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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24592 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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@RandomRanger made the following observation last week:

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on?

As this was posted in the context of Scott’s recent article on the Vibecession and I’d say that is an issue largely unrelated to the porn industry I decided to post a separate reply.

Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell. It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc. She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly. She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock. She’ll never have children or if she does, they’ll turn out to be screw-ups. Society basically throws money at her because she was willing to turn into a social pariah without status for their amusement.

Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

The intended meaning of my post was that this is what other people think, not an accurate, complete model of reality:

I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.

I was trying to explain what might be lurking in the back of people's heads, who aren't neccessarily aware of power-law distributions or attention economies. The same could apply to the Island Boys or any number of other influencers. I was thinking of those /pol/ threads that show some lowlife making huge amounts of money that get 300 replies because it's ragebait and attentionbait.

And to a certain extent, isn't this whole discourse proof of my point? It's a potent topic both here and in less erudite forums. It makes people upset with how the economy is functioning, people in this thread are talking about income distributions. I was not trying to raise the object-level topic, only use it as an example and yet here we are in another huge battle/wealth of the sexes and pornography discussion.

Point taken. I'd ask a different question though. What would you think about a male porn performer making 800,000 pounds a month? Would it outrage you more? Less? How would people see it in your view?

It'd outrage people a less since it'd be 'damn that's impressive'. The sexes are different. It's like how when a female teacher has sex with a boy internet commenters are like 'Nice' or 'why couldn't it have been me' and when it's a male teacher and a girl there's a much harsher response.

Even I can't help but think that Bonnie Blue is worse than her male equivalent, in part because the male equivalent isn't really imaginable. I don't see a guy having sex with 1000 girls in a day as a PR stunt that boosts his profile to that level. But the hypothetical equivalent would be very bad. I support harsh treatment of Chad Thundercock if he goes around and disrupts the social contract or demoralizes people like Bonnie Blue.

That is exactly the point I was going to make. Being openly in porn as a man not only will not erode your social standing, which is the case if you’re a woman, but will even elevate it on average. Having the opportunity in itself to bone multiple beautiful women is generally seen as its own reward if you’re a man, which largely explains why male porn actors are indeed paid less than female ones on average. In fact, I think the idea of even getting paid to bone women on camera is seen as a sort of absurd idea by normies. After all, we can all imagine how many men would gladly be doing the same thing for free.

I’d argue that the working-class men outraged by Bonnie Blue would be much more outraged by a male porner earning the same sum of money (for whatever reason), because it’d seem even more unfair.

(The sex scandals involving women teachers that you mentioned is a different matter with a peculiar explanation in my view, but I won’t start discussing it in this comment.)

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money

I am not sure that I entirely understand the point that you are trying to make, because it seems that you are not making any point, but there is no central committee that needs to condone every monetary transaction between people. If someone discovers a clever way to make and deliver 500,000 pizzas every month at a profit, society in general probably does not even know about it, unless it gets highlighted in media etc.

Like others pointed out, it is all supply and demand. Society condoning or tolerating people making money has nothing to do with it. The only way that society's tolerance affects things is how it limits the supply of people willing to provide the thing that people are willing to pay for. In reality the relationship between making money and society's tolerance is the opposite of what you seem to think. The more something is tolerated, the more people are open to doing it, and therefore the supply goes up and the money that any one individual can make goes down. If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

I am not sure that I entirely understand the point that you are trying to make, because it seems that you are not making any point, but there is no central committee that needs to condone every monetary transaction between people.

People are generally OK with Bonnie Blue making around 800,000 pounds a month because they understand that she's sociologically damning herself so it seems only fair that she's making a lot of money while she can; it's also not illegal and complaining about it just makes you appear like a loser. The people making money for her are loser men anyway so nobody cares. In a similar manner, we're generally OK with fashion models (or at least some of them) making a lot of money because we understand that their careers are generally short, and with men doing dangerous jobs getting good pay because it's known that they might die on the job.

You seemed to be saying earlier that people being OK with Bonnie Blue earning a lot of money is the explanation for why she is able to earn a lot of money. Now you only claim that people are OK with Bonnie Blue making a lot of money, but are no longer claiming that that explains why she is able to. So your point actually seems to be quickly deflating into nothing.

If people were generally not OK with Bonnie Blue making a lot of money, how could we tell? What would be different in that hypothetical universe compared to our actual universe? And if people generally did not even know who Bonnie Blue is, and did not even care, how could we tell? How would that hypothetical universe be different compared to our actual universe?

In reality the relationship between making money and society's tolerance is the opposite of what you seem to think. The more something is tolerated, the more people are open to doing it, and therefore the supply goes up and the money that any one individual can make goes down. If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

To be a bit more specific regarding doing the same thing… Bonnie Blue makes as much as she does through relentless self-promotion. Doing something degrading like having sex with dozens of men in a day, and then winding up in the discourse for it, is how she’s been able to stand out from the glut of wouldbe porn stars.

Only fans, etc. has millions of content creators and millions of women who are fine with showing various amounts of themselves. There is not an under supply of women open to being porn actresses/OnlyFans models. It is, rather, an attention economy. The top earners on OnlyFans make a lot of money while the overwhelming supermajority of women who expose themselves online will never earn enough to replace a minimum-wage full time job (but would certainly like to earn that much).

If there were 800,000 women doing the same thing as Bonnie Blue, then each of them would make on average 1 pound a month, but since 799,999 women said "nope" then one single woman gets to harvest all the demand.

This doesn't sound right. If 800,000 were willing. I'd guess the allure of it would fade and the pie would shrink.

I'm not sure I follow. What exactly doesn't sound right? Allure would fade for whom? How exactly would this loss of allure shrink the pie?

For punters who are willing to pay something for something unique. If lots of people all do the same formerly unique thing, they don't get a share of the spoils of fame, they (potentially) all get nothing.

Are you guys trying to rediscover the labor theory of value?

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. — Margaret Thatcher

I should note right off the bat that I’m out of the loop about modern porn, I haven’t consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn’t really serving any purpose for me. I only know anything about Bonnie Blue from posters complaining about her existence. Including buying her own PR created hype, such as inflated subscriber/income numbers, designed to make her look more successful.

There are a lot of men who struggle with porn addiction, and they desperately want porn stars to be extravagantly miserable. There’s a certain kind of man who needs porn actresses to be degrading themselves in order to enjoy the product. It feels like cosmic balance, Porn makes them feel bad after their orgasm, and they want the people in the porn who have power over them, who make them do this over and over again, they can’t possibly be happy.

If we don’t want porn stars to make money, if we don’t want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I’m not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee’s graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

It’s at core a demand problem. If men consume porn there will always be porn stars. Though to be frank, my wife is reading a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and I’m not sure other actresses are any better off. There’s a reason actress and prostitute have long been similar careers. And reading Jenna Jameson’s wikipedia page, Jenna being the last big queen of porn I was aware of when she was dating Tito Ortiz and he was LHW champ in the UFC, she seems to have wound up pretty low, but not really that unexpected compared to any other comparable actress of the time. It’s quite likely that any porn star or prostitute will come to a bad end for the very reasons that made her pursue the job to begin with. But it seems like a failure that people consume her content, not that she produces it. It's entirely within the power of men to do.

The problem is that porn and prostitution, like sports, are where you make a lot of money (if you make it) when you're young but you age out fast (I think for porn there's also the novelty problem, that the consumers want fresh content all the time).

So then you have to have something else to pivot to, when you're still in your 30s/40s (which is relatively young). And for porn actresses, the majority can't act (because that's not the talent they were hired for), so it's extremely hard to break into legitimate acting career.

