Of OnlyFans and Intimacy at Scale? | Hacker News Reader

Of OnlyFans and Intimacy at Scale?

jamesmcgirk.substack.com

> One recent estimate suggests a 50th percentile OnlyFans performer takes home a mere $43 a month.

I worked for a large cam site (on the tech side of things) a while back and this is something I wish people realized. There really are a some models bringing in tens of thousands of dollars a month, but they are few and far between. Often times these girls (I say girls because I never saw a single male performer come close to that amount) were either super niche or mildly famous before joining the site and in either case they treated camming like a full time job.

I've seen people talk about girls on OF making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and while I'm sure some are, I wish people would understand how few are actually making that amount. In the same way that it's possible to "move to Hollywood and get discovered while working tables", it's technically possible, but it requires a lot of work and even more luck. Also, similar to freelancing sites, you're competing with (and being undercut by) people from around the world. A huge number of the women on our site were from South America or Eastern Europe earning what would be below average wages in the US, but more than enough for them to live off of.

Personally, I have zero problem sex work (clearly, based on my work history), but we still live in a time where many people do. I just want people to be aware of what they are getting themselves into. What goes on the internet stays there forever and you are extremely unlikely to make enough money on these sites to never have to work again. I doubt many people on here are planning on getting into sex work, but I think it needs to more publicized how much of pipe dream "earning $10000 a week" is on these sites.

> I've seen people talk about girls on OF making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month and while I'm sure some are, I wish people would understand how few are actually making that amount.

I think this is the same result of people who look at Twitch and think they can be the next Ninja or Shroud. Yes, there are people on Twitch that make many thousands of dollars a month. The odds of becoming one of those people is vanishingly low for someone starting out fresh, and it takes many years to build up to that point. These are people who spend 8+ hours in front of a camera interacting with a live audience, 6-7 days a week, not to mention all of the things that happen in the background. Joe Shmoe in his house, streaming a couple hours a night when he gets off work, is likely not going to make it.

Fully agree. Also, quite a lot of those streamers that later become successful are starting out with expensive specialized equipment and/or a house that looks like a movie set.

I'd say by now, Instagram and YouTube are more like hobbies for bored kids of rich parents.

I think it's the same with us developers and app stores, or with indie games in general.

You always hear about the top performers, and you always hear the average (skewed by high-earning outliers). But you never hear the median, because that's what would honestly tell you how much revenue you could expect.

Just want to give a shoutout to the author for giving a fairly unbiased take here. Sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be, and with places like OnlyFans making it a (relatively) safe option there's a lot of people who are able to make money while maintaining autonomy. I've noticed especially among people working in tech there's quite a bit of sex-work shaming that goes on. Hopefully this article helps break some of that programming.

I personally am not against sex work but I am against giving the illusion of a personal intimacy and manipulation of lonely socially unsavvy guys who pay for this. There is nothing wrong with sex work but a lot wrong with emotional exploitation and preying on the vulnerable.

Sex workers are exploited much more than they exploit their clients. I think most people know what they are getting into.

How so? The way I see it is that they rake in thousands while not giving anything permanently, on the other hand there are people who risk financial and emotional ruin from predatory sex workers (I am not saying all of them are that way, I have met honest ones myself).

If you are talking about pimps, Onlyfans has mostly indepenent workers AFAIK.

They are giving quite a lot permanently. Their images will always be out there on the internet and in the world, and could be used against them when applying for future jobs, etc. The sex worker generally doesn't have XXX footage of their clients. It's the other way around.

Sure, some people give them more than they can afford. Sometimes car dealerships sell people dumb cars they can't afford too.

edit: Regarding pimps, there's plenty of women who are forced by pimps to perform online. It's extremely common. I imagine moreso with COVID.

I would argue that the normalization of virtual sex work is in the process of being socially accepted because a lot of sex workers are forced into it due to unemployment and the current COVID-19 situation, and due to the sheer amount of girls getting into it. It seems quite trivial compared to people losing their wealth and emotional health because they "don't know what the world is really like".

What permanence would you expect from transactional intimacy? It’s like going to the movies, you’re paying someone for a temporary escape from reality.

