A bigger part of all of this is the people who manage many Only Fans performers.
I did not know this was a thing until I came across this watching a few podcasts. Then more and more and more I realized this management industry was quite big.
And it makes sense, the performers are performers and not really business oriented for the most part. So its a vacuum that was waiting to be filled.
Then again, is it really any different from managers for actors, musicians, artists and other "normal" industries? I remember my father who was an artist had a few gallery owners who managed his sales, showings, personal commissions and other artist activities.
Now that I think about it decades later, its remarkably like pimping. Hahaha. No wonder dad had a love/have relationship with those people.
Not just that... they also lease huge buildings, build "cubicles" inside, furnish them to look like bedrooms, get girls the same way as they would for any other adult business (from human trafficking to working from a very poor country, with enough desparate people for that), and then take a huge cut of profits.
I would distinguish between human trafficking which is illegal, and simply hiring people for work which is perfectly legal and normal.
Also because it’s digital, no one actually has to leave their country. As a person living in a very poor country, we look upon this as safer than immigrating to work as a maid for a rich family in Dubai.
>I would distinguish between human trafficking which is illegal,
Yes, the trope of every single person in the adult entertainment world or escort world is automatically a victim of human trafficking is quite tired. Yes, it absolutely happens and should be stopped when found, but at the same time, there are people doing this work of their own volition and actually enjoy it.
And the way to stop the trafficking is to make the industry legal, and regulated and the workers in it given protection (like pretty much any other worker - OHSA style).
When you make a demand illegal, it doesn't stop that demand, but instead a black market and exploitation happens around it. Making it legal will stop the crimes, make it possible for the police to patrol and arrest people doing the wrong thing, and provide a way for those exploited to seek help without themselves being exposed to another type of danger.
Not so sure that making it legal alone will stop trafficking (not saying it shouldn't be legal though). People are trafficked to do legal work all the time, like in nail salons, laundromats, construction, canvasing, etc.
I agree, but I'd like to get back to my original point which is that we should distinguish between human trafficking and normal immigration and outsourcing.
Show me the evidence? In Amsterdam, where this is a thing, a large percentage of the girls are actually trafficked. Of course they deny it, because to accuse a pimp means severe repercussions either for herself or family back home.
I could accuse you of the same thing, if you're saying a large percentage of the girls a.k.a. a majority are trafficked yet they don't report it, how are you coming to that conclusion and getting that data in the first place?
I’m not sure the question is whether legality completely extinguishes a black market for the goods or services in question. After all, there’s still a black market for individual cigarettes (“loosies”) in poor neighborhoods, even though cigarettes remain legal. It’s a question of whether the situation is substantially and incrementally better in those places where the conduct is lawful than where it isn’t. So if there is less trafficking, I’d say that’s a net win.
> And the way to stop the trafficking is to make the industry legal, and regulated and the workers in it given protection... @chii
That's complete horseshit...
Human trafficking isn't just applied to sex workers. Human trafficking happens with butlers, maids, housekeepers, drivers, gardeners, and other house-staff.
Human trafficking is a demand problem not a supply problem. People demand slaves, so a slave market is born; period.
Human trafficking is a: 'Humans Suck', problem. Can't stop human trafficking without curing the 'humans suck' thing.
Doesn't matter the protections in place, they're there already. Doesn't matter about exposure to the issue, we all know it's happening. Doesn't matter the legal repercussions we enact, the penalties are on the books.
Doesn't matter... Humans suck, and there are those who will pay a premium for a literal slave.
I think the solution to demand problems is better options. Tiger poaching to sell their balls as boner pills went away with viagra. Viagra worked better than fake animal snake oils.
Domestic robots will solve the human trafficking for domestic slaves as robots will be cheaper and better.
I think there’s also social progress as neither I, nor anyone I know has human trafficked to get a butler or whatnot, but 100 years ago that probably wouldn’t have been true.
I think automation can reduce the dependency on humans but it can't completely eliminate it. People don't use maids because they lack washing machines, microwaves, and food delivery services. The usage of maid service has to do with social customs than it does with actual necessity.
> I think there’s also social progress
Speaking about the US, there's a general aversion to employing people for personal service jobs. Tech workers making 300k can certainly afford a maid who makes 60k, but actively go out of their way to instead employ a variety of people through 'gig' work and 'apps' to do simple tasks. They simply don't want to be seen as employing a maid, but still get all the benefits of having one (via the errand running service).
So is the grad student paying for her education by stripping. I trust some strippers are independent doing it out of their own will. That's cool, but there's no easy way to tell if they are coerced or not. Few coerced would tell so to a stranger; they obviously have a lot to fear.
