Nadia Miller

“I don’t really want kids right now… They can cry in a Ferrari,” Elle Brooke replied to the question of how she would explain her career to her kids in an interview with Piers Morgan. During the interview, Talk TV ran the headline:

Thanks to social media platforms like OnlyFans, a career in porn is not what it was. The cracked leather casting couch, Nikon camera set, and hairy producer named Niko have been replaced by the comfort of your own home, an iPhone, and an arm flexible enough to catch the right angles. Whereas a person who followed their favourite pornstar used to be called a stalker, today’s cam-stars post content to be seen exclusively by their followers, who pay a fee for special access. As Brooke’s comment implies, OnlyFans is lucrative; the $5 subscription may sound like peanuts, but there are 210 million users who are willing to pay for access to images, videos, and even private messaging, just to feel close to their favourite creators [2].

More people are now turning to OF as an additional source of income– a ‘side hustle.’ OF has 2.1 million creators [2]. Creators are not necessarily making pornographic content, and the platform does not market itself as a porn site, but the accounts with the most subscriptions are women who post sexually explicit content, which has generated some moral panic from across the political spectrum. Although sex work is decriminalized in many countries, many retain a negative attitude towards it. The question about the morality of sex work is archaic––  originating in (mis)interpretations of Biblical, Quranic and other religious texts.

Given that much of the concern about pornography has to do with women and their socio-political status, feminist philosophers have much to say about the matter. Martha Nussbaum, the Harvard-borne moral philosopher, uses Playboy images of Nicollette Sheridan playing tennis in a tight up skirt to illustrate the immorality of objectification:

it says, in effect, she thinks she is displaying herself as a skilled athletic performer, but all the while she is actually displaying herself to our gaze as a sexual object. (pp. 255)

The thought is that sexually suggestive and explicit content is inherently objectifying in nature. Nussbaum takes it that the content is therefore unethical.

Even if we agree that the content is objectifying, we might not be willing to grant that this necessarily makes it wrong. According to Nussbaum, there is only one circumstance under which sexual objectification might be ethically permissible, which is where there exists a history of mutual love and intimacy between sexual partners. So, Nussbaum’s view compels us to think that the playboy pub was unethical (that is, unless it could be said that Sheridan was in a loving, intimate relationship with her entire audience).

How does this all relate to feminism, exactly? Well, a simple argument can be made for the case that OnlyFans is anti-feminist. Let us start with some premisses:

1. Feminism is about ending the immoral treatment of women
2. Sexual objectification is immoral in the absence of a Nussbaumian relationship
3. OnlyFans sexually objectifies women
4. The objectification that takes place on OnlyFans is not in the context of a Nussbaumian relationship

2,3, and 4 give us the sub-conclusion:

Sub-C: The sexual objectification of women on OnlyFans is immoral

Which in turn gives us our conclusion:

C: OnlyFans is anti-feminist

A view like Nussbaum’s leaves little room for the possibility that OnlyFans creators like Elle Brooke aren’t doing something anti-feminist. (Morgan would be happy with this conclusion.) However, is Nussbaum really right in her conviction that sexual objectification is only acceptable between partners who share a pre-existing intimate and loving relationship? After all, it appears that both Sheridan and Brooke are happy to be objectified in this way, at least insofar as they are being compensated for it. Indeed, it seems that many if not most of us are happy to objectified in return for a wage.

For instance, take a manual labourer. To their employer, their body and labour is a means to an end, namely, the end of keeping the business afloat. And, while the labourer is aware that they are being objectified by their employer in this way, they are willing to do so in return for a living wage, benefits, and whatever else it is they stand to gain from taking the job. Put simply, by signing their employment contract, the labourer consents to being objectified. Now, taking for granted that we are condemned to live in this capitalist society for the time being, most of us would not find this sort of objectification morally objectionable. The right to partake in a capitalist framework (i.e., the right to work) has in fact been central to feminism over the years, so it cannot simply be that objectification as such is immoral and anti-feminist at that. It must be something about the special nature of sexual objectification which makes it morally deplorable.

