OnlyFans Is Not a Safe Platform for ‘Sex Work.’ It’s a Pimp | Hacker News Reader

OnlyFans Is Not a Safe Platform for ‘Sex Work.’ It’s a Pimp

nytimes.com

31 pointsajay-b24 comments

>“Put simply, whether you’re a ‘high-class’ call girl or a street walkin’ ho, when you’re on a ‘date’ you gotta get on your knees or lay on your back and let that man use your body any way he wants to. That’s what he pays for. Pretending prostitution is a job like any other job would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.”

What about a coal miner, does he have a choice whether to go into work and risk life and his lungs once inside the mineshaft? What about a soldier defending the country, when he sees a bunch of enemy soldiers approaching his position? Does he have a choice whether to run away or fight them? What happens to military deserters? The full force of the law does not punish you if you cancel a 'date' at the very last minute. I could go on and on Aren't they selling their bodies too? I see from the Wikipedia that it says she's a radical feminist so maybe she doesn't consider these things as something really bad.

Like it or not, there's an economic reality out there.

Maybe we should have universal basic income for all before banning platforms that a lot of people rely on for survival. Otherwise this sounds like 'let them eat cake'.

What is there preventing people who are on the platform from getting other jobs? Your comment makes it sound as if those people are completely incapable of doing any meaningful work.

Whose to say that the work they are already doing isn't creating value? And why is only one subset of a person's efforts consider something value creation if it meets certain check boxes, but other ways of using one's time isn't consider creating value.

People pay for sex around the world. People are exchanging value for it. So it is apparently something worthy of value. I mean that is how money works right? When I give you money, we are in an exchange where value is being transferred because there is obviously something of worth involved.

Social Anxiety, lack of upward mobility, a pandemic, higher education, the inability to stand for 8 hours a day, allergies...

If someone is really bothered because of the depiction below, they can still look for 'meaningful work'. Nothing is stopping them right now.

This is for sex workers, but selling sex online may result in some people feeling their dignity is violated. Those can still find different jobs right now too.

Removing the option for people who either don't have other good options or do not feel like the above situation is as bad this radical feminist is making it to be, is not a good thing. If sex work is so denigrating to the high class escort as she makes it out to be, why are they still in that field not look for other options? Maybe they don't see it as denigrating as she does, or maybe they don't have other options. In both cases it doesn't make sense to remove that option beyond law enforcement going after pimps and traffickers.

As I said earlier, what you stated sounds exactly like 'let them eat cake'.

They may be capable of other work, but for some reason they're doing OnlyFans.

Perhaps they know more about their options than you or I do.

Regardless, banning OnlyFans won't create new opportunities for them.

If banning OnlyFans is a social good, should they be compensated for the lost opportunity, the price that they're paying?

Both coal miners and soldiers can freely choose other professions. Many sex workers are forced into the profession out of an inability to put food on the table or make rent.

People today gravitate toward the path of least resistance. Legalizing sex work results in swaths of men and women performing a job that is, at best, a massive negative for the economy and a known gateway to drug abuse and mental dysfunction. You could make the same argument about other professions like professional gamers who play 12 hours a day destroying their bodies. I’d be inclined to entertain such an argument.

I clearly remembered if I wanted a shot at going to school for engineering and getting out of my meth ridden rural town, volunteering in the Navy. I really had no other options than either I was going to be a consumer or a maker of meth.

Both of those jobs are very often performed my people with little to no other option to escape poverty. A poor kid growing up in WV in some bumfuck town may only have the option of mining coal like generations before him or joining the military to escape the town. Of course he could just leave the town on his own but now he's out in the world with no family or friends to support him with a high school education that puts him at the bottom of any job applicant pool. These kids are at the same level of advantage as poor kids in inner cities. Poor education and possibly a poor home life leads to limited opportunities which leads to a cycle of poverty that's hard to escape. Things like basic income and free college can really help those that wish to succeed and escape their economic class. To simply ignore the situations that drive people to join these jobs is ignorant at best and classist at worst.

A net negative how? Because it's a non-necessary service? Then it's as much of a negative as nice restaurants or TV shows are.

It's just supply and demand. There's demand for sex work, so there's a supply of sex work. Criminalizing sex work just makes life harder for sex workers. They have to dodge cops constantly, and they have trouble getting healthcare. If they get in trouble, they can't call the police.

It's a free country — let them do their jobs in peace. If they'd rather have a different job, they can switch careers on their own, without getting arrested.

"But what about sex trafficking victims?" Sex trafficking victims will have a lot less trouble going to the police if they're not at risk of having charges pressed against them for being prostitutes.

She also refers to high class escorts in her article. They are not forced workers.

