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I have a lot of trouble begrudging anybody anything in this, even though I don't like it. The models who own the pages can't possibly give everyone in their sub

I have a lot of trouble begrudging anybody anything in this, even though I don't like it. The models who own the pages can't possibly give everyone in their subscriber base what they want. The subscribers are looking for a product, and they're getting it. The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here, except a business relationship, and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic. The personalities described here - like Jason Rosario - don't seem like particularly pleasant people to spend a lot of time with. Their life goals and priorities are not mine. But like most porn, while it might be kinda gross, but it shouldn't be illegal or inherently subject to societal shaming (if Rosario was selling energy drinks, who would judge him the same way?). The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video. What if a subscriber is having a genuine mental health crisis? What if they threaten to kill one of the models? Or themselves? Is Jason Rosario prepared to handle that? None of those possibilities seem like reasons to just shut all of this down or do anything - not that I'm sure the article is advocating for that. I'm just not sure what else to do or consider in response to this phenomenon. I guess I just acknowledge it exists? I doubt the people in this story could be counted on to behave responsibly, but until they don't, I'm not sure what it matters.

lmm 4y ago
> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here, except a business relationship. This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then. > and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic. Given global wage inequality, is it really? I'd expect many of them to be the equivalent of the famed "chinese gold farmers".
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then. The business transaction there was "I'll support you if you give me an heir." Infidelity is a clear breach of that fucked up transaction, which is why it was a big deal. Not really similar to buying a video online.
abigail95 4y ago
> Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video price discrimination is good! For the rest of it, banning porn is probably a losing battle, but surely we can make fraud illegal, like passing yourself off as someone else. For the rest of the what-ifs, do nothing, or call the police. I don't think pornographers should have a special duty to act over a shopkeeper or bus driver.
- Kinrany 4y ago
  Price discrimination is only good as long as rich people are paying more. But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less.
  - bko 4y ago
    > But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less. Ah, so it's the rich people driving all those sensible cars with the exact practical functionality as the higher end models
    - Kinrany 4y ago
      People engaging in conspicuous consumption are not trying to save money.
- codebolt 4y ago
  A lot can change over a decades time. I hope and believe that porn will eventually be a lot more restricted than it is today, as the societal downsides become more and more apparent.
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    While ubiquitous access porn is relatively new (I think) with printed magazines and now the internet, one still has a great reference from something much older - prostitution. One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn. A lot of progressive nations these days (citation needed) are aiming to regulate and make prostitution safer, not outright ban it. Now, aiming and succeeding are different things, I admit.
Timshel 4y ago
>and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic. So then what it's ok to take advantage and scam them ??? WTF ...
- aqme28 4y ago
  What scam? These are all upfront deals. Content is actually delivered.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    "impersonating the women in conversations with their subscribers" Is the idea that since the subscribers should know that it isn't the model that it doesn't matter that it isn't the model?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ratww 4y ago
      That's a bit of a strange situation. I can't get angry about something like this. On one hand, sure, the customer paid to talk to a specific model, and sure, scamming is wrong. On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. A service is definitely being provided, no harm done, just like "sending a post asking for an autograph" as someone below described.
      - yifanl 4y ago
        > On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. Do you know that for a fact? It's hard for me to understand the minds of these subscribers, but surely, if they're so invested in one particular model, of course it would matter to them.
        4y ago
rawbot 4y ago
> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here Oh, but there is plenty of platonic relationships with camgirls, streamers and such. It can reach levels of delusion that you wouldn't believe.
- llampx 4y ago
  For the models it is still only a business relationship, except in very rare cases. By the same token, prostitution can also be a meaningful personal relationship, as shown in the movie Pretty Woman.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    as shown in the documentary Pretty Woman
    - samhw 4y ago
      I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.
  - rawbot 4y ago
    As your sibling commented mentioned, even if they attempt to treat it as a business relationship, not all people can handle it. The mental toll of receiving affection and then basically fake reciprocating it is hard, and not everybody can take it.
  - JetSpiegel 4y ago
    > movie Pretty Woman. You mean Pygmalion?
- ratww 4y ago
  I don't know anyone on OnlyFans, but I know a few women who do "Just Chatting" Twitch streams and the psychological toll on them is huge. Having to give people constant attention, answer every question or at least acknowledge it, and provide a sort of faux-friendship in exchange for money is a really strange arrangement. Just yesterday a long-term supporter of one woman I know "confessed their love" to her, and will probably unsubscribe because she won't reciprocate. Another interesting but sad fact is that a lot of those streamers have significant others, but they hide it from the audience because they believe they'll get more engagement. Sure the same thing might happen in regular businesses, but the interactions are either shorter (eg cashier) or at least it's acknowledged as being entirely professional.
e63f67dd-065b 4y ago
I don’t think 70% is unreasonably high for a fully-featured agency doing everything from marketing, management, etc. The value-add in this industry is not the model - there are plenty of beautiful women willing to take nudes in the world. The hard part is actually finding and extracting money from paying customers - cross-promoting with other models, spamming a million posts on every nsfw subreddit, having a human carefully determine how best talk to a customer and entice them into paying, etc. Traditional porn studios of course take this farther - models just show up and act, and the studio pays for cameramen, editors, websites, marketing, promotion, distribution, etc. This is basically a smaller scale version of a porn studio, where now the actor is also the director and camera operator (although I would guess the largest accounts will have professional editors and the like) but all the other work is offloaded onto an agency. I can easily imagine a Russian/Ukrainian model that doesn’t even speak a word of English (the traditional low-cost labour for the industry) using one of these agencies and making an order of magnitude more money after a 70% cut than they otherwise would. The balance here is on who’s driving the value. Is the model special in some way such that they can draw large amounts of paying customers with little effort? Then they will accrue to themselves most of the profit in the industry. Otherwise it’s the people doing the marketing work that make the most money.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  It is not at all unlike a funding round. Do you give up X % of your business for a cash injection or go it alone? With the cash it could be a billion $ company, without it just a side gig worth -$'s.
- elil17 4y ago
  It seems like the chatters, not the models, who aren’t getting a fair cut.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    Chatters are even more expendable. They don't even have to have a looks, only reasonably decent typing/writing skill. I wonder what it will take to replace them with GPTish ML model?
davidro80 4y ago
pc86 4y ago
Negotiating different rates for a product is just price discrimination (with negotiation added in). There's nothing remotely unethical about that.
golergka 4y ago
> The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). It's an open market without anything even remotely resembling a monopoly, where all parties involved are professional and can relatively easy exit a contract they find unfair.
usrn 4y ago
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  >Kind of like weed makes you mentally weak ah, I too love to speak about things I'm not familiar with in a way that demands any authority. >Porn isn't necessarily just wrong because of the abuse of individuals Famously, porn is only abusive and we must clutch our pearls to rid us of these earthly sins.

