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Under the skin of OnlyFans

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Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#511

Post by wwweston »

ripsawridge wrote: post #454
wwweston wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds about right. I think there's a growing consensus that making criminals of the workers doesn't help (you might lightly criminalize the buy side in some cases, but criminalizing the sell-side makes it harder to help workers who get in trouble), and I appreciate the discussion from any political corner that helps make that point. On the other hand it's also weird to me to see progressive elements talk of nor…

> perhaps like some progressives, I am not sure there is as big a difference as we'd like to believe between selling one's spring days to be a cog in any commercial operation and selling participation in sexual gratification. There is! In the first case, you work with colleagues who may become friends, you learn how to treat people and build stronger relationships. The "cog in [a] commercial operation" quip is an abs…

In some conventional jobs, you have the opportunity to make friends with colleagues and otherwise build relationships. If you've never worked for an enterprise badly suffused with exploitative and adversarial interactions or known anyone who has, then you may want to re-examine the idea of who is constructing their opinions here from a position of privilege. And there is likewise a distribution of conditions under which sex work is done.

Speak to statistical distributions within each if you must (preferably from well-researched statistics including polls of people involved) but what's actually less than sane is the construction of a rigid dichotomy in which the abuse happens over here in this sex-work-bad-place and the positive-human-interaction stuff happens over here in happy-commercial-peer-space.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#512

Post by dragonwriter »

newsclues wrote: post #478
dragonwriter wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because normal jobs suck, doesn’t mean sex work is good. Just because sex work sucks doesn't mean that you improve sex workers conditions by criminalizing their work while creating no legal opportunity. Criminalizing sex work just makes it suck more , and the reduces the best case for people for whom it was their best available option (whether or not it still is.)

This logic could apply to any illegal trade. Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder? Because there are negative effects to individuals and societies at large. Sex work is not the only way for people to support themselves, anymore than professional killers who can also find other means of work.

> This logic could apply to any illegal trade.

Well, no, because most illegal trades aren’t illegal to protect people voluntarily engaging in one side or the other of the trade.

> Why do we make killers lives worse with criminalization of murder?

No one argues for criminalization of murder to protect people who would be murderers if it was legal, but people do argue for criminalization of sex workers to protect people who would be sex workers from exploitive labor conditions (but tend to fail to have a narrative, when so doing, about how narrowing their options to include only options that they would, were legal sex work available, see as worse than legal sex work—including illegal sex work—does that.)

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#513

Post by ausbah »

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…

you know that military recruiters often target high schoolers, often for enlisted infantry positions right? how is that any better?

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#514

Post by dalbasal »

standardUser wrote: post #474
dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If in 30 years we live in a society where people post nudes like they do facebook posts.. ..then the calculus will be different. Current culture is what it is, and we live within it. Imagine a culture where prostitution is "no big deal." It's acceptable for parents to encourage college kids to take a summer job in a brothel and it affects their life in the same way as a summer job at a car wash. Just because you c…

"..then the calculus will be different." We only get to "then" by challenging the norms we are faced with "now". The question is do we want to move forward to a more accepting world, or settle for the narrow, judgmental mess we've inherited.

Well... we get to some sort of "then" regardless. I'm all for challenging norms and striving forward, sexual liberation and such. I just don't think only fans represents that better, more accepting world. Do you?

Seems perfectly reasonable that OP doesn't want his kids engaged in it.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#515

Post by [deleted] »

frickinLasers wrote: post #345
roenxi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably bad for the mental health of the men too. As the thread ancestor noted - sometimes "'fan[s]' [go] nuclear and was waging all out digital war.". I'm guessing that is just a thing some men do but it is bound to be made worse by women correctly figuring out the high-engagement equilibrium is tantalising without promising. But a lot of them probably aren't going to realise that they're dealing with unexploded or…

fyi, explosive "ordnance" is spelled without the i. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506723/how-did-o...

[deleted]

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#516

Post by standardUser »

dalbasal wrote: post #514
standardUser wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"..then the calculus will be different." We only get to "then" by challenging the norms we are faced with "now". The question is do we want to move forward to a more accepting world, or settle for the narrow, judgmental mess we've inherited.

Well... we get to some sort of "then" regardless. I'm all for challenging norms and striving forward, sexual liberation and such. I just don't think only fans represents that better, more accepting world. Do you? Seems perfectly reasonable that OP doesn't want his kids engaged in it.

I strongly disagree and would argue that we usually only get to "then" by active struggle, not just by waiting around.

And yes, I absolutely do think that normalization of sex, both for profit and otherwise, is an indispensable part of a more accepting world. OnlyFans has already helped move that needle considerably.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#517

Post by dragonwriter »

emptysongglass wrote: post #483
dragonwriter wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

> I wouldn't describe the far left today as having anything to do with its foundations.

I wouldn't describe you as having any useful knowledge of the left (even to the extent of being able to identify the part that is the “far left”.)

> What I've observed is a political group largely held together with

The far left isn’t “held together” at all, but riven with fairly deep internal divisions. Whatever group you see that seems unitary and held together by anything is a much narrower faction than “the far left”, even if it happens to coincidentally overlap with it. In the particular case of the one held together by:

> 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 mostly a fairly narrow vocal largely petit-bourgeois faction of dilettantes inspired mainly by a weird blend of identity politics messages concocted by center-right groups to look progressive while preventing class solidarity occasionally (but not consistently; a lot of them are pretty much exclusively focussed on non-economic-class identity politics) mixed with progressive economic slogans that that are, at best, dubiously compatible with their particular brand of identity politics.

Being extremely generous based on the subset incorporating, however poorly, leftist economic messaging as a component of their platform, one might consider this group to overlap with the far left, but it certainly is not the same as the far left.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#518

Post by ausbah »

throwawayof1234 wrote: post #416

Made a throwaway to post this. For various reasons I happen to know personally many (>10) women who've created an OnlyFans or otherwise participate in online sex work. I know these people well enough that we discuss things like our mental health state / conditions. One commonality that I have found is that many of the women who start an OF are already suffering from a mental health condition that has as a symptom hyp…

I don't buy the narrative of children from single mother homes faring worse due to not having a "father figure". the hardships fared by such children stem from lack of adequate family finances and lack of parental interaction due to overwork. those families need more financial help, not lamenting about "two parents is always better than one"

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#519

Post by KaiserPro »

post-it wrote: post #409
JohnWhigham wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the reason people lose the ability to appropriately parse and manage themselves in the context of sex? Because you've lost the context of what sex is and what it has been in society, and in humanity as a whole. Sex is inherently primal, bestial, even brutal in nature. We've been trained over hundreds of thousands of years to build ourselves up to it and in return we get rewarded with brain chemicals and the c…

Eating is inherently primal, bestial, even brutal in nature. You're expected to not abuse the meat counter clerk.

This is what I should have said. This is an excellent reduction of my waffle.

Re: Under the skin of OnlyFans

#520

Post by tekromancr »

ayngg wrote: post #74
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 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 don't see sex work as "drug dealing with intimacy and attention" any more then, say, twitch streaming; or podcasting. The whole media environment has been retooled to incentivize super-unhealthy (but perhaps unsurprising given our decades long trend towards individualism and isolation) parasocial relationships
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