And so, like the former sports star who blew through his fortune and now is no longer in demand, and who failed at running a business (it often happens, the Plan B of "I'll open my own sports shop/bar" does fall through) and didn't get a gig as a pundit, or a manager, the ex-porn star is left trying to squeeze the last drops of profit out of fading glory.

It's not so much to do with shame and stigma, as it is that nobody loves a fairy when she's forty.

Porn actress of the onlyfans kind is more of a marketing job than an acting job and the ones that make are pretty good at it. They'll have no problem pivoting to marketing for somebody else or social media management/strategist, IMO. The logical plan B for a sports athlete is to be a trainer of some kind.

I haven’t consumed commercial pornography in like a decade now. I would like to pretend that I quit watching porn for moral reasons, but I actually just found that while I was aroused by porn, the actual moment of orgasm when I was masturbating inevitably happened while I was looking away from the screen and remembering/remixing memories of partners I had. I realized that porn wasn’t really serving any purpose for me.

If we don’t want porn stars to make money, if we don’t want their names to be common bywords, men need to stop consuming porn. I’m not even asking you to stop masturbating! Just use your imagination and your memories! Think about that time in the back of the car after Kaylee’s graduation party, or that girl in the bookshop who never wears a bra.

Typical-mind fallacy. Maybe you have a wealth of experience and a great imagination, but I have only about three IRL-based sexy situations that I can imagine well enough to fap to (available upon request), in comparison to the dozens of text, hundreds of video, and thousands of image situations that I have compiled on my computer.

Ah, the famously feminist political bloc of “loser chumps.”

This is like seeing the sales figures for Modelo and acting shocked that “we” aren’t prepared to jettison Mexicans.

It's a good culture war post because it demands a better answer than "This is why we need shame back in society!"

First, let's look at the opposite side of the coin; Men. The equivalent of sex work for men is violence. The Bonnie Blue equivalent is probably a professional athlete but, as many posters downthread pointed out, Bonnie Blue is the top 0.0001%. The median is truck stop stripper, part-times OnlyFans'er, club bottle girl who gets groped every weekend. For men? That's something like strip club bouncer, semipro MMA fighter, and Marine Corps Infantry Lance Corporal (no I am not joking). They're paid something like 40% of the median wage (often less) to risk maiming and death. Society views them mostly as disposable and, in cases like the MMA fighter, perhaps, kind of a weirdo. The USMC infantry vet gets some "thank you for your service!" awkwardness at times, the free breakfasts on veterans day, and a good rate from USAA, but then has to deal with the VA for his horrible migraines, busted knees and hips, and/or panic attacks.

And yet I, and many others like me, absolutely still see military service as a great job choice, be it temporary or career. And I see being a semi-pro MMA fighter as probably not something you should bank on working out (like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB) but, if you want to do it for some time because you love it, go right ahead. Strip club bouncer, eh, I've got some personal issues with that (related: Today is a Holy Day of Obligation, everyone make to get to mass). But let's just smooth out that rough edge and say bouncer at a nightclub. From me, you get a shrug - probably not a career, but if the cash is good for now, take it. Work on a plan to build a different and better career.

The point is is that male violence as a "method of employ" is absolutely permissible (so long as the employ itself isn't illegal; gangs, mafia, etc.) And sex work as a method of employ is not. Because sex is a special category of activity that is 1) at the core of the basic political unit, the family and b) the only thing (for now, sigh) that results in the continuation of the species. It's too socially valuable to be commoditized. That's my argument against sex work. You, a young woman, are selling yourself short and also engaging in some seriously anti-social and socially damaging activities even if it's just pictures of your unclad self on OnlyFans. And this is, in no small part, because of the power law issue other commentators posted.

If Bonnie Blue wants to go out do all of these disgusting things for money, that's really up to her. She isn't forcing these men to do it with (to?) her. They are also making their own slimeball choices. But then you have the literally millions of young girls who get into stripping, porn (traditional), and onlyfans. They do it because "sex is fun!" (TM) and "no one should judge you!" It's a bill of goods underneath a bridge I have for sale. Soon enough, these totally normal girls realize holy shit this is not for me, and nope out of there. But there's a long distance between how those girls are going to feel versus how the guy who got into his first bouncer-fight at the club felt. To me, there is an intrinsic, basic human reason for that (see above). And those that promote "sexual self-expression" (what in the hell is even that?) are promoting a kind of spirital semi-suicide under the satanic word -"fun."

Addendum - to close the loop on male violence jobs.

These kind of jobs aren't good for the long term. Even the most badass Navy SEAL is retired by 45 at the latest, and that's an outlier. Unlike sex work, as well, they can all be done - even as a FULL career - without getting to the point of interpersonal violence. A lot of bouncing is standing around looking intimidating (and vomiting girls). If you joined the military in 1980, there was a not so bad shot you could've done 20 years without ever actually being in combat (deploying is different than combat, remember).

Sports, especially MMA, I will admit, are a little different. The NFL CTE "scandal" revealed how a lot of guys were actually destroying themselves, unknowingly, for decades. I suppose my argument might fall down a little here but I'll weasel out of it a little by saying that in sports no one is actually trying to kill the other person.

It’s really not a good post.

More like a window into a bizarro-verse where economics don’t exist, “everyone knows” that the OP’s views are the only moral ones, but “we” won’t risk offending our ruling feminist cabal.

I appreciate your willingness to write a more sane version.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc

I don't think that's obvious at all. Imagine going in to your local school and telling them that one of the teachers there used to be a porn star. They'll ask "was she breaking the law?" and you'll say "Well, no, it's all legal, but the movies are pretty shocking." They'll ask "when was this?" and you'll say "oh, years ago. Then she retired and went back to school for an ed degree so that she could get a normal job. But we can't let her get away with that, you need to can her immediately for her bad morality from when she was younger." They'll ask "How did you discover all this" and you'll say "I make it my quest in life to investigate ex-porn stars and trace them to their current location so that I can find out what they're up to."

Somehow I don't think that conversation would go well for you...

You really don’t have to look very hard to find examples of teachers getting fired over a past in sex work, some of it a lot tamer than that.

Can you find me an example of a teacher (or some other normie core job) getting fired specifically for only fans? all the examples that other people linked seem kind of old fashioned.

I disagree with your scenario outlined here. First, because a "concerned parent" probably wouldn't just go in to the school. No, she'd probably go to the PTA first. So then, it's not one person going to the principal, it's a bunch of outraged soccer moms, threatening to raise a stink unless they Do Something.

Second, just a quick Google search returned a bunch of results. Like this case in California, albeit it was almost 13 years ago:

A middle school teacher who was fired after students learned she had appeared in pornography has lost her appeal to return to the classroom, her lawyer said Tuesday.

A three-judge panel unanimously decided Stacie Halas, 32, was unfit for the classroom. Halas was fired in April from her job as a science teacher at Haydock Intermediate School in Oxnard after online videos of her in porn were discovered by students and teachers.

"Although (Halas') pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Judge Julie Cabos-Owen wrote in a 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence.

Halas was continually deceitful about her nine-month career in porn before she went to work at the school, the decision said.

Her lawyer Richard Schwab said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry.

It's right there: fired for having done porn before she became a teacher, because the fact those videos are out there makes her "unfit for the classroom" in perpetuity.

And for a newer example, there's Texas in 2017, which also involves Libertarian politics:

A sixth-grade teacher at an all-girls school in Texas is out of a job and fighting to get her position back after district officials learned she worked in porn more than a decade ago.

Resa Woodward, 38, was removed from the classroom at the Young Women’s STEAM Academy in Dallas in November, after district officials received an anonymous tip regarding her work as an adult film actress, although a subsequent internal review cleared her of policy violations, the Dallas Morning News reported.