lmm 4y ago

> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here, except a business relationship. This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then. > and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic. Given global wage inequality, is it really? I'd expect many of them to be the equivalent of the famed "chinese gold farmers".

boomboomsubban 4y ago
>This seems no less real than a medieval nobleman's arranged marriage; infidelity or cheating was a big deal then. The business transaction there was "I'll support you if you give me an heir." Infidelity is a clear breach of that fucked up transaction, which is why it was a big deal. Not really similar to buying a video online.

abigail95 4y ago

> Negotiating different rates with different subscribers for the same video price discrimination is good! For the rest of it, banning porn is probably a losing battle, but surely we can make fraud illegal, like passing yourself off as someone else. For the rest of the what-ifs, do nothing, or call the police. I don't think pornographers should have a special duty to act over a shopkeeper or bus driver.

Kinrany 4y ago
Price discrimination is only good as long as rich people are paying more. But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less.
- bko 4y ago
  > But rich people are on average better at knowing how to pay less. Ah, so it's the rich people driving all those sensible cars with the exact practical functionality as the higher end models
  - Kinrany 4y ago
    People engaging in conspicuous consumption are not trying to save money.
codebolt 4y ago
A lot can change over a decades time. I hope and believe that porn will eventually be a lot more restricted than it is today, as the societal downsides become more and more apparent.
- karamanolev 4y ago
  While ubiquitous access porn is relatively new (I think) with printed magazines and now the internet, one still has a great reference from something much older - prostitution. One might conjecture that if society hasn't determined prostitution to be universally bad and banning it everywhere, then the same thing wouldn't happen to porn. A lot of progressive nations these days (citation needed) are aiming to regulate and make prostitution safer, not outright ban it. Now, aiming and succeeding are different things, I admit.

