Sex work is cool and all but it's also cool to be able to support your friends without it requiring them to give you pictures of their buttholes in exchange for money. I can't help but feel like this particular phenomenon is a product of a uniquely American capitalist hellscape and that maybe this sort of thing wouldn't need to be a normal occurrence in a semi-functioning society. What do you guys think?
There is a tendency on the left for people to accuse you of slutshaming or wanting to punish sex workers when you criticize sex work as an industry. The reality is the vast majority of sex workers do it out of desperation or coercion, and sex work becoming more common has literally always been reflective of worsening conditions. Sure some of them genuinely love it and feel liberated by it, but the fact that so many young women are doing it is not a good thing. The difference between a right wing critique of the onlyfans phenomenon and a left wing one is that rightoids focus on the sex workers while left wingers focus on the system that results in increasing sex work.
Exactly and when you couple that with extreme atomization and isolation you're left "selling" to your Facebook friends. I logged onto Facebook for the first time in months and saw this along with a few people advertising their OnlyFans and it just left me bummed and thinking about how it would change the ~nature of friendship~ were this sort of thing to become completely commonplace as people's material conditions continue to decline.
The rate of profit is falling more and more, there will be a commodification of more and more parts of life.
The reality is the vast majority of sex workers do it out of desperation or coercion, and sex work becoming more common has literally always been reflective of worsening conditions.
There's a pipeline for underage Roma girls from eastern european orphanages to western european brothels. I've never understood the "But people enjoy doing it" argument, because reality is way worse if you're not living in the west.
The reality is worse than people admit right here in the west as well. Something that radlibs don't like to talk about is the fact that when sex work is legalized, human trafficking increases always. Australia legalized regulated brothels and the number of human trafficking cases skyrocketed. Like you said, young roma girls are groomed and trafficked to Holland.
https://proletarianfeminist.medium.com/the-problem-with-the-phrase-sex-work-is-work-bdac613eb2f0
I think Onlyfans is basically the Uber business model for porn and there's no reason to support it. It's just that now sex work is using pseudo lefty language because it is a truly horrific industry and a lot of young liberals don't want to have any engagement with it beyond opening and closing a video on a streaming site.
I was just thinking about this the other day. Well, a tangent thought I suppose. It was about the way people go to stores just a way of socializing because they're so atomized and alienated they can't think of a non-transactional way to interact with other people. I worked at this place that sold coffee and snacks that opened at 5:45am and every morning, before we opened, there would be a bunch of old people out front in their cars, waiting to come in to get their morning cup of coffee. They'd socialize with the staff and each other and drive, presumably, back home. Just lonely old people paying 50 cents for a coffee refill and a conversation to start their day.
Sounds like my time working at Dunkin Donuts, except the old people came in after the morning rush usually and hung out for a couple hours.
Maybe I’m just off base with this, but do people really ask their friends to sub to their onlyfans? I thought it was something you did with a stage name, for strangers online. I figured it’d be weird to have people you’re close to to pay money to you to see that.
I bet it varies a lot by social scene but yeah, it's something I've seen a lot among people I know.
It's only the cisheteronormativity speaking if you trick yourself into forgetting that you're actually purchasing nudes and not progressing a relationship. That's textbook dude tendencies and what the entire thing is designed around lol.
I mean unless you're paying to see it, then it's transactional lol
I'm not saying it's a good thing so many people have to turn to sex work btw, I'm just saying this isnt a great take. Some people are really open about the sex work they're doing, doesn't make them your SO
I guess? Idk friendship occurs in a lot of places lol.
I don't think I would have a problem being a friend with someone I paid for sex, specifically if they are a sex worker and we are all on the same page there, but I have never paid for sex nor am I a sex worker so it's moot.
I don't see how it's necessarily a conflict of interests though.
Thats not the context though. The context is being friends with someone you know is a sex worker and you contacting them for that reason.
I mean that's sex work in a nutshell, so I'm not necessarily for it. Especially under capitalism.
Ehh, it doesn't seem unbelievable that some people would prefer selling nudes for extra cash over... I dunno, cleaning the bathrooms in a train station, or working in a daycare, or whatever other kinds of work might be available as part of a federal jobs guarantee program.
I'm not sure about that. I think, with increasing automation, we are very quickly reaching a point where we don't need everyone working in order to have a fully functioning society (if we aren't there already).
I mean, some people are still gonna have to work for quite awhile into the future, and I specifically mentioned cleaning and daycares because those are jobs that I imagine won't be automated for quite some time. But my cautiously-optimistic vision of a non-dystopian, near-future is one in which a large portion of jobs have been automated or eliminated, basic needs (food, housing, healthcare) are provided automatically, and working is something that people do largely voluntarily, for extra money or some other kind of incentive.
Ie, you'd have an apartment, food, and healthcare, so you don't need to work if you can't, or even if you just don't want to (society won't really have enough jobs available for everyone, esp if the economy isn't fully oriented towards capitalist growth as it is now). But if you, like, want to get a Playstation 9 or whatever, you'd probably have to do some work, because we'll still need some people working to do some of the basic stuff that isn't easy to automate.
In a society like this, prostitution and selling nudes will likely still exist, but, unlike now, people won't be forced into it because its the only way to make sure the utility company doesn't turn their heat off.