…

Woodward, who did not return messages seeking comment early Wednesday, told the paper that she was forced into pornography — saying “that involvement was not of my own choosing” — while living with an older man during a tough time financially. She eventually got herself out of the situation and finished school before becoming a teacher for the Dallas ISD, which serves roughly 160,000 students from pre-K through 12th grade.

But district officials got a tip in March claiming that Woodward worked in porn under the alias Robyn Foster, a name active in the business from 2001 and 2004, credited with 16 movies, according to a web-based adult film database cited by the Morning News.

…

Woodward, according to the internal report, told district officials she stopped working in the business in 2001 and thought a man she knew was retaliating against her by informing her employers of her past.

“I’ve been trying to live my life as far away as possible from this stuff for a long time,” Woodward told district officials, adding that no students, colleagues or supervisors knew of her sordid past.

Bauer then closed the district’s investigation in March, ruling that Woodward’s “past participation” in pornography did not constitute a policy violation.

Woodward’s work as a well-known activist for the Libertarian Party of Texas, however, would lead to her being outed, according to the Dallas Morning News.

…

Woodward told the Dallas Morning News that she wrote a post on Facebook last fall about a drunken driver that angered another man who claimed to be associated with the Libertarian Party in another state due to his beliefs about police. That man then detailed her past on social media websites, Woodward said.

Woodward then notified district officials of the post and she was placed on administrative leave on Nov. 29.

“They told me they were pursuing termination because it became public,” she said.

And it's not just women who get fired, either. From Florida in 2011:

A Miami-Dade teacher's past life in the adult entertainment industry has gotten him kicked out of the classroom.

The school district's investigation into Shawn Loftis, a substitute teacher assigned to Nautilus Middle, Miami Edison Middle, Fienberg-Fisher K-8 Center and Miami Beach Senior High, began last January.

…

But that time was cut short after administrators at Nautilus learned about Loftis' past. Under the alias Collin O'Neal, Loftis was a successful adult film star, even shooting movies on location in Miami Beach. After three to four years of success, Loftis went from in front of the camera to behind it and ran his own adult film company.

But then Loftis decided to change careers and get out of the business all together. Loftis said he wanted to sell his company and use his Master's Degree to teach. He qualified to be a substitute, taught for about a year until one day the past caught up to his present.

…

Loftis said he was terminated because it was determined that he broke a School Board rule which states:

"They are expected to conduct themselves both in their employment and in the community in a manner that will reflect credit upon themselves and the school system."

In addition to being fired, Loftis' teaching certificate is also in jeopardy. He said he may no longer be able to teach the lessons he wishes someone would have taught him years ago.

"I also want people to think before they dabble in that industry what they want to with their future," said Loftis.

Or then, moving over to Canada, there's Quebec in 2014 proving that time is no real remedy:

Pre-internet, you could likely move on from a career in pornography with only the occasional wondering glance your way. But now one Quebecois teacher, 73-year-old Jacqueline Laurent Auger, has had her past catch up with her after pupils went online and discovered softcore porn films she appeared in around 45 years previously.

She has now been dismissed from her position teaching drama workshops at the elite Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf in Montreal. “As educators, we had to ask what message is transmitted to all our students, boys and girls, from the first year of high school to the fifth, by the fact that the teacher of their drama workshops could now be seen on the Internet in the most suggestive of scenes,” the school wrote in an online statement, adding that they wanted to preserve “a calm setting free of allusions or discomfort that is unfavourable to our educational mission.”

Laurent Auger has called the move “completely absurd. I’m 73 years old. When I made those films I must have been 28 or 29. It was to make a living so that after[wards] I could work with great teachers and actors, in Paris and in Quebec. Come on.”

Sure, the culture has shifted in the past decade, but not that much, and not everywhere. So, again, I still don't see it playing out like in your scenario.

Ouch. Nine months? And that's enough to tank her teaching career. To be fair, if the 15 year old guys in her classes are all looking up Teacher's nude scenes that's not going to make for good discipline in the classroom.

These are the downsides people don't consider.

Ah, a modern classic.

Alright, I'll grant you it can sometimes result in them losing a job. And props for researching all these cases. I still don't think it will happen all that often though, and increasingly less with time. Like in your second example, it sounds like the school initially took the side of the teacher, and only decided to fire her after it turned out she was still using her porn name to promote Libertarian politics. And the last one had no trouble working for... 45 years(!?) that's crazy that they still fired her. It will depend on the specific school board and administrator though.

Presumably the trick would be to release the news to the parents (possibly via Facebook/WhatsApp) and the children (if possible) before the school. Then the children won’t take the teacher seriously and when parents ask why their children are being taught by a porn star, the school’s response would be “WTF why did we hire a porn star?” rather than “we’re aware and it’s really none of your business”.

The other traditional method for disguising an attack is the old ‘expression of support’. “It’s disgusting that people are accusing Teacher X of being the famous porn star Y” or “there’s no way this is X, right?”.

As a wise man once said, “It is necessary to put yourself firmly behind somebody before you can stab them in the back.”

There are multiple cases of a teacher's former career in porn coming to light and her losing her job as a consequence:

Yeah but notice that there's extenuating factors in both. In the first, she was in a movie where she openly talked about being a teacher. In the second, the school initially defended her until it turned out she was still using her porn name to promote Libertarian politics. Both of those are news stories from 10+ years ago about a woman who was in porn 20+ years ago.

They'll ask "How did you discover all this"

One assumes something obvious like an interview question along the lines of "what's with this ten-year gap in your resume" or "oh, you were an actress, did you star in anything popular?"

what's with this ten-year gap in your resume

"I presume you are familiar with the Official Secrets Act?"

She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock.

Riley Reid, Mia Khalifa and Sasha Grey all turned out fine. Riley Reid is happily married to a handsome wealthy man and they have a child and apparently a nice family life. Faye Reagan on the other hand is one of those homeless tunnel people living underneath Las Vegas. Dakota Skye died of a fentanyl overdose. Usually the fate of ex-porn actresses (like anyone else) is more tied to whether or not they were already a drug addict with poor time preference and impulse control issues, not any kind of scarlet lettering from what they used to do. Given that Bonnie Blue seems to be a skilled intelligent grifter, she will probably turn out fine.

What I don’t get is why everyone sees this as some kind of moral issue and not the massive late-Soviet Union-style failure of economic allocation that it really is.

What I don’t get is why everyone sees this as some kind of moral issue and not the massive late-Soviet Union-style failure of economic allocation that it really is.

Can you elaborate please?

Faye Reagan on the other hand is one of those homeless tunnel people living underneath Las Vegas. Dakota Skye died of a fentanyl overdose.

There does indeed seem to be a high mortality rate among female performers due to suicide and drug overdose. Maybe it's just a case of bad vibes about the porn industry but I'm sure the statistics bear it out.

Usually the fate of ex-porn actresses (like anyone else) is more tied to whether or not they were already a drug addict with poor time preference and impulse control issues, not any kind of scarlet lettering from what they used to do.

Also due to the psychological damage that comes with porning in general, I assume.

Can you elaborate please?

On paper the free market is supposed to route goods and services in a somewhat rational manner and create value. In practice the system seems to have gone loony and catabolic in a lot of ways. What you are seeing now is the capitalist free market equivalent of the endemic product and commodities shortages seen in the late Soviet Union. In western countries, industry is gone, the critical infrastructure that allows for the market to exist is falling apart, wages are going down. There are shortages of housing, rising food prices, rising automobile prices, massive shortages of critical armaments and military equipment, shortages of computer chips. Meanwhile bajillions of dollars are being pumped into irrational and economically wasteful Skinner boxes like narcotics, gambling, OnlyFans, and video game micro-transactions.

