old. The only thing that matter is what you produce, and if you get hurt you will be replaced by someone just as desperate.
unacc_acc 5y ago
We're 100+ comments into the thread and nobody's brought up free speech yet. Not an argument I'd make personally, but it comes up so readily for all other sites. Imagine swapping this comments section for one on the BBC coverage of Parler. You'd get - angry defense of the right of anyone to post anything - repercussions to posting denounced as "cancel culture" - advocacy of censorship-free payment methods - condemnation of censorship by major tech companies (there's no OF app because it would be banned, and even mentioning it on Insta can sometimes get you banned, which is why creators post indirect links) - demands for laws to be passed guaranteeing that you could post porn on Facebook without being banned Conversely, if we swap this comment thread to one on Parler we'd be asking who these content creators are that are exploiting lonely young men, whether this kind of content should be stigmatized more, and if it's a history of abuse that leads them to do it.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Nobody is talking about it because there is not much censorship on porn or sex work in the West. I agree I'd prefer there were no rules about it but I don't think it affect that many people on HN. If you live in many Muslim countries or in a socialist regime like North Korea, China or Cuba, you'll have stronger limits to what you can do.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- roenxi 5y ago
  If the topic was different, the comments would be different. The burden is therefore on you to draw the parallels, not on the reader to imagine swapping one for the other while you point out how the conversation would be different. There are no arguments around free speech that can actually be compressed into a one liner. They all have at least a paragraph of nuance and how edge cases need to be handled.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
While I agree it definitely has some disadvantages, these influencers turning OFs understand the trade off: my reputation, my private photos / videos for millions earned passively. All influencers hoping to make decent money on OFs already need to have some kind of platform, so they already massively traded away their privacy. Selling a nudie is the next step if you're struggling to make money. This guy (a fellow Software Engineer actually) is a growing YouTube channel who's doing a sort of vlog / reality show about his family and friends. Once he started approaching 1mln subs by consistently putting out great content, his friends and family launched their own social channels as well to benefit from the clout. His mom and his girlfriend have their own YouTube channels but they're not as popular. Still, their onlyfans passed his YouTube's channel revenue in a very short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE
blippage 5y ago
> I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage. I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ... We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections of the Women's Lib movement are particularly to blame for this, and it is right to heavily censure them. Sites like OnlyFans exploit lonely young men who are poor at making connections with women. It's morally wrong to engage in exploitative behaviour. Period. I don't care if they're "beta cucks", "incels", "losers", or whatever de-humanising manshaming words one cares to use, exploitative behaviour is still wrong. Sure, if you bounce your tiddies over on OnlyFans then it doesn't make you literally worse than Hitler, but these people should be discouraged from what they're doing.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Is it worse than fast food restaurants, pizza joints, or bars exploiting customers who appear (in retrospect) prone to over-indulge?
  - imtringued 5y ago
    This question is interesting because we don't even consider the opinion of the chicken that are being served.
- brazzy 5y ago
  You're making the implicit assumption that sex work is always inherently exploitative. That is a common assumption shared both by social conservatives who think any sex outside marriage is wrong anyway, and certain feminist circles who seem to have a problem with seeing male sexuality as anything but a threat. But I don't think that assumption is correct. Sure, sex work can be exploitative, and it often is. But it doesn't have to be. Just like the hospitality industry has an endemic problem with workers being exploited financially and tolerating verbally abusive behaviour from customers - yet nobody suggests restaurants in general are morally wrong and should be discouraged. It is possible to do sex work in a non-exploitative way that maintains respect and boundaries between sex worker and client. The problem is that you can increase short term profits by blurring boundaries, and the network effects of online platforms probaby magnify that.
AKSucks 5y ago
