OTOH this is not the same as "VHS" porn of the past decades.
A few decades ago, there weren't that many "productions", performers were much fewer and some porn performers name were known by anyone, regardless if you had seen porn with them staring or not. A person getting out of the business and trying to make a new career would have a high chance of meeting people, especially men, in real life who might have seen at least one movie.
Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
> Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
This is dangerously wrong coming at least a decade after there are entire communities devoted to unmasking performers’ real identities and multiple reverse image search tools exist as apparent businesses. That used to be a human-driven practice - I first heard about it coverage of the Chinese internet mobs from the perspective of victims of misidentification - but like everything else it’s reportedly adopting AI. Here’s a story which got a bit of discussion a few years back:
One of the big things to remember is that these systems don’t need to be perfect, or even close, to cause harm. Even if they were only 10% accurate, that’s still a lot of people living with the question of whether the person they just met knows or whether today is the day some nut sent those links to HR. You can’t rely on getting lost in the crowd any more.
The fact these tools and some creeps exist doesn't mean your actual coworkers in your career will use those to find you.
And more importantly, said creeps would be the one who would have an inappropriate behavior in the workplace regardless of the tools they have at their disposition.
It doesn’t guarantee it, no, but it does mean the odds are rapidly getting higher.
It’s also severely optimistic to think that the guy doing it will suffer the consequences: if you search the news, you’ll find plenty of examples of cases where someone thought they knew the attacker but wasn’t able to prove it. Moreover even if they could prove it and the attacker did suffer consequences, it won’t magically wipe everyone else’s memories.
That is assuming that the identification will be solely driven by random individuals. However, expect there to be, if there already aren't, professional services that will do that in an organized way e.g. somebody may hire them for building an online presence profile of a future spouse. With the advent of AI and scaling afforded by cloud, such initiatives will only get more effective.
> Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
Your model of "social ramifications" seems to assume no one ever talks to anyone else, which is dead wrong. So to see problems, the only thing that needs to happen is one person needs to see their porn out of maybe the 1000 people who could recognize the performer IRL, then a rumor starts and a significant fraction of the 1000 (and more people besides) find out. No fame required.
Then the problem can balloon if another person out of that 1000 is angry with the performer, and decides to dox them by creating a website or posting that explicitly outs them to anyone who searches their name on Google.
Then, on top of that, there's all the facial recognition tech that's floating around, which is basically a "go strait to jail, to not pass go" thing.
in most cases, i don't think the social ramifications to worry about are 'your family finds out' but rather 'obsessed fan won't stop calling you', 'companies decline to interview you for a non-porn job', or 'cute guy turns out to have enough of a hangup about your past sex work to not date you' (which apparently doesn't necessarily imply he's not relationship material, though i'd think it ought to)
> or 'cute guy turns out to have enough of a hangup about your past sex work to not date you' (which apparently doesn't necessarily imply he's not relationship material, though i'd think it ought to)
Obviously such a person is not relationship material for a sex worker, but why would you think he ought not be relationship material for anyone else?
well, i was more thinking about a former sex worker, a group which includes many more of your friends and acquaintances than you're likely aware of. i'd think of it as much less of a red flag for anyone else!
still, it's a clue that what he wants out of the relationship is not an equal partner but a sort of brood mare or something. here in argentina, the kind of guys who would have a problem with former sex work often use the term 'mileage' (kilometraje) when they're talking about why they want to date virgins. they see you as a commodity to be consumed (the explicit analogy is comparing your vagina to a used car) and see your own sexual expression not as an opportunity for your flourishing but as degrading and damaging to you, since you are the good being consumed in the sexual encounter. this is the same conception of human sexual relations that underlies the rhetoric that prostitution is 'selling your body', rather than renting it like any other kind of hazardous physical labor, and that gives the name to the 'purity rings' worn by evangelical high school girls
this implies that, unless he's looking for a no-sex-until-marriage relationship (an honorable but tiny minority of such men), he's looking to exploit you, putting some mileage on your vagina, as he sees it. he's hoping you'll let him degrade your purity with his penis, if you aren't too used up already
of course, different people are different, and not everyone who has these hangups buys into this whole misogynistic ideology. but it's a real thing, and it's something that women have to be cautious of
the practical problems that result, even for non-former-sex-workers, are that guys like that are likely to have problems with the fact that you actually weren't a virgin when you started dating (unless you were, but that's also a tiny minority of all intimate relationships); if, god forbid, you get raped in the future, he might abandon you when you most need him, considering you to be 'damaged goods'; and he probably will feel entitled to cheat on you, since you're the good being consumed, and he's the consumer. in the best possible case, where he wants to be celibate until marriage and honestly monogamous afterwards, you're probably looking at a year or more of celibacy followed by marrying someone you might not have sexual chemistry with
> well, i was more thinking about a former sex worker, a group which includes many more of your friends and acquaintances than you're likely aware of.
