Bibliographic record
Abstract
The erotic camming industry has been around for almost three decades, exponentially growing as technology continues to push the bounds of how sex work is constituted online. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in unexpected technological and cultural revolutions, with increased innovations, humans becoming more dependent on technology more than ever, and disrupted online and offline operations (Anikin, 2021). The sex industry has irrevocably changed as well, especially online sex workers and adult performers as they experience an economic boom in the midst of the pandemic. This gave grounds to increased online sex work engagement, ranging from the creation of new online sex service sites and digital creators to camming veterans who had been active pre-COVID (Rubattu et al., 2023). Sites like OnlyFans can offer as a curious case study of ushering in exponential economic growth and social change and is worth exploring through critical lenses to complicate and challenge the hegemonic structures that is positioned in and must navigate through. In this piece, I will explore OnlyFans through the lens of neoliberalism, complicating the empowering language of self-made and empowered sex workers while they navigate capitalistic structures and at their expense, exploited for capital gain. Different case studies will be explored showing sex workers being affected by the “Girl Boss” neoliberal and choice feminist rhetoric, critiquing the language that presumably was in place to uplift and empower sex workers to destigmatize sex work (but inversely feed into capitalistic structures). I attempt to pull back the rose-colored glasses that so many sex workers on OnlyFans went in with (the promise of quick, easy, earn-while-you-sleep money along with being your own boss) and critically think about why this language has been prominent in the first place. The language of empowerment within neoliberal feminism, as reflected in this piece, is a quite potent tool for capitalism to be perpetuated, especially within the world of online sex work. No matter how much one is aware of the tendrils of capitalism reaching out in almost every aspect of their lives, they must play the game if they want to operate within the world of online sex work. Capitalism has shown to push workers, especially in marginalized communities, to different lengths to garner income: whether that may be enduring racism and discrimination to retain subscribers, to going through almost harmful lengths in order to stay above the competition, to almost losing oneself because of feeling personal responsibility to respond to the inequalities manifested by capitalism. Neoliberalism thrives hand in hand with capitalism and is part of a symbiotic relationship at the expense of our sex workers. Perhaps our gaslighting, gatekeeping, and girlbossing isn’t as productive as we thought.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".