onlyfans fucks sex workers

So the news that Onlyfans is banning pretty much all sexually explicit content just dropped recently. While I know it’s still difficult for many people to talk openly about sex and sex work despite sex being a natural part of life and omnipresent in TV, movies, literature, and pretty much everywhere else in life, this is definitely worth pointing out and condemning, the main reason being the impact on sex workers, who are often placed in extremely dangerous and exploitative situations due to a combination of prudish western/Judeo-Christian sexual mores and laws specifically targeting them criminally and censoring their content. The generally negative cultural attitude towards sex work, laws like SESTA/FOSTA, and moves like the banning of sexually-explicit content on sites like OnlyFans only serve to push those who choose sex work — whether out of desperation or because they enjoy it — to do so under more dangerous conditions, driving them to work with predatory people or companies who exploit them due to the difficulty of finding safe and legal venues for their work, and making it more difficult for them to earn a living while compelling them to take more risky chances.

In the past, primarily due to the criminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work, most sex workers were at the mercy of shady pimps and porn companies that didn't pay well and often abused the women and men who made living as sex workers. While not quite the level sex workers owning the means of production and distribution, platforms like Onlyfans help to give sex workers a central place where they can safely sell their content and profit off of their own labour, putting them more in control of that labour and the fruits of it. But after Onlyfans grew into the giant online presence that it's become by catering to sex workers and their clients/consumers, building itself and its capital off of the former's labour, the site is bending to the will of finance capital and suspending all sexually-explicit content and citing the prohibitive financial and labour cost of verifying all content, putting many of the people who made this site into a very difficult financial position. Most seem to be saying the same thing, that the news hit them out of the blue and many aren’t sure what they’re going to do. And this may be true for other similar sites who use payment processors such as Mastercard.

These companies, along with Christian groups and hacks like Nicholas Kristof, have used the very real evils of things like sex trafficking and lack of moderation of large porn sites regarding things like revenge porn, non-consensual sex or release of private pictures and videos, sexually explicit content of underage women and men, etc. to target all sex workers and the platforms they use to produce ethical porn that's legal and consensual and that they themselves control and profit from. While all labour is treated unfairly under capitalism, what has made sex work so exceptionally dangerous and seedy has been the unwillingness of western capitalism to fully recognize people's bodily autonomy and the legitimacy of sex work as real labour. And while it’s certainly a good idea to try and make sure the people producing this kind of content are of legal age and doing so of their own free will, the means by which they are trying to achieve this is directly harming the very people it's supposedly intended to protect.

Besides the generally impact to sex workers in terms of negatively affecting their financial stability and safety, what stands out to me is the role finance capital itself is playing in all of this. As one person put it on Twitter, "Wow, [Mastercard] is basically forcing policies onto OnlyFans? Isn't it crazy that finance capital creates an authoritative relationship that allows it to assert itself politically?" Money is social power. Money is political. And money controls our labour. Moreover, the government itself, which primarily looks out for the interests of the wealth and capital, seems to be on the side of companies like Mastercard, and has harmed sex workers with laws such as SESTA/FOSTA. SESTA/FOSTA was ostensibly meant to combat sex trafficking but has instead led to sex workers being forced into more dangerous places/situations to make a living. This move only serves to exacerbate that problem by removing a relatively safe space for sex workers to earn a living and stifling their ability to do things like advertise and legitimize their very real labour. If we, as a society, are going to continue to consume this kind of content and avail ourselves of these services, then we should treat sex work as real work, and stop forcing these women and men to labour in the shadows.