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When the economy went virtual during the coronavirus pandemic during 2020, so did sex. The combination of loneliness and financial anxiety created a boom for OnlyFans, the online platform where anyone can join to sell unique content (almost always sexual) to their “fans.” The Guardian reported that the number of OnlyFans users grew from 7.5 million users in November 2019 to a staggering 85 million in December 2020—which is an increase of more than 1000 percent.
But as the world has reopened, much of sex has stayed virtual. OnlyFans has continued to expand: TechJury, a software review company, reports that in 2023, “over 170 million users have registered an OnlyFans account, including 1.5 million creators.” This means that purchasable intimacy is scaling: never before has sex been more available for such low costs.
As the sex work industry grows, debates about it have intensified. Some proponents focus on decriminalizing sex work, arguing that it is a matter of life and death. Others focus on moral justifications, pointing to arguments about bodily autonomy, the extra income such work provides, and even the fulfilling nature of the work.
These defenses overlook intractable harms caused by a growing sex work market. Sex work takes advantage of underage women who easily bypass OnlyFans’ weakly enforced age restrictions, and low-income women desperate for quick cash. It also has a corrupting effect on human well-being and dignity, since it denies the fullest meaning and power of sex. And it impacts the broader culture, encouraging men and women to commodify one another.
The sex work industry’s barbarity is apparent in the ways it manages its clients. Last May, the New York Times magazine published a report by Ezra Marcus on the “The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans.” These e-pimps are exactly what they sound like: middlemen who serve as mediators between digital sex workers and their clients. E-pimps also manage communications between digital sex workers and their clients. They hire chatters, who are ghost writers for OnlyFans “creators.” Marcus writes: “These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos.” He continues:
The subscribers presumably think they’re talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele—typically horny, lonely men—make it pretty easy. “Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us to just feel a connection,” reads a post on Think Expansion’s website. This desire, the post explains, is a pimp’s bread and butter, “e-” or otherwise: “Hustling simps has been an art since the beginning of time!”
In other words, pimps and their chatters use male loneliness as an opportunity to coax as much money out of clients as possible. Perhaps some people applaud this as an example of the unfettered market working its magic. There’s a demand for companionship, people are willing to provide it at market price, and product delivery is streamlining.
But these market defenses too often ignore the real nature of demand, and the ways outside circumstances shape it. Our demands are not always on equal footing with one another: some things tempt us even though we know, ultimately, we don’t want them. Desires conflict with each other. Most of the men paying for digital sex would probably prefer freely chosen, genuine companionship rather than flirting with men in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia posing as beautiful women. But when counterfeit intimacy is just one click away, it creates a demand for something that men might not really want, but that is born of desperation or even addiction.
Our demands are not always on equal footing with one another: some things tempt us even though we know, ultimately, we don’t want them.
Digital sex work, like pornography, is probably reinforcing incel status and even turning men into incels. The sex recession has been widely documented at this point. In an April 2022 New Yorker essay, Zoe Heller cited some striking data: “In a study released in 2020, nearly one in three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported no sexual activity in the past year.” Many users on OnlyFans are weary from the hardcore violence of porn, and have turned to OnlyFans for something that more closely resembles the intimacy of a relationship. It’s not hard to see how men might opt for these e-girlfriends and might shrink away from relationships with flesh and blood women who, like any human being, have needs, opinions, and imperfections.
Scaled sex work, therefore, manipulates and exploits men, and distorts the broader sexual environment. But what about the women who are sex workers? Is it harmful to them, or is it an edgy but ultimately fun way to make money? Is it a necessary revenue stream for women who would otherwise be bereft of economic opportunity?
For many sex workers, their experience is not as glamorous as the industry’s defenders suggest. In an unintentionally revealing conversation, Reason Magazine asked a sex worker and data science researcher named Aella to “explain the class differences in types of sex work.” Aella responds:
I did a survey of a bunch of escorts and found that the amount of bad things they encountered, like sexual assault … was pretty strongly correlated with their price range. Basically, the more money you charge, you’re pricing yourself out of more sketchy clientele. The people who are going to be paying you $1,000 an hour are not going to sexually assault you. They’re a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or someone who just doesn’t want to mess with that.
Educated, attractive, and interesting sex workers like Aella can get away with charging high prices and dodging “sketchy” stuff like rape. Those at the top of the sex work food chain avoid much of the violence and harm those at the bottom experience. As a significant body of research indicates, there are disturbing links between sex work, porn, and human trafficking.
Even for online sex workers who are not trafficked into the industry, some turn to digital sex work out of economic desperation. Again, this might seem like a defense of sex work: it offers income to those who need it. But on OnlyFans, only a small percentage of “creators” are making a good income. Another 2021 New York Times magazine report noted that “90 percent of creators take home less than $12,000 a year.” In other words, the vast majority of women are getting just a few hundred dollars here and there.
