the girl on the screen

content warning: sex, nudity, a double life

I don’t think I can name really anything that happened during the front half of this year. I just zoomed through my camera roll and could only find selfies I took while waiting for the trolley, while sitting on the trolley, while walking to work from the trolley. When people ask about my life, I have a bad habit of only mentioning my job and how much I don’t like it - how tired I am, how stuck I feel, how it takes up what feels like every second of my life. It isn’t that much has changed, I’ve worked full-time for nearly five years now and finessed every second I could when I was part-time as well. But this year, I’ve felt consumed, probably because I’m spending all of my time somewhere I don’t want to be.

In the last few years, I’ve reflected a great deal on my identity as a working class person. I need to be working in order to survive. I spend a lot on little luxuries - things from Target I don’t need but want, specialty beers from the beer shop down the street, a shameful amount of DoorDash orders every month, a coffee before work as at least one thing to look forward to in my day. But I really don’t think these things are keeping me from any significant class movement. At the end of the day, if I do not work, I am not able to live.

In the last few months, I’ve noticed my funds feel a bit different than they have in the last few years. My wiggle room starts closing in, my pockets feel lighter sooner. I’m quick to blame the economy and corporate greed, like any good leftist would. I’m the first to complain about my underpaid labor and the exploitative beast that is capitalism. But one other factor that I cannot deny is that for the last four years, I’ve held two jobs and one of them, I recently quit.

I was self-employed. A hobby job. A creative outlet. I made my own schedule and everything was on my terms. Customers could come and go as they pleased and consume as little or as much as they wanted. They appreciated my art, often monetarily, offering tips if they felt it was worth more. They were grateful and everything I sold had appeal to at least one person, if not the whole lot of them.

For four years, I was a content creator on OnlyFans.

I started in October 2020. I was working from home and there was something about the isolation that made me feel as though the only version of myself who mattered was the version that existed online. There was no opportunity for shame or overthinking the things I posted on social media because there was no opportunity to see anyone in person and face their opinion or idea of me.

At the time, I was processing a break-up. A break-up from something that so heavily relied on sex as the glue keeping us together. Something that made me feel as though my body and what I could do with it - or, rather, what could be done to it - was the most important thing about me. In our relationship, when we were apart, I’d send him my most seductive photos, almost as a plea. “Don’t forget about me. Remember what you could have. Remember this version of me. Remember why you love me.” I loved pinging his dopamine receptors. I loved getting that text to come over and feel worth something again. I loved being in his room and feeling like as long as he was touching me, as long as he was kissing me, as long as he was positioning me, praising me, using me, that he loved me.

He’d been seeing someone else simultaneously. That may have been where my desperate sense of winning him over came from. Once we finally cut ties and he moved forward with the other person, I had all of these photos of myself and no one to share them with, no one to validate me and make me feel worthy. From time to time, I’d post them on the internet - in an Instagram story or carousel, my Twitter or Tumblr account in exchange for likes from strangers and acquaintances alike. But it didn’t make me feel alive in the same way. I needed to know I was desirable, that I could be wanted, that I could intrigue.

I talked to someone on the internet a few months later and they mentioned using OnlyFans as a sort of archive for their nudes. They shared their link with me and gifted me a free subscription and it was the first time I’d ever engaged with the site at all. The images and videos they posted reminded me of Tumblr in the 2010s, before the social media company was bought out by Yahoo and banned most forms of pornographic content. I grew up on the website, spending most of my teenage years locked in my room reposting photo after photo and curating my online persona that influenced my real life ego. It was the dawn of the iPhone and I didn’t have to worry about my parents knowing what I was looking at on my screen. At the time, I wasn’t into pornography too much. I’ve always preferred fantasy and allusion compared to outright, explicit visuals. But, nevertheless, it was there, on the site, ready to be consumed.

Tumblr is known as a blogging site, but I think users will remember its place in history as a vehicle for aesthetics. There was little utility in having an account other than connecting with people and relaying to them who you were, what you liked and what you thought. It’s where I learned the art of the selfie, posting images that became more aesthetically pleasing over time via VSCO edits and photosets. Occasionally I’d post a saucy photo wearing less and posing more, realizing this not only got me more likes, but could also get me reposted by someone else and create a brief chain reaction of attention. With this came a desensitization to nudity and an ability to see amateur self portraits as art in the same way one would look at a painting or a film or a sculpture. There are countless forms of media that depict a naked body, and within my generation, these images were beginning to come from a less prestigious, more romantic place. They no longer had to be gods or A-listers or high-fashion models. They could be faceless lovers photographed on an entry level Nikon. Or a strategically cropped torso with enough implication to incite just enough lust from behind a keyboard.