In 50 years Bonnie Blue’s picture is probably going to be in a history book somewhere in the chapter about how the United States economically fell apart and dissolved.

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

This isn't even true. Most porn stars make less -- it's a steep pyramid.

It's the same with kids that want to become soccer stars or football greats -- sure Messi & Brady made $100M a year or whatever, but it's just not representative. Or rock stars or rappers. There is an allure of glamor and a draw of the very top of the pyramid, but the reality is that most live music acts are done in a local dive bar for barely a few bucks. Some kid in the hood really thinks he's gonna be the next Drake?

This seems like a far more parsimonious explanation about stardom.

I think giving this any sort of mind at all only further advertises snd normalizes it. Most of us live in radically free societies, where this behavior isn't illegal, and there certainly is no appetite in legally enforcing morality.

The question on a society level is income inequality.

On a personal level: ignoring this is the solution. Focusing any sort of attention at this is a waste for some other productive thing you could be doing. My parents were able to communicate and instill their values in my siblings and I without coming in contact with the gutter. And I think not tolerating or being a part such a conversation with colleagues is trivially easy. Get better friends, if with a co-worker unwanted sexual conversation (even if you're not the target of it) is harassment.

Assuming that 800,000 figure is correct in the first place (there’s probably room for doubt but that is beside the point) I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

This paragraph inverts the justificatory burden, to my mind. If society wants to prohibit some profession they need a good reason for it. Thing are permitted by default, not forbidden. In the United States, at least, it's not like no one ever tried! They were consistently prevented by courts ruling that the first amendment protected the production and distribution of pornography. This in a sense just moves the discussion "up" a level, why not amend the constitution to permit restriction on pornography? But prohibition of pornography has never enjoyed that widespread degree of support.

Warehouse workers and information security officers have a certain level of respectable standing within their social circles. The likes of Bonnie Blue don’t. Women understand that she condemned herself to the equivalent of crack whore Hell.

Do they? I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc.

Why would she want any of these jobs? At 800k/month She will make the lifetime salary of many of these professions in a few years. Comparing to the warehouse worker, she made the equivalent of ~30 years doing that work in one month! It's also kind of funny if you read the first paragraph of her wiki page:

Blue was born in 1999[1] in Stapleford, Nottinghamshire. Before beginning her pornographic film career, she worked in finance recruitment for the National Health Service (NHS) and was married. In 2021, her marriage ended and she moved to Australia, although she told Cosmopolitan UK in 2024 that her ex-husband still worked with her "behind-the-scenes".

She had one of those respectable jobs and gave it up!

She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed. Maybe she’ll become a porn director and people will pretend like she has talent for it. Either way, everybody knows she’ll age out rapidly.

If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.

Now you might make the argument that she brought it all upon herself and thus should not be getting any sympathy and deserves poverty. But society doesn’t apply such norms to young women because they are seen as possessing innate biological value and also as naïve and easily misled. We’re aware that most young women who get drawn to porning probably don’t fully understand the long-term consequences of their actions, with the explanation being that they were fed modern feminism their entire lives and thus assume that women no longer live in sexual shame and that selling access to your orifices in camera is empowering. We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

She clearly has a talent that means she doesn't "deserve" poverty. Even before she was getting rich from OnlyFans she seems to have had a fine career. I'm also skeptical she wants or needs my sympathy. I suspect things are going pretty well, from her perspective. There are plenty of things about the current pornography industry I think are bad but few, if any, seem to apply to Bonnie Blue.

I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.

I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.

If you had collectively starred in/produced dozens or hundreds of porn videos that made millions of pounds, wouldn't you be good at it? Why would people have to pretend you were good? As far as longevity Alexis Texas and Angela White have been doing it for over 20 years. I don't know what their earnings look like over that time but it's clearly an industry you can stay in if you have the talent and desire.

It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films, and that the career of a female porn star who enters the industry in the 21st century lasts, on average, three years.

I am highly sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.

Why?

It's a well-established finding that a woman's sexual desirability tends to decline over time, which has obvious implications for a sex worker's expected earnings and career longevity. Of course there are women who can keep it up well into their forties, but such people are the exception. This deep dive into the stats of the Internet Adult Film Database found that 47% of female performers leave the industry after filming fewer than three films.

Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.

Why?

Imagine you're a straight woman. You meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.

Ok. But I think we have already established Bonnie Blue is hardly average. I am not sure how to compare traditional films to OnlyFans but I'm confident she has done more than the equivalent of three.

I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.

Imagine you meet a woman who must be in the 100th percentile for promiscuity (at least in terms of numbers of sexual partners); who's had sex with men who were cheating on their girlfriends with her; who's explicitly encouraged married men to cheat on their wives. Maybe she'll tell you that's it's just a persona she's playing and she's nothing like that in real life (or maybe not). Either way, are you going to take the risk of introducing her to your husband or boyfriend? Maybe you'll counter that you're extremely sex-positive, without so much as a single SWERF bone in your body, and that you'd never get into a relationship with a man unless you trusted him completely – but I would hazard a guess that that does not describe the average woman. And a woman you don't trust to leave alone with your husband or boyfriend (or even your potential husband or boyfriend) is not your friend, no matter how you slice it.

I guess two things that come to mind.

1. I notice the shift in goalposts from "she doesn't have any friends" to "the average woman probably wouldn't be her friend." I'll agree to the latter, but the former doesn't follow from that.

2. This also seems to ignore the existence of both happily single and lesbian women, for whom the potential partner stealing is presumably not an issue.

I agree that she is above average. The point I was making about the average number of films a female performer stars in before leaving the industry is that a lengthy career is not the norm. IAFD has an "active from–to" field listing a performer's period of activity: if one were to scrape this data it should be trivial to find the average duration of a female performer's career. Given what I've read about the industry and what I know about the relationship between a woman's age and her perceived attractiveness (her value on the sexual marketplace), I would be astonished if the average female performer's career lasts for ten years or more. I'll do some digging and see if I can find a definitive answer to this question.

I don't disagree with anything in this paragraph, I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.

I missed this on a first pass: the link I linked to earlier did analyse this exact question and found that the average female porn star's career duration had fallen from nine years in the 1970s to three years in the early 2010s (the report was published in 2013). The analysis also found that the average woman (regardless of ethnicity) gets into porn at the age of 22.

Given my earlier point about how a woman's perceived attractiveness tends to diminish over time, we can tell a story about women getting into the industry when they're very young, making some money while they're pretty close to their prime years, then retiring when their star is starting to fade.

Well, it stands to reason that if no "average" woman would want to be friends with Bonnie Blue, her pool of potential friends is dramatically restricted. If the only women who would want to be friends with her are

  • lesbians
  • single women who aren't looking for a relationship with a man, or
  • straight, coupled women who don't have a problem with introducing their partners to a sex worker who actively encourages married men to be unfaithful to their wives (perhaps because the women in question are polyamorous or in open relationships)

it stands to reason that her pool of potential friends is minuscule compared to the average woman's. Not to mention that, even if a woman falls into one of the above categories (even if she loudly claims to believe that sex work is real work), she might just have an instinctive disgust reaction towards associating with sex workers.

So, no, I don't know for a fact that Bonnie Blue has no friends, but given that we both accept there are a lot of women who would have perfectly understandable reasons not to want to associate with her (and given that many OnlyFans content creators report chronic feelings of loneliness), it seems reasonable to assume that she has few same-sex friends, if any. (Maybe she's a fag hag who has a group of gay men she goes to brunch with: other than other porn stars, a promiscuous gay man is probably the only kind of person who could hope to match her in body count. They could trade war stories.)