Permanence would be a sex worker on retainer or a committed partner.

Permanence, as in friendship after the fact. And some people might mistaken transactional intimacy for real friendship.

two wrongs don't make a right.

No, but exploitation of the type of man that thinks the stripper is actually into him is not among the most pressing issues surrounding sex work. It's an extremely strange thing to focus on. It's like focusing on anti-white racism. Sure it exists, and it is bad. But it has nowhere near the consequences of anti-black racism, so there is no equivalence between the problems.

The exploitation of lonely socially disabled men is not something insignificant. It's actually quite big on the severity scale compared to the exposure of the material of the performer as Onlyfans is in the process of being normalized to society.

Is it really?

I don't know, but I have the feeling that "lonely socially disabled men" are just very vocal about it.

Suicide is one of the top causes of death for people under 55. Suicides are overwhelmingly male (4:1). I think exploitation of lonely men absolutely has consequences. None of this downplays the consequences for women in online sex work however

I wouldn’t say it’s extremely strange. For example folks that have been through an issue themselves or know someone that has are likely to be more attuned to it’s effects.

There’s also statistically a rather large reduction in initiation and frequency of sexual activity for young adults in the us, particularly young men. Things like this could be causal factor.

Lastly young adults are killing themselves at record rates and young men 4x as much as young women, again things that feed into depression and detachment are worth considering.

I’d say it’s ok to be concerned about both.

"A hurts me, so it's ok to hurt B" mentality is destructive indeed.

Please exploit me buying from me a $20.00/month subscriptions of my semi-naked pics.

and exploit us of the relentless (and devious) spamming of websites like reddit, dating apps like Tinder, POF, etc.

OnlyFans creators have quickly started to use very underhanded self promotion techniques, and unfortunately many of them are straight up emotional manipulation.

You're taking about these guys like they're children who are incapable of fending for themselves. They're paying for nudes over the internet, I'm sure most of them know that and are fine with it. If they delude themselves into thinking it's more, maybe they do need someone to watch their wallet for them after all.

This is not treating them like children but more like focusing on the fact that a lot of them are naive and emotionally desperate guys who are not aware that it's all a game and are vulnerable to be preyed on by somebody who is willing to give them fake personal interaction and affection for their cash.

Anyone who thinks they’re getting actual intimacy from some sort of transactional relationship is, to put it bluntly, an idiot. However, I think it reflects more poorly on the people who raised these guys than the guys themselves.

I see how one can come to this point of view, but I think there is a perspective missing here about just how lonely and miserable some people are.

When you have never had a partner, when you have never been hugged and told you're loved, when you may also not even have friends or co-workers, and much more, things... are much different. I've met many males on the Internet where all of this applies, and they have a very easy time getting addicted to things that provide social comfort, whether is is Twitch, OnlyFans, Youtubers, and many other things. They want so badly to feel comfort, friendship, affection, and so on, that it is very easy to be tricked into thinking you're attaining it when you are in fact only attaining many strong correlates of it.

I think a lot of this ends up at it not being socially acceptable for men to show emotion or to seek emotional support. I imagine if that were the case most of these people would realize what they're paying for doesn't even approach being a shadow of the real thing. This is a group that would benefit a lot from some sort of self love/self care messaging but I don't even know what that would look like if it were tailored to this group.

I also kind of feel for all the people who signed up to sell nudes on onlyfans thinking they'd make a quick buck and ended up playing therapist for a bunch of lonely maladjusted dudes.

How am I supposed to feel about a sentence like this?

> "Like there was one guy who paid me to make a reaction video about his ‘appendage’ and it took me like seven takes to sound like I was excited by it."

To me, that's just deeply sad. Paying a woman to act as though she's interested in you is the commoditization of an innate yearning for companionship. It's turning something that poems are written about into mere transaction. And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.

> And it's baffling to me how people who tend to be "against capitalism" somehow rally to the free market when it comes to selling sex.

