Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

elle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 261 posts

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#141

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #125
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sex work is work all the same. From a normative standpoint, we ought to support sex workers directly, rather than the studios and production companies that are often exploitative. OnlyFans seems to get rid of the middlemen in the porn / cam girl industry, I think that's a massive benefit for sex workers today.

My question to most people on this forum are: would you really be ok if your daughter was best friends with a sex worker? Everybody says "of course!" in theory... but in reality I think it falls apart. Lots of blurred moral lines.

Any blurring of moral lines likely comes down to hangups W.R.T Body Autonomy. At the end of the day, if you one believes that everyone is allowed to make their own choices about their body, that would have to include their daughter, their spouse, their mother even.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#142

Post by j-pb »

sio8ohPi wrote: post #131
downerending wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what message does this send to girls who are not considered attractive enough Arguably this same message is also being sent to boys, who almost certainly aren't "attractive" enough to be paid in this medium. Aside from that, who is even paying these people? It's not like there's any dearth of free porn out there (or so I've heard). Unless it's someone rather famous or personally known to you, why bother?

Why support someone on Patreon? Why tip your waiter?

Well it's not like we have an army of amateur waiters out there waiting to serve you for free.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#143

Post by DoreenMichele »

thatcat wrote: post #113
DoreenMichele wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but I think your perception of relative ease for men has a filter of survivorship bias Please don't put words in my mouth. My life is hard enough without that. I never expected anything to be easy. Just possible. My Patreon sits at around $150/month and I get the occasional tip while I get accused of being a beggar for expecting pay for my writing at all when all other doors are effectively closed to me for various r…

Men face the same difficulties you describe when starting a career and getting paid for the value they provide. Simply because 1% of men do not face that due to networking or luck does not mean that the vast majority are in some privileged position.

To be succinct, the main issue I have with HN is that when I try to network and say things like "Email me about that. Let's discuss that issue privately." it typically turns into roughly "Honey, can I get your phone number? Can we have a coffee date (for romantic reasons and not business reasons)?"

I strongly suspect this is not a huge issue for men.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#144

Post by MuffinFlavored »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #141
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question to most people on this forum are: would you really be ok if your daughter was best friends with a sex worker? Everybody says "of course!" in theory... but in reality I think it falls apart. Lots of blurred moral lines.

Any blurring of moral lines likely comes down to hangups W.R.T Body Autonomy. At the end of the day, if you one believes that everyone is allowed to make their own choices about their body, that would have to include their daughter, their spouse, their mother even.

Exactly! You get it. I find it so hard to believe that there is supposedly zero overlap between HackerNews comment posters claiming "there is nothing morally wrong with sex work" and people who in reality when pressed with the exact situation would say "I am against my little sister performing sexual acts for money"

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#145

Post by sio8ohPi »

downerending wrote: post #139
sio8ohPi wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why support someone on Patreon? Why tip your waiter?

If there 1000 other waiters who appear to be perfectly thrilled to work without tips, why would I? If someone needs charity, I'd consider it, but I don't care to be "paid" with naked pictures in that case.

But they will work without tips. Nobody is making you tip. Why not just pay for your meal and leave?

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#146

Post by seibelj »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #136
seibelj wrote: post #123

Who would have guessed so many people on HN are against individual freedom? There is absolutely zero ethically or morally wrong with someone selling sex, or buying sex from someone else. Or maybe we should ban pop music stars from revealing too much skin in their music videos? Where do you draw the line between "This is immoral!" and "Wow, what a successful person!" Just ignore it if you don't like it. No one puts a…

> There is absolutely zero ethically or morally wrong with someone selling sex, or buying sex from someone else. That's an insanely modern/left view with zero consideration to basically all historically socially accepted conservative views of the past. It's trendy to support sex workers online in 2020 but in the 2000s I'm pretty sure 95% of white suburbia wouldn't have wanted their daughters hanging out with sex work…

Can you explain what is morally wrong with buying or selling sex?