Can we please not use the term "sex worker" for people who do not face the vast majority of risks (health/physical, financial, legal-of-the-criminal-sort, and emotional) that someone who actually engages in sex with other people for money does? You (generally speaking) cannot get infected with STIs, pregnant, assaulted, raped, drugged, stabbed, murdered, convicted, jailed - for being a camgirl. You (generally speaking) can use the banking system, report that income, pay taxes on it, etc. You don't need to seek "camgirl friendly" medical professionals. Etc, etc. I knew someone who called herself a sex worker because she posed for some fetish clothing store photos and did some fetish site photo shoots (it was a fetish involving certain items. No interaction, much less sexual, with other models/actresses. Nothing went into anyone's orifices.) You might technically kinda almost be right when you squint really hard and aren't wearing your glasses in a dark room and you've had a few shots. But you're assigning/claiming a label to grant/be viewed as oppressed/lower-privileged while not actually suffering from oppression or lower privilege. Camgirls - and models - calling themselves "sex workers" is like calling yourself black when you had a great-grandfather who was black.
- xenocratus 5y ago
  This is part of the concept creep saga: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1796080 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1...
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Sorry if I step on some toes here since I know very little about this topic (feel free to correct me!) but isn't this turning things on their head? Normally in discussing other topics I see people arguing that a quicker/earlier stigma leads to less people going further. Is this wrong?
  - tnzm 5y ago
    Right now, certain media outlets have been promoting a "debate about sex work". As usual, this is meant to shutdown any productive debate on the subject. You seem to start with a preconceived notion that "sex work" is harmful and people need to be prevented/protected from engaging in it. As with any aspect of our society, there are too many feedback loops involved here for anyone to have an opinion which is not based on anecdotes and propaganda, except the sex workers themselves (maybe!) So let's discuss the general case instead. Stigma and ostracism are very ancient tools for ensuring compliance within a social group by threatening members with social exclusion; however, quicker/earlier stigma prevents non-conformity earlier, but it also locks people out "on the outside" quicker/earlier. Stigma is also easy to abuse - it's the perfect excuse for hurting someone who you see as "less than human" due to their stigma, and then blaming them for it. If you're betting on a civilization collapse scenario where in-group cohesion is the decisive factor for survival, it would be rational for you to uphold stigmatization of any behavior that diverges from the established rituals of your in-group. Our present civilization, however, has decided that social exclusion is harmful in the general case, and (quite haphazardly) is trying to remedy _that_. As our systems become stable enough to support people safely "going further" with their diverse, even mutually incompatible lifestyle choices, the logical conclusion would be to eradicate stigma and replace it with a more humane way of nudging people away from potentially harmful actions.
dannyw 5y ago
Sexualisation is a reflection of society. Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup. In my view, onlyfans is a net positive for society. Would you rather like sex trafficking? Because face it, humans have hormones, and our social norms encourage men to go for status and women for appearance. These facts create the atmosphere for sex work.
- dabbledash 5y ago
  “Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup.” My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.
  - random_kris 5y ago
    Sure you might not notice it. But 80% of others notice and comment on it. They don't expirence anything directly, but through time they get better treatment versus their non makeup wearing counterparts. Source? My office expirence, also my gf's master thesis was on how apperence affects office atmosphere.. (something in this line)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - rmah 5y ago
      My observations are that it's typically other women who make comments about women not wearing makeup, not men. Or more generally speaking, it's other women who comment most on women's appearance (dress, makeup, hair, etc.) than men. Honestly, from what I've observed, most men seem rather oblivious to it most of the time (though obviously, not all the time).
      - random_kris 5y ago
        I agree with this on you. But subconsciously women that look nice and have their apperence on point have bigger effect on me than women with "regular" apperence.. so I might not comment on it but it is a difference
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
I believe you, but honestly I think most jobs in modern society come with metal health costs, especially those in the "unskilled labor" category. Maybe sex work is worse, but maybe it isn't, at least for a certain kind of person.
MrFantastic 5y ago
I have known a lot of "dancers", I lived in a high rise next to an upscale joint. The biggest problem is that their professional skills are fleecing men out of money. "Who has deep pockets and how can I get the most money out of them?" It's not like you can just turn off that mentality once they quit.
