Introduction
Advertising tools used by sex workers for solicitation and client screening have been identified as supporting occupational health and safety (OHS); however, sex work legislation ...continues to criminalize advertising by third parties. We explored how the criminalization of third-party advertising and online censorship shapes indoor sex workers’ access to OHS measures such as client screening, and negotiation of prices and services, in addition to income security.
Methods
As part of a community-based study in Vancouver, this analysis drew on 47 interviews (2017–2018) with indoor sex workers and third parties (e.g., managers, receptionists). Interview transcripts were coded by applying a collaboratively- developed framework drawing on structural determinants of OHS to explore multilevel risk and protective factors shaping sex work environments, including access to advertising.
Results
Participants’ narratives highlighted that most third parties provide support with online advertising on behalf of sex workers; however, criminalization limits potential safety and income security mechanisms. Third parties take on the financial and labour burdens of advertising and screening for indoor workers, particularly for racialized, im/migrant workers who might face language barriers. Sex work laws and online censorship severely restrict communication, and resulting vague advertisements undermine sex workers’ OHS by limiting advance screening, and negotiation of prices, services, and use of PPE.
Conclusions
Third-party criminalization, coupled with online censorship, hinders advertising, with related harms exacerbated for im/migrant sex workers who would otherwise benefit from the OHS measures offered through advertising.
Policy Implications
Legislative reforms to decriminalize all aspects of the sex industry, including sex workers’ right to third-party advertising, are urgently needed to increase OHS of sex workers.
OnlyFans is a digital patronage platform on which over two million content creators produce sexually explicit content for more than 130 million users. Increased Internet access and innovative ...technologies that enhance sexuality via connections and knowledge are changing the ways people navigate their sexual lives. OnlyFans is unique due to its position between digital sex work and social media and its high degree of cultural assimilation. We explored with a mixed-method approach how OnlyFans users perceive the effects of their OnlyFans use on their sexual learning and sexual lives. A diverse sample of 425 OnlyFans users participated in our online survey. The quantitative results revealed that participants reported mostly positive influences of OnlyFans on their sexual lives, and that they learned new things in terms of sexual practices, sexual preferences, relationships, and sexual health. Participants also reported that they tried new things, including toy use, sexual identity exploration, sexual and relationship practices, and gender identity exploration. Thematic analysis for the qualitative question revealed increases in declarative/conceptual and procedural knowledge in terms of sexual improvements/expansion; improvements in relationships; self-improvement/expansion; skill acquisition; connecting with others through OnlyFans; and value-related learning outcomes. These results provide insight into the ways users engage with OnlyFans for sexual learning, exploration, and expansion at individual and partner-levels. Findings have implications for sex education and research and practice in digital spaces.
Workers from a variety of industries rapidly shifted to remote work at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While existing work has examined the impact of this shift on office workers, little work has ...examined how shifting from in-person to online work affected workers in the informal labor sector. We examine the impact of shifting from in-person to online-only work on a particularly marginalized group of workers: sex workers. Through 34 qualitative interviews with sex workers from seven countries in the Global North, we examine how a shift to online-only sex work impacted: (1) working conditions, (2) risks and protective behaviors, and (3) labor rewards. We find that online work offers benefits to sex workers' financial and physical well-being. However, online-only work introduces new and greater digital and mental health risks as a result of the need to be publicly visible on more platforms and to share more explicit content. From our findings we propose design and platform governance suggestions for digital sex workers and for informal workers more broadly, particularly those who create and sell digital content.
With over 1.5 million content creators, OnlyFans is one of the fastest growing subscription-based social media platforms. The platform is primarily associated with sexual content. Thus, OnlyFans ...creators are uniquely positioned at the intersection of professional social media content creation and sex work. While the motivations of experienced sex workers to adopt OnlyFans have been studied, in this work we seek to understand the motivations of creators who had not previously done sex work. Through a qualitative interview study of 22 U.S.-based OnlyFans creators, we find that beyond the typical motivations for pursuing gig work (e.g., flexibility, autonomy), our participants were motivated by three key factors: (1) societal visibility and mainstream acceptance of OnlyFans; (2) platform design and affordances such as boundary-setting with clients, privacy from the public, and content archives; and (3) the pandemic, as OnlyFans provided an enormous opportunity to overcome lockdown-related issues.
