why more and more creators are branching out into adult entertainment

In an ever more crowded and difficult to navigate social media landscape, more wanna be influencers and viral stars are trying to get attention by emulating porn stars.

You’ve been complaining about it for a while now. Porn bots filling up replies of almost every social network. Every other content creator’s links in bio feature an OnlyFans, or at least a Fansly. Constant jokes featuring some rendition of the PornHub logo. And an awful lot of streamers are wearing less and less clothes, advertising ever more NSFW shenanigans. It’s not just you. Social scientists have noticed this trend as well and are interested in measuring its extent and creating some quantitative standard for further research into how many people want to bare it all, and why.

The most recent study looked at just over 1,900 videos on Twitch and noticed that out of 745 female streamers, 579 added some sort of sexual element to their broadcasts, such as revealing postures, talking about sex, and acting seductively. By contrast, just 15 out of 1,174 male streamers met the same criteria. In short, women who stream in a number of popular categories add sexual elements to all their broadcasts, thumbnails, and content more often than not, while men are seldom trying to do the same.

Why is the sexualization so prevalent and so lopsided in terms of gender distribution? I’d guess the simplest and most obvious answer would be “because that’s what gets clicks, obviously,” but we don’t have hard data on this. It just seems like no one would be doing it if the traffic needle didn’t move. Where we do have more peer-reviewed ground to stand on is that it also has a classic “everybody’s doing it effect,” as those often exposed to sexualized imagery start to steer towards self-sexualization.

That also makes sense because like almost all primates, we take social cues from our environment and peers. (Which is a very scientific and polite way of saying “monkey see, monkey do,” basically.) In spaces where sexualization is expected, for good or ill, a lot of people will just assume this is the part they need to play. In spaces where it may be frowned upon, we’ll lie that everyone around us is a sex fiend while we keep our animalistic urges under control.

Which brings us back to the original question of why your feed may be getting a little more porny. Increasingly, social media algorithms are switching from considering how many followers you have and who follows who — the so-called social graph in social media developer parlance — to what you and said followers actively engage with and share. This is why so many creators with once soaring followings plateaued. Having a lot of followers is no longer all that important, getting them to click on you is. And how do you get those clicks? Well, you can borrow a strategy from COVID’s heyday.

how covid made the internet a little sexier

Let’s go back to that horrible year of lockdowns, fires, disease, public protests, and every email, ad, and press release starting with “in these unprecedented times” for a little bit. With an awful lot of bored, homebound people trying to wait out the COVID pandemic, demand for sex workers’ offerings went through the roof, and with tens of millions losing their jobs, the interest in trying to meet that demand was just as high.

Over 150,000 users every day were creating brand new profiles on OnlyFans, a site now synonymous with online sex workers. There were virtual strip clubs. And, as odd and unbelievable as it still sounds, you could hire dominatrixes in Animal Crossing, the saccharine game seemingly designed to trigger cute aggression. As much as millions of people were marooned at home and getting cabin fever, millions more spent years in jobs that have been rather precarious at best.

The freelance economy of the past 15 years had been a socioeconomic regression for many at a time we needed some real, actual forward thinking. People are now used to looking at every potential hobby and recreational activity as a revenue stream to help make ends meet, or feel like they have some sort of financial security. Technology and social media make it easier than ever to try your luck at fame and fortune. And almost everyone either has an HD camera handy, or can invest a few hundred dollars in one.

Now, you could say to those deciding to supplement their incomes with professionally baring it all should’ve tried their luck with delivery services. But odds are, they already were on these platforms, making deliveries during the day while risking exposure to people who were told by an angry man on Fox News that wearing masks and washing their hands were liberal conspiracies, and gulping down livestock dewormer will cure the Chinese Marxist Illuminati pedophile cannibal reptilian “bioweapon.”

Sitting home and taking nude pictures and videos seemed safe, pleasant, and maybe even fun and ego-boosting by contrast if you were successful, so quite a few took all the jokes about selling feet pics and underwear for rent to heart. Especially so if their bank accounts were rapidly dwindling. Yes, there were the occasional rude fans, but I’ll bet it beat dealing with all the Karens and Kevins suffering from severe quarantine rage you couldn’t block with a click.

After the pandemic abated thanks to vaccines and better treatments, creators whose attempts at amateur porn stardom were at least supplementing their needs had little reason to stop making money. Their success stories encouraged other creators to join in — see the aforementioned study about social context cues — and it’s now more or less of a template. Start on your streaming or social platform of choice based on what content goes viral where more easily, and if your brand allows it, create that OnlyFans page and start pushing the envelope. There was horny gold in them there hills.

the “shocking discovery” that sex work is work

It’s was at this point that internet pundits began to jump in and proclaim sex work the new driving for Uber, and hinting that for yet another stream of passive income, you should be investing in a glow up and practicing your o-face for the soon-to-appear legions of horny fans. But that’s the fantasy. The reality, according to sex workers, is rather different. One of the reasons why they think robots could never do their job is because only a part of what they do involves nudity and sex.