- toast0 5y ago
  Sounds like training for enterprise sales or class action lawsuits?
an_opabinia 5y ago
You could say all the same things about video games. Serious mental health costs. Reinforce bad behaviors (like procrastination and inability to delay gratification). There are even almost nude characters in video games, mainstream ones like League of Legends. So very much reinforces objectification of women. And that’s okay, but if a bonafide woman wants to dress up as that character, suddenly Twitch’s audience complains. > stigmatizing… rebranding… People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans. That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
I think you're mostly describing social stigma in your points.
oftwjul2021 5y ago
Throwaway because hooooboy. I started using a cam-girl's services when I was dealing with a break-up. Where things went wrong was, this worker happened to be local to me, and happened to know the person who I broke up with. When I said I wanted to find someone with a personality like theirs but in real life, they offered to meet me in person. The short version? I was catfished for 2 years while helping them build their career (their partner, who I never knew about despite asking if they had one before trying to enter a 'relationship', didn't want to be active in helping her, since he was a pre-med student and was worried about the social fallout between that and his family.) I got to learn a lot about the industry, more specifically around Reddit. I also got to deal with the pain of trying to get my videos removed, polite requests didn't work and I had to go right up to legal threats to finally make it happen. What I was able to figure out: - There are cases where this line of work results in a grooming 'feedback loop'. A surprising number of these girls had partners, many times said partners were successful individuals in other careers. And also involved in various other scenes (BDSM comes to mind.) It often struck me as a cover for predatory behavior; some of these workers will find it hard to shy away from the money that can be made, yet at the same time the constant barrage of misogynistic behavior from clients almost certainly has an effect on them. Their partner gets someone conditioned by the environment. - My abuser, last I was aware, was fairly resigned to working small office jobs and/or sticking to camming until they finally decide to have a child. When I first met them they wanted to be a teacher. Make of that what you will. - There were cases of extremely controlling behavior within the communities themselves. I heard stories of one of the more successful workers having a sort of 'ranch' for workers that wanted to come by and up their game (and, of course, play with them and their partner.) The ranch itself was almost cult-like with it's management of time and tasks. - A lot of these workers have serious mental health issues, often unresolved. Some of these women are abusive and manipulative towards their clients. I experienced this firsthand, and when I made the mistake of trying other camgirl's services long after the incident noted above, I had my consent regarding hypnosis violated by more than one. Unfortunately, the common case of stalkers/creeps means that predators are usually able to get away with their actions, because any attempts to call them out results in the perception that the victim is a stalker/creep for trying to pierce the corporate veil behind a bad actor in the industry. FWIW, yeah, I went to a -lot- of therapy over what happened and in a much better place.
tekromancr 5y ago
I don't see sex work as "drug dealing with intimacy and attention" any more then, say, twitch streaming; or podcasting. The whole media environment has been retooled to incentivize super-unhealthy (but perhaps unsurprising given our decades long trend towards individualism and isolation) parasocial relationships
throwaway6945 5y ago
"A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run." Um, blaming the victim much? Those men have full agency not to be psychotic jerks towards them. No one is forcing them to abuse, harass, and/or threaten sex workers. But I agree sex workers are being groomed and subsequently exploited by sites like onlyfans with unrealistic promises of quick money for relatively little work. But so are tech workers by sites like this and other VC funds, so should we ban venture capital too? It's once again the inclusion of sex that makes sex work distinct, no? I wish we had a society that provided better preparation and opportunity to everyone, but we don't right now, and sex work beats living on the street or getting stuck in an abusive household IMO. "I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply." Which is an entirely new subject wherein societies that experimented with total legalization got a better outcome than societies that hyperfocus on drug wars. Neither choice seems ideal, but one does appear to be unambiguously better given the available data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I think it all reflects badly in how unsophisticated society still is with handling the most natural thing in the world--sex. The ridiculous morals of yesteryear still carry the day.

