The pandemic has impoverished women all over the world, increasing their vulnerability. Data on the jobs lost mainly by women in Italy are echoed elsewhere. At the same time, the virus has become the perfect ally of any abuser and of the entire system of collective oppression towards women. We can find all the tools that enable and encourage violence: isolation, control, confinement to care roles, loss of paid work and therefore of economic independence.
The loss of work for women
But to overcome the crisis and the loss of work for women, who in Italy have lost 312,000 jobs out of a total of 440,000, there is a way, and it is to take up “the oldest profession in the world’: prostitution. An opportunity not to be missed, narrated and proposed by mainstreaming as a “new” job, a gift during a time of crisis like this one. Something like: I’m doing it now but “I’ll stop as soon as I want”. The problem does not only concern Italy, let’s be clear.
In this direction, one of the most recent innovations in terms of job opportunities for further impoverished women is called “only fans”: a term that we could translate as “admirers only”. but which admirers, I wonder?
“Only Fans”: how it really works
Speaking of “Only Fans”, we read, surfing the web, that it is a “porn site that earns thousands of euros for its members”, and that works more or less like this: you open a page and you decide how much to charge your “fans” every month to access and see material that in many cases is soft porn or similar content. In many cases, influencers, models and variously famous people use Instagram to advertise and consequently get “fans” to pay pages found on an uncensored site. According to Fanpage, this site was born as a “neutral platform”, but thanks to the lack of censorship it has become in a few years “a particularly popular destination for professionals in the world of hardcore, up to simple users of other social networks who want to show off in a more daring way to their followers”.
The term “sex worker” immediately appears: the key to the operation of “retouching and making up the commercial exploitation of sex”, quoting the words of Julie Bindel’s investigative book, “The Pimping of Prostitution”. As usual, there are also those who immediately take advantage of it, since the site takes 20% of the revenue of those who publish material. For more detailed information, however, we should turn to the “New York Times”, where in a 2019 article entitled “Only Fans, the site that changed sex work forever“, we read that
the site was an idea of Tim Stokely, a man who ran a soft porn site and wanted to offer his customers the chance to become directors of their own porn, tailor-made for them by their favourite actresses. “You can get porn for free now,” says one of his closest collaborators
Who benefits from it
In fact, the story told by the article is that of a progressive impoverishment of people exploited in the world of porn. Paid less and less in the film market, they migrated to “YouPorn” and were pushed into prostitution, in person or by webcam, because of the lack of income due to the increase of images and films on the web. And so we come to the latest novelty, presented in the subtitle as an opportunity for the protagonists to empower themselves and control their own production and income.
Obviously the majority are women who publish images, while the paying “admirers”, those who continue to have the money that women don’t, are mainly men. Danii Harwood says she has made a lot of money with “Only Fans”, and so has someone else. What is the situation of women who have tried to cope with the pandemic using this site, can be read in another more recent article, again in the New York Times, which talks about what happened to those who found themselves without a job and tried to survive by opening a page on that site. From the subtitle, it is clear that history is repeating itself: the site was very popular during the pandemic, with 90 million users and more than a million authors of content, compared to 120,000 in 2019. But the sale of more or less soft porn images is so overpriced that women have often ended up getting very little out of it.
The women interviewed came to the site after losing their jobs, but while some of them made money, others did not. Some of the women interviewed came to Only Fans out of desperation (“people who worry about how to eat, how not to have their electricity cut off, how not to be evicted”), and some have discovered that it is a real full-time job that can earn a maximum of 250 dollars a month, with the added risk that the images may end up causing them to lose other jobs or be used for other forms of blackmailing.
Witnessing the risks is a webcam girl from the USA, who explains: “anyone who enters this field has to expect privacy violations, potentially dangerous interactions with clients, and no law to protect you”
Risks and dangers
Not to mention the prejudices that those who have a job risk losing it or risk, as for prostituted women before the Merlin law in Italy, exclusion from certain rights. The managers of “Only Fans” refused to comment on the most recent NYTimes article. The 2019 NYTimes article states that contrary to the visibility sought by those who publish material, those who run the site do not like to be found and known. Julie Bindel in her article for the Evening Standard, “Only Fans is sex work and pornography: stop calling it empowering”, she is very clear in defining what “Only Fans” actually is and does so with the experience of someone who has studied and documented the international sexual exploitation market.
“Pornography is simply filmed prostitution, and Only Fans is both prostitution and pornography. It is part of a new wave of platforms and business models aimed at extending the scope of the porn industry.” Bindel gives an example of what the risks actually consist of: “Some of the women who produce content for the site end up terrified and traumatised. One woman told me she couldn’t sleep after being stalked two years ago”.
“my biggest fan- the woman confessed with an ironic smirk, tracked down my workplace and I found him there. I was terrified”
Empowerment has nothing to do with it
Men pay to control, to tell a woman what to do and how to behave in order to boost their self-esteem and confirm their stereotypes of masculinity. Violence is control, and exercising it by paying for it, adds pleasure; indeed, the pleasure lies precisely in paying for it, in the humiliation of the woman. In many ways filmed prostitution is more dangerous than prostitution for its own sake, because the images can be stolen to haunt a woman forever. Being paid increases the sense of collusion in the abuse, making it more difficult to overcome the violence.
What is “empowering” in all of this? Mainstreaming insists on calling work what is “Neither sex nor work” (Silvia Niccolai, Tavernini Luciana, Daniela Danna, Grazia Villa, VandA editrice), but the best marketing tool and confirmation of the patriarchal status quo. Tackling prostitution is a necessary way to break the mechanism of production of what Judith Herman calls a “socialisation using the practices of coercive control”.
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