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@RandomRanger made the following observation last week:
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.
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.
Do they? I am highly skeptical the people who Bonnie Blue is friends with in real life regard her this way.
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:
She had one of those respectable jobs and gave it up!
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.
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 sceptical that Bonnie Blue has friends of any kind, at least as you and I would understand them.
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I would expect her to wind up in multiple relationships with high status entertainer men- isn’t that what sex symbols usually do?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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 her Onlyfans? 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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
Not to mention securing a starring role in a film directed by one of the greatest American directors of his generation.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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"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).
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).
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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.
We agree about reading, but disagree on the content. Try Exodus 20:3.
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.
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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.
Uh, doesn’t the average OF girl have quite poor earnings?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And you actually believe such claims??
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.
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.
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.
Guys I've worked with. To clarify, some of them do make money, but it's generally not a lot.
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As the joke goes:
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?
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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.
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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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