I just question the accuracy of extrapolating Bonnie Blue's career longevity from the average porn star's career longevity, given the many other ways in which she is not average.

What "many" ways are these? I accept that she's an unusually successful and famous porn star, and that you would naïvely expect a porn star who's making bank to stick around longer than one who's making peanuts (although who knows? maybe the reverse is true – you make bank at the outset and then quit while you're ahead before diminishing returns kick in. Mia Khalifa was a household name comparable to Bonnie Blue, and she was very keen to point out that her initial foray into pornography lasted less than a year). But I don't know that Blue is "not average" on many axes other than her sizeable wealth and fame.

As an aside, I really dislike this style of argumentation where I try to make a prediction based on historical data, and you point out that the person we're making predictions about isn't average, therefore historical data is completely useless for making predictions and we might as well throw darts at a wall.

Like, imagine if we were curious about how long Michael Jordan will live for (I don't know why we want to know this, just roll with it). I might look up an actuarial table for the life expectancy of a black American male born in the year whatever. But then you jump in and say "but Michael Jordan is not average on many axes! He's unusually tall and unusually rich! Therefore looking up the average life expectancy of a person born in that year is of no help to us at all!"

Averages are just that, average. They will describe an average person more accurately than they describe a non-average person, but that does not in any way imply that they don't describe a non-average person at all. At best they might describe a non-average person just as well as they do an average person (we might find that Jordan's height and net worth have no impact on his life expectancy, or one has a positive effect and the other negative, which cancel out); at worst they give us a ballpark figure, a lower or upper bound which is more relevant to the conversation than pulling numbers out of a hat. As I said, I'm open to the idea that there might be a positive correlation between a porn star's financial success/level of fame and the duration of her career (but there might not be), but citing two examples of successful porn stars with unusually long careers doesn't come close to demonstrating that. And I find it kind of rude that I'm trying to answer a question with empirical data, and you're rubbishing these efforts because "Bonnie Blue isn't average, therefore averages are completely useless in making any predictions about her future career trajectory".

She’ll very probably never marry or if she does, it’ll be to a man who’s a laughingstock

I would expect her to wind up in multiple relationships with high status entertainer men- isn’t that what sex symbols usually do?

That just makes you a loser in women's eyes.

Bonnie Blue has an entire team behind her (no pun intended) and they are world class at creating publicity. They manage to engineer her into relavence by getting her into lega trouble, e-drama and on interviews with legacy media. Far more people follow her e-drama than actually watch her porn. Her latest antics gets tens of millions of views on social media without containing any nudity.

Showing pictures of your privates on only fans isn't going to get you rich. In order to get rich you need a massive following and marketing. If Aella was just posting ass pics should would be making 500 dollars a month. She has turned herself into an influencer within a space with a lot of well paid nerdy men.

The problem is all the women who don't understand this and start an OF, make 300 dollars a month yet every one around them will eventually find their nudes.

The attention economy is just brutal since it is genuinely zero sum in nature and almost all rewards occur on a power law distribution.

Ain't nobody manufacturing more 'attention' in a factory somewhere, you've got to fight to draw from the same limited well as everyone else.

So you get the Red Queen's race as personified by Bonnie Blue (you have to do increasingly extreme and controversial acts, or pretend to, just to stay relevant), and the crab bucket effect where EVERYONE else you're competing with is looking for the smallest opportunity rip you down to give themselves a chance to ascend.

Does anyone remember Hawk Tuah girl in this the year of our Lord two-thousand-and-twenty-five?

Now... we're adding AI into this mix and expect the top performers in this space to get absolutely CUTTHROAT to stay on top. Although a few of them might decide to gracefully retire with their millions.

It’s very obvious that she’ll never find any sort of respectable job. She’ll never be a secretary, a nurse, a teacher, an HR manager, an accountant etc. She’ll very likely stay in the porn business or become a “sex worker” or be unemployed.

This seems like extreme cope to me. Too many conservative folks here take the normativity of sexual prudishness for granted. We are rapidly accelerating into an age where this sort of thing is embraced, if we aren't already fully there.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus! I'm sure some business would love the publicity of hiring her, as FtttG outlined above, this is a new dynamic in the modern attention economy anyway. Our culture is extremely sexually immoral, don't get your hopes up that porn actresses are facing any serious consequences.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus!

Eh, Stormy Daniels had to go peddle her tale of Trump around the chat show circuit to make more money after spending whatever payoff she got. That's not someone who has gracefully transitioned into a new, lucrative career after aging out of acting in porn.

Maybe the new society will embrace the likes of Bonnie Blue, but I think she's probably just at the wrong time: already known, already labelled, not the fresh new e-star who will be the one to become the AI face of 'we're the new start-up so daring we hired an e-thot to be the face of our marketing' company.

I highly doubt she won't be able to find a normal job, in fact it may be a plus! I'm sure some business would love the publicity of hiring her, as FtttG outlined above, this is a new dynamic in the modern attention economy anyway. Our culture is extremely sexually immoral, don't get your hopes up that porn actresses are facing any serious consequences.

Good luck making a list of hardcore porn performers who notably go on to successful, fulfilling mainstream careers with stable relationships into middle age and beyond.

There's maybe a couple who quietly retired from the public eye and live on a ranch somewhere.

On the male side you have perhaps literally ONLY Ron Jeremy. And he's come to an extremely ignominious end.

EDIT: Wait, I forgot Sylvester Stallone. But he didn't have a very long adult career and it was softcore so I am comfortable discounting him.

Most of them that try to do something in the mainstream end up flaming out.

In no small part because there's a lot of other vices that tend to surround that particular career path, and you'll have very few respectable allies in your corner if you stumble.

Remember that one State-level Democratic candidate who had filmed sex acts for a Cam site? She lost.

The one porn actress I ever heard of going on to a mainstream career was Marilyn Chambers, and she seems to have ended up going back to porn eventually (but also some independent movies).

Traci Lords did. Not a great career, but definitely a career.

Our culture is extremely sexually immoral

Bonnie is in the UK, where the particular forms of extreme sexual immorality take quite a different form, as does the prudishness. Do you think the government would take her side if she tried to become a nurse or teacher and a customer or parent complained?

There's probably any number of roughly-anonymous, behind-the-scenes type jobs she could take if need be, but I am skeptical she would have much success finding a public-facing, non-porn-adjacent job.

Do you think the government would take her side if she tried to become a nurse or teacher and a customer or parent complained?

Yes, I could easily imagine a UK government tossing the complaining parent or customer into HM Prison after a (non-jury) trial.

This. A very important part of keeping prostitution illegal, or at least in a gray market, is so that it remains low status. But if a woman can engage in postitution with no legal risk, no personal risks, she benefits from it, she makes lots of money, well, that is going to be a high status job and it will make prostitution high status over time. It actually takes large societal effort to prevent prostitutes from having more status than mothers, it does not just happen naturally. Relatedly, young single women earning more than young single men has been seen as a consequence of modernity making male skills less valuable. I am skeptical. It may just be a result of DEI plus the legalization, protection, and normalization of "soft sex work" -- marketing, sales, being a secretary, etc. If young women were allowed to monetize their femininity in any era, they might have been out earning young men.

I highly the doubt that prostitution being low status is a consequence of it being illegal. I'd say it's considered low status because it means ugly old men get to use your holes for money. In Germany, for example, it's legal but apparently also generates a great deal of human trafficking from Eastern Europe as there's a dearth of German women signing up to be whores.

But if a woman can engage in prostitution with no legal risk, no personal risks, she benefits from it, she makes lots of money, well, that is going to be a high status job and it will make prostitution high status over time.