Figuring out what is so special about sexual objectification, such that it decrees a moral evaluation separate from other forms of objectification, is surely a fraught task. It is true that in ordinary, face-to-face sex work, the risk of violence and unwanted pregnancy is very high. But sex is not uniquely invasive compared to manual labour and, at least where OnlyFans is concerned, the risk of proximate harm (like physical violence from a client or unwanted pregnancy) is lower. Moreover, pace Nussbaum, the presence of an intimate, loving relationship itself does little to protect from these risks– sexual violence and the coercion of loved ones happens no less in the context of marriage and monogamy than in their absence. Take, for example, the wife who gives her husband a blowjob because she feels it is her duty, or the person who unwillingly agrees to be penetrated only because their partner has been insisting on it for years.

Now, this only tells us that sexual objectification in the context of a Nussbaumian relationship can still be immoral, which does little to address the simple argument from before. But if relationship statuses can’t explain the (im)morality of sexual objectification, then we have a clue to look elsewhere.

As Patricia Marino argues in her “The Ethics of Sexual Objectification: Autonomy and Consent,” consent should be central to our analyses of the ethics of objectification. Marino’s view is deeply intuitive if, like me, you have been subjected to the ‘consent talk’ in schools throughout childhood and adolescence (you know, the whole ‘no means no’ and ‘the absence of yes is a no’ spiel). Her view also caters to those of us adventurous folk who feel that things like BDSM and having a one-night stand aren’t necessarily unethical. Basically, if X consents to be sexually objectified, then it is not immoral. This principle is much more amenable to Brooke’s situation– she at least seems sure that it was her choice to create an OnlyFans account. It is an important tenet of feminism that women should choose how their lives, careers and futures take shape. So, we might side with Marino and take the following stance on OnlyFans:

OnlyFans is feminist only in the case where a user consents to being sexually objectified.

This principle sounds misleadingly straightforward to satisfy. Channelling Rousseau, to consent is to willingly give up a right to something; either to some aspect of one’s self or estate. Some examples: If I give someone consent to use my bike, I relinquish the right to use it for the agreed period of time. If I consent to sex, I conditionally and temporarily give up some of the right that I have to not be touched and moved in certain ways and places by another person. To consent to the publication of a pornographic image where I am the subject is to give up the right I have to keep the image private. Etcetera.

This conception of consent may be dated, but I think it helps to put into perspective just what is at stake with consent. Moreover, consent must be willing – I cannot genuinely give consent at gunpoint, nor can I consent under deceptive pretense or any other coercive force – and this is where the OnlyFans question gets tricky. Marino writes about “adaptive preferences,” choices we make under a constrained set of circumstances, such that it would be hard to describe them as ‘free’ choices. Imagine I am starving, and I have before me the choice to eat either some insects or some dirt. I am disgusted by both, but only one will give me any sort of nutrition, so I choose to eat the insects. Really, I would rather have eaten neither; I’d much rather have a sandwich, but I was forced to adapt to the dire nature of my situation.

Being a woman condemns one to all sorts of socially and politically dire situations. We are under the constant pressure to conform to oppressive stereotypes about femininity; about how we should look, behave and feel; about what shapes our lives ought to take and how we ought to make ourselves available to men as service providers and desire satisfiers. If political society exerts a constant and inescapable force upon us to make certain choices, to what extent can these be consensual? Can one choose to be an object when one is primordially defined as such? The point may be easily extended to workers as well as women– if we must work to survive, then the sense in which we consent to an employment contract is surely problematic. Often, the law is not so concerned with such complex philosophical issues; many contracts stand as long as their terms are intact and you signed at the X. You agreed to the terms and conditions. You said yes. You consented.

In a society where a young woman’s worth is defined by how well she sexually gratifies men, and how many she can gratify at once, an attractive OnlyFans profile turns out to be her pièce de résistance. Of course, she must first choose to use it, but is she free not to?

Refs

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNCs4Gz4TiY&pp=ygUYcGllcnMgbW9yZ2FuIGVsbGUgYnJvb2tz

[2] https://thesmallbusinessblog.net/onlyfans-statistics/

Marino, Patricia. “The Ethics of Sexual Objectification: Autonomy and Consent“. Inquiry 51.4 (2008): 345-364.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Objectification“. Philosophy and Public Affairs. 24.4 (Autumn, 1995): 249-291.