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Notes -
@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.
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:
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.
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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.
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Uh, doesn’t the average OF girl have quite poor earnings?
I read it was around 100 dollars. What are you getting at?
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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.
That does sound quite unpleasant!
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
How? Why would they do that? You don't own the scenes.
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.
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.
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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.
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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?
Wait, why can't a blue-collar working guy earn an extra hundred bucks a month blowing dudes on the side?
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