I don't think that has been demonstrated historically. You can have hetairai, geisha, and Les Grandes Horizontales, but while they achieve fame, a degree of wealth, and social influence, they never become high-status enough to overcome falling back into poverty; extravagance was expected of such women, but eventually the source of wealthy lovers dries up.

The Second Empire was undoubtedly the golden age of French courtesans, who became idols of their time. Legendary women, whose wealth and power were astounding, whose beauty and seductive charm overcame the reason of men... Virginia Rounding doesn't simply recount their lives; she also strives to describe the mythical aura that surrounded them. Take Marie Duplessis, for example, who became the prototype of the virtuous courtesan; Apollonie Sabatier, who knew like no other how to put everyone at ease in her salon, where the most bawdy conversation was the norm; La Païva, a Russian émigré who seemed to enjoy the fresh flesh of wealthy young men; and Cora Pearl, a flamboyant English beauty, who had the gift of "making bored men laugh." The Great Courtesans offer us a vibrant portrait of nineteenth-century Paris and its most brilliant personalities. A venal woman was judged not only by the price she commanded for her favors, but also by her degree of freedom in choosing her clients. The humblest prostitute, at the very bottom of the ladder, had no choice but the common man; the elite of the demimonde, the renowned courtesan, had an almost infinite selection at her feet. Generally, the size of the fortune outweighed the personal qualities of the potential lover—but still, she had a choice. At least, that was the optimistic view of her situation; in reality, the more luxuriously the courtesan was kept, the more she spent, and the greater her need for money became. Her role consisted of spending, rather than saving, the money with which her wealthy patron showered her, for the conventions of the time demanded that a man of the world's mistress be a highly visible ornament, proof of his social standing, and not a liaison hidden away in a discreet apartment.

Per a Grok query, famous former famous porn stars marry “normal” men and enjoy a better than average social life. Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts. Mia Khalifa is an influencer dating a rapper. Riley Reid is married to an athlete. So there is no significant trade-off here. This is probably because, even if 90% of men find them disgusting, there’s probably 1% who find them attractive, and a percent of that 1% will be well-adjusted and even high status.

A political party could probably gain voters by running on taxing pornstars, but maybe the connotation of being the “talking about porn” party is too negative to be worth it.

Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts.

That's not much, if we're honest. Any young woman who's not hideously ugly can do a popular podcast and have beta simps orbiting her.

Mia Khalifa is an influencer dating a rapper.

From women's perspective, that doesn't mean shit.

Riley Reid is married to an athlete.

Fair enough; I don't know about his career so I can't comment. What I know is that he comes across as a miserable cuck in the one interview I saw with him. Again, my argument isn't that such women cannot marry, it's that they cannot marry a respectable man they're attracted to.

Sasha Grey is a Twitch streamer and does popular podcasts.

Not to mention securing a starring role in a film directed by one of the greatest American directors of his generation.

We’re also aware that this is a lie but modern feminism benefits well-off middle-class women so we’re not prepared to just jettison it for this reason.

I am afraid that blaming sex work on feminism is rather big misunderstanding. Sex-positive feminism as far as it had any influence, had been thoroughly defeated.

Modern feminists tell little girls to aspire to become presidents, CEOs, soldiers, cops, prison guards etc, not OnlyFans super stars.

I agree that it’s defeated in the strict sense that the majority of self-identifying feminist women probably believe the Sexual Revolution had long-term negative consequences (but not net negative ones) for women and generally failed to deliver its promises. As far as I can tell, they also believe that toxic men in general and the still-existing vestiges of the patriarchy and its female useful idiots are responsible for such negative externalities. They aren’t questioning the goals and tenets of the revolution, only the consequences. As far as they’re concerned, the idea that promiscuous women should be able to live without sexual shame and that there’s no good reason to judge them is still legitimate. The idea that Bonnie Blue is doing something shameful does not enter their minds.

A few porn producers make a lot of money; most make little. A few musicians make a lot of money; most make little. A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little. Society condemning or condoning the activity has little to do with it, so long as the activity is legal.

If there is a market for a type of a product (porn, music, soccer-play), and the product scales (once you make a song, you can make many copies for cheap), then the bulk of the market gets captured by the top talent.

Warehouse workers, on the other hand, get close to similar payment. Maybe the more experienced ones get three as much as newbs, but not a thousand times more. Warehouse work doesn't scale.

A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little

This is directionally correct, but European football is unusual among sports in how much less true it is than elsewhere. Large European countries have multiple divisions of fully-professional football, all of which pay the players a living wage. England, for example, has: Premiership (20 clubs, make the big money you expect of pro athletes) EFL Championship (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is around £500k annually, which is more than newly promoted IB MD or Biglaw partner, but less than the average for those groups) EFL League One (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is north of £100k, with stars earning £200-300k and even benchwarmers getting in the upper-middle class range if they play outside London). EFL League Two (24 clubs, average salary around £50k which is comfortably middle-class) Nationwide Conference (24 clubs, not required to be fully professional by league rules but all currently are, salary figures not published but anecdotally most are in the £20-30k range except for a few stars). Plus a few fully-professional clubs, or individual star players with pro contracts at semi-professional clubs, in the lower leagues.

Rosters are 25 per club plus youth players, so that represents a total of c. 3000 players making a full-time income as professional footballers. Essentially all of them are better off (relative to overall lower wages in the UK) than minor league baseball players.

A few porn producers make a lot of money; most make little. A few musicians make a lot of money; most make little. A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little.

If there is a market for a type of a product (porn, music, soccer-play), and the product scales (once you make a song, you can make many copies for cheap), then the bulk of the market gets captured by the top talent.

I basically agree with this. Although I would add that the stigma of sex work is probably a factor. In other words, the competition to be a superstar porn actress is probably less intense than the competition to be a superstar musician or athlete. Because a high percentage of women don't want the social stigma of being a sex worker.

I think a better comparison would be to compare a warehouse worker with a run-of-the-mill sex worker. e.g. a dancer at a strip club. In that case, the dancer makes more money (presumably because the market is compensating her for accepting stigma and also because she will quickly age out of the job) but she's not making ridiculously more money.

"Taylor Swift is just singing and dancing, LeBron James is just jumping and throwing a ball, Cristiano Ronaldo is just running and kicking a ball, and they are billionaires, wtf is going on?"

Well, if you are badly paid warehouse worker and see celebrities as people responsible for your misery, your proletarian consciousness is rather undeveloped. Instead of watching TV or tiktok, reading some theory is in order.

But the proles are not upset about celeb pay. They might be upset about CEO pay, but rarely entertainers. They’re the fans here(that’s what celebrity means).

Are "the proles" worried about CEO pay, or is it the left-wing academics/intelligentsia who are worried about it and ascribe those worries to "the proles." Most of the proles would like promotions to move up to the higher paying jobs, but maybe don't know how to optimize their skills to climb that ladder. There may be some fraction of over-educated leftist agitators who work amongst proles who, instead of utlizing their intelligence in more important higher-paying positions, harbor fantasies about CEOs earning less than warehouse workers, but most proles probably think they're crazy.

The proles mostly understand that CEO’s earn more than them, but very few will defend how much more- which, TBH, is mostly an artifact of poor corporate governance.

I don't know about actual warehouse workers, but the people who comment on reddit love bitching about CEO pay.

When Luigi Mangione murdered that CEO a few security guards at my work laughed and joking asked which CEO would get it next. On their break in the lunch room where I could hear them.

But the proles are not upset about celeb pay.

And there is no evidence that "warehouse workers" are exceptionally upset about Bonnie Blue either, OP who started this discussion is probably not a warehouse worker (and if so, he is rather non representative one), and premise of this whole thread is faulty from the beginning (not that this could and should stop interesting debate from developing).

they are billionaires, wtf is going on?

