Dr Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith.
School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication Lecturer Dr Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith has recently had an article published in Porn Studies. The article, titled OnlyFans as Gig-Economy Work: A Nexus of Precarity and Stigma, is focused around understanding online sex work as a kind of gig-economy work.
Most of Dr Easterbrook-Smith’s research to date has been about the way that sex work and sex workers are represented in the news media. Aotearoa New Zealand has a model of sex work decriminalisation that has been in place since 2003. This model treats sex work broadly as a job and regulates it in the same way that comparable businesses are regulated. It’s subject to occupational health and safety regulations, as well as labour laws, the same as other businesses.
However, the stigma of sex work doesn’t evaporate at the same time as it is decriminalised, so sex workers here still experience discrimination.
“Online sex work is mediated through a platform, the same as things like Uber or Fiverr, it’s piecemeal. The workers are contractors not employees and how they work is determined by the policies of the platform," Dr Easterbrook-Smith says.
In the early stages of the pandemic, OnlyFans started to gain a lot of mainstream name recognition and grew very quickly, for a combination of reasons. Many people who had formerly done face-to-face sex work switched to online sex work and some people who suddenly found themselves unemployed or under-employed started doing online sex work. Anecdotally at least, there was an increase in clients as well, as a lot of people found they were lacking social interaction and had fewer things to spend their money on while stuck at home.
Dr Easterbrook-Smith points out that gig-economy work exposes workers to financial precarity, because the work is never reliable or guaranteed.
“For online sex workers, this is amplified by their additional exposure to banking discrimination both personally and their exposure to risk via discrimination against the platforms they work for. In the article I call this a ‘compounding precarity'."
Dr Easterbrook-Smith has identified that banking discrimination against the sex industry is widespread.
“This affects individual sex workers who sometimes have difficulty opening and retaining bank accounts and who also can’t use common apps or platforms used to send and receive money for anything related to adult services without risking their accounts being frozen and the funds seized.”
One of the ways that gig-economy style online sex work is different to other kinds of gig-economy work is that there are very few ways that workers can receive payment outside of these platforms. An Uber or a taxi driver can arrange for customers to book with them directly and pay them cash, or designers working on Fiverr might point people towards their Instagram where they could order work from you and pay directly.
This isn’t an option for online sex workers, because most, if not all, payment apps specifically exclude sex workers from being able to use them. Paypal, for example, can’t be used for adult transactions. Neither can apps like Venmo or CashApp.
Locally, sex workers report having trouble getting Eftpos facilities or having their accounts closed, even though sex work is entirely legal here. So sex workers are far more reliant on these platforms than other gig-economy workers and at the same time the platforms they work for are much less stable, because they’re reliant on payment processors who increasingly often revoke access to their services.
And it is not only the individuals who are affected. Larger companies are also affected by banking discrimination. The biggest story about this was when OnlyFans briefly announced they were banning explicit content in late August 2021, as a direct result of banking discrimination. They eventually walked this back, but other sites have been affected, namely Pornhub and AVN Stars (a subscription based site similar to OnlyFans).
“When a big company loses access to payment processors, they then can’t accept payments from customers and often can’t send accrued earnings to the contractors who make content for the sites. Sometimes there’s no or very little warning of planned changes. A lot of this discrimination can be linked very directly back to the stigma about face-to-face sex work and legislation out of the USA which greatly increases the liability of websites and payment processors whose services were used to advertise or facilitate prostitution. This is where the interaction between the stigma against prostitution, or full service sex work, interacts with online sex work. Sex work is heavily stigmatized and while attempts to police it more heavily are sometimes justified on the basis that they supposedly protect the people doing it, they almost invariably backfire."
Dr Easterbrook-Smith argues that to properly understand online sex work it has to be analysed in both ways simultaneously - as a kind of gig-economy work with a lot of the work practices and characteristics typical of that, but also with reference to the stigma that sex work is subject to, since that materially impacts the way the sites function and workers’ experiences.
Dr Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith is a Lecturer at the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication on Massey University’s Wellington campus. Their recent book Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker, which was published earlier in 2022, looks at how sex workers have been discussed in the news media.
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The acceptable sex worker – how media coverage still stigmatises many in the sex industry
Dr Gwyn Easterbrook-Smith's new book Producing the Acceptable Sex Worker looks at how sex workers are discussed in the news media.
