I read an interesting item on Medscape today. It was a report on health care workers doing online sex work to supplement or replace their income. One was a young man doing dementia care in the UK; the other was a young female EMS worker in New York. Both were on the website “Only Fans,” which allows subscribers to solicit explicit photos and videos from content creators who create their material in the privacy and safety of their own homes, and upload it on the site.
Both of the stories emphasized that health care work was harder, soul-sucking, particularly during the pandemic, and insufficiently remunerated. Both workers were struggling to pay for food and rent. “Only Fans” sex work allowed them to earn in a month what their full-time jobs pay in a year.
Sex work has a long history as a survival strategy in times and places of conflict and/or poverty. What’s surprising here is that neither of the stories was set in a conflict zone or among a class of individuals that one might expect to be especially poor. Still, “poor” is a relative term that applies not just to one’s access to material resources, but also to whether those resources are adequate to provide a person and dependents with food, shelter, safety and opportunity. In other words, I might not expect healthcare workers