Well, I'd expect hours will be reduced vs what we have now, but there comes a point of diminishing returns. where having like 60 different people doing the job of what would be one person today probably greatly reduces efficiency. For example, operating a train: let's say that today, a train operator works 8 hours a day, five days a week/~20 days a month. We could imagine a society where instead, there's about 40 people and they work for 4 hours, once a month.
In this scenario, efficiency is greatly reduced, because it takes time to train people, takes time for people to get experience etc. I'd rather be on a train that's managed by someone that's got the experience of being there week in and week out for years, not a dude who only comes to work 12 or 24 times a year. Same with many other jobs.
Seems more reasonable to say that this one person's job will be split, let's say, 2 or 3 ways, so that she needs to work like, say 5 hours a day for 3 days a week instead. I'd imagine we can both reduce hours, and reduce the number of people working.
As to how close we are to "full automation", well, that'd be a long process over many decades. But it might happen faster than you imagine. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42170100 heres one study suggesting it may be 800 million jobs worldwide that get replaced by automation by 2030. With most of that happening in highly developed nations like Germany, China, and the US (since poorer nations can't afford the robots). Now imagine what the year 2050, 2080 or 2100 might hold for us.
In the US alone, 39 to 73 million jobs may be eliminated by 2030,
Of course, some of this will be balanced by the growth of new jobs in other areas of the economy (robot repair man, for example) but I just don't see how it will be possible (or preferable) for there to be enough new jobs to replace all the old ones.
I called this my "optimistic" vision of the future because my pessimistic one is one in which the twin forces of the climate crisis and automation renders vast swathes of the global working class extremely impovrished by the end of the century. I think these are the two forces that are most likely to create a situation that will allow socialism, or something like it, to happen.
Survive, yes...just not as prolific when the only people who do it are people who specifically want to do it.
Total griftification of everything. Very bad folks we don’t love to see it. Not a sign of a declining society but a sign of a deceased society
Oldest profession and all that.
Calling the sex trade a grift is tantalizingly close to the incel line about sex being a trick women use to get money from men.
Onlyfans is just the latest incarnation of an age old practice.
my not-that-hot take is that selling homemade porn on OF is no more or less "alienated," "empowering," whatever, than selling homemade jewelry on etsy. We're just used to thinking of sex as tied up with relationships, but conditioned to understand gift giving as the exception to normal human interactions that proves the rule of barter and trade.
my not-that-hot take is kind of the opposite of yours in that if we're being conditioned to think of sex a certain way that it's likely that we're being conditioned by capital to think of sex as closer to meaningless because that makes it easier to commodify. Sex means something different to everyone so moralizing binary judgements like sex work = good and empowering or sex work = bad and alienating are completely useless anyway, but if we're thinking about this stuff within the capitalist hellscape we exist in the view that selling sex is just like selling stuff on etsy is one that might benefit capital more than it does you or your intimate connections to other people.
I think I wasn't super clear and our positions may not be all that different. I will say though that I disagree with your account of what the hegemonic attitude towards sex work has historically been under capitalism. Like everything to do with sex, social attitudes have been varied and contradictory, but the dominant view of it in polite society, at least until the mid to late 20th century, was that it was entirely disreputable, dishonest, and a threat to the social fabric and bourgeois morality. You could ascribe the ambivalent reversal of these attitudes to the neoliberal turn, but I think we agree that it's not a neat delineation. The point I was trying to make is that a society that compels people to put sexual services on the market is perverse, because markets are perverse.
Totally! And for the record I was referring to the present moment, not anything about historic hegemonic attitudes towards sex work. Like so many things that capitalism is good at exploiting, changes in social attitudes towards sex were literally the entire reason why the floodgates to profit were opened. I feel like my timeline for the very beginning of this shift is informed mostly by boogie nights lol
Trading sexual favors for basic qualify of life conditions is bad, for the same reason any imposition of labor demand in a country with our level of surplus is bad.
One could argue it is worse, due to the social stigma attached. But removing the stigma from sex work is meaningless unless you improve the material conditions of all workers.
It's an extremely weird thinkpiece and it's a bit terrifying to think people genuinely can't separate their interpersonal relationships from work. Even if it wasn't your nudes you're selling to your friends, seeing them as possible clients must put a strain into any relationship. Are you hanging out with me because you want to hang out with me, or because you think you may extract a little bit of profit from me? There's a little bit of debasing already when you bring up you're selling Tupperware or herbalife in random convos with your friends.
it's schrodinger's horniness. we are all simoultaneously horny and chaste until proven otherwise
Lmao, do not, and I repeat, do not, look at your friend's butthole without their express permission
Honestly, as a gay man, I've exchanged nudes with a lot of ppl and become friends with them, and now sub to their onlyfans. I don't really think of the money involved tbh as none of the people are dependent on it as far as I can tell, and I've never really paid for porn so my value for money ratio is gonna be good for awhile. Also as someone who's into fat people, there's better private fat content than whats available on sites 🤷♂️
idk I only really think it's a bit fucked when "barely legal" or desperately poor people are selling themselves, but that's capitalisms fault, not sex work. Additionally it inherently rewards rich creators with nice cameras/rooms and it's practically impossible for homeless people to make content, but this still seems like Capitalism Bad rather than sex work itself.