People that are against capitalism on the left tend not to be against volintary exchange of labor for money but the power relations between capitalist and laborer in capitalist industry. That's not an issue with individual sales of labor on the marketplace direct to end consumers of a service, which seems to be the issue here. The fact that the kind of service involved is sexual is beside the point.

Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally. What bothers people on the left about capitalism is, from the article:

> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.

> Maybe that's true for Marxists but it's not true for "the left" more generally.

It's true of a lot of the non-Marxist Left, too.

> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.

Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

> Im struggling to see how you imagine a crackdown on voluntary sex work would make that better, except as a way of draining more resources from everyone (itself making more people starve) to guarantee that fewer people could make a living in voluntary exchange (making even more people starve.)

I'm "struggling to see" how you interpreted my post this way.

As long as we're both struggling here, please explain how sex work doesn't entail massively imbalanced power relations. I wasn't just talking about OnlyFans: the post I responded to says "sex work is stigmatized way more than it should be". But even if we're only talking about the internet, I think you're extremely naive if you think physical separation means there's no coercive power involved. The money comes from somewhere. And don't forget, there's a middleman between the performers and the audience.

> Sure, I think with genuinely left policies, there's be less people who felt that sex work that lots of people not doing it find unacceptably degrading was a net win, and so fewer people choosing to voluntarily engage in that; capitalism naturally is economically coercive that way. But there's nothing particular about sex work here, fewer people would accept agricultural field work at current wages, absent economic coercion, too. The fix for the problems capitalism creates index work has everything to do with capitalism and very little to do with sex work.

I can't parse this. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem or "the problems of capitalism".

I think that general revulsion toward capitalism has very little to do with Marx and much more to do with unfairness (perceived and real), cutthroat competition that seems to reward dishonesty, the dispossession of the losers in that competition, and crass materialism. To me, all of those things clearly apply here.

And ironically, same its happening with sex and intimacy. Let's listen to Houellebecq one moment:

“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

> Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.

It's a trait of a natural darwinian systems imho. Look at how it works in nature - a pride of lions would have 1 alpha male who dominates most, if not all females.

I have no reason to believe that humans don't have the same innate behaviour as lions.

In fact i've read on some forum focused on prehistoric events (Neandertalis and sapiens "cohabitation") that the theory of humans having wolf/lion pack type of behavior (Alpha male with multiple females, beta couples leaving the pack during hard time, stuff like this).

It is sad.

Is the solution to ban selling the reaction, or is the solution to work towards a society where fewer people are inclined to buy it?

It's probably not the case that the availability of the reaction is the thing that leads to the hollow transaction.

I dunno about unbiased, seems pretty concerned about 18 year old girls specifically might be "at risk" but then wants to say "well maybe that 18 year old comes from an abusive household and so she could use the money", like come on

Women profiting from OF is not some bubble-like behavior that might sabotage American society down the line if we're not 'careful', sex work has existed since the beginning of time and in much much more liberal forums than American society, and will continue to exist to a non-trivial degree wherever urban populations exist. Like no shit, lotta single people stuck in front of their screens so its a gold rush at the moment; who cares.

The more concerning problem is the growing puerility of hetero men for lack of a better term and porn trends in America tend to confirm that. These women aren't putting a gun to anyone's head, and Jordan Peterson had a very big audience for a reason

This completely... sort of.

OF is a cynical take on relationships and love. I don't know how anyone could be taken in by this fantasy. It's a hollow thing. Still, if that's what you want, that's fine.

I happen to be single, and I'd say 95% of my interactions on dating sites are these gals who are "selling."

This is my main problem with the thing-- I am looking for a wife, and I am bombarded with insincere people on these sites.

Damn, that sucks! I think the only non-genuine messages I got on dating apps were from obvious spambots, so it never wasted too much of my time to filter through them. But it's probably gotten worse in the last few years.

Ah yes, nothing like exploiting teenage girls and pretending to be feminist liberal progressive while doing it! There is no physical pimp in this case, but lots of viral marketing duping immature teenagers into believing they can make it by selling their dignity. I don't care if some 30 year old person wants to make a life out of camming, but don't come here pretending like Onlyfans is some force for good. And then you dare criticize people like me who call a spade a spade, instead of criticizing the people profiting from this scam.

