Destigmatising Exploitation

OnlyFans does Schoolies

The Project has always been a fairly low brow program masquerading as progressive intelligentsia. I have long considered it a kind of Behind the News (BTN) for adults.  BTN is an ABC children’s program that re-interprets the news in a progressive framework for children. But The Project has outdone itself this week with a segment featuring three OnlyFans porn stars (two women and one trans-identified male) boasting about their trip to Surfers Paradise for Schoolies 2023. 

“Schoolies” for those who don’t know, is an annual party event held on the Gold Coast in Queensland at the end of the school year, especially for children who are finishing their schooling life after graduating grade 12. 

The Project segment that hit my feed Sunday night, featured three OnlyFans porn stars talking about the trip they are planning to Schoolies to create content with attendees, we assume teen boys. Children finishing schools in Queensland are usually 17. The internet porn content creators featured on the program, said that they will not pay boys for participating in what they call “relatable content”, instead the boys will receive the sexual services for free, while the camera is running. The content creators will then make money from the content.

When the OnlyFans actors were asked why they picked this particular demographic of recently graduated school boys by The Project, one of the content creators said “they’re legal, they’re wanting and willing to participate, why not?.” There was no pushback from the hosts of The Project toward the plan to bring children into their businesses as unpaid pornography actors, or the general creepiness of preying on 17-year-old boys who are filled with massive amounts of testosterone, and probably alcohol and drugs.

None of the panellists of The Project asked what kind of negative effect the pornographic content may have on the children’s social position, job prospects or the life they are only just embarking on, given that the content is not likely to disappear from the internet.  

The question that the host of The Project did have for the OnlyFans promoters was clearly a pointed one. “How much money do you make from these videos? The trans-identified male claimed that he made $24,000 in 24 hours and one of the women claimed that she had earned $40,000 in a month from the pornographic content she produced.  They may as well have been wearing a big button saying “Earn Thousand Today! Ask Me How!” According to UK Feminist Julie Bindel very few women make decent money from OnlyFans, the “average earnings are in fact £120 per month and most accounts take home less than £102”.

This tacky piece by The Project, not only managed to overlook the ethical issues of recruiting boys, barely of sexual consent age, into free sexual labour, they provided a linked advertisement for girls to go into the apparently glamourous and profitable career of prostitution.

The response to The X post from the public demonstrated that the program’s take on this is out of step. The Project initially hid the negative comments, then turned comments off, even after that, the public anger was clear in the re-tweets compared to very few likes.  The post was still there Tuesday morning but by Tuesday afternoon the post had been deleted.

Our progressive elite have become blissfully detached from the reality of public opinion and appear to be wholly unaware that progressive values are not gaining public traction anywhere near as fast as the policy promoting them is being produced.

For me, it is no not the featured pornography performers that are the concern, but an industry hungry for content in a corporate and governmental environment that takes the legal standard as the moral standard and pushes the legal standard lower and lower.

The Queensland Government have committed themselves to a policy path for the decriminalisation of sex work in Queensland including “destigmatisation” of sex work. The stigma of sex work is said to increase the vulnerability of sex worker to “exploitation and violence”.  The language that is used to destigmatise prostitution in progressive organisations is “sex positivity”. 

The Project have adopted cultural change policy objectives by embracing targeted talking points in media stories like this one.  Talking points in media are more and more influenced by government funded organisations like ACON (AIDs Council of NSW) who run the Australian Workplace Equality Index.  Media companies pay ACON for advice to run employee programs like Pride and Diversity to address a range of cultural change objectives that governments choose to promote.

In their Sexual Health Action Plan, ACON expressed a need to take “an empowering, ‘sex positive’ approach” in order to avoid fear or shame around talking about “sex and sex work”.

ACONs “Pride in Diversity” program provides a framework for the “Proud” employee network that is run by Paramount throughout their subsidiaries, including TenPlay.  The members of Proud include the Senior Vice President for Content & Programming for Paramount and Social Media Strategy Manager for Ten.

