This week’s Sunday Times featured an opinion piece by Sarah Ditum under the headline, “The sex trade has a mask for every age, but underneath it’s always about exploitation”. Its main focus was OnlyFans.
Here are the final six paragraphs. It is the last three that are relevant to us, but to be fair to Ditum I give the previous three for context. And indeed I don’t imagine many of us would disagree with what she says about the appalling Andrew Tate. However things go pear-shaped when she starts pontificating about prostitution.
Every once in a while, though, the less savoury side of OnlyFans breaks through to public view. Last week, it was making less flattering headlines, in association with the alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate, who is being prosecuted in Romania. The charges, if proven, would heavily implicate OnlyFans. Tate is accused of grooming women into believing they were his girlfriends, then convincing them to join OnlyFans. Along with three co-defendants, he allegedly controlled the income from this. One message reportedly declares their intention to “slave these bitches”.
All four deny wrongdoing. (OnlyFans says it can’t comment on an ongoing case, but points to policies designed to prevent abuse.) Still, “slave these bitches” is a good summary of the attitude to women Tate has promoted in his own videos. “I don’t mention webcam until after I have sex with a girl,” he says in one. “You don’t want a girl who’s in it for money. You want a girl who’s in it to be with you.”
It’s a cynical strategy but an astute one, because most women are reflexively appalled by the idea of commodifying themselves. Which is why pimps use the kind of “loverboy” techniques that Tate has described.
I once interviewed a woman who had been in prostitution. For her, as in the allegations of those who say they were abused by Tate, it started with a man she thought was her boyfriend. He asked her to have sex with his friend — and, eager to prove her love, she said yes.
This is what “sex work” almost always comes down to: a woman doing something she doesn’t want to and a man making her do it. The power the man in question holds over her might be emotional blackmail, it might be physical force or it might be her basic financial need.
It all amounts to something similar, however you garnish the sex trade with rhetoric about “empowerment” or sanitise it with glossy new technology. The industry will find another “acceptable face”, but it can never rid itself of its own squalid reality.
Ditum's generalising from a tiny sample is poor journalistic practice. She “once” interviewed an ex-prostitute – and this leads her to assert that prostitution is “always” a case of “a woman doing something she doesn’t want to and a man making her do it”.
“Emotional blackmail”? Very rare, I would have thought, although there is evidence that some Romanian pimps use such techniques. “Physical force”? Pretty rare too, other than sometimes in the murky world of Romanian and (in particular) Albanian pimps and traffickers.
“Basic financial need”? Yes, certainly, in most cases – but generally as the result of a conscious and considered decision to prefer the pay and the hours of the oldest profession to working at Harrods, Home Bargains or Happy Shopper.