OnlyFans is a curious phenomena, it will be curious to see if OnlyFans results in a dilution of the general value of dating women. I support the right for someone to sell images of their body, however it seems idiotic to think that this kind of social acceptance of "being an e-hoe" (in my girlfriends words) won't come with any negative societal effects. And to be clear, I say this as someone who dates an online sex worker.

Edit - to be clear, yes, I am currently in a "real" relationship (we share a domicile) with a woman who works a professional job during the day and does part time sex work to supplement her income.

How is the value of dating women determined by buying sexy videos/images online?

(Please note I am not the GP)

Historically, dating involved a man spending money on a woman, nominally for purposes of courtship to prove he was a good provider, but often simply in hopes of sex in the immediate future. As social norms have changed -- such that casual relationships and sex outside of marriage have become more acceptable while women are more able to establish an earned income -- we still tend to default to men paying for dates in hopes of getting laid.

So dating has something of a tendency to be a polite form of prostitution where men spend money in a gamble in hopes it leads to sex. If men can legally spend money and state up front they are expecting X, Y or Z and get it, why "date"?

Though when the OP says they are dating an online sex worker, I assume they mean they are in a relationship to this person. The word "dating" gets used rather sloppily to mean a variety of things -- which isn't all bad, mind you, but sometimes interferes with clear communication.

Is "the guy paying" still a thing?

I mean, I sometimes pay for friends or my partners, but I never spend a dime on a women I was dating/courting and I never had the impression they wanted me to do so.

In my experience, women would evaluate me mostly on my character and looks and not so much on my money.

I'm 55 years old and swore off "dating" of the "man pays for dinner and a movie and feels thus entitled to paw me" variety when I was sixteen. So it's possible my information is out of date.

I gather things are in the process of changing and lots of people will, say, just hook up via an app. But, generally speaking, it is my understanding that it tends to still be the norm that the man typically pays for a date.

We do have the term Dutch Treat to mean each person pays their own way. Someone on HN from the Netherlands once described that as evidence of what cheapskates the Dutch are (or something along those lines). Personally, I am inclined to interpret it as related to the fact that the Netherlands has a reputation as having a better than average track record on women's rights and are moving away from social norms rooted in men paying for sex and implicitly treating women as nothing but sex objects for purchase.

(Edit: I'm American. Sorry for doing that American thing and acting like "everyone I talk to on the internet is also American." I'm really tired today. Oops!)

Yes, it's probably a cultural thing and I couldn't even say it's everywhere in the country I come from like I said or just the women I dated.

Thanks for adding some more civil discourse to this discussion :) .

You are correct in your assertion that I am in a relationship (we share the same apt) in regards to "dating" a sex worker. I added this context to indicate that I have more first hand knowledge of what it means to be a sex worker than someone who well... doesn't date an online sex worker.

My girlfriend has mentioned that some women do not handle the money well or make emotional compromises with work hours etc that can at times lead to very sad outcomes. It would be a sad day if it was socially "okay" to ask any random woman if they "have an onlyfans" so you can see them naked for $8. That is a sad state of affairs, granted we're already half way there since asking if a woman has an Instagram in many cases could be perceived as asking "do you have an instagram filled with soft-core pornography of yourself?".

I'm open to objection by any of the members of HN who likely (ironically) identify as male feminists. For the record, my gf finds your cause hilarious and pandering at best ;)

For the record, my gf finds your cause hilarious and pandering at best ;)

My "cause"? I don't know what that is supposed to mean.

Bro...

I think it's more of a possibility that a date is transactional than it is anything like a tendency.

Like, lots of people have spent lots of words talking about how problematic it is to overtly treat it as transactional.

I don't disagree with you, but I've been attacked for stating too bluntly that "dating is a polite form of prostitution." (You will note I swore off "dating" nearly four decades ago -- as stated in a separate comment by me here.)

I'm not attacking you for it, but I'm disagreeing. My point above is that most dates do not have a transactional pretext and are not similar to prostitution at all.

Some dates probably are like that.