People say stuff like that, but I'm skeptical. It probably indicates more about "your friends and acquaintances" than mine.
> still, it's a clue that what he wants out of the relationship is not an equal partner but a sort of brood mare or something.
I don't think you can infer that from not wanting to date a former sex worker, and you seem to be fixated on a certain stereotype (which may be super common in Argentina, for all I know). Others may not want to date a former sex worker for other reasons, for instance because the choosing sex work indicates a willingness to use intimacy transactionally and to be manipulative (or at least insincere) as well as experience and habits of doing that.
sex work seems to be anything but manipulative. It is rather blunt. Give me money and I will provide this service. Said service can be pretending acting like someone who actually love doing it for you or have feelings but this "acting" is not hidden.
If your issue is manipulative and insincere people, I would say the people you want to avoid are people working in politics, marketing, insurers or people reaching some level of management in general.
i do think sex work is more common in argentina than in other places i've lived. misogynists don't seem to be
i'm not just talking about a simple stereotype, though; i'm talking about a whole misogynistic ideology which is so widespread that you have to understand it in order to give any coherency to widely used phrases like 'sell your body' or 'purity ring'
i don't have any experience with prostitutes or camgirls as a client or social media manager or anything, so i can't really speak to their transactional use of intimacy and manipulativity, or lack thereof. they certainly seem sincere enough in the social interactions i've had with them, though hard to shock and rather unwilling to 'go along to get along' or to use euphemisms
intuitively i'd think that such a 'willingness to use intimacy transactionally and be manipulative' would tend to improve their earning potential, as with waitresses who are willing to flirt with clients, or psychologists whose work depends on clients trusting them with intimate emotional details, but many other factors seem like they'd come into play in all of these situations
> i'm not just talking about a simple stereotype, though; i'm talking about a whole misogynistic ideology which is so widespread that you have to understand it in order to give any coherency to widely used phrases like 'sell your body' or 'purity ring'
Honestly, it seems like you're conflating many different things (e.g. the "mileage" thing above, "purity rings," and the pejorative connotation of "sell your body") into a single artificial whole that doesn't actually exist as such. I'd grant the "mileage" thing is probably clearly a part of some "misogynistic ideology," but not the other two. The Wikipedia page on "purity rings" lists examples of male (now) celebrities who once wore them. The idea of "selling your body" being pejorative connects to the idea of commerce being corrupting (which is seen elsewhere, such at the concept of "selling out") and I don't think male prostitutes would be seen any more favorably than female ones.
you have some good points, and i appreciate the exchange
one clarification, though: i wasn't talking about the pejorative connotation of "selling your body", but rather the idea that a prostitution transaction amounts to a sale of a physical good (a body) rather than a rental of the good (and a sale of a service). to be coherent, this entails the premise that the sexual encounter leaves that good seriously and irreversibly damaged—and that the prostitute's client is not similarly damaged. indeed, a weak implication is that he benefits from the transaction
as for male prostitutes, part of the same meme-complex in many cultures is that being penetrated is what damages and degrades you; this is often bound up with ideas of male superiority, because the male role in vanilla penis-in-vagina intercourse is the role of the penetrator. in other cultural contexts, what's considered degrading is sex with men, who are of course almost always the clients of male prostitutes. but i agree that there is a lot of variation
there is also a lot of variation between people, and someone might be fertile ground for the 'purity ring' meme not because they feel that sex degrades women (or penetratees) but because it's just dirty and impure all around. this is the underlying metaphor for idioms like 'taint' (as a synonym for 'genitalia'), 'dirty joke', 'dirty old man', and so on. but you may be aware that boys wearing 'purity rings' is kind of a man-bites-dog phenomenon, rare enough to draw comment. the wikipedia article says that it became the 'focus of media attention' on the jonas brothers (the celebrities you mention)
someone who finds sex repulsive might be relationship material, but not for a conventional allosexual monogamous relationship. they could work well with an asexual partner or a polyamorous partner
It's always fascinating to see the working assumption that women are somehow indifferent to these issues. As though being a sex worker is fine as a man.
This is a topic I can speak on. I was a top male performer on one of the live sites about 10 years ago. I've went on to having a successful career in software, it helped me afford getting through college, I'm not sure I would have had the career I did without that help.
