A dominatrix explains why documentaries about sex work never get it right

There are some hard-working sex workers in Hulu and ABC News’ new documentary, Only Fans: Selling Sexy, and I respect them. I’ve been a sex worker for over 20 years, and being in a documentary about doing sex work is a gigantic leap of faith. We’re rarely treated with respect, and sometimes not even with much humanity. It’s often difficult for me to even watch many sex worker documentaries; such filmmakers favour drama and controversy, and choose to sensationalise the lived experiences of myself and my sex work peers.

For those who’ve been living under a rock, OnlyFans is a subscription service website where individual models can create and sell photos and videos of themselves. (There are creators on OnlyFans who do not sell adult or erotic work, but they are not the subject of Hulu’s doc). There are several other sites that work the same way, but OnlyFans got name checked by Beyoncé, while Bella Thorne almost blew the whole thing up, and these, among other things, made it the biggest player in the game. 

Hulu/ABS News did better than most with their documentary – it’s smoothly made, and it only made me wince a few times. But the true value in OF:SS is the voices of the sex workers. In media, anyone who does sex work is deemed not to be a credible witness to their own life, so there are always non-sex workers in these documentaries who serve to confirm (or more often deny) what we say is real. Irony in 2021 is watching a glossy TV show inspired by a sex work website, which features non-sex working actors saying to the camera, in serious tones, that giving sex workers “all this attention” might make us “go too far”. Ask yourself: why does that sound a little hypocritical to me?

But it doesn’t matter, because I’m sure they got legally paid to say it. Actors and models generally are – even when they act in steamy love scenes. In fact, I’m sure everyone who worked on this TV production about OnlyFans models got paid. And no one is upset about any of that; it’s just the models on OnlyFans being paid that upsets some people.

And these people aren’t alone. Writing moral panicky takes on OnlyFans (and sex work in general) has been some opinion columnist’s favorite hobby during the pandemic. But all that manufactured hand-wringing is a grift – see: The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof. These articles are an island of garbage that floats into your Facebook feed when radical feminists collide with upscale suburban wine moms, and stories about zip ties on your car mirror start bubbling up. Sex workers are a gift to people who stir up fake outrage for a living. In a changing world, it’s still permissible to hate sex workers and scapegoat them for anything you don’t like – facts not required. 

There is another forthcoming documentary called Buy/Sell/Date, which also claims to be about the sex industry, but I’m sceptical. That’s a tacky, dehumanizing title, and producers Rashida Jones and Meryl Streep have both come out against sex worker’s right in the past. Why is it OK for corporations and famous people to take the lives of sex workers and sell them – and therefore make money off us – but somehow not OK if we do it?

Everyone I know says when they went to OnlyFans for the first time, they were struck by the beauty and allure of the people on it. But certain kinds of people in power are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of OnlyFans, because they don’t want to acknowledge the circumstances – the rising economic inequality even before the pandemic hit, and then millions suddenly jobless, the majority of whom are women – that made it such a cultural hotspot. Sex workers are like teen actresses in the 90s: the gatekeepers of fame and attention want to act shocked that we’re exploiting our tits, even while they’re exploiting our tits.

So, OnlyFans: Selling Sexy suffers from a lack of self-awareness. It depicts sex workers politely, but it never truly confronts the viewer with their own misplaced rage at adult creators. One of the models was fired from her non-sex work job because she was an OnlyFans model, and it’s treated as an, ‘Oh well, tough break for her’ moment in the script, instead of, ‘Hey, maybe this is actually the issue we should be confronting’. Herein lies the problem with sex work documentaries: sex worker’s problems are presented as if they are a natural result of our choices, rather than of a society that’s normalised both poverty and anti-sex worker stigma.

The US has a fantasy about itself as a nation that depends on, among other things, low-income women doing certain kinds of underpaid or even unpaid labor. A single mother of color, quitting her minimum-wage job and choosing instead to support herself by making porn videos of herself at home, while her children sleep in the next room? That is simply an intolerable idea to people whose wealth depends on obedient low-wage workers, and who think that “making America great again” means strictly enforcing heteronormative, white-dominated, cisgendered Christian values. 

“OnlyFans: Selling Sexy suffers from a lack of self-awareness. It depicts sex workers politely, but it never truly confronts the viewer with their own misplaced rage at adult creators” – Mistress Matisse

You may laugh at the notion that patriarchal capitalism is that worried about people having alternatives to low-wage service jobs – but patriarchal capitalism has no fucking sense of humor. Women profiting from their own bodies is both a social and economic threat to the system, so it must be punished. Some people want a world where sex work can never exist, but maybe you’ve noticed: we are not living in that glorious worker’s utopia. And we will never magically bring about that egalitarian paradise just by being meaner to the most marginalised group of workers in the world. 

I’ve made a living as a sex worker for all my adult life, and I like it. But you don’t have to be ‘empowered’ by sex work to legitimately engage in it. People are selling sexy images in greater numbers than before out of a clearly observable financial need. It’s a direct result of years of national income stagnation and inequality. You don’t like people selling nudes? Try paying them a fair living wage. But instead, people are taught to hate whores instead of billionaires. And OnlyFans: Selling Sexy never really questions that status quo. It flirts with self-awareness here and there, but mostly skitters away from the tough questions. There are many different kinds of people ‘selling sexy’ on OnlyFans, but the one thing they have in common is that they’re all people striving to achieve some economic stability in an unstable world, in the only way they feel is available to them. And that’s the real controversy.