So we can prioritize the protection of people forced into sex work at the expanse of willing sex workers, just like we prioritize protecting workers from forced overtime at the expanse of those that are willing to work 24/7 (and like any other work related enforcement, it should be directed at employers, not workers)
As a society we should prioritize the protection of people. I recall how the Swedish police announced at spring a few years ago that they would then stop all further investigation at construction work places because there were so many human trafficking violation at such places that just going to a single construction place would drain the budget to the point that they could do any more human trafficking investigation for the rest of the year.
I suspect the news article was a bit of subtle protest by that police department, but it kind of illustrate how low we as a society is prioritizing protecting workers. Some people in the construction industry has also came out saying that construction as an industry would not function without the cheap labor that human trafficking contribute. It should be a major alarm clock that protecting workers from the most basic of threats, ie threat of violence and/or threats by the employer to not pay the employee. Some of the enforcement should land at the consumer who benefit from the situation, which would require companies to insure against shady subcontractors.
Sweden is a great example for sex work laws: they made it illegal to consume and to pimp, but sex work itself is legal. Which fits with most labor laws: when there's exploitation of labor, it's hardly the workers' fault
Dubai is one of the main places where people from my country emigrate to for servant work. However safe it is in regards to crime, it's not really safer for the immigrant underclass who makes up maidservants and construction workers.
If you have immigrated to a country where you don't speak the language, don't share customs or culture, and your religion is illegal to practice (ergo no social safety net) then it's not particularly 'safe' for you if you have a disagreement with your employer.
Survivorship bias. You often hear only about the top earners and not the poor person doing onlyfans and working another job. Or two. I'd expect the majority of performers not to live in large, nice houses.
Majority of performers aren’t really serious about it either. Due to morality constraints, very few people find it easy to buckle down and work 8 hours a day at that job… whereas if they were to pick a body damaging job like construction they would have social support to help them get through the day.
This girl is very managed from what I can tell.. I remember seeing the manager and production crew setting up in one video and it was a realization seeing big studio lights and reflectors and people running around.. and I can't tell if they are trying to be ironic with the name they use for their talent:
I think pimping is the right word for it. This is a controversial topic to broach, but it's difficult if not impossible to know what's going on in the lives of these performers behind the camera. On the face of it, they all seem to consent. But putting on a smile for the camera doesn't rule out coercion behind the scenes. That the presence and role of these managers is not more widely stood should be read as a warning sign; that lack of transparency is precisely the protection a pimp would want.
There are few meaningful safeguards. Platforms positively identifying performers is good, it helps combat trafficking of kidnapping victims if nothing else. But it doesn't begin to address all the other scenarios in which a performer might be coerced. The platform knowing that Performer X has real name Y doesn't give them any insight into the existence of Pimp Z who has access to all her documents/accounts and threatens to kill her if she ever tries to leave.
Maybe you think "I know this woman, I watch her stream for many hours a week in unrehearsed situations, I have a strong parasocial relationship with her and I know she's not being abused" But you don't know that. Abuse can be hidden from close friends, family, neighbors, and certainly it can be hidden from stream simps.
This condition is subsidized by a government that neither legalizes nor protects sex workers (such as their being unbanked), and when it directs its attention to them (FOSTA/SESTA) makes their situation more difficult, rather then less, driving it farther underground.
America prefers to pretend like it doesn't see things, so it isn't expected to do anything about them. Sufficiently underground child trafficking is as good an outcome as none because how could we have known? The same way you know about any other workplace abuses; you inspect, you interview, and you make resources available. But we'd rather treat it like we treat farmwork, and simply wear blinders and continue to buy vegetables.
edit: there's no reason that providing services to sex workers has to be lead to pimping other than that we prefer it that way.
Human trafficking remains a grave concern in European locales where prostitution is broadly legal. This is not an America-issue, it's a human nature issue.
Sport managers, model managers, music managers, film star managers... There are few job titles that has such a rich history of abuse. It almost seems that in every case we hear about a manager it is how they are abusing someone. Maybe this is a job that governments should start to regulate more heavily in order to prevent abuse.
Regulate how exactly and what would it help with? Accounting requirements can help with things like money laundering and fraud. I am not certain of what measures would help with abuse there. Not saying it is impossible but we should know what we are doing.
Take a sport manager. If the manager give their athlete drugs to improve performance in order to boost their own status or profit, then clearly something is wrong with the incentive structure. Managers could be held to a higher legal standard and liability, require a license like accounting, and we could fund police investigation when abuse is suspected. If the problem still remain we could regulate how managers are allowed to profit from athletes, removing some of those incentives for abuse. Going even further and more restricted, managers could be government appointed rather than hired, requiring that managers go through a strict government process.
