This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
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“Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” a novel-turned TV series about a 19-year-old single mom who turns to OnlyFans to get by, has attracted plenty of attention and acclaim — especially with its star-studded cast that includes Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman, Nicole Kidman, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
We’ve come a long way since “Pretty Woman,” but why is a story about a 19-year-old driven to OnlyFans by financial desperation so popular?
Rufi Thorpe, the author of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” told CNN she believes OnlyFan’s “rising cultural relevance” is because “people are trying desperately to afford their rent.” The article explains that financial struggles in a harsh economy have led OnlyFans to be more “accepted” and less “stigmatized.” Thorpe has also been clear that she supports the destigmatization of the sex industry, saying that her goal with the novel was to “explore sex work as work.”
But it is a failing position to accept that financial necessity should drive women to OnlyFans and that society should refrain from condemning OnlyFans as a result.
To be clear: I certainly don’t believe women who turn to OnlyFans out of economic desperation should be condemned; it is the systems and individuals who exploit their desperation that deserve our censure.
Consider an analogy: A landlord approaches a woman in his building who is struggling to pay her rent. “If you send me nude photos a few times a week,” the landlord says, “I’ll forgive your debts. Otherwise, you’re out on the streets.”
Does it make your skin crawl?
How about this one: A CEO arranges a private meeting with a female employee. Behind closed doors, he explains the offer: “Come into my office at the end of every workday and do a strip tease. If you do that, I’ll double your wages.”
In contexts like these, most people recognize that coercing sexual consent through financial necessity — or even financial opportunity — is exploitative and abusive. There’s a good reason for this. It’s because sexual consent is a uniquely sensitive type of consent, which must be given completely freely. Generally speaking, it is not wrong to pay someone to do a job that they may not really desire. But sexual consent warrants a particularly high standard of freedom and autonomy. As such, it is wrong to use money (or any other means) to pressure someone into accepting sexual situations that they do not authentically desire.
As a society, we largely understand this — hence our reactions of repulsion to the landlord and CEO examples. But for some reason, when it comes to OnlyFans and the commercial sex industry, there’s a clear doub
Society is increasingly happy to accept and even celebrate the sex industry. Social media and mainstream TV are full of glamorized stories of women who went from making minimum wage to raking in millions on OnlyFans. And this, the popular narrative goes, is empowering to women.
But leveraging a woman’s economic need to coerce her into unwanted sex acts is not empowering. It’s exploitative.
It’s worth noting that very few women actually make good money on OnlyFans. In fact, the average creator earns only $131 per month. However, even if it were true that OnlyFans was the answer to women’s financial problems, the question becomes: How did we end up with a society where accepting sexual exploitation is a woman’s best option to support herself?
As Thorpe and the CNN note, the struggling economy certainly plays a role. But it’s far from the entire answer. If it’s just the economy, why aren’t men flocking to OnlyFans to make money? Why are the vast majority of people selling content on OnlyFans women and the vast majority purchasing content men?
This is about much more than the economy. It’s about a society that has commodified women as sex objects. A society that tells women their primary worth is in their ability — nay, their obligation — to please men sexually. And a society that withholds or grants financial rewards on the basis of women fulfilling that obligation.
I’m reminded of a man who once said to me, “Pornography is empowering to women because it’s one of the only jobs where a woman can make more money than a man.”
At the time, I was simply rendered speechless. But I’ve long wished I could go back and say what I really thought about his absurd argument.
A world where the only way a woman can make more money than a man is to strip for those leering men is not a world that’s empowering to women. That’s not a system that was created by and for women. It’s a system that was created by and for men.
The hard truth is that the sex trade has always been a misogynistic industry whose sole purpose is to cater to male sexual entitlement. It has never been about what’s best for women.
Even the glamorized OnlyFans is not exempt from that fact. Diving deeper into common experiences on the platform shows creators face a myriad of serious harms at the hands of subscribers, pimps, traffickers, and even the OnlyFans corporation itself. These women deal with stalking, rape, abuse, threats of physical violence, financial exploitation, psychological manipulation, death, suicide, mental health harms — you name it.
Embracing the sex industry as “empowering” does not erase its fundamentally misogynistic and exploitative nature. It simply obscures it.
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Lily Moric is the communications and content strategist with the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national nonprofit organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and pornography.
