I literally can't do this anymore.
Backstory: I started doing sex work when I was 19 back in 2010. I became an anarchist as a teenager and hung out at infoshops during my high school years. After I went off to college I began doing SW, largely because I viewed it as a way to make money that didn't involve wage slavery. Many of the other anarchist women I knew (both cis and trans) were SWers and introduced me to the whole culture. I loved every minute of it. I got to work on my own terms with no hierarchical domination by a boss. I could decide my own schedule. I could say no to clients I thought were creepy or oppressive. I wasn't paying taxes to the settler-colonialist AmeriKKKan government. To me, and many other anarchist comrades, sex work was anti-work.
During my time as a SW, I was able to finish college and pay off my student loans in no time at all. I was able to pay my rent in a city where rent prices are through the roof. I was able to contribute to paying for my friends' and comrades' rent, student loan debt, medical bills, legal bills, HRT, bike repair, ADHD medications, and many other things involving mutual aid. Between 2014-2017 I was making more money than I knew what to do with. At my "peak" I was making $2k a week. It was an incredible experience. And best of all, I felt like I was actually engaging in anarchism. I wasn't being a hypocrite when it came to my values. I was telling the capitalist system and the state to fuck off and showing that my body or my will couldn't be dominated. All of that changed when the pandemic hit. I couldn't serve clients anymore due to the lockdowns. But the biggest problem was something even worse. Around this time began the growth of OnlyFans. I saw how more and more people fully integrated into the colonial-capitalist system were starting OF accounts. So I started one too, and I started making money, but it was nowhere near what I was making as a SW previously.
And this is exactly why I'm thinking of quitting SW. OnlyFans has essentially done to SW what AirBNB has done to housing and Uber has done for public transportation. But the worst part is, OF has made SW no longer subversive. SW was originally a way for marginalized and colonized folx to break out of wage slavery and become their own boss, and also to reclaim control of their bodies from the colonial-imperialist-YT supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal cistem. Now, every single suburban white girl starts an OnlyFans the day she turns 18 in order to make a few extra bucks. In fact they're now ENCOURAGED to start one. There are even Hollywood celebrities, big-named influencers and YouTubers who have OF accounts, people who already make loads of money yet feel the need to take money away from people who are far more oppressed than them. And they now have the nerve to call themselves "sex workers" because of it. Look at all the top creators on OF and you'll notice how the vast majority of them are colonially attractive, white, cis, able-bodied and have what a eugenicist would determine as "good genes." What was once the domain of the marginalized, queer, neurodivergent, colonized and internally-colonized has now become the domain of the colonizer.
So, to put it lightly, I can't do sex work anymore. There is no point. Even if I was still making thousands of dollars a month it doesn't feel worth it anymore. Not when OnlyFans has gentrified SW and the subversive quality of it is completely gone. I feel mentally abandoned.
My problem is, I have no idea how I'm going to survive now. I literally can't get a "real" job in retail or in the food industry. I spent 15 years of my life as a SW and don't have the experience for anything else. I've never made a resume. I'm autistic so I can't look customers in the eye. I'm also ADHD so I can't handle tasks very well. My AuDHD also gives me a strong sense of justice and I often feel like I'm too moral to be working in capitalism. And on top of it, I'm chronically ill so I'm constantly low on spoons and spend about half my day in bed. I dread having to go back to live with my mother, because she's 72 years old and would force me to be her caregiver even though she knows I'm disabled myself.
Any comrades have advice for this gal?
56 posts and 3 image replies omitted.>>704637the vast majority of prostitution in the world is rape
just like the vast majority of wage labor in the world is slavery
westoid middle class prostitutes doing it for cash while otherwise well off enough to go to college, etc. are equivalent to westoid middle classers who are in no way precarious, and wage for accumulation rather than survival
>>704276The idea of OnlyFans "gentrifying" sex work is so funny to me. Like bro, you can't see how nearly all of the street hookers are desperate women, drug addicted, Black and Native women, women with four kids they need to feed, women who came from abusive homes and used sex work as their only way to escape, women who are being trafficked? All while the professional escorts and girls at legal brothels charging $1000/hr are white, come from middle-class backgrounds, and have college degrees?
How much money do you think the porn industry brings in each year and who is acquiring most of that money?
The temptation to romanticize sex work, or any form of informal survival hustle, as inherently subversive is a variation of the same idealism that treats “the bourgeoisie” as a cloud. To confuse autonomy from a boss with autonomy from capital is to miss the point: capital is not simply the wage relation in its factory form, but the total social relation that structures survival. Marx was clear that the lumpenproletariat, including those operating through illicit or stigmatized economies, are not outside capital but subordinated to it in distorted form. Their work does not abolish exploitation; it recirculates value through shadow markets, intermediaries, and now platform capital itself. When sex work flourished as an oppositional survival strategy, it was never because it negated capitalism, but because it allowed individuals to maneuver within its cracks. The arrival of OnlyFans did not “gentrify” a once-radical practice; it revealed that even the most stigmatized forms of hustling are always vulnerable to commodification and enclosure. Just as the haute bourgeoisie weaponizes lumpen elements as disposable instruments of counterrevolution, the petit accumulation of the hustler, whether through drug networks, smuggling, or sex work, does not challenge the mode of production but risks reproducing it on a micro scale. There is nothing revolutionary about climbing from proletarian precarity into petit-bourgeois entrepreneurialism through illicit means. Subversion does not lie in individual exit strategies but in collective struggle to rupture the whole system of capital’s reproduction.