Yet even if all these women were making enough money selling digital sex to live comfortably, selling and buying sex is discordant with human well-being. Unlike other actions we perform with our bodies, the ramifications of sex are not confined to the activity itself. Someone can sell their labor mowing a lawn, but they probably won’t stay up for nights wondering if they did anything wrong or embarrassing while cutting the grass, desperately hoping that the lawn’s owner loves them, or anxious that a baby will emerge. Even when pregnancy isn’t a concern, sex stirs our inner lives. The clichés are true: sex can be like a drug because, when not tempered by self-restraint and social norms, desire for it can control the rest of one’s life. It’s something that’s too sacred and powerful to be bought and sold.
“Buying” sex with culturally approved gestures is a mainstay of dating culture: two or maybe three dinner dates is the standard price of going to bed with a Tinder match.
The power of sex is apparent in the ways its ramifications extend beyond the two people who do it. This is no less true of paid sex: as the sex work industry grows and moves online, it encourages a transactional view of relationships in mainstream culture. To borrow an image that Unherd writer Mary Harrington has used, our attitudes about sex and sexual practices are part of a broader ecosystem. The mainstreaming of virtual sex work means that sex will become more and more commodified for everyone else. Thanks to the rise of “sexfluencers,” women who have no connection to sex work but have an online presence regularly get approached by men requesting sexual images. And “buying” sex with culturally approved gestures is a mainstay of dating culture: two or maybe three dinner dates is the standard price of going to bed with a Tinder match. Women in this environment must often choose between sleeping with a man they just met or being ghosted by him since he can easily find someone else who’s willing to put out. The more sex is for sale online, the more likely these trends will continue apace.
Some like sex advice columnist Dan Savage have argued that all relationships are transactional, even marriages; so sex work is actually not fundamentally different than any other sexual relationship. Yet the idea that all relationships are transactional and therefore morally equivalent relies on an overly hazy, expansive definition of “transaction.” It’s true that marriage is transactional insofar as it’s mutually beneficial and an exchange between two people. But what marriage exchanges is self-sacrifice and, if it’s working properly, it makes people grow in virtue. Exchanging sex for money, by contrast, gives the buyer a sense of ownership over the product (another’s body), and requires no sacrifice other than a dent in the wallet.
The more sex work scales, the easier it will be for men and women to see one another as commodities to be used and discarded—all the while dulling their natural longing for love and companionship. We should not only make every effort to remove sex work (digital or otherwise) from the market, but also to make it utterly unthinkable.
When several years ago I posted the screenshot of a defamatory tweet by a serial harasser on my Facebook page (for “friends” only), I did not expect how people would react to this. Tenured philosophers, including many with left-wing or liberal politics cautioned me to take down the post. They private messaged me urging I should take it down, and even publicly chided me “Why would you post such a thing?”
The following is a guest post by Helen De Cruz (Saint Louis University). A version of it first appeared at her blog, Wondering Freely.
[Artemisia Gentileschi, “Susanna and the Elders” (detail)]
When several years ago I posted the screenshot of a defamatory tweet by a serial harasser on my Facebook page (for “friends” only), I did not expect people would react as they did. Tenured philosophers, including many with left-wing or liberal politics, cautioned me to take down the post. They privately messaged me urging I should take it down, and even publicly chided me, “Why would you post such a thing?”
Well, it was already public, so what do I do about it? Should I sue him? Most certainly not. It would ruin my career. Better to keep my head down and write papers for top-10 general philosophy journals if I wanted to survive in the cut throat context of academia. Better to just plug away, work at my publication record, do not rock the boat. “You know how people are, they don’t want a troublemaker.”
I’ve since thought of this incident and many others that happened in the course of my academic career where philosophers are happy with the status quo and nothing happens.
Let me tell you about a rare instance in which something did happen. At a conference, while I was a postdoc, I told Eleonore Stump about a particular troubling case of gender harassment I had experienced, as well as about a bad general climate with drinking late into the night and difficult power relationships I experienced in the work place. She was shocked and said to me, “What our profession needs is a code of conduct.”
I thought it was a good idea. Codes of conduct are not uncommon in professions. Even clowns have them. A code of conduct by the American Philosophical Association would stipulate how we could cultivate a better professional environment. This would be an environment where people are not just at the mercy of one person (who may be excellent, of course), or where the boundaries between professional and private are frequently blurred; where professors take advantage of people in weaker situations such as putting their names on their students’ papers without contributing (common in Europe) or where they serially have relationships with their students. It would be an environment where you could go to conferences expecting these to be professional events. So we went ahead and petitioned. Thanks to the fact that I had a senior tenured colleague advocating, we got a good number of signatories and the code was adopted. I still consider this to be a significant victory for Eleonore and me.
But I didn’t expect all the pushback! Codes of conduct are bad, stifling, redundant! If a code were adopted, you can’t even have a drink with a student without being accused of sexual harassment. A lot of people I considered allies and whom I still greatly respect (and so will not link to their blogposts, etc.) went on philosophizing about the good and bad of codes of conduct. They thought deeply about the nature of codes of conduct, about what it says about a situation, about how they don’t work anyway (a conclusion they reached a priori).
