Public Perceptions of Sex Work are Changing, but that Doesn't Mean Sex Workers are Safe

“Rather than stand up for the stigmatized and vulnerable, OnlyFans made the decision to lose out on millions, possibly billions in revenue to bow to the pressures of the conservative minority, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about the sex work industry, conflating it with trafficking and child abuse rather than doing the basic work to support and understand the members of the industry they were serving. ”

In the past two weeks, we've seen one of the biggest names in digital sex work, OnlyFans, first vow that they were going to remove all adult explicit content from the site, and then after a week of getting butt-fucked by the press, by the hundreds of thousands of sex workers who they were ostensibly and suddenly forcing out of work in the middle of a pandemic, and by the millions of subscribers and members of the public who think sex work is work, OnlyFans then magically reversed their ban, having miraculously figured out a way to make their bank/payment processors work after all.

It was a cop out that everyone saw from a mile away. OnlyFans had long been hinting that they wanted to distance themselves from the very people that the majority of their profit comes from (99% of their top earners are sex workers) because of the stigma of being part of the adult industry. However, OnlyFans would be nothing without the sex workers who use it, and most importantly, the sex workers who started creating content on it during the pandemic, which established OnlyFans as one of the giants of the digital sex world industry. However, it was clear from the start that they were uncomfortable with the sex workers who used the platform, often banning or freezing accounts with little explanation given, and last year when Bella Thorne infamously started an OnlyFans account only to back out and explain it all away as some sort of joke or flimsy attempt to support sex workers, OnlyFans used it as an opportunity to change their terms to make it harder for sex workers to get paid out; which stymied the income of thousands. With the soft launch of their app earlier this year, OnlyFans saw the stringent ToS of the iOS store as a chance to once and for all get rid of those pesky sex workers that they made their fortune on. (Don't worry Apple, we haven't forgotten you and what you did to Tumblr and all the other apps like it. Your Draconian approach to gentrifying the internet via our phones won't work forever).

Any idiot with half a brain could've told you that yanking the rug out from under your biggest earners was not only a bad business move for your company, but that turning out thousands of vulnerable people and removing their sole source of income in the middle of a global pandemic was, ummm, not a good look. OnlyFans went from being a platform in which sex workers could reclaim economic independence and power to being reviled as a money-grabbing, selfish and cruel website that never cared about anyone but their own bottom line. And that was definitely true. In statements following up their initial announcement, they explained that the move was an economic one, motivated by how difficult it is to get banks and other financial entities to fund and process sex work payments/subscriptions. It's not impossible though, on Pornhub you can pay for premium content, give creators tips, subscribe to channels and all of that. Chaturbate, ManyVids, and other contemporaries of OnlyFans also show that it's not impossible to support and host adult content on your site. It took less than a week for news sources to find out that OnlyFans was just using money as a cheap excuse to cover up the fact that they didn't want to stand up against pressure from anti-porn groups that were campaigning against OnlyFans to take down adult content because "OnlyFans is host to the most trafficking of anywhere on the internet" (an unverified and completely false claim). Rather than stand up for the stigmatized and vulnerable, OnlyFans made the decision to lose out on millions, possibly billions in revenue to bow to the pressures of the conservative minority, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about the sex work industry, conflating it with trafficking and child abuse rather than doing the basic work to support and understand the members of the industry they were serving.

In the year of our Lord and of Covid variant delta 2021 however, public perceptions about sex work have changed. Increased exposure to sex workers through social media and news sites have led more people to understand that sex work is work, and that sex workers are just like us, people who are trying to eke out a living despite the iron hand of capitalism trying to crush us all. There is more understanding that sex work does not equal sex trafficking, and that for many, turning the patriarchal structures of objectification and sexualization into something empowering and economically viable can be very healing. The reaction to OnlyFans' decision to boot sex workers was swift and harsh. Thousands of people publicly condemned the company for betraying the very people who made them such a successful company in the first place, and after merely a week, OnlyFans was forced to abruptly turn around and change their mind. Many saw it as a victory, seeing it as David defeating Goliath, but by no means does it mean that sex workers are safe.

Many sex workers on Twitter complained that within the week of uncertainty, they lost hundreds, if not thousands of subscribers, costing them a significant amount of income. The abruptness with which OnlyFans magically found ways to process payments/deal with banking systems proved that it was never an insurmountable problem, just an inconvenient one. And OnlyFans has still not promised to never ban sex workers from the platform. They've 'suspended' the exodus, but by no means cancelled it. Sex workers online have been telling one another to move to other platforms, to publish their content upon multiple websites so that the cancellation of one platform isn't as devastating, and finally to try to offload their content entirely, and to move back to private websites by which subscribers can reach them personally. They are surviving the turmoil, not because OnlyFans is 'saving' them, but because sex workers are resourceful, resilient, and ever-determined to not be erased.

Accountability is important. Accountability and public shaming forced OnlyFans to reverse their decision on banning explicit content. But that doesn't mean that sex workers are safe. It doesn't mean that we've built a world that thinks about their needs, that offers them protection from predators or the religious conservatives who wish they didn't exist. Sex workers are still as marginalized and uncertain as ever, forced to continue using platforms like OnlyFans that they know will drop them at any moment. So while the OnlyFans reversal is a small victory, it is by no means a permanent change. We still need to be vocal and persistent, that sex work is not something that will go away or disappear or turn its head in embarrassment, but it is an intrinsic and important profession, one that carries its own risks, and that by consistently normalizing it can we really help protect and support sex workers.

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The Whorticulturalist is the mother of this magazine. She is a sex-positive blogger and creative who enjoys rock climbing, dancing, and camping. In her spare time, she’s probably flirting.