Idolaters gonna idolate.

Nobody forces anyone to buy concert tickets or watch the NBA. Celebrity wealth is a measure of how much people want to worship them. The "exploitation" here is voluntary.

Instead of watching TV or tiktok, reading some theory is in order.

We agree about reading, but disagree on the content. Try Exodus 20:3.

A good suggestion. I would also recommend Exodus 20:17 in this situation.

We agree about reading, but disagree on the content.

Not really. The bible was extremely extremist and revolutionary book when it was written, and still is. Historically, when disgruntled people were massively reading this book, it was sign that the world is going to be set aflame.

If Early Iron Age Bible writers saw modern society, especially modern UK society, they would be as revolted and horrified as is humanly possible, and Bonnie Blue and her antics would not be even in top 20 reasons for this disgust.

the Early Iron Age

In the early Iron Age, the predominant religions at the time included:

•Sending your daughter to the temple of Ishtar so she can lose her virginity getting railed by some stranger for money

•Burning your firstborn child to death as an offering to Moloch

•Big orgies under groves to celebrate seasonal changes

Not to mention both Sodom and the tribe of Benjamin getting wiped out because they couldn’t keep their roving bands of gang-rapists under control. The early prophets of the Bible wouldn’t like modern society, but I doubt they would be particularly surprised. Neither would St. Paul, given the time he spent in Rome and the Greek cities.

The quintessential dude asks: Would you suck a dick for a million dollars?

A lot of people today will never marry. A lot of peoples children will turn out to be screw-ups. A lot of people have no social standing, get no respect, and are at the end of whatever stick is being swung around. They, unlike Bonnie Blue, work very hard and still get no money.

I think what most people feel when thinking of the huge amounts money these women are making is denigration. They see their own lot in life as even lower than that of a prostitute.

Bonnie Blue is the most extreme example, and is only held high since she is doing viscerally disgusting things that people can look down on. I mean, fuck a thousand dudes for a million dollars? Hell no. But outside of that there are thousands of girls making executive level salaries dancing on TikTok with an OnlyFans on the side. Every blue collar working guy is an objective loser in comparison. It's humiliating to know that there are teenage girls shaking their ass on camera for more money than they will ever make. The economy has to be a joke and your participation is the punchline.

To that end, no, most of these girls will never have trouble finding a boyfriend or creating a small bubble of privacy with all the money they've made. It's all cope. They can buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years. There are plenty of pornstars that disappeared and their kids are growing up just fine since the old porn has been long buried with the new.

I can't find the article but a fair few years ago there was an Instagram model owning the Red Pillers back when RooshV and all of that stuff was at a highpoint. She wrote, as I recall, explaining how she got invited to Dubai or somewhere similar. She sucked a few dicks, denigrated herself in front of some rich arabs, and a few weeks later she was out with enough money to last a lifetime. She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts, she bought an apartment near a university where she would start studying and so on. All in her early or mid twenties.

To a red pill 'high value man', this girl is crushing it. She can do whatever she wants. She looks good, is young, has more money than 99% of her peers. There's no argument. She has the power, men gave it to her.

I'm afraid I didn't save a source on this, just the numbers, but the last studies I saw claimed that:

  • $12K/year is a 92nd percentile income for camgirls
  • $50K/year is a 99th percentile income on OnlyFans
  • The median OnlyFans income is around $2K/year
  • The modal OnlyFans income is 0.

Yeah, there was some girl who made $1M in 24 hours. That's how dualized labor markets work. From the outside, it looks awesome to be a multimillionaire actor, ball player, musician, or whatever, because the ones who become successful are almost tautologically the ones that everybody knows about, and the ones who don't make it big become invisible.

No, "most of these girls" cannot "buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years". The ones who metaphorically won the lottery can, sure, but every blue collar working guy can literally buy a lottery ticket if he wants.

That said, I'm not sure if there's much more downside to the metaphorical lottery ticket than there is to the literal one. You do have to choose between being open about your sexual past with future partners (and risk scaring some off) or being tight-lipped about it (hurting the level of emotional intimacy you can share), but that's been a tradeoff that everybody's had to face since the Sexual Revolution, whether there were cameras involved or not. "I only did it for the money" might even inspire less jealousy than the standard "I loved my exes just as much, but don't let that make you pessimistic about our future; tenth time's the charm!" Worst case scenario: at some point somebody's going to set up a Reverse Image Search with much more advanced AI than Google originally had and much fewer scruples than Google currently has, and they're going to suck in every random archived torrent they can find ... but under what circumstances is even that really going to backfire on you? The modern liberal consensus is "that's your own business", and the most common conservative consensus is "that's awful, but you can repent and be forgiven".

I'm not convinced. The girls famous enough for the argument that their 'OnlyFans fame will bite them in the ass one day' to be applicable are making more than 50k a year. If not on OnlyFans specifically then on Instagram and other things.

You don't need to be "famous". I know of one girl I went to uni with who started doing porn. She isn't really famous or big (although I am sure she has a decent income with some business acumen), but pretty much every common acquaintance seems to know about this. Especially very difficult to escape if you make content in any other language than English since such markets are rather small.

She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts

Someone with that level of planning is probably even rarer in sex work than "hot, young, willing to do it all". The wealthy young sports stars and entertainers often follow the same trajectory: young, talented, making more money than they ever imagined or that their (working class/lower middle class) family would see in their entire lifetime, and along with that is the usual entourage of hangers-on and ways to spend all that money (including the tales we've all heard of managers and agents ripping them off). They generally are too young, too little educated, and not smart enough to plan ahead to the end of the career (which comes faster than they imagine) and when all the money will dry up. The smart ones get sponsorships and gigs as spokespersons for products and licensing of their image, savings and investments, plans for what they'll pivot to when the popularity wanes and the money dries up. But even there, starting up your own business can fail. The less smart ones? They're the ones end up "I used to be famous" and the subjects of "where are they now?" questions.

Uh, doesn’t the average OF girl have quite poor earnings?

I read it was around 100 dollars. What are you getting at?

What's stopping a blue collar working guy from also starting an OnlyFans and advertising to a gay/bi audience? Being straight can be a plus and play to the "turn him gay" fantasy too, or you can just lie the same way female OnlyFans models pretend to be interested in their subscribers. And male instagram models can also get invited to Dubai for highly paid sex work.

To some extent, it does happen: one of the many swerves of the Peanut The Squirrel saga from last year was that the squirrel's owner was doing very gay4pay-looking onlyfans while having a wife. Which could be bisexual, but you can be bisexual and work blue collar, and a lot of the framing was more 'what straight guys think gay guys want' than what even the bottomiest gay guys actually want.

Which points to a part of the problem, if you're a straight guy trying to sell to gay ones. Look at fantasy (art or written) gay4pay or orientation play, and there's a lot of stuff that's not just going to be uncomfortable for a straight guy to try (though there's definitely a lot of that: forget taking a dildo, who wants to wax their chest), but will also just be very hard to credibly recognize or sell.

On the other hand, SquirrelDaddy was an OnlyFans making in the top 1% and maybe top 0.1% of male earners, so maybe my tastes are just weird.

That said, the available business strategies are less viable. The nice thing about gay courting's that there's somebody into everyone, and sometimes the breakdowns can come in surprising ways (eg, one of the top 0.001% male earners on OF is outright obese)... but there's not necessarily many people into anyone. The entire male side of onlyfans pulls in about a fourth of the revenue that the women's side does, and the top (hurr hurr) is saturated with tops that are, to be blunt, not possible for the average man even if he wanted to. Any of the highest-end creators in any space tend to have people who are doing that career as a full time job and a half, but to be blunt, almost all of the top male creators are genetic freaks. Ain't no amount of zinc and pineapple that's doing that.