Timshel 4y ago

>and expecting a random woman to shower you with attention for $50 a pop videos seems unrealistic. So then what it's ok to take advantage and scam them ??? WTF ...

aqme28 4y ago
What scam? These are all upfront deals. Content is actually delivered.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  "impersonating the women in conversations with their subscribers" Is the idea that since the subscribers should know that it isn't the model that it doesn't matter that it isn't the model?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ratww 4y ago
    That's a bit of a strange situation. I can't get angry about something like this. On one hand, sure, the customer paid to talk to a specific model, and sure, scamming is wrong. On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. A service is definitely being provided, no harm done, just like "sending a post asking for an autograph" as someone below described.
    - yifanl 4y ago
      > On the other hand, those conversations are already so artificial and staged (and customers know it!) that it doesn't matter who has them. Do you know that for a fact? It's hard for me to understand the minds of these subscribers, but surely, if they're so invested in one particular model, of course it would matter to them.
      - 4y ago

rawbot 4y ago

> The comparisons some have made to infidelity or cheating seem misplaced: There's no real relationship here Oh, but there is plenty of platonic relationships with camgirls, streamers and such. It can reach levels of delusion that you wouldn't believe.

llampx 4y ago
For the models it is still only a business relationship, except in very rare cases. By the same token, prostitution can also be a meaningful personal relationship, as shown in the movie Pretty Woman.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  as shown in the documentary Pretty Woman
  - samhw 4y ago
    I mean, a friend of mine was an escort, and certainly ended up in entanglements like that. At the end of the day you are two human beings. Whatever your professional situation, these things are inexorable.
- rawbot 4y ago
  As your sibling commented mentioned, even if they attempt to treat it as a business relationship, not all people can handle it. The mental toll of receiving affection and then basically fake reciprocating it is hard, and not everybody can take it.
- JetSpiegel 4y ago
  > movie Pretty Woman. You mean Pygmalion?
ratww 4y ago
I don't know anyone on OnlyFans, but I know a few women who do "Just Chatting" Twitch streams and the psychological toll on them is huge. Having to give people constant attention, answer every question or at least acknowledge it, and provide a sort of faux-friendship in exchange for money is a really strange arrangement. Just yesterday a long-term supporter of one woman I know "confessed their love" to her, and will probably unsubscribe because she won't reciprocate. Another interesting but sad fact is that a lot of those streamers have significant others, but they hide it from the audience because they believe they'll get more engagement. Sure the same thing might happen in regular businesses, but the interactions are either shorter (eg cashier) or at least it's acknowledged as being entirely professional.

e63f67dd-065b 4y ago

I don’t think 70% is unreasonably high for a fully-featured agency doing everything from marketing, management, etc. The value-add in this industry is not the model - there are plenty of beautiful women willing to take nudes in the world. The hard part is actually finding and extracting money from paying customers - cross-promoting with other models, spamming a million posts on every nsfw subreddit, having a human carefully determine how best talk to a customer and entice them into paying, etc. Traditional porn studios of course take this farther - models just show up and act, and the studio pays for cameramen, editors, websites, marketing, promotion, distribution, etc. This is basically a smaller scale version of a porn studio, where now the actor is also the director and camera operator (although I would guess the largest accounts will have professional editors and the like) but all the other work is offloaded onto an agency. I can easily imagine a Russian/Ukrainian model that doesn’t even speak a word of English (the traditional low-cost labour for the industry) using one of these agencies and making an order of magnitude more money after a 70% cut than they otherwise would. The balance here is on who’s driving the value. Is the model special in some way such that they can draw large amounts of paying customers with little effort? Then they will accrue to themselves most of the profit in the industry. Otherwise it’s the people doing the marketing work that make the most money.

shapefrog 4y ago
It is not at all unlike a funding round. Do you give up X % of your business for a cash injection or go it alone? With the cash it could be a billion $ company, without it just a side gig worth -$'s.
elil17 4y ago
It seems like the chatters, not the models, who aren’t getting a fair cut.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  Chatters are even more expendable. They don't even have to have a looks, only reasonably decent typing/writing skill. I wonder what it will take to replace them with GPTish ML model?

davidro80 4y ago

pc86 4y ago

Negotiating different rates for a product is just price discrimination (with negotiation added in). There's nothing remotely unethical about that.

golergka 4y ago

> The place for real unethical behavior, therefore, is on the margins: Taking unreasonable cuts of models' income (70%!). It's an open market without anything even remotely resembling a monopoly, where all parties involved are professional and can relatively easy exit a contract they find unfair.

usrn 4y ago

bobkazamakis 4y ago
>Kind of like weed makes you mentally weak ah, I too love to speak about things I'm not familiar with in a way that demands any authority. >Porn isn't necessarily just wrong because of the abuse of individuals Famously, porn is only abusive and we must clutch our pearls to rid us of these earthly sins.