When I scrolled through OnlyFans for the first time, granted it was only this one person’s account, I saw it through the same social media lens. Yes, I was watching this man get himself off, but how was it any different than curated audio posts of strangers moaning into their phone mics on my explicit tumblr of choice, porn4ladies?

The photos I had buried in my camera roll evoked the same imagery. They were perfectly cropped or perfectly grained or perfectly framed as stills from a film you’d reblog to show your taste. In this way, I could live out my pin-up girl dreams. I needed to show someone, I needed someone to see.

I created an account and tweeted it out once, and instantly, maybe 15 followers flooded in. Some had usernames obscuring their identity completely, others had subtle implications of who they might be. Since my Twitter following was mostly people I knew in real life, these newfound “fans” were obviously the same. I saw friends I knew had partners. Or people I wouldn’t have imagined wanted to see me in that way. Even though I wasn’t at work in person, I knew I didn’t want to face people I was only supposed to know professionally. From the first day to the last, I pinned a post at the top of my account that read something like, “I can tell some of you are coworkers. (You’re for the most part anonymous, but I can just tell.) If you bring this account up to me outside of this platform, I will not hesitate to call HR. Please don’t ruin my fun by disrespecting my boundaries. Thanks.”

The warning worked. One or two have confessed to knowing about it over the years, but I never had anyone confront me about seeing my most vulnerable self. For this reason, I never posted anything below the waist, except occasional photos of my backside in barely-there underwear. My vagina felt like the only thing I could protect. The one thing reserved for those allowed to be intimate with me. Everything else was fair game.

The strategy for my account was a sort of “dropbox for nudes.” I felt safe for a few reasons. First off, it was only viewable to those who signed up and made an account. Second, I posted as though it was my Tumblr or my Instagram - the regular “thirst trap” photos showing skin or hinting at something were free. But, if you wanted the good stuff, you had to pay. Any photo or video with actual nudity was placed behind a paywall for the cost of a coffee. At first, I did embrace the porn of it all. I didn’t post content that could be explicitly described as such, but the captions were lusty and the videos were suggestive. After awhile, the more I thought about the account becoming public in some way, like some sort of exposé that could ruin my life or, worse, come out to my parents, I toned it down and focused on the idea of aesthetically pleasing photos that just happened to have my nipples in them.

my director of photography era

It takes one week for payments to clear and be cashed out. I originally had my money deposited into my debit account, but that account is technically shared with my father. To this day, I hope he never googled the company supplying my checks, though I doubt he was actually ever curious enough to scroll through my bank account at all. Eventually, after the paranoia got to me, I switched the routing to a personal savings account instead.

The first two weeks were really something. There is a special kind of dopamine hit, a different kind of validation that comes from people purchasing photos of your half-nude body. Most people bought every post, and some tipped, and this added up to maybe $400 dollars at first. Upon my first paycheck, I treated the funds as if it was fun money. At the time, staying at home in the pandemic everyday, I was saving a lot, so there wasn’t a dire need for extra money in my pocket. With the cash that came from selling my body online, I bought myself my first guitar. It was a pretty little pink Stratocaster that cost maybe $250. Anything over $100 has always felt like a luxury to me, so a purchase like this truly could never have been made without this particular means of funding. For the first time in my life, I could afford a hobby.

I spent the following few months working from home, teaching myself how to play and write music and also, posting more and more content. Every now and then, someone would create an account, buy some things and then delete forever. Obviously, this worried me a bit. Sure, most accounts were faceless users with numbers for names but the idea of someone coming in, taking a peek and disappearing completely made me uncomfortable. The thing about the internet is that everything can be screenshot, everything has the potential to last forever. To this day, I don’t know who exactly has had access to me and who still has the photos to prove it. I think about it a lot. But there’s really nothing I can do.

Over time, the act had an ebb and flow of gratification. Some days I felt whorish, like shedding my clothes was baring more than my body and instead baring a soul with no morals and no sense of shame. Other days, it was the only thing that made me feel like I was someone worthy of my greatest weakness: attention. Around the same time, the grueling emotional labor from my job as a chat support advisor nine hours a day rearranged my stress hormones so terribly that the bottom half of my face was only made up of cystic acne. I didn’t recognize it then but I realize now that the anxieties of the pandemic were only exacerbated by spending nine months being berated behind a computer screen, either by entitled customers or managers attempting to motivate me into generating more revenue. Every photo I have from this period of my life has me covering my mouth or is taken from a distance or, in terms of content, has cropped out my head entirely, completely detaching me from the fleshy object purchased and consumed in a blue-light glow.

