“My Job, My Life, Myself.”
By: Punya Sidhu
Tags: Instagram, Sex, Onlyfans, Loneliness, Covid 19

“My Job, My Life, Myself.”

In 2010, a man named Kevin Systrom took a photo of a dog. He uploaded it to Instagram with the caption “test”. This was the first photo ever posted on the app. Kevin and another man named Mark Krieger, sold the app to a third man named Mark Zuckerberg in 2012. The dog remains nameless.

If you were a conscious member of society in 2010, you more than likely remember the conception and feverish rise of the app. Maybe you posted a picture of your cup of coffee. Ten years later, some of us rely on it to pay rent.

You probably also remember new words starting to show up everywhere: “creatives”, “influencer” and “branded content” are among them. “On-Brand” was added to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary in 2019. So was “screen time”, “page view” and “gig economy”. So was “influencer”.

As the COVID-19 pandemic forced a number of people to “live” online, a surge of new businesses, OnlyFans accounts, Patreon pages, YouTube channels, and Depop accounts were created. The more time we spend online, the more ways, we realized, we could commercialize ourselves.

Adult content creator Romi Chase provides paid coaching for those looking to make money in the online sex work industry. She assesses each part of their online presence: their social media pages, their website, and their OnlyFans page. She spends an hour and a half on a phone or video call to discuss what they need to keep doing or do differently to grow their following and increase their monthly income.

OnlyFans saw a reported 75% increase in new accounts in April 2020, a month after the world went into lockdown. Unlike porn sites, OnlyFans allows subscribers to interact directly with models, and offers a level of authenticity and intimacy that many were missing both before and during the pandemic.

Chase has learned that what her own subscribers really want from her is a personal connection; they pay her phone bills, buy her items from her Amazon wishlist, and pay for her nails.

“They don’t really care for this whole Instagram fame, or social media fame, or articles written about me. They don’t care about that,” Chase says. “They want to know the real me.”

In a January 2020 study published by health-insurance company Cigna, 61% of American adults reported being lonely, up three percent from 2018. After the world went into lockdown in March, the months that followed showed an expected uptick in reported loneliness: a study done by UK charity Mental Health Foundation found that 44% of UK residents aged 18–24 said that they were lonely during the pandemic; before the pandemic, 16% of people in this same age group reported feeling lonely.

The level of interactivity and personal one-on-one interaction that people are able to get through OnlyFans helps to satisfy the need for human intimacy.

“[The] majority of them stay and become regulars, because of the interaction,” Chase says. “Because I allow them to enter my life. As I started doing it, I realized, that’s kind of what they need… they want to be able to help me out.”

The language surrounding sex work has changed too: “adult content creator” became a term for those who are engaging in online sex work, while “sex worker” was reserved for those who are full-service or in-person sex workers. While “adult content creators” were able to use the pandemic to their advantage, many other sex workers were unable to do the same. Instagram has long been accused of shadowbanning, or censoring content by hiding posts by certain accounts from those who do not follow them. If a user posts a picture with a hashtag, the post won’t show up under that hashtag when searched. The site states in its community guidelines that users are unable to “offer sexual services”, while Facebook’s community standards state that they “draw the line, however, when content facilitates, encourages or coordinates sexual encounters or commercial sexual services between adults such as prostitution or escort services”. Much is left to the platform’s discretion as to what constitutes a “sexual encounter” or “sexual service”: plenty of influencers with OnlyFans pages are left untouched, while full-time sex workers are unable to post videos of strip club performances or links to adult sites without fear of falling victim to shadowbanning or having their posts removed.

Instagram’s community guidelines state that they don’t allow “Attempted coordination of or recruitment for adult sexual activities” including strip club shows, but these rules seem to be reserved for strippers who rely on the platform to circulate their posts and get engagement rather than pole fitness gurus.

The acceptability of different forms of sexuality is a topic that sex educator and sex & dating journalist Caroline Colvin has navigated during the pandemic. They noticed who the “sex positivity” movement within the sexual wellness industry leaves out:

“You can talk about vibrators, you can talk about the best sex positions for you and your partner but the minute you bring up strippers and sex workers, it’s a problem because it’s not a palatable expression of sexuality,” Colvin says.