by ayngg 5y ago

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

All valid points. I guess it’s difficult to simultaneously de-stigmatize and urge caution. Instead what happens is we encourage new people to try it, and then some of the people who have tried it share their experiences with the community. That’s how people end up learning about problems with it. Since it is an experimental phase there are more failures (went poorly for some folks). We might say the same thing happens with bad crypto schemes. Young people get excited and they can lose a lot of money. Though the stakes are potentially higher when you lose your reputation.

sebmellen 5y ago
And then the cycle of stigmatization begins again… Almost as if there is a purpose to it. Is stigmatization always an objectively bad thing? I suppose it depends on your frame of reference. I don’t think any person should be stigmatized for what they do, but certain activities may well deserve it. I suppose that’s also a recurrent theme in the New Testament. One thing I think ought to be stigmatized more is video game usage. I know many people (mostly men) my age (late adolescence) whose lives have been/were destroyed by chronic video game addiction. Similar with porn and “sex-work adjacent” things (on the consumer side).
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  I was 'cured' from videogames by meaningful interesting job. Once they kicks in, games become much less attractive. I still play some titles sometimes that feed my SciFi or History interests, like MassEffect or Ck2/TotalWar, but I don't enjoy them like I used to.
  - wussboy 5y ago
    I experienced something similar, but never realized anyone else might as well. Thanks for writing this.
- belorn 5y ago
  Every thing that is used by the lower class to escape reality get stigmatized, and the more effective it is the more problematic society view it. The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I also personally prefer people who are addicted to games over those addicted to alcohol, and long term it is much safer for everyone involved.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    I have never heard about such a link. I gotta go dig around. Thank you for the hint.
  - watwut 5y ago
    > The decline in alcohol addictions is often attributed to gaming, particularly among men. I have never seen this. Like, this is literally first time I see this attribution being made.
    - belorn 5y ago
      Interesting, I have seen the link being discussed several times on national news, in particular to the decrease in teenage drinking. Some people also link this with lower amount of sex. There is also studies showing that heavy investment in gaming reduces the risk of excessive alcohol use and alcohol-related harm. While I have not seen a study on it, I would expect to see a correlation between the need to escape reality and the use of tools that allow escaping. With this follow also a link with social status and class. It is why alcohol use traditionally was associated with the lower classes, and laws directed at consumption of alcohol was basically laws direct at the lower classes.

brazzy 5y ago

> A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run. This is something that's really been bugging me when looking at Reddit's porn subs. There has been a really noticeable change in the last 2 years. Back then, a majority of the posters seemed to actually be amateurs getting their kicks from online exhibitionism. Now it's 99% OnlyFans advertising. I guess that professionalization was bound to happen. But what bugs me are the titles: they used to be descriptions of the content, sometimes addressing the audience as a whole. But now, most titles personally address the viewer with things like "Be honest, would you lick it?". I bet that raises engagement and gets subscriptions, but seems like a really bad idea in terms of, as you wrote, mental health for the women, and reinforcing toxic attitudes among the men.

tinco 5y ago
The titles on sites like pornhub are a lot worse. Sometimes I feel like they're automatically generated or something, with weird sexual fantasies that aren't even remotely in the video. It's become a bit of a meme, and it certainly has always been present but for example the incest stuff, it's just disturbing to me to the point where I greatly prefer browsing on Reddit just because the titles are more tame. Another cultural thing, they've recently started automatically translating the titles to my native language, and I don't know why but the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. Automatic translation is always annoying but here it's especially jarring.
- toyg 5y ago
  >the titles sound so much more vulgar in Dutch than they do in English to me. It's the other way around: you're less emotionally connected to your second language. You're not phased by the most scurrilous elements of English, because of a combination of factors (like the way your brain processes a second language, and the fact that you did not grow up in a native English culture). Whereas you have a primary connection to Dutch and its native culture, so you instinctively know what is vulgar or disgusting in a much more direct way.

thinkingemote 5y ago

> not well understood yet I would say every culture around the world before the last 20 years or so understands this perfectly well. It's just the conclusions that this vast majority have come to do not agree with the current society. That leads us now to express misunderstanding and bewilderement.

stared 5y ago

> there are mental health costs that are often not talked about On the contrary, everyone is talking about mental costs, implying that they do not know what they are doing. I know a person who changed her work from being a cashier at a supermarket to a sex worker. Mentally, she benefited a lot. In one job, she felt like an automaton serving people. I other she had personal relationships with her clients. You can guess which is which. Or another one, also from a sex worker: "We don’t ask the barista, the plumber, or the mail person whether they really like their job as a measure of whether their industry should be criminalised. Imagine criminalising the whole clothing industry because of bad working conditions in some factories. Or health care. No, we understand that people who work under bad conditions need labour rights. That that is going to help them much more than criminalising their jobs. Why is this so difficult to understand when it comes to the sex industry?" https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart.com/i-love-sex-work-should-not-matter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200220124433/http://rosieheart... To make it clear - yes, there are risks, short and long-term. I guess some underestimate long-term risks (e.g. revealing one's face online, which is a point of no return; or if they ever do unprotected sex). Yet, "sex workers don't know what they are doing" is a patronizing approach.