Okay. I misunderstood something. I've reread your comment and I don't know where the disconnect is.

One of the things you commonly see is that men get divorced and don't want to pay alimony or child support on the grounds that she isn't sleeping with him anymore.

So I think for a great many people, there is a strong connection between "he pays the bills and his expectation is sex." And I think this begins with our dating norms where he typically pays for the date.

I think the fact that this is baseline normal for most people is why it is offensive to point it out. People want to think their relationship is a good relationship and not transactional and the evidence seems to be that it's much more often transactional than not.

There's a difference between "commonly" and "majority".

Is there data that shows it's a majority of relationships? I tried researching a couple of statistics that might be illustrative in the other direction and didn't find much (not, "didn't find the answers I wanted" but "didn't find any answer").

I'm comfortable calling it the "majority" because that only means "more than half." It doesn't have to mean anything as high as ninety percent.

I don't think saying "at least 51 percent of the time, it's transactional" is some kind of extremist position.

I did this analysis for my own benefit, not to convince anyone of anything. I chose to swear off "dating" of the "polite exchange of money for sex" variety because I felt it undermined my quality of life, my de facto human rights, etc. I'm satisfied with how that decision has impacted my life.

Given what I have overwhelmingly heard from other women, I have the impression that most women are less satisfied with their relationships to men than I have been.

I wonder if what you're observing is the result of stronger commercialization in the US.

In Europe, my impression was that most "dates" are just hiking or bicycling together, or cooking together, or in university you'd study together.

For a cooking date, of course one has to buy slightly more ingredients. But I would have been very upset if you would call that "spending money on a woman [..] in hopes of sex" or "a polite form of prostitution", because I'll usually share my food if I have visitors, no matter which gender or intention.

My opinion is that most of the dating that you see in movies is quite impractical, because all of it prevents an honest and intimate discussion. Plus I don't know any couples who met that way.

Shopping? Noisy, crowded, too many distractions.

Cinema? It's either too noisy, or everyone else will hate you for talking.

Restaurant? Why make things unnecessarily awkward by having a private discussion in front of 20 strangers?

In short, my impression was that the woman sizing up the man if he will be a good provider only happens after the blossoming relationship is already working on a sexual level. And I'd say that is reasonable and not offensive. If you plan to move in together or want to have kids in the future, you'll want to have a teammate that can support you.

My mother's a German immigrant. It's entirely possible that my negative reaction to dating as a teen in the US is because I had European expectations of just spending time together and getting to know each other and that's not how that went.

I found the title of the blog ‘Our Cyberpunk Now’..interesting. I am a long time collector of Victorian and Edwardian Erotica. There is a sub sub genre of Cyberpunk erotica.

I was reminded of this story about a madame who runs a cyberpunk pleasure house with mechanical delights and persons of various genders and combinations thereof and is taken to task by the owner of the already established whorehouse in town. And then they take each other to task and so on.

Which makes me wonder when will we have customizable Real Dolls and robot courtesans. Hand to heart, I did ask this question at a TechCrunch disrupt and I think people thought I was being ‘cute’. I wasn’t.

Sex robots as an industry is a gold mine. Why aren’t we disrupting it? It will fix the human trafficking issues, mental/physical health issues and not to mention the legal /moral issues related to exploitative prostitution.

I feel three areas need disruption: Ag, adult entertainment and geriatric tech and the tech in USA is too lazy for the first, prudish to tackle the sex robots part and apathetic about the last one.

This would of course beg the question of what is legal and what isn’t legal when it comes to sex robots. Will we extend our morality code to robots? And then we will enter a very very gray area.

Some interesting interviews with OnlyFans performers - author says they use little Telegram groups to support one another

TBH the piece felt a bit like humble bragging about being in a relationship with a semi successful onlyfan model, and was pretty short on insight.

A number I'd like to see is the evolution of the number of young adults doing sex work. A lot of people having an onlyfan would have been stripping/escorting before, and onlyfans is much safer so a definite progress. But is there that many more that engage in it? Onlyfans doesn't seem to publish model numbers, but I doubt it's remotely enough for it to be considered normalized in any society...

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