The ACON influence over our media is prolific. A website run by feminist Kit Kowalski ACON Exposed, highlights in detail the influence ACON exert over a range of workplaces, including Australian public and private media organisations.

It is not just media content but legislation that ACON are influencing. Independent MP Alex Greenwich currently has some very disturbing Bills before the NSW parliament, on his website he twice acknowledges the help of ACON in drafting the Bills.

The Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill and Conversion Practices Prohibition Bill 2023 were introduced to the NSW parliament in August. The Bills assume a broad purview to change a range of legislation in line with LGBTIQA+ objectives, but a close look at the legislation reveals a targeted removal of legislative protection of women and girls from the harms of prostitution.

The Greenwich Bill aims to remove “outdated offences [that] remain in the Summary Offences Act that still criminalise some sex workers, add to stigma and discrimination, and are unnecessary.” Among those offenses that Greenwich considers outdated and unnecessarily complicated is one that prohibits;

exerting coercive conduct or undue influence to “cause or induce” someone to “commit an act of prostitution” or surrender any proceeds from it is an offence.

One may ask why a law that criminalises coercion into prostitution and pimping is egregious to Alex Greenwich? Apparently, the law creates complications for “sex worker businesses in recruitment” and especially when they are “helping a person just starting sex work.” Agencies who are “helping a person” into the sex work on OnlyFans do so with extravagant promises like the ones platformed by The Project.  The agencies then promote and control the person’s account in exchange for a massive cut of the subscriber income.  The girls are predominately from low socioeconomic background and are encouraged to do more and more degrading acts for higher subs.

A recent US study of OnlyFans content creators indicated that the platform does not replace in-person sex work but often provides a gateway to it. Respondents to the survey indicated that they were subject to constant demands from agencies to produce new content under the threat of having their account pulled. Respondents also indicated that the platform was a magnet for traffickers and child pornographers.

Girls being recruited into the sex industry on the Gold Coast are not earning tens of thousands of dollars a month doing naked play with teenage boys, but become subject to the the brutal outworking of porn fuelled fantasies on young female bodies, the profits of which largely fall into the pockets of the kind of unsavoury characters that have always run the sex trade.

Munich based gynaecologist Liane Bissinger has documented her experience working at a sexual health clinic in Hamburg where she treated women in prostitution. During her time there she documented the injuries to women’s bodies from prostitution including pelvic floor damage, STI’s, cystitis and badly damaged and torn vaginas and anuses. Bissinger says there were some cases of very young women “who already had difficulty retaining urine or faeces”.

If you are brave, you can read the full report, but it’s grim. In addition to the physical injuries that violent and prolific sex causes to prostituted bodies, the effects on the psyche of prostituted women is “often even deeper, longer lasting, and harder to treat in comparison to the physical damage”. In addition, prostituted women are disproportionately victims of rape, violent crime, and murder. The sex industry by its nature can never be safe for women and girls and the myth that it can become safe with “destigmatisation” and positive promotion is darkly sinister.

OnlyFans has repeatedly come under fire with accusations that the site monetises sexual images of children as young as five. The company continues to claim such content is slipping through the “cracks”, but accusations of their reluctance to remove illegal and exploitative content of children and young people has persisted throughout the years.

It is easy to understand why many parents are keen to continue to stigmatise prostitution as a career option for their children, and expose companies like OnlyFans and their agents as pimps. While it is indeed counterproductive to shame prostituted women, the right of access to women’s body for money is not a feminist but a market objective, and now apparently a LGBTIQA+ cultural change policy point.

What we are seeing in this latest unpopular post by The Project, is the delivery of governmental and capital objectives into our living rooms through the seeping institutional corruption of ACON. ACON, I will remind you, has been funded by conservative as well as progressive governments for many years. Growing concerns of women who oppose the powerful LGBTIQA+ governmental and capital driven agenda are being silenced as prudes and transphobes, not just by progressive players, but by what are now called “moderates” of the right.

I would say that The Project should be ashamed, but I know that such shame is against their sex positivity policy objectives.