It's really hard to believe coal miners love backbreaking dangerous work in mineshafts so much that they won't switch if they had other job options. How many tech workers(or any desk worker working in an air conditioned building for that matter) left their job to become a coal miner?

I believe there has been plenty of commentary of coal miners saying they hope their kids don't end up in mine.

Just an example: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/us/miners-steer-children-...

The author of the op-ed is an anti-porn crank[1]; she advocated (successfully) for local ordinances banning pornography in the 1980s[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharine_A._MacKinnon#Pornogr...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipornography_Civil_Rights_O...

This is a terrible article.

> One measure of this success is the media’s increasing insistence on referring to people used in prostitution and pornography as “sex workers.” What is being done to them is neither sex, in the sense of intimacy and mutuality, nor work, in the sense of productivity and dignity. Survivors of prostitution consider it “serial rape,” so they regard the term “sex work” as gaslighting.

Allegedly, sex workers are called "sex workers" because "the media" insists upon it. In point of fact, sex workers have insisted on it, because when they get reframed as victims, it tends to lead to a lot of laws that criminalize their jobs, and that is very bad for sex workers [1].

The author makes a bizarre generalization that all "survivors" of sex work think sex work is basically "serial rape." To construct this, she cites two former sex workers, which is hardly any sort of consensus. Perhaps if she had consulted the Global Network of Sex Work Projects [2], a large worldwide network of dozens of sex-worker-run, pro-sex-work nonprofits, she would have formed a different impression of the consensus in the industry.

Sex work can be a good job. That's why so many people flocked to OnlyFans. It's really condescending and shitty to dismiss sex workers as helpless victims and all their advocacy as "gaslighting."

[1]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/08/07/why-sex-work-should-be-d...

[2]: https://www.nswp.org/who-we-are

For those who are not aware by name alone, the author, Catherine MacKinnon, is a very dedicated anti-pornography and anti-prostitution feminist. She was a major player in the 1980s when mainstream feminism split between sex-positive and anti-sex-work camps. Whether or not you agree with her position here I think it valuable to remember that it is one she has consistently held for decades, and part of a broader stance that sex work harms women. This is not a random essayist but an activist for a particular set of broader societal changes who is writing this piece.

> This is not a random essayist but an activist for a particular set of broader societal changes who is writing this piece.

What’s your message here? Are you saying a random essay would be more credible or less credible?

I’m not super informed on this topic, but admittedly, I would give more credibility to someone who’s consistent on their message and not willing to sway with the wind for personal gain- regardless of whether I agree or disagree with them.

It means both that she’s biased, and also that she’s incredibly hostile to sex workers, which makes her one of the least qualified people to talk about what is safe for sex work or good for sex workers.

"Biased" can't become code for has a well-known point-of-view that disagrees with mine.

I don't agree with Catherine McKinnon on anything, but I don't think she should be disqualified from speaking because she believes what she is saying. Her arguments should be discussed on their merits.

I can’t read the article but the headline is making claims about the safety of sex workers on OnlyFans. Someone with an ideological axe to grind has an incentive to distort or selectively highlight the facts around such claims. It’s worth noting they are trying to persuade you to their viewpoint and not attempting to offer an objective account.

> I can’t read the article

https://archive.is/GlzDG

The author of the piece has an agenda, selectively using anecdotal evidence to gain attention. Think the headline “Florida doctor dies after receiving Pfizer vaccine” that was published not long ago. Nobody reads the follow up piece where it’s ruled unrelated.

There is a reason I wrote my post in as carefully a neutral manner as I did. My message is that the author has a significant body of other work supporting her position and has spent considerable time developing and advocating for it, and that this is not really about OnlyFans alone but part of a broader social movement the author is a notable part of. I am deliberately not taking a stance on that movement as part of my comments here, because I think it’s a complicated topic deserving of serious discussion, and that that discussion has been ongoing for forty years as part of mainstream feminist debate.

Perversely, it seems that writing in an intentionally neutral way has caused me to get downvoted to zero, while the top comment calls the author a crank.

Lost me at:

> For more than three decades, researchers have documented that it desensitizes consumers to violence and spreads rape myths and other lies

Meh. I grew up with internet porn, and the progression of the bad side(s) of it have only made me way less receptive to that type of crap. At this point rape/violence/dominant-sex-focused stuff is just boring, sad, and let's face it... less "engaging".

Sure, there are always gonna be dirt-bag-people behind the scenes involved in some of it, but, there are also a lot of people who are now able to do their _own_ thing on their _own_ terms because of these types of platforms. Take that away, and you've become more part of the problem than the solution. The "product" will always exist, taking away the option to do it on your own terms seems like a regression.

Remember when the NY Times hosted well conceived intellectual discourse? Yeah me neither.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com