I think the odds of getting recognized were a bit lower for me being a male, my peak live viewership was a little over 1k viewers. A video of me also got reposted and featured on PornHub gay and was able to accumulate ~100k views before I was able to get it taken down. There are still plenty of videos around that I wasn't able to get taken down but the big sites like PornHub respect DMCA takedown requests.
Regarding getting recognized, I think you are somewhat right but it likely still happens. I had 2 people recognize me in person, only 1 found my real name because they recognized me at my college graduation. Nothing came of it besides them trying to add me on FaceBook. I think for girls they would be more likely to get recognized if they are successful because they get a lot more viewers.
I was lucky that nobody that did recognize me posted anywhere about what my real name is since that would be a way to find the videos of me when people search my real name. I think that is probably the biggest risk with performing is that if that association happens, it would probably be hard to wipe that association from the internet. One way out of it for women though is that they could take their spouses last name when they get married, their new name wouldn't be associated with the old porn name.
I have told people in my life about that past job. It had no impact on any of those relationships and never really came up again. So if it did come up again, I don't think it would have much impact on my life. In my mind, sex work is real work and those who do it should not be shamed for doing it.
> So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
I have no comment on the morals and ethics but as far as modern technology goes; most if not all of OnlyFans finds its way to darkweb | pirate | hoarder megasites where there's always a few because-we-can obsessed techlords training facial recognition, gait recognition, and seeding AI generated VR porn engines, etc.
We can be certain that any woman with an OnlyFans portfolio will face that being dragged up later in their life if they are at all slightly public.
They do have the modern available hand wave explaination of "deepfake by weird ex" that becomes more and more believable each passing day.
> We can be certain that any woman with an OnlyFans portfolio will face that being dragged up later in their life if they are at all slightly public.
I fail to see how it would be limited to women with an OF portfolio and not any female with an instagram/tiktok/facebook/linkedin account? Deepfaking is an online abuse problem that can reach anyone who has a public photo online on the internet.
\1 Real life identification via images posted online.
This can happen to anyone and more specifically it has a very high chance of happening to people who use OnlyFans and think they'll remain unknown - which runs counter to the opinion expressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41529846
[ .. Nobody will know who you are .. ] So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.
\2 Deep faking is increasing in frequency and has yet to be countered.
This offers actual OnlyFans creators an "out" if they wish to have lives seperate to their OF persona's - they can claim anything dug up to be a deepfake (in the absence of any contrary metadata that's definitive).
It's also something that will plague anyone with images online; it's probable that in the future people will pay as little attention to photorealistic videos of Margaret Thatcher blowing Ronald Reagan as they do those of the girl next door getting filthy with a centaur.
Steps are being taken to counter deep fakes, those steps will likely fail to some degree.
I would bet lot of producers and consumers live in different countries. A lot of online porn is produced in eastern europe and ex-USSR and societies there a lot less prude and religious compared to US. Some bullshit politicians might state otherwise, but US is far more conservative.
I would dare to disagree, and my source is meself as I'm from the region. You're mixing up social conservatism with protestantism apparently. For starters, Eastern Europe is quite a big thing. Some parts of it are very religious, and some completely not. But it's not the point: it's absolutely not OK on a mainstream level of society of probably all EE, and former USSR countries to earn on onlyfans. And FWIW being publicly known as a subscriber puts LOOSER over one's forehead
Actually in modern times it could be blink of an eye of a search if someone wants to find and has the motivation. In some cases such a search result match/suggestion might as well be inadvertent. But easy nonetheless.
it's possible, we'll see. certainly the stigma is much less now than it was 40 years ago in the vhs age
also most of the camgirls i know in real life block access to people who live in the same country as they (and i) do; that greatly reduces the chance of awkward dialogues with long-distant uncles at the next family reunion
Similar to how job listings often ask for LinkedIn, I wonder how long until there is a field for OnlyFans or PornHub creator accounts. Dystopian and depraved, sounds perfect for this godless timeline.
A few decades ago, there weren't that many "productions", performers were much fewer and some porn performers name were known by anyone, regardless if you had seen porn with them staring or not. A person getting out of the business and trying to make a new career would have a high chance of meeting people, especially men, in real life who might have seen at least one movie.
Nowadays pornhub and onlyfans are flooded by wannabee independent performers. Even the most addicted to porn can't possibly follow and keep track of more than a tiny subset of performers. So there is a good chance you can still have a career alongside it or switch from OF to a non sex related career easily.