emptysongglass 5y ago
My wife who is a sex worker is in therapy provided by her camsite because the work is so toxic. She was as pro-sex-work as you can be when she first started five years ago. It's majority trauma and I have to hear the stories every day. The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usually it's just singulars as imperatives), cum, then leave. She's started keeping a list of clients who say thank you. Almost none. The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. Mostly what they're getting is trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
- belorn 5y ago
  I don't see how you are replying to the above comment. When has ever an exploited work force been thanked for their job? When there exist no labor protection, the traditional approach when someone died on the job was to replace them with a new desperate person. Livestock in, livestock out. Becoming a sex worker today in most countries is like becoming a coal miner of old. The only thing that matter is what you produce, and if you get hurt you will be replaced by someone just as desperate.

unacc_acc 5y ago

We're 100+ comments into the thread and nobody's brought up free speech yet. Not an argument I'd make personally, but it comes up so readily for all other sites. Imagine swapping this comments section for one on the BBC coverage of Parler. You'd get - angry defense of the right of anyone to post anything - repercussions to posting denounced as "cancel culture" - advocacy of censorship-free payment methods - condemnation of censorship by major tech companies (there's no OF app because it would be banned, and even mentioning it on Insta can sometimes get you banned, which is why creators post indirect links) - demands for laws to be passed guaranteeing that you could post porn on Facebook without being banned Conversely, if we swap this comment thread to one on Parler we'd be asking who these content creators are that are exploiting lonely young men, whether this kind of content should be stigmatized more, and if it's a history of abuse that leads them to do it.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
Nobody is talking about it because there is not much censorship on porn or sex work in the West. I agree I'd prefer there were no rules about it but I don't think it affect that many people on HN. If you live in many Muslim countries or in a socialist regime like North Korea, China or Cuba, you'll have stronger limits to what you can do.
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roenxi 5y ago
If the topic was different, the comments would be different. The burden is therefore on you to draw the parallels, not on the reader to imagine swapping one for the other while you point out how the conversation would be different. There are no arguments around free speech that can actually be compressed into a one liner. They all have at least a paragraph of nuance and how edge cases need to be handled.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

While I agree it definitely has some disadvantages, these influencers turning OFs understand the trade off: my reputation, my private photos / videos for millions earned passively. All influencers hoping to make decent money on OFs already need to have some kind of platform, so they already massively traded away their privacy. Selling a nudie is the next step if you're struggling to make money. This guy (a fellow Software Engineer actually) is a growing YouTube channel who's doing a sort of vlog / reality show about his family and friends. Once he started approaching 1mln subs by consistently putting out great content, his friends and family launched their own social channels as well to benefit from the clout. His mom and his girlfriend have their own YouTube channels but they're not as popular. Still, their onlyfans passed his YouTube's channel revenue in a very short time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQsp54kyMwE

blippage 5y ago

> I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage. I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ... We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections of the Women's Lib movement are particularly to blame for this, and it is right to heavily censure them. Sites like OnlyFans exploit lonely young men who are poor at making connections with women. It's morally wrong to engage in exploitative behaviour. Period. I don't care if they're "beta cucks", "incels", "losers", or whatever de-humanising manshaming words one cares to use, exploitative behaviour is still wrong. Sure, if you bounce your tiddies over on OnlyFans then it doesn't make you literally worse than Hitler, but these people should be discouraged from what they're doing.

sokoloff 5y ago
Is it worse than fast food restaurants, pizza joints, or bars exploiting customers who appear (in retrospect) prone to over-indulge?
- imtringued 5y ago
  This question is interesting because we don't even consider the opinion of the chicken that are being served.
brazzy 5y ago
You're making the implicit assumption that sex work is always inherently exploitative. That is a common assumption shared both by social conservatives who think any sex outside marriage is wrong anyway, and certain feminist circles who seem to have a problem with seeing male sexuality as anything but a threat. But I don't think that assumption is correct. Sure, sex work can be exploitative, and it often is. But it doesn't have to be. Just like the hospitality industry has an endemic problem with workers being exploited financially and tolerating verbally abusive behaviour from customers - yet nobody suggests restaurants in general are morally wrong and should be discouraged. It is possible to do sex work in a non-exploitative way that maintains respect and boundaries between sex worker and client. The problem is that you can increase short term profits by blurring boundaries, and the network effects of online platforms probaby magnify that.