I wouldn't recommend a gay (or 'I'm just posing naked for my fans, which I totally assume are women') actor go to Dubai for sex work, though. The UAE's more extreme punishments are theoretical even for their own inhabitants, but they have made life miserable for tourists in the past. While those punishments theoretically include M/F situations, they're much more likely to hit man-on-man ones.

who wants to wax their chest

That does sound quite unpleasant!

The vast majority of female OF whores don't make any real money on the platform. The lower demand and greater competition for male whores on OF means even fewer of them make any real money. This was already the case before OF, with male porn actors making way less per shoot than females.

An argument I've heard is that the vast majority of accounts on OF are barely active. They try it for a few days or a few weeks, upload a few low-effort selfies, and then give up when it doesn't instantly make them rich like they were hoping. Or they just get embarrassed, who knows. But the ones who actually stick with it and grind it out, uploading new content there and on other platforms daily, they tend to make quite good money. Maybe not "mansion in your 20s" money, but much better than most jobs. They have other options to make money too which kinda go together. The typical pattern is like: Make an instagram with sexy non-nude pics, make a twitter that's similar, and then an OF with the nude pics. Depending on how it goes they can make money from sponsorships, work as a model/dancer/promoter for regular clubs, dancer at strip clubs, or just straight up escorting. All of these things go together, and the OF account acts as a force multiplier for getting paid attention in other ways.

It's humiliating to know that there are teenage girls shaking their ass on camera for more money than they will ever make. The economy has to be a joke and your participation is the punchline.

Ouch, this is brutal to read but so true. It has always been thus, but at least in the past women & especially prostitutes were extremely low status. Now that prostitution is becoming normalized, the sting is far deeper.

They can buy mansions, hire maids, babysitters, tutors, and never work a single day in their lives after grinding OnlyFans for a few years.

I can't find the article but a fair few years ago there was an Instagram model owning the Red Pillers back when RooshV and all of that stuff was at a highpoint. She wrote, as I recall, explaining how she got invited to Dubai or somewhere similar. She sucked a few dicks, denigrated herself in front of some rich arabs, and a few weeks later she was out with enough money to last a lifetime. She detailed how she set up investments and savings accounts, she bought an apartment near a university where she would start studying and so on.

And you actually believe such claims??

There are plenty of pornstars that disappeared and their kids are growing up just fine since the old porn has been long buried with the new.

Yes, I concede that could plausibly have happened in the case of some women that are old hags at this point and have performed in films that were released on VHS and were later never digitized.

A lot of people today will never marry. A lot of peoples children will turn out to be screw-ups. A lot of people have no social standing, get no respect, and are at the end of whatever stick is being swung around. They, unlike Bonnie Blue, work very hard and still get no money.

Hold up. Who are you specifically referring to in this case? Average blue collar men?

What is not to believe? The top 1% of OnlyFans creators can generate everything from 20 to 100k per month. Factor in prostitution on the side and you can make a lot of money.

Yes, I concede that could plausibly have happened in the case of some women that are old hags at this point and have performed in films that were released on VHS and were later never digitized.

No one remembers the vast majority of pornstars, even those that were digital. Remove the makeup, change the hairstyle and have the publishers start scrubbing your scenes and/or stop republishing them. There's no pornstar purgatory for those girls that could cope with the profession.

Hold up. Who are you specifically referring to in this case? Average blue collar men?

Guys I've worked with. To clarify, some of them do make money, but it's generally not a lot.

Guys I've worked with. To clarify, some of them do make money, but it's generally not a lot.

So I’m assuming your argument is that many of them have such a low social status as men and earn so little that many of them will never marry and never gain social standing and respect despite working hard. Fair enough. But there’s a difference between eroding your own chances of marriage and respectability in exchange for money as a woman with society’s tacit approval and being downtrodden as a man to such an extent that you’re effectively shut out of marriage and respectability.

have the publishers start scrubbing your scenes and/or stop republishing them

How? Why would they do that? You don't own the scenes.

Remove the makeup, change the hairstyle

Let's assume that you're a guy in high school whose mother "starred" in a bunch of porn flicks but generally remained obscure and only one or two of those flicks were ever digitized and uploaded online. All it takes for your social standing to be demolished by bullies is one asshole finding those flicks and identifying your mom.

I don't understand the relevance of the difference you point at. The point is working men look at media where the success of public prostitution is advertised and they respond with a series of doomposting, copes and other dismay. Something about it fundamentally emotionally affects them.

How? Why would they do that? You don't own the scenes.

By asking the publisher. Professional porn production is a small world. Most want to keep a good reputation with former or would be actors. There are also laws regarding personal privacy. If you've quit for a few years you can easily make a case that your privacy is being harmed by the publication of pornographic material involving you.

I am sure there are a few kids who have had a hard time because their moms did porn. But there are also a lot of pornstars no one remembers or sees. The notion that they will all be facing hard times just isn't accurate. In fact most of them wont.

Why are you comparing top 1% on a platform with a blue-collar worker? Top 1% in almost every industry makes a lot of money.

That's who the blue collar workers are comparing themselves to when they see news about the latest OnlyFans sensation making millions in a week or Bonnie Blue sucking off a small township. It's not just about the money but how you get it.

Do the top 1% of blue-collar men have such complaints though? Because that'd be the valid parallel here.

The feelings of blue collar workers are not invalid just because they are not in the top 1%. I don't understand where that contention comes from.

They're not looking at engineers or sports stars going 'life is so unfair, this economy is a joke, how could these people make more money than me'. They are seeing prostitutes publicly sexually denigrating themselves on camera and making millions and it revolts them on some level.

If your argument is that they should not feel what they feel because of a wage comparison between clue collar workers and prostitutes then you are missing the point of the contention. Because it's not just about the money.

The quintessential dude asks: Would you suck a dick for a million dollars?

As the joke goes:

Since you're the one earning much less than a million dollars, you're the one sucking dick here - I provide fellatio services.

Jokes aside, I recall recently reading that the median OnlyFans earnings are far below the wage of a blue collar working guy. Hardly soothing for him since he can't even earn an extra hundred bucks a month on the side that way the way those young women can.

And to compare this with the good old times, when was it really not the case that some prostitutes were called geishas or courtesans or favorites or royal concubines and enjoyed wealth and social standing that was even higher than Aellas of today?

median OnlyFans earnings are far below the wage of a blue collar working guy. Hardly soothing for him since he can't even earn an extra hundred bucks a month on the side that way the way those young women can.

Wait, why can't a blue-collar working guy earn an extra hundred bucks a month blowing dudes on the side?

I think the simple explanation is that society generally condones or at least tolerates porn “actresses” making large amounts of money because people generally understand that such women are condemning themselves to social damnation with assumptions about their reputations that may very easily turn out to be naïve and thus deserve to be at least financially well-compensated by simps whom society considers to be loser chumps anyway.

I'm not sure what is the problem here that you're positing an explanation for. Why assume that she makes that money because "society condones it"? Society doesn't decide what she makes, outside of the very broad question of sex work legality that is out of the hands of most of society anyway. A minority of rich whales decide what she makes. Society can condone it or be salty about it all they want, it's not going to stop whales from whaling.

Yeah "supply and demand" is the explanation here. Reading more into it is as superstitious as reading tea leaves.

I'm not sure what is the problem here that you're positing an explanation for. Why assume that she makes that money because "society condones it"?

OP was asking wtf is going on with Bonnie Blue earning such amounts of money. I offered an explanation that I think is the most plausible. I'm assuming that anything that routinely happens in society without inviting widespread outrage and without getting banned/suppressed is by definition at least tacitly condoned by it.

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