The dirty secret about OnlyFans It's not hot to be a prostitute

Great. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you know it’s illiberal to object to the fact that many women, from privileged artists (Lily Allen, Kate Nash) to normal if naive teenaged girls, have so deeply drunk the kool-aid of neoliberal feminism that it is somehow empowering, rather than the most degrading thing imaginable, to be sold in any capacity to men? Or to recoil from the bleak spectacle of a methodical orgy in which anonymous pervs can waddle over to a woman sat on a bench whose only function is to fuck them?

It takes little consideration to see that these latest additions to the ancient and undying canon of prostitute-lore — from Mary Magdalene to Fantine to Pretty Woman — are yet more slanted apparitions, this time not icons of feminist victory but promotional material for feet pics. Internet virality and atrophying feminism have collided — and the result is more of the same.

Because of just how hot being a sex worker is right now, we’re obsessed with reading about it. The pseudonymous Eve Smith’s How Was It For You?, released this summer, is a bracingly matter-of-fact account of a prostitute’s progress; in it, we are told that the only “type of man” who does not visit brothels are those who “buy you half a shandy on a date at the pub and expect to get into your knickers”. We are laughing at this man not because he sees sex as transactional, but because he is not willing to pay enough for it. How desolate. Elsewhere, Smith brushes away critics’ horror by saying her colleagues are merely “grinding to buy food, to pay rent, to support our kids”; “we can’t rely on men,” she writes, though by definition she has chosen by her own account to do precisely that. The great target of her ire is not the clients who endanger her so much that she must hide weapons “around my dungeon”, or the difficult childhood which sets the scene for her entry into brothel-work, but the “liberal, middle-class white woman with a moralistic agenda”, the radical feminists who pity her. This is understandable; their concern undermines her entire way of life, and so must be infuriating.

But this does not mean their fears are baseless. The statistics on prostitution are naturally elusive, and their presentation by advocacy groups is almost entirely contingent on the group’s bias: the pro-decriminalisation Prostitutes Collective claims only 6% of “migrant sex workers” are trafficked (“many said they prefer working in the sex industry,” the website cheerily states), whereas studies in Norway and Canada put the average age of entering prostitution at about 15; one 1986 study claimed that 90% of the “adolescent prostitutes” it surveyed had been abused by a caregiver or neighbour.

A culture which shamefully casualises prostitution, whose pornification is so complete that punters can reasonably buy erotic videos from the girl who works behind the till in the petrol station, has forgotten how bad things really are. In the UK, you are more likely to be murdered as a prostitute than in any other profession. One 2008 study of 130 prostitutes  in San Francisco found 68% had been raped on the job; this figure rises to more than 90% being raped in the past year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (in a study which also noted gang rapes by police officers). At the same time, our engagement with these facts has been obliterated by the dogma of supposed sex positivity. A 2024 revision of “Roxanne” would have the fraught heroine not pining, lost, in a doorway but grinning from ear to ear while filing a hefty tax return (girlboss!).

The most likely reason for this extraordinary lapse in critical thinking is the transformation from in-person prostitution to the digital; it is analogous to the place of pornography changing from the top shelf of a newsagent to the private, free and instantaneous ease of the smartphone screen. It’s so simple, and so much less risky and humiliating, to hop on a website and set up a profile than to stand on a street corner. But the fact that your leering client is physically absent does not alter the philosophical lie at the heart of prostitution, digital or otherwise: that consent itself can be bought.

Until OnlyFans ballooned in the cultural imagination, prostitution was subject to a different kind of fantasy, one laden with pity and horror. Think of Taxi Driver (1976), Sport and Iris spinning slowly in the pinkish light of the bordello, the pimp’s ringed, lecherous fingers in a carousel with the child’s own, small and limp. Twelve-year-old Jodie Foster crystallises the spirit of prostitution: she clunks about in too-tall shoes, brazen and glassy-eyed  — that is until, in moments of privacy, she’s revealed as little more than a costumed kitten, her backstory blurted out in southern syllables between chomps of a jelly sandwich.

Iris reveals the doubleness of the fantasy prostitute: she is both surprisingly tough and impossibly vulnerable, vixen and victim, a painted-faced trader in a stageworthy performance and a font of misery waiting to shatter and spill. The message of cinematic portrayals of prostitutes has, until very recently, been thus: succumb to your tragic fate, or be saved. Those saved tend to be young: in Pretty Baby (1978), Brooke Shields’s Violet, the same age as Iris, is saved from the brothel by the New Orleans photographer Ernest J. Bellocq. Older, more cynical working girls tend to die off, like Christie in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho who is dispatched by an airborne chainsaw. Christie is somewhat more plucky than her colleague, and so lives a bit longer. Ultimately, the 20th century would have its prostitute in her final act either returned to a state of cosseted security, or once again a tangle of limbs, paying the toll for her moral lapse.

This fate was not always so fixed — once, prostitution at the higher levels could be a route to influence. Nell Gwynn, Charles II’s favourite actress and courtesan, escaped syphilitic destitution with wit and pluck in a world curiously both more pious and less horrified by the presence of prostitution in public life. The figure of the prostitute in the novel is, concurrently, less hinged on tragedy. The witty narrator Fanny Hill of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is tricked into the game as a 15-year-old, having her “maidenhead” auctioned off (to a client described as a “liquorice old goat”) before mastering, and enjoying, her craft and being carried off into married respectability by an eligible former customer. These cheerier narratives are yet more fantasies, though exceptions to a plight which mostly meant disease and destitution.

A century later, the archetypal prostitute-victim spirals into the cultural imagination via Victor Hugo’s Fantine in Les Miserables (1862). Buffeted between misfortunes by cruel swindlers and heartless bureaucrats, Fantine descends into penury and is killed by disease, having sold her hair and two front teeth. Then, it was understood that not all prostitutes would prosper; one was far more likely to end up a Fantine than a Nell Gwynn or Fanny Hill. Now, to warn of prostitution’s pitfalls is to be intolerant, shaming and unkind. Because concerns about the very nature of prostitution are unsayable, the character of charitably termed “sex work” is warped by the few OnlyFans girls who rake in millions a year at little supposed personal cost. It is of no interest to “sex-positive” feminists (and certainly the legions of oleaginous “fans”, rarely mentioned in these discussions) that many of those shunted into prostitution are subjected to regular violence, exploitation by pimps and brutality by police.

Just as we baulk at the victim/vixen archetypes of film and literature of the past, we should question the untouchability of the 21st-century cult of the digital sex worker, whose central claim — that we can get rich with no consequences to our happiness or safety — has led god knows how many women to sell pics to dirty old men in the village for a few weeks, realise they can’t earn anything like what they’ve been told, and delete their profiles, only for that material to exist in perpetuity on both third-party porn sites and in the minds of dismal men, for whom the object-status of all women was never in doubt. How is this new myth, of the emancipated OnlyFans model, any less of a fantasy than the child victim Iris saved from the bordello, or the witty, scheming Fanny Hill? Do not believe the messaging; we are further from seeing prostitution for what it really is — a scourge which visits the bleakest of fates on the most vulnerable — than ever.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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