I’m not “trendy”, it’s a deeply held philosophical belief about individual freedom.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#147

Post by krapp »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #136
seibelj wrote: post #123

Who would have guessed so many people on HN are against individual freedom? There is absolutely zero ethically or morally wrong with someone selling sex, or buying sex from someone else. Or maybe we should ban pop music stars from revealing too much skin in their music videos? Where do you draw the line between "This is immoral!" and "Wow, what a successful person!" Just ignore it if you don't like it. No one puts a…

> There is absolutely zero ethically or morally wrong with someone selling sex, or buying sex from someone else. That's an insanely modern/left view with zero consideration to basically all historically socially accepted conservative views of the past. It's trendy to support sex workers online in 2020 but in the 2000s I'm pretty sure 95% of white suburbia wouldn't have wanted their daughters hanging out with sex work…

>That's an insanely modern/left view with zero consideration to basically all historically socially accepted conservative views of the past.

No, not every culture in history has been saddled with the Judeo-Christian prejudice against women and their sexuality.

Also, historically socially accepted "conservative" views include slavery, rule by divine right, child labor and trial by combat. A view having been held and taken for granted for a long time doesn't make it correct.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#148

Post by edmundsauto »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #143
thatcat wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men face the same difficulties you describe when starting a career and getting paid for the value they provide. Simply because 1% of men do not face that due to networking or luck does not mean that the vast majority are in some privileged position.

To be succinct, the main issue I have with HN is that when I try to network and say things like "Email me about that. Let's discuss that issue privately." it typically turns into roughly "Honey, can I get your phone number? Can we have a coffee date (for romantic reasons and not business reasons)?" I strongly suspect this is not a huge issue for men.

My experience has led me to believe (as a not famous, not attractive, not well connected man) that I would not get an email back in the first place. I have no idea whether or not that is problematic, but that's my perception: that I wouldn't even get the opportunity to prove myself.

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#149

Post by [deleted] »

mydongle wrote: post #127
DoreenMichele wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what message does this send to girls I think the larger problem is the degree to which men refuse to engage women in a substantive intellectual fashion. I appear to be the highest ranked woman on HN. I've been here over a decade. It continues to be the case that most men don't really want to talk much with me unless they are hitting on me. This has proven to be a huge barrier to effective networking and a huge ba…

Does the normalization of women getting rich and living lavish, bourgeoise lifestyles from selling their bodies help or hurt the perception of women? Even before OnlyFans blew up, people(both men and women) already looked down on women who did sex work for a living. What do you think happens from here when every girl and their grandmother's has an OnlyFans? That's something every guy will probably be thinking about n…

[deleted]

Re: OnlyFans, influencers, and the politics of selling nudes during a pandemic

#150

Post by DoreenMichele »

edmundsauto wrote: post #148
DoreenMichele wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be succinct, the main issue I have with HN is that when I try to network and say things like "Email me about that. Let's discuss that issue privately." it typically turns into roughly "Honey, can I get your phone number? Can we have a coffee date (for romantic reasons and not business reasons)?" I strongly suspect this is not a huge issue for men.

My experience has led me to believe (as a not famous, not attractive, not well connected man) that I would not get an email back in the first place. I have no idea whether or not that is problematic, but that's my perception: that I wouldn't even get the opportunity to prove myself.

On the upside, that at least saves the time and energy of trying to figure out how to reply to someone in a way that moves things in the right direction and wondering if you are just crazy and reading in problem behavior when there is none and so forth.

I was strung along for months by someone who was married and not telling me that until he finally told me one day that he was married, his marriage was in the toilet and he needed "a friend." I wouldn't have fallen for that if it was clearer to me what actual successful networking looks like.

When two hetero men network, saying "Hey, let's have coffee" is a clear and unambiguously platonic proposal. This is not true in my case and it leaves me with serious challenges in figuring out just how on earth you do this.

It's only very recently that I have figured out how to get someone to discuss my work with me because those initial inquiries are so often ambiguous. Networking looks not dissimilar to dating in the initial phases and that means I waste a lot of time trying to make a business connection that will never happen because business is not his goal and will never be on the table, no matter how I handle things.

Post reply on HN