Eventually I garnered a following of 80 or so. I’m not sure where they came from since I only posted my username publicly once. I’m half convinced my account was posted on some reddit page somewhere, or shared to friends who shared to friends. Regardless, I was consistently generating anywhere from $100 to $300 a month, adding some extra padding to my paycheck as inflation fluctuated in and out. It was getting me by.

It could be argued that I had a bad business model. If I had a $10 subscription fee, I would have had an $800 revenue stream each month (plus tips) for a majority of my stint. That’s what most content creators do, it’s the only way to make a genuine living out of it. To me, the idea of offering a subscription felt like an obligation to deliver a month’s worth of content on a more consistent schedule than I cared to follow. It’s the same reason I don’t charge for my writing either. It’s the difference between a job and a hobby. I don’t want filler, I only want quality. And I want it on my terms.

The paywalled posts also served as my protection. I had a fear of someone unworthy subscribing for $10, screenshotting every single post and fleeing the scene. There were people who didn’t need that kind of access to me. I valued myself at the $700 or so it took to unlock every post, instead of just $10 from each individual a month. There were some users who hit my threshold. Loyalists, I couldn’t tell you why. Some would message me compliments, words of encouragement, special requests. What I enjoyed the most about the platform was that I could post what I considered “art” in the way that I wanted, so oftentimes, I didn’t follow through with any of their requests. When I’d ask what they had in mind, I expected some niche kink, like writing their name on my body or playing their favorite song a la Jenny in Forrest Gump. Something that would remind me them of my humanity, that I wasn’t some Blade Runner-esque cyber girlfriend, but an artist they could enlist to make their wildest fantasies come true. Each and every time, like clockwork, their response would be some variation of the vulgar, “Pussy pic?” I’d respond and let them know that was my boundary and they’d thank me and ask for nothing else. Their lack of imagination always amused me.

It is clear next to no one saw my account through the lens I saw myself. My bio read, “my body is art and someone should look at it,” but I know most of my followers just saw another half-dressed, taunting body on their dashboard.

I stopped posting sometime this past July. It sort of came organically. I stopped taking photos of myself before I got into the shower or when I got dressed in the morning. I stopped dancing around in new underwear and bralettes for the camera, for an ever-watching viewer. I think overall I just didn’t have the free time. Every so often someone would purchase an old post, but most of the time, naked versions of myself simply existed like pixelated statues on display for any aroused visitor to admire in my personal archive. When I made my final post stating that my time on the website was coming to a close, a few of the loyalists purchased and tipped as a wave goodbye. I waited one more week before I deleted my account for good - the designated waiting period until the farewell funds became my own. And with that final cash-out, I had closed the pin-up girl chapter of my life, the e-girlfriend chapter of my life, the prostitution chapter of my life.

Prostitution - root word Latin: prostitut- “exposed publicly, offered for sale”

I feel publicly exposed right now. I never write about myself as a sexual being from a place of pride instead of a place of shame. I feel no shame for having had this account, for having had this journey. I feel as though I gained a great deal of sociological perspective because of it. I feel as though I was able to spend the last four years paying down credit card bills and indulging in triple-digit splurges from time to time. I read articles every so often about “OnlyFans girls.” It almost feels like they exist for public humiliation. As a way to farm hate comments about a woman trying to figure out her place in the ever-evolving digital economy. Men partake in the website too, but there aren’t many articles about their sultry six-figure salaries.

We’re living in an era of conservatism. Gen-Z holds puritanical values about sex in media and the harmful role it plays in our society. Millennials are bombarded with trad-wife content and forced to consider having two and a half, maybe four and a half, kids in order to live a traditionally fulfilling life. There has been a steady regression into shame and morality politics that makes this essay feel all the more rebellious. I can’t say I support every aspect of sex work. I can barely say I consider what I did to be sex work. But I know I unlocked versions of myself financially, spiritually, creatively whom I would not have known otherwise. Yes, I have shown my body to those who have paid to see it. But I’ve given it to - or worse, it’s been taken by - some who did not see any value in it at all. If what I have to offer in this capitalist society is not the skill that I hold, but the body with which I was born, then the most rebellious thing I can do is determine what it is worth.

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I hope you enjoyed this confession. Although sex and politics are my favorite subjects to ruminate on, I rarely use my platform to speak on them in ways that feel as smart or artistic as I know I am. I want that to change this year. I want to be a bigger writer than I’ve been. Thank you for listening. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for enjoying my art.

xoxo,

meeshonfilm