I am sure there are even more ways that I can't personally think of, and obviously some would not be culturally accepted.
I have the feeling that many adult performers went to OnlyFans in the first place so they could have control over the price, content, schedule etc. But it looks like OnlyFans like every industry will consolidate over time and bring many of the problems of mainstream porn with it.
Many adult performers started using OnlyFans because it allowed them to refer their own non-adult social media following (i.e. IG/TikTok/Twitter/Reddit) to an adult friendly platform that didn’t take an insane cut.
What most people don’t realize is that traditional cam platforms like LiveJasmin and Streamate allocate a 30% cut for themselves and a 30% cut for the referring affiliate, typically a porn site. The remaining 40% is allocated to the model - 30% if the model uses a studio.
Another unspoken player is the credit card processor who typically captures 10% of the revenue for “risk”.
I don't know why the scare quotes on risk. It is absolutely there in this industry. Chargeback rates are crazy from the kid who swesrs he didn't steal his mom's credit card or the husband who promises he wasn't the one buying this stuff, it must have been a hacker. This is also not entirely unfounded because some areas of this indistry are very easy to juice revenue from stolen credit cards.
There is a reason that even with those high fees to be made, most processors will not touch the industry.
If we would just get on-board with smartcards, hey 30 years late is better than nothing, then chargebacks would be a lot harder to justify.
With the system the way it is, the card processors eat a little loss from "fraud", and then use that as a justification to exert editorial control over what industries they want to process payments for, because there's a lot of "fraud" in them. No it's not fraud, it's someone being embarrassed about their spending habits and claiming their card was stolen. If it was harder to steal cards, that would change.
Visa/MC's crusade against legitimization of sex work is a political/religious stance that has absolutely no place in what should be infrastructure. Infrastructure should be neutral.
The answer is deeper still. Remove charge backs so the credit card companies become "dumb" utilities rather than some sort of service that can provide "value add". I actually don't know why it's even a genuine thing other than it's digital so "you can". In every other realm we deal with this concept using courts, police and as plain old fraud.
Take away chargebacks and then the tables will turn. Tons of super shady sites will capture your money and run off with it.
There is a reason CC fees are so high in the porn industry and it isn’t just huge companies ripping off the little guy. The CC processor not only has to factor in the risks of client chargebacks but also the merchant themselves doing something shady (malicious or not)… say getting their DB hacked and having all the CC data in plaintext or something. Or just the merchant folds up shop and bails on the customers…. 10% rates exist for a very good reason
Why would you want to remove charge backs? If you pay for something and don't get it, have your payment instrument stolen, get tricked by a scam, etc then charge backs seem like an excellent tool to have. Charge backs are also not independent of the courts, if you trigger an illegitimate charge back then the counterparty can sue you.
No need to remove chargebacks. But there does need to be an electronic analogue to paying with cash, a utility provided by the federal government. Supposedly it is being worked on and called "FedNow".
Pretty good given the first ammendment and lack of other rationale such as scarcity of airwaved. A pretext to deny would be difficult for domestic companies.
The feds have been pressuring financial services companies to "de-platform" legal businesses, including those in the adult industry, for years.
The govt's pretext has been "reputational risk." Isn't it nice of the feds to tell a bank that "someone" might not think well of them if they provide services to "those" people?
It is established law that a business that acts at govt behest is a state actor, so that "pressure" is enough to bring the 1st amendment in. That is, if there's a 1st amendment argument. However, said de-plaforming doesn't seem to succumbed to a 1st amendment challenge.
Maybe such a business would win with a first amendment argument on FedNow, but how many can survive until that decision comes down?
I don't have numbers but I thought the motivation is that they make more money by making it safe for people to use - it encourages use and nets them more transaction fees. It probably helped kick off online shopping.
These are the same problems any streamer faces, whether the audience is there for sex or videogames. Good content takes a significant time and effort to create.
I did not know this was a thing until I came across this watching a few podcasts. Then more and more and more I realized this management industry was quite big.
And it makes sense, the performers are performers and not really business oriented for the most part. So its a vacuum that was waiting to be filled.
Then again, is it really any different from managers for actors, musicians, artists and other "normal" industries? I remember my father who was an artist had a few gallery owners who managed his sales, showings, personal commissions and other artist activities.
Now that I think about it decades later, its remarkably like pimping. Hahaha. No wonder dad had a love/have relationship with those people.