The New York Post, that OnlyFans Medic, and the Real Scandal They Didn’t Cover
By: Bonny Brooks
Tags: Society, Poverty, Sex, Economics, Media

Over the weekend, journalists at The New York Post picked a random nobody and threw a grenade at her life. I’m talking of course about that 23-year-old NY-based paramedic — let’s call her Ms. K — posting racy pictures on OnlyFans to supplement her pay.

For anyone still catching up with the more recent iterations of the gig economy, OnlyFans is a portal where content creators set up profiles, and monthly subscribers (“fans”) pay to access pictures and videos — frequently explicit ones. OnlyFans was made infamous by more seasoned sex workers, but has become increasingly popular as a “side hustle” for workers and students struggling to pay their bills.

Most such women try to remain anonymous and keep the two jobs separate, because the discovery of an OnlyFans profile can lead to shunning and loss of their main job, and not just in “socially responsible” professions like nursing or teaching. For example, in April, BuzzFeed reported on an incident in which a mechanic from Indiana was fired after her coworkers found her OnlyFans account and began harassing her.

No matter, as far as the intrepid speaking-truth-to-power reporters at the Post were concerned. Despite Ms. K’s apparent pleas to remain anonymous, they plastered her full name under the headline: “NYC Medic Helped Make Ends Meet with Racy Only Fans Side Gig.” This, along with two header photos of her, one being in her paramedic uniform with the company name and logo visible. The fourth estate at its finest!

Ms. K is said to have been distraught, and at the time of writing, at home in West Virginia with her mother and father, who is recovering from cardiac arrest. She has not been able to speak to her employer about the scandal, but believes her job is hanging in the balance.

And well she might. For despite the fact that the private ambulance company she works for (Senior Care) pays below hospital wages, the firm expects impeccable behaviour from their staff on and off the clock. Job descriptions on the company website bar all “inappropriate conduct, on and off duty,” and require that every worker “adhere to standards of personal ethics, on and off duty, which reflect credit upon the profession.”

Impeccable off-the-clock conduct for below par wages — sweet deal!

Senior Care have reportedly asked to meet with Ms. K, when she will learn her fate. But the internet, deliverer of such dilemmas, is now riding to the rescue, and a GoFundMe page has been set up entitled: “Help (Ms. K) Fight For Her Livelihood.” If her OnlyFans page remains up, I’d wager her revenue will increase, but this is little consolation if she’s fired from the job she loves.

The Real Scandal

There is so much to talk about here. About journalistic ethics. About the value we place on medics, particularly during a pandemic. About slut-shaming. About a decline of intimacy and the fact that even before the pandemic, people were having less actual sex than decades gone by. But none of these issues are more relevant than digital capitalism’s ways and means.

The real scandal is not an erstwhile Florence Nightingale getting paid to be sexy, or even a tabloid doing some tabloiding. It’s that the American economy can be so precarious — even for a paramedic putting her life on the line in a global pandemic — that online sex work serves as supplemental income.

As other paramedics have attested, poorly paying jobs are commonplace, and the work is often traumatic. New York is a notoriously expensive city. Many a first responder has been forced to take a second job or extra shifts. What a sad indictment of present-day economic precarity that the people risking their lives to save ours should find their incomes insufficient.

In a statement today, Ms. K said:

I’m here to tell you all that my First Responder brothers and sisters are suffering. We need your help. We have been exhausted for months, reusing months old PPE, being refused hazard pay, and watching our fellow healthcare workers die in front of our eyes, in our ambulances. At least three NYC EMS workers died by suicide this year and there has been very little action about the lack of mental health care accessibility for first responders. EMS are the lowest paid first responders in NYC which leads to 50+ hour weeks and sometimes three jobs. My brothers and sisters DESERVE CHANGE!

Sex work is more prevalent than you probably think. Reliable figures are difficult to come by since it tends to take place in the shadows, so there are research access and under-reporting issues. Prevalence estimates seem to vary, and there is also the question of how you define the sex industry.

One oft-cited statistic is one percent of American women. But a U.S. 2016 YouGov poll (with a 4.5 percent margin of error) found that six percent of women reported having had sex with someone for money. Unsurprisingly, sellers of sex were concentrated in lower income brackets. “Cam work” is another matter, of course, but increasingly “sex work” is an umbrella term covering the physical act, stripping, phone work, and online content like that found on OnlyFans. Internet sex work flourishes in a world that increasingly enacts its pains, pleasures, and mundanities online.

The pandemic has seen several million Americans lose their jobs, and the online sex market thrive. As far back as June, Insider reported that since the COVID crisis hit, almost half a million had moved onto OnlyFans, IsMyGirl, and other erotic content sites.

Should we be surprised when desperate people get sent a $1200 check and told “good luck”?

As the friend of Ms. K who set up the GoFundMe page said: “In order to support herself during the pandemic as well as her family, (Ms. K) turned to sex work.” And back in October, BuzzFeed reported that nursing students are resorting to OnlyFans to make ends meet. As is most often the case, “sex work wasn’t part of the plan” for these bright, hard-working young women. But as the BuzzFeed piece noted, online sex work has become “an increasingly mainstream facet of the gig economy and people … say the risks are worth it to keep themselves afloat.”

Sex worker advocate Kate Zen told BuzzFeed:

People who were not sex workers started using OnlyFans and became sex workers due to losing their other jobs during COVID-19. So, again you see sex work, as it often is, as a sort of gig of last resort for people. … This is the way it’s always been. … For a lot of the people … sex work is not necessarily their only occupation, or the main occupation even; it’s this emergency source of informal income that they can get when they’re in a bind.

Indeed, as has been observed, escaping poverty in America often means the utterly implausible instance of no unforeseen significant expenses in a person’s life for years. That sex work should be the safety net is just scandalous, whichever way you slice it.

Both the need for OnlyFans as a “part-time gig,” and the need to keep that gig a secret, is driven by the modern serfdom of the gig economy, in which companies paying below-par wages for backbreaking work (as in the case of many EMTs) can dictate off-the-clock conduct.

OnlyFans and its ilk is an interesting permutation in online sex work, since it seems to offer something closer to a simulated girlfriend experience, offering a peak into the model’s (constructed, online) personality.

You might say this is heartening, and certainly the greater earning cut for images (as opposed to porn) and autonomy that OnlyFans seems to offer its models has been touted as a benefit. But I am reminded of an unrelated rumination of Jia Tolentino’s:

Today, there is nowhere further to go. Capitalism has no land left to cultivate but the self. Everything is being cannibalized — not just goods and labor, but personality and relationships and attention. The next step is complete identification with the online marketplace, physical and spiritual inseparability from the internet: a nightmare that is already banging down the door.

The whole “OnlyFans paramedic” affair has clearly been an awful ordeal for a bright young woman who is putting her life on the line amidst COVID. But it probably won’t hurt Ms. K financially because, even if she gets fired, which seems fairly likely, the coverage is massive exposure for her page and the GoFundMe fund currently stands at $56,000.

But what about all the underpaid or laid-off workers who can’t afford to live and don’t attract a big GoFundMe? Such is the biggest scandal in all this, and the oft-untold story.