A common mistake in left discourse is to talk about “the bourgeoisie” as if it were a shapeless cloud floating above society, producing exploitation without visible machinery or human agency. This is politically lazy, theoretically idealist, and fundamentally anti-Marxist. Marx understood class as a real, structured formation, with identifiable fractions, alliances, and contradictions. Without tracing those internal structures, our politics is reduced to moral outrage and protest ritual, not strategy.
C. Wright Mills helped break through the fog with his power elite concept: corporate, political, and military leaders form a self-reinforcing oligarchy through shared institutions, elite universities, think tanks, corporate boards, and military command networks. Aaron Good, in American Exception, deepens this by showing how the U.S. state is best understood as tripartite:
The Public State, the visible, elected layer of governance.
The Deep State, the permanent security, intelligence, and covert-ops apparatus.
The Duopoly System, the bipartisan elite party structure that manages dissent and ensures policy continuity for ruling-class interests.
Good argues that the U.S. ruling order operates within a framework of “exceptionism”, the Schmittian concept that sovereignty lies in the state of legal exception a state acts upon for its self-preservation and “higher immorality” — a shared elite ethos that systemic criminality is acceptable when it benefits the class as a whole. This is not moral corruption in the abstract; it is a structural feature of bourgeois power, binding together factions that otherwise compete.
Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire observed how the haute bourgeoisie could weaponize the lumpenproletariat as street muscle, a reactionary shock force against workers. Good’s work shows how this practice has been modernized and globalized: the U.S. deep state has repeatedly partnered with criminalized intermediaries, foreign mercenaries, paramilitaries, gangs, to advance imperial interests. This is part of what Good calls elite illegalism: the routine use of illicit means by elite actors, shielded from accountability, to maintain and expand power.
This is not just an occasional moral lapse. It is a mode of governance. CIA-linked drug networks in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, heroin production under U.S.-aligned mujahideen in Afghanistan, Contra cocaine trafficking in Central America, Balkan heroin routes under NATO protection, even tolerated human trafficking networks — these are not “rogue” episodes. They are deliberate strategies that:
Provide off-the-books funding for covert ops.
Reward loyal intermediaries.
Destabilize or weaken target societies.
Maintain plausible deniability for the public state.
The recent public release of parts of the Epstein list is a striking example of how elite illegalism operates in the realm of social control. Epstein’s network, intersecting finance, intelligence, and politics, functioned not merely as a personal vice operation but as a potential leverage system for elements within the haute bourgeoisie and intelligence services. The mingling of billionaires, senior politicians, royalty, and corporate executives in a criminal network of trafficking and abuse underscores Good’s point: the boundaries between the “respectable” public elite and the covert criminal underworld are porous by design. Such scandals are rarely prosecuted to the top because they are structurally protected, serving both as blackmail tools and as demonstrations of elite impunity.
Seen through the Mills–Good framework, Epstein’s operation bridged all three layers of the tripartite state. It touched the public state through politicians and regulators who were compromised or protected him. It connected to the deep state through ties to intelligence-linked figures and agencies that allegedly facilitated his travel, funding, and immunity. And it intersected with the duopoly system via bipartisan political patrons and donors. In this way, the scandal illustrates that elite illegalism is not a peripheral feature of the ruling class, it is one of the hidden ligaments binding together its different organs of power.
Critically, this line of analysis is not a drift into right-wing conspiracism. The reactionary fringe often hijacks these scandals to promote antisemitic tropes, nationalist myths, or culture-war diversions. A Marxist analysis rejects such mystifications. We focus instead on the material relations, the fusion of capital accumulation, state power, and covert criminal networks, that give these scandals their systemic function. This is not about chasing lurid personalities; it is about exposing how capitalism at its imperial core integrates legal governance and organized crime into a unified class project.
By treating the bourgeoisie as a cloud, we erase the material integration between the “legal” and “illegal” sides of imperial capitalism. We miss how the haute bourgeoisie works through specific nodes: finance capital, energy conglomerates, arms manufacturers, private intelligence contractors, and transnational banks that launder illicit proceeds.
Good’s thesis reminds us: the U.S. ruling class is not simply a national capitalist elite. It is an imperial bloc that fuses state power, covert networks, and transnational capital into a single operational system. Within this bloc, bourgeois factions compete for policy dominance but share the deep-state machinery that protects the whole class. Understanding these internal divisions, and their shared illegalism, is not an academic luxury. It is the only way to identify contradictions.
>>704276>Everyone and her cat is now doing onlyfans. Why not write a novel? You can base it on your past experiences. You can make it as subversive as you want. To be cynical, subversive novels probably sell better to a public trapped in the grind and looking for escapism.
You'll need another job while you're writing it. Waitressing? You might not need much of a resume for that. A mate of mine did it. This was in London, so it might be different. She said it was tiring, but good money.
>>712586>but what else can you say about itThere's a bit more you can say about it. I think the OP has a legit point about gentrification. Alright, one thing "alternative" lifestyles aren't an alternative to is capitalism. But we all have to make a living, under capitalism. And the sex industry does at least give people who find it difficult to do a regular job, for various reasons ,a way to earn money.
Or did. gentrification is eating into that.
It's been happening in Soho in London, for example. Formerly a red light district with loads of pubs and where genuine artists and weirdos would hang out (Francis Bacon for example. ) the prostitution "walk ups" are gradually disappearing. Coffee shops there now have red neon prostitution signs as decor, but no actual prostitution. The place is being turned into a tourist trap/ theme park.
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