Porn, like any entertainment career, suffers from the public perception that it will be automatically lucrative and launch you into the financial stratosphere. When people heard that I used to do weekly international radio, they assumed I was getting a six figure retainer. It was hard not to laugh because the reality is that contributors who get paid at all are very few and far between. Plus, many people who appear on the radio and TV are more than willing to do it just for the exposure.

The same exact dynamic can be seen in the world of adult entertainment. Thanks to our society’s erratic love-hate relationship with porn, we have a handful of porn stars that are seen as instant celebrities, but we also not so secretly envy their jobs. In our minds, they get to have sex all day, an activity most of us consider the most fun one can possibly have, and cash rains on them from above. (Among other things.) This is, in part, why so many flocked to open accounts on OnlyFans during the pandemic. It’s sold to us as the ultimate get rich quick scheme.

But the truth of the matter is that you have to have real talent, luck, and determination to reap significant rewards. And in the highly saturated environment of social media and NSFW forums you have to be everywhere for strangers who know nothing about you and couldn’t possibly care less about your goals to even consider giving you a look. It may take a long time and significant investment to start seeing stable, steady returns from your efforts. There may be more money and attention to go around, but there’s also more competition for it than ever before as well.

Statistically, it’s very likely that the vast majority of aspiring new performers will fail and then try to scrub their nudes from the web because discrimination against sex workers is alive and well, and it may easily cost them a future job even though that discrimination is based on ignorant, false, and woefully outdated stereotypes.

While younger generations may be more accepting, despite being somewhat more buttoned down when it comes to actually having sex, your typically older managers and executives will be far more likely to abuse any evidence of any attempt at online porn stardom. But then again, some people may have given up all hope of having a traditional job that actually provides them with long term financial security, and fully embracing the renegade content creator side-hustles-for-life style, including the all too familiar now OnlyFans link in their bio after being battered by inflation and mass layoffs in the wake of interest rate hikes.

a wave of semi-accidental porn stars

Every entertainer needs a hook. Back in the day, if you got lucky, you got an agent who could figure out how to market your and what talents were in high demand. With traditional gatekeepers gone and replaced by whatever social media feed algorithm was last pushed by TikTok, Meta, or The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter, and a daily tally of user engagement numbers, there’s no reliable guide on developing your hook. It’s all trial and error in a process that can take years, and is very likely to end in failure, so creators need to appeal to as many demographics as possible.

The message is “Look, I need your attention to pay the bills. So, what do you want? Music? Comedy? Live reality show drama streams? My naked ass? Take your pick, I can do it all.” And that seems to work given the number of creators doing it as a side hustle at the very least. If it didn’t, we’d probably see a lot fewer links and far fewer thumbnails that venture into borderline softcore from creators trying to stand out on platforms where the algorithms change constantly and typical human lust is the one constant on which you can rely.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think there’s anything problematic with wanting to be a sex worker because you genuinely enjoy it. We also can’t dismiss how many sex workers have chronic health issues that make it harder to keep a more routine job and genuinely love what they do, or are part of a marginalized group for whom this ended up being a decent, steady job where they feel empowered and autonomous. I am not here to yuck anybody’s yum or make personal judgments.

But we should shouldn’t bury the air of desperation and feeling that hobbies or even an otherwise private recreational activity that could be monetized in any way should be because the future looks so uncertain and bleak, and pretty much everyone save for the top quintile in North America keeps falling behind thanks to mostly stagnant wages and runaway costs of living. COVID-19 was a stress test for modern societies and economies, and they did quite poorly under the strain.

The pandemic may finally be under control with vaccines and proven treatments, but we’re still reading about legions of aspiring adult performers furiously competing with each other to pay the bills because their jobs simply aren’t enough and feel a need to jump into something, anything they can do from the comfort of their home, which can then steer them towards OnlyFans and adult entertainment in a bid to stand out, and become a large enough node on that “interest graph” that they don’t need to fret how to make rent for a few months.

In short, because the vast majority of what we see on the internet is determined solely by our level of engagement with it, and a lot of people see it as a way off the hamster wheel of dead end and low paying jobs that demand more and more while giving less and less, they’re trying to get fuck you money by fucking themselves and each other, and hoping you’ll notice and be interested it enough to like and subscribe.

See: Anciones-Anguita, K., Checa-Romero, M. (2024) Sexualized culture on live-streaming platforms: a content analysis of Twitch.tv, Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 257, DOI: 10.1057/s41599-024-02724-z

Karsay, K., Knoll, J. et al (2018). Sexualizing media use and self-objectification: a meta-analysis. Psych Women Quart, 42(1), 9-28, DOI: 10.1177/0361684317743019