The dynamics became clear. Many senior people told me, a postdoc on a string of temporary jobs at the time, that codes of conduct are superfluous at best and somehow make things worse, and that I had made things worse by petitioning for it. I felt terrible for the way our actions had been received, and I started to doubt myself.
Eleonore, for her part, was not bothered. Philosophy is a professional group of people, she told me, and while virtue is important, you cannot expect virtue to win out every time. You need good structures and procedures, and a code of conduct can help to foster those.
Thinking back of this incident from 2014, what I am now struck by most of all is that no-one who said how bad codes of conduct are actually had a counter-proposal or did anything to improve the climate and the situation for women and non-binary people in academia. All they could do was attack a junior colleague’s attempts to improve the situation. So, though the code was adopted, nothing structurally changed because the collective of academics had already decided it was a bad idea without thinking of an alternative.
And so, they could go on as before.
I’m writing this in an angry mood as I am thinking back of the literally twenty or more academics (all, except one, women or non-binary people) who told me they were victims of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and more. One particularly sticks in my mind—her married professor kept on trying to start a relationship with her when she was a grad student. She eventually relented, feeling she was in a difficult situation due to all sorts of problems in her personal life. Then, after a couple of years, he got tired of her and they parted. He never even read her dissertation, though formally her advisor. He never writes her letters of recommendation. She had the immense fortune of having an external committee member (fwiw a white man, and a lovely human being) who knew about the situation and who became her de facto adviser and letter writer. That true ally never said anything, though he wanted to, because the victim was worried that were the relationship revealed, her career would be over. After all, it was consensual. And people would say she tried to sleep her way into a better position. Meanwhile, that relationship, though long ended, is still negatively affecting her career. Her advisor, of course walks free with no repercussions.
I can tell many other stories like this. Some people do nothing because “it’s a lot better than it used to be.” This is not a recipe for doing nothing. We still have a structural problem.
Purely anecdotally and from my own and other people’s experiences, what is often happening is that academia is such a cut-throat, cold environment where your own ability to do philosophy is constantly questioned. You doubt yourself, you wonder if you have it in you. And if you are not a man, you do not benefit from “brilliance beliefs”. This was perhaps most apparent in my personal life when I was on a team of 6-7 postdocs who were all competing for the same tenure track position and all the faculty were going on about how brilliant this or that male candidate was. When I asked those faculty about my own chances, they said that surely as a woman and a person of color I would soon benefit from affirmative action. The message was clear: everyone wants to hire you, just not us.
In such a situation you can find yourself lonely, friendless and vulnerable to individuals who predate on people with that profile. They make you feel you’re special. The structural problems in academia regarding how we treat junior people, the callousness with which we discount their needs and testimony because they’re just passing through and aren’t people we need to take into account anyway, is part of why this keeps on happening. So if we seriously acknowledge that academia, and particularly philosophy, has a MeToo problem, we need to acknowledge the structures that enable these situations.
A student recently asked me why tenured people do nothing and even actively work to keep the status quo. After all, they are in the safest position to actually do something and not just philosophize the situation away or discount possible solutions. My sense is: Many people want to do nothing because it doesn’t affect them. Some might do nothing because they’re still traumatized. As a woman or non-binary person in academia you sometimes feel like you’ve navigated a field of landmines; when you come out at the other end with tenure or a TT job you say “Oh good I didn’t step on a landmine!” as you hear stories about the unscrupulous individuals you have through luck avoided to associate with.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Some people do nothing out of fear of false accusations. While these do exist (but note the incidence is low), I think their possibility is not a good reason for doing nothing. Acknowledging philosophy has a MeToo problem will indeed involve that we take seriously the testimony against repeat offenders and do something, rather than sit back, do nothing, and wait until there might eventually be a Title IX lawsuit (or the equivalent in non-American contexts). But it also just involves believing people, standing with the victims, and, for the love of God, not advising “Just keep your head down!” or “People who create a stir are seen as troublemakers, just wait until you have tenure.”
Support the victims. Believe them. Believing them does not mean you need to engage in a collective hunt against the person they accuse, but it does mean to be very cautious, and it means listening to them and thinking together about legal ways to address the situation. I’ve known a situation where a well-known repeat offender kept on getting invited for prestigious lectures at conferences, even though several women told the conference organizers that they felt unsafe with him on the program. In one instance, the organizer uninvited the person (who has since left the profession after credible Title IX allegations). This was good but it came, in a sense, too late, as this had been a pattern for years, and organizers knew about it.
Supporting possible victims before they become actual victims is even better. We should develop strong mentoring relationships, preferably in structured contexts so it does not depend on personal sympathy alone. We should find a path forward, and finally end the pervasive sexual harassment that is happening in our profession.
UPDATE: A #MeToo in Academia conference is in the planning stages. The organizers write:
We would like to form a planning committee with a group of people from various backgrounds to discuss what such a conference on sexual abuse in academia should include. At this point, the conference is not associated with any institution, discipline, or location. Thus, everyone with interest is invited to reach out. Survivors of sexual harassment or abuse, particularly in academia, are especially encouraged.
You can learn more about it here.
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