Subscription Intimacy: Amateurism, Authenticity and Emotional Labour in Direct-to-Consumer Gay Pornography
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: As pornography studios deal with declining profits and performers work to survive on decreasing scene rates, direct-to-consumer platforms such as OnlyFans are being hailed by some as saviours of the industry. Exemplifying the promises of the current gig economy, these platforms claim to offer supplemental income and autonomy and have been praised by journalists as addressing market demand for intimacy in a mainstream pornographic landscape largely devoid of it. But these platforms can also be seen as another example of the emotional labour that is increasingly required of porn performers. This includes performers depicting “authentic” desire in their videos, participating in on-camera interviews, and engaging with fans across multiple social media networks with differing regulations around nudity that can be challenging for adult performers to navigate. This article situates these direct-to-consumer platforms within the larger history of gay porn production, amateur video, and discourses of authenticity, and considers the possibilities of monetizing new forms of emotional labour, or what I refer to as “subscription intimacy.” Keywords: gay pornography, authenticity, amateur pornography, emotional labour, social media.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it