AKSucks 5y ago

Can we please not use the term "sex worker" for people who do not face the vast majority of risks (health/physical, financial, legal-of-the-criminal-sort, and emotional) that someone who actually engages in sex with other people for money does? You (generally speaking) cannot get infected with STIs, pregnant, assaulted, raped, drugged, stabbed, murdered, convicted, jailed - for being a camgirl. You (generally speaking) can use the banking system, report that income, pay taxes on it, etc. You don't need to seek "camgirl friendly" medical professionals. Etc, etc. I knew someone who called herself a sex worker because she posed for some fetish clothing store photos and did some fetish site photo shoots (it was a fetish involving certain items. No interaction, much less sexual, with other models/actresses. Nothing went into anyone's orifices.) You might technically kinda almost be right when you squint really hard and aren't wearing your glasses in a dark room and you've had a few shots. But you're assigning/claiming a label to grant/be viewed as oppressed/lower-privileged while not actually suffering from oppression or lower privilege. Camgirls - and models - calling themselves "sex workers" is like calling yourself black when you had a great-grandfather who was black.

xenocratus 5y ago
This is part of the concept creep saga: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1796080 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10463283.2020.1...
Dah00n 5y ago
Sorry if I step on some toes here since I know very little about this topic (feel free to correct me!) but isn't this turning things on their head? Normally in discussing other topics I see people arguing that a quicker/earlier stigma leads to less people going further. Is this wrong?
- tnzm 5y ago
  Right now, certain media outlets have been promoting a "debate about sex work". As usual, this is meant to shutdown any productive debate on the subject. You seem to start with a preconceived notion that "sex work" is harmful and people need to be prevented/protected from engaging in it. As with any aspect of our society, there are too many feedback loops involved here for anyone to have an opinion which is not based on anecdotes and propaganda, except the sex workers themselves (maybe!) So let's discuss the general case instead. Stigma and ostracism are very ancient tools for ensuring compliance within a social group by threatening members with social exclusion; however, quicker/earlier stigma prevents non-conformity earlier, but it also locks people out "on the outside" quicker/earlier. Stigma is also easy to abuse - it's the perfect excuse for hurting someone who you see as "less than human" due to their stigma, and then blaming them for it. If you're betting on a civilization collapse scenario where in-group cohesion is the decisive factor for survival, it would be rational for you to uphold stigmatization of any behavior that diverges from the established rituals of your in-group. Our present civilization, however, has decided that social exclusion is harmful in the general case, and (quite haphazardly) is trying to remedy _that_. As our systems become stable enough to support people safely "going further" with their diverse, even mutually incompatible lifestyle choices, the logical conclusion would be to eradicate stigma and replace it with a more humane way of nudging people away from potentially harmful actions.

dannyw 5y ago

Sexualisation is a reflection of society. Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup. In my view, onlyfans is a net positive for society. Would you rather like sex trafficking? Because face it, humans have hormones, and our social norms encourage men to go for status and women for appearance. These facts create the atmosphere for sex work.

dabbledash 5y ago
“Ask women what they experience if they show up to work without makeup.” My experience of not wearing makeup in lots of places, over many years: Nothing happens. It’s fine.
- random_kris 5y ago
  Sure you might not notice it. But 80% of others notice and comment on it. They don't expirence anything directly, but through time they get better treatment versus their non makeup wearing counterparts. Source? My office expirence, also my gf's master thesis was on how apperence affects office atmosphere.. (something in this line)
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  - rmah 5y ago
    My observations are that it's typically other women who make comments about women not wearing makeup, not men. Or more generally speaking, it's other women who comment most on women's appearance (dress, makeup, hair, etc.) than men. Honestly, from what I've observed, most men seem rather oblivious to it most of the time (though obviously, not all the time).
    - random_kris 5y ago
      I agree with this on you. But subconsciously women that look nice and have their apperence on point have bigger effect on me than women with "regular" apperence.. so I might not comment on it but it is a difference

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

I believe you, but honestly I think most jobs in modern society come with metal health costs, especially those in the "unskilled labor" category. Maybe sex work is worse, but maybe it isn't, at least for a certain kind of person.

