Subscription Intimacy: Amateurism, Authenticity and Emotional Labour in Direct-to-Consumer Gay Pornography
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".