If you are talking about pimps, Onlyfans has mostly indepenent workers AFAIK.
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.
Permanence would be a sex worker on retainer or a committed partner.
I don't know, but I have the feeling that "lonely socially disabled men" are just very vocal about it.
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.
OnlyFans creators have quickly started to use very underhanded self promotion techniques, and unfortunately many of them are straight up emotional manipulation.
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 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.
> "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.
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.
> The environment it creates is ruthlessly competitive. Winners win big, losers starve.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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
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.