When quarantine spurred a bout of summer boredom, and desire to express their creativity and sexuality, Colvin started an OnlyFans page, where they post photo and video content. They found a sense of empowerment in their work, and found that it made them feel good about the way they looked.

“I’ve obviously gotten thicker since quarantine has started, and I think it’s really helped me with my self image,” they said. “I think it’s been nice to have these artful imprints of my body. At a time when I could be feeling bad about it, I think It helps me see myself in a positive light.”

What happens when our livelihood is so closely linked to our identity? What do we do when the way we look, act, and speak dictates whether or not we are able to feed ourselves? The inescapability of social media can be unsettling. The realization that one relies on social media to sustain a career rings true for many in the creative industries. A January 2020 study published in Sage Journals on the relationship between Twitter and the fashion industry analyzed data from the social site to determine its relationship to the changing industry. Researchers found that fashion content created by “amateurs” was overtaking long standing fixtures like fashion magazines: “But new technology is changing the way in which fashion is consumed — intermediaries, such as major fashion magazines, are losing ground to user-generated content produced by amateurs and published on social media“ (Casadei & Lee). What will be the impact on a generation of people who have relied on social media for virtually their entire lives?

“I don’t want to be too pessimistic but I just feel like it just shows that capitalism is so embedded in the world and how we move throughout the world,” Colvin says.

It’s not only the need to constantly use social media that can be exhausting, but also the speed at which people are pressured to release content in order to stay relevant.

Brooklyn-based photographer, model, and social media advisor Izzy notices a pressure amongst those pursuing creative careers to always be releasing content.

“Responses are required immediately, because there’s so much access and people will expect to see all sorts of projects all the time, constantly,” she says. And it’s exhausting.”

Another effect of the capitalism-driven brainchild of Systrom and Krieger is the lack of authenticity that often accompanies the experience of using or consuming social media.

“You have to create a brand out of yourself,” she says. “I used to be so into that and be really trying to… present this particular look, or this particular attitude and I’m like, ‘that’s not me.’”

The eerie feeling of meeting someone in real life who is completely different from the image they present online, or vice versa, can be a necessary reminder that you don’t really know people unless, well, you know them (I promise I’m going somewhere with this). Earlier this year, memes about not wanting to be perceived circulated on Twitter. Thousands of people resonated with the feeling of wanting to simply disappear, without having to deal with the perceptions of others. If you hadn’t considered it before, the likelihood of considering moving to another country, finding an empty hillside somewhere and starting a commune might have gone up this year.

As people tried their best to disconnect as much as they could, lots of them turned to home improvement and interior design projects to make their space as peaceful as possible.

Yuka Iwasaki, co-founder of the curated Instagram homeware boutique Resident Objects, started the business with Camille Nichelini before the pandemic hit. The page, featuring the pairs’ own apartments, has served as inspiration for people trying to revamp their homes to feel vibrant and happier. Gone are the days of “modern” minimalism: people want to feel inspired and at home in their homes.

“We just wanted to decorate our homes to be as happy as possible,” Iwasaki wrote in an email. “I have never been drawn to minimalism, in fashion or in home decor. In recent times maybe because of COVID I have been drawn to things that make me feel nostalgic. Anything from the 80s or 90s really, the decades I grew up in and have fond memories of.”

Allison Vanhook, founder of handmade blanket company Beluga Blankets, shares a similar sentiment about the need for comfort when at home; she began selling handmade knitted blankets during quarantine, and realized the need that people had for something intimate. As people spent more time in their homes, they realized that they wanted things that were personalized to surround them, rather than a hoard of convenient, mass manufactured items from Amazon.

While we (by we I mean me, who can’t and won’t cook) made jokes about people baking bread and returning to the roots of human civilization, it led many to a realization about where all of our s**t comes from, and how much we depend on each other.

“Throughout this process I’ve learned so much about sourcing materials and what goes into a project,” Vanhook says. “If you see a sweater you just look at the sweater and the price tag but you don’t think about, ‘okay, they had to go to a mill, they had to source the wool, they had to design the pattern, and then they had to execute it’.”

This year was a fever dream. I’m not sure that I’m even going to remember most of what happened. But it changed everything. It brought all the different facets of our lives together: sometimes in a good way, other times in a terrifying way. We’ll probably continue to spiral, but at least now we have tools to ground us.