MrFantastic 5y ago

I have known a lot of "dancers", I lived in a high rise next to an upscale joint. The biggest problem is that their professional skills are fleecing men out of money. "Who has deep pockets and how can I get the most money out of them?" It's not like you can just turn off that mentality once they quit.

toast0 5y ago
Sounds like training for enterprise sales or class action lawsuits?

an_opabinia 5y ago

You could say all the same things about video games. Serious mental health costs. Reinforce bad behaviors (like procrastination and inability to delay gratification). There are even almost nude characters in video games, mainstream ones like League of Legends. So very much reinforces objectification of women. And that’s okay, but if a bonafide woman wants to dress up as that character, suddenly Twitch’s audience complains. > stigmatizing… rebranding… People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans. That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

I think you're mostly describing social stigma in your points.

oftwjul2021 5y ago

Throwaway because hooooboy. I started using a cam-girl's services when I was dealing with a break-up. Where things went wrong was, this worker happened to be local to me, and happened to know the person who I broke up with. When I said I wanted to find someone with a personality like theirs but in real life, they offered to meet me in person. The short version? I was catfished for 2 years while helping them build their career (their partner, who I never knew about despite asking if they had one before trying to enter a 'relationship', didn't want to be active in helping her, since he was a pre-med student and was worried about the social fallout between that and his family.) I got to learn a lot about the industry, more specifically around Reddit. I also got to deal with the pain of trying to get my videos removed, polite requests didn't work and I had to go right up to legal threats to finally make it happen. What I was able to figure out: - There are cases where this line of work results in a grooming 'feedback loop'. A surprising number of these girls had partners, many times said partners were successful individuals in other careers. And also involved in various other scenes (BDSM comes to mind.) It often struck me as a cover for predatory behavior; some of these workers will find it hard to shy away from the money that can be made, yet at the same time the constant barrage of misogynistic behavior from clients almost certainly has an effect on them. Their partner gets someone conditioned by the environment. - My abuser, last I was aware, was fairly resigned to working small office jobs and/or sticking to camming until they finally decide to have a child. When I first met them they wanted to be a teacher. Make of that what you will. - There were cases of extremely controlling behavior within the communities themselves. I heard stories of one of the more successful workers having a sort of 'ranch' for workers that wanted to come by and up their game (and, of course, play with them and their partner.) The ranch itself was almost cult-like with it's management of time and tasks. - A lot of these workers have serious mental health issues, often unresolved. Some of these women are abusive and manipulative towards their clients. I experienced this firsthand, and when I made the mistake of trying other camgirl's services long after the incident noted above, I had my consent regarding hypnosis violated by more than one. Unfortunately, the common case of stalkers/creeps means that predators are usually able to get away with their actions, because any attempts to call them out results in the perception that the victim is a stalker/creep for trying to pierce the corporate veil behind a bad actor in the industry. FWIW, yeah, I went to a -lot- of therapy over what happened and in a much better place.

tekromancr 5y ago

I don't see sex work as "drug dealing with intimacy and attention" any more then, say, twitch streaming; or podcasting. The whole media environment has been retooled to incentivize super-unhealthy (but perhaps unsurprising given our decades long trend towards individualism and isolation) parasocial relationships

throwaway6945 5y ago

"A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the long run." Um, blaming the victim much? Those men have full agency not to be psychotic jerks towards them. No one is forcing them to abuse, harass, and/or threaten sex workers. But I agree sex workers are being groomed and subsequently exploited by sites like onlyfans with unrealistic promises of quick money for relatively little work. But so are tech workers by sites like this and other VC funds, so should we ban venture capital too? It's once again the inclusion of sex that makes sex work distinct, no? I wish we had a society that provided better preparation and opportunity to everyone, but we don't right now, and sex work beats living on the street or getting stuck in an abusive household IMO. "I almost see it as drug dealing, with the drug being intimacy and attention, and by nature it is a transaction where the dealer always uses their own supply." Which is an entirely new subject wherein societies that experimented with total legalization got a better outcome than societies that hyperfocus on drug wars. Neither choice seems ideal, but one does appear to be unambiguously better given the available data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I think it all reflects badly in how unsophisticated society still is with handling the most natural thing in the world--sex. The ridiculous morals of yesteryear still carry the day.