Under the skin of OnlyFans • Hacker News Board

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#481

Post by aeturnum » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

Khaine wrote: post #296

I’m not anti-sex or anti-sex work, but I think onlyfans is evil. They have a business model, that is perfected to extract as much money from whales as possible. Performers appear to have ‘relationships’ with their subscribers, encourage them to tip, buy ‘customs’, and ‘engage’ with them. These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys th…

> These sad lonely sexless men spend all their money on this shit. It consumes them, until they are out of money, then it destroys them. It warps their expectations of relationships further impacting their datability, driving them even more towards onlyfans.

You're casting this as a situation where sex workers are preying on people, when I think it's equally true that sex workers are helping people cope (in a way that can be mal-adaptive).

There is nothing wrong with enjoying buying content from sex workers. There's nothing wrong with selling it. The people who spend in ways that are unhealthy for them (which is common across many industries) were not put into that mindset by the sex work industry. The industry just doesn't have that much power.

The official definition for substance use disorder is when use starts to damage other parts of the patients' life. In situations where there are some users of substances who lead happy lives, blaming the substance alone is desceptive - it's the combination of factors that have led a particular person to use it in an unhealthy way. It is common for people to act in even less healthy ways if you abruptly cut them off from their mal-adaptive coping mechanism.

I hope that you do not just direct this critique towards the marginalized group of people that provides a relationship-like service, but also towards the far-more-powerful forces that grind people down to the point that they cannot turn away from parasocial relationships.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#482

Post by aqme28 » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

chrisjarvis wrote: post #458

ipnon wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be 18 to sign up. It's like saying the military is a mechanized process turning young men into troops. Some people sign up for the military before they graduate high school, and gladly. There has to be some arbitrary age where a boys and girls become an adult, when they can and must accept responsibility.

That is low quality comparison. Whether or not you agree with the high goals of the (US?) military; for a great many people it is a solid career, a role model they never had, and possibly a stepping stone out of an awful life. Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives. This is much different than saying "Ooh youre 18 now, look how much money these 3 people make sellin…

Maybe this is controversial, but I think the US army does less good for society than an OnlyFans model.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#483

Post by emptysongglass » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #423

emptysongglass wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife who is a sex worker is in therapy provided by her camsite because the work is so toxic. She was as pro-sex-work as you can be when she first started five years ago. It's majority trauma and I have to hear the stories every day. The men who drive by want to cum as fast as possible with as little damage to their pocketbook as possible. So they drive in, maybe critique her appearance, say, "tits" or "ass" (usual…

> The far left has really hijacked the discourse around sex work and used language of empowerment to encourage young girls to get in and get what's theirs. No, it hasn't. The far left is anti-capitalist, and includes both pro-and-anti-sex-work factions; the attitude you describe is more that of the pro-sex-work portion of the pro-(possibly somewhat tamed)-capitalism center-to-center-left. The pro-sex-work portion of…

I wouldn't describe the far left today as having anything to do with its foundations. What I've observed is a political group largely held together with an obsessive compulsion to root out any element not in line with its own brand of correct thought, which contains a variety of maximalist interpretations on everything from sex and gender to race and institutions.

It's a far left I've experienced both in the US and here in Denmark and I think it's largely the far left people think of when it is mentioned.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#484

Post by trompetenaccoun » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

neonbones wrote: post #438

throwmeawaydddy wrote: post #33

Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creator…

I can tell something from a POV of a webcam. My ex-girlfriend was a webcam model on the biggest website (chatur), and she was successful. It was even before the rising and growth of OF, somewhere around 2017. She was happy with her job, and as I know, she is still satisfied with the money she gets from it. Usually, it's around $500-1000 and even $2-3k for one day of work. It's happened because we live in a poor count…

Our culture is sick. I don't judge you or your ex-girlfriend for doing it but the whole webcam business shouldn't be a thing. Governments should do more to help socially awkward people make real connections with others outside the internet. Instead people sit at home more and more and then lonely men pay to look at streams of women masturbating. If you got someone to time travel from 100 years ago they'd probably think we've gone full retard.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#485

Post by standardUser » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

blippage wrote: post #198

ayngg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in general there are some pretty big costs that aren't fully understood to doing sex work, even outside of the social stigma of being found out by your friends and family, there are mental health costs that are often not talked about. A lot of sex workers overtly reinforce social behaviors towards women (sexualization and objectification among other things) in order to appeal to men, which hurts them in the l…

> I feel like these dangerous aspects of sex work are often ignored in the current zeitgeist of de-stigmatizing, I agree entirely. I heard of one young lady who started an OnlyFans, apparently did quite well, but decided to stop it because of the psychic damage. I'm going to be heavily downvoted for this, but I'm going to say it anyway ... We need to stop all the bullshit about how it empowers women. Certain sections…

But what about me? I'm not a beta cuck, incel or a loser (last one could be debatable). Yet I love OnlyFans, I love the amateur porn videos on PornHub, I love live webcams and all that stuff. I love that I actually pay for a lot of it! I certainly enjoy these things much more than traditional porn videos. My partner enjoys viewing some of these things with me. We may or may not have even partook a few times ourselves!

I don't see why I should be denied access to all of this fun paid sex stuff (consuming and producing) just because other people can't handle themselves. Should I also not be allowed to drink or gamble or play video games just because some other people abuse these hobbies in a dramatic and harmful fashion?

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#486

Post by throwaway6945 » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

throwmeawaydddy wrote: post #33

Fire up the throwaway! Not 100% related to the article, but directly related. I worked as developer for a product in the same niche ("democratizing adult content"). I spent almost 2 years working on the frontend, devops, and building out the analytics engine (all pre-covid). Anyway, on to the comment at hand. We had a small number of users compared to OnlyFans (when I left, there were about 20K active content creator…

What's striking to me is that the negative consequences of sex work are not at all the sex work itself, but the stigma and trauma inflicted on sex workers by other people who ought to mind their own business, but clearly won't and from abuse by mentally ill mostly male sorts taking out their frustrations upon them in increasingly horrible ways.

I don't have a solution here. But I also agree that there are plenty of other horrible jobs in the world and it's also striking that the same people who lose their minds over sex work would not raise a peep over those other professions that have little or nothing to do with sex.

Judge not lest ye be judged? Yeah right.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#487

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

chrisjarvis wrote: post #458

ipnon wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be 18 to sign up. It's like saying the military is a mechanized process turning young men into troops. Some people sign up for the military before they graduate high school, and gladly. There has to be some arbitrary age where a boys and girls become an adult, when they can and must accept responsibility.

That is low quality comparison. Whether or not you agree with the high goals of the (US?) military; for a great many people it is a solid career, a role model they never had, and possibly a stepping stone out of an awful life. Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives. This is much different than saying "Ooh youre 18 now, look how much money these 3 people make sellin…

> Also a very small percentage of these are actually fighting in infantry risking their lives.

The idea that risk of life in the military is exclusive to the infantry (or even “combat arms” more generally) is...pretty ludicrous.

And the military is systematically and manipulatively marketed to young people at least as much as online sex work is.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#488

Post by Xylakant » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

newsclues wrote: post #466

Xylakant wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to misunderstand my point, despite me spelling it out. I don’t consider anecdotes dangerous. I consider basing policy discussions/decisions on anecdotes dangerous, because anecdotes cannot capture sufficient data. What policy should we derive from my anecdote about my friend who was deliberately targeted by the person they were caring for? Ban nurse work because it’s unhealthy? Ensure sufficient oversight so…

You denounce anecdotal evidence and then cite it, as evidence for your views. What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.

> You denounce anecdotal evidence and then cite it, as evidence for your views.

My explicitly expressed view is “do not base any policy discussion on anecdotes, even the ones I cited.” Recounting the anecdotes only shows that I can pick sufficient anecdotes to support both sides of the argument and as such, basing any reasonable discussion on them is futile.

> What policy should we derive from your friends personal experience? None! Because we should consider all the data and not your friends story.

Exactly.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#489

Post by wonderwonder » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:33 PM UTC

NateEag wrote: post #315

Telemakhos wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't going to be a welcome question or politically correct, but why do you let your wife continue to engage in something that is "majority trauma" and that makes her need therapy?

At a guess, because his wife is a human and gets to make her own decisions?

I hear this a lot and I feel that often people making this statement are being disingenuous. My wife and I are a team, if she is doing something that I don't like then I can ask her to stop, she can do the same for me. An extreme example but if your wife / husband was cheating on you, could you not ask them to stop as they "a human and gets to make their own decisions"? Same thing applies to work, a job can take over your entire life and affect everyone around you. My wife had a terrible job that she hated and I had her quit it, take a massive pay cut and do something else, she is much happier now. People are so much on their high horse of letting everyone do whatever they want but people don't exist in a void, their actions affect everyone around them.

Obviously you should not use violence or force to cause a change but if my wife was working in a profession such as this I would absolutely give an ultimatum of either stop or the kids and I are leaving. Sometime tough love is still love. With that said I don't know OP's situation and they will do whatever they think is best in a situation.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#490

Post by jasonlotito » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

emptysongglass wrote: post #471

jasonlotito wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't believe elevating sex work to a pedestal in the cultural consciousness is right or ethical. It's not being put on a pedestal. It's being pulled up from the gutters. > It's a damaging profession both to its consumers and to its creators. There are far more damaging professions that are well respected and accepted in the modern world. However, because the stigma attached to them is generally positive, they ge…

Have you read my original comment upstream? If not, please understand the position I'm coming from first. My wife is a sex worker. She has been for five years, four of those together with me. Before I met her, I was a part of a community of sex workers I had known since I was in my twenties so add 5 years more of direct experience with the lives and minds of those workers. My friend who has worked as a domme for the…

> If not, please understand the position I'm coming from first.

This doesn't change anything I said. Nor change the fact that your attitude is part of the problem. You are not unique in your point of view, but having that point of view doesn't mean your opinions are immediately valid.

> I do not make this observation as one uninitiated.

But you are. You are just an observer. You are not a SW yourself.

> I write with the weight of a decade of contact with these people

If that's true, then it should come as no surprise that there are more people in your position that disagree with your attitude. Otherwise, you don't know as much as you think you do.

Edit: In fact, I'll say that by using your position to push the narrative that what your wife does is "ugly and violent," you are doing more to support the idea that people should treat those like her in an "ugly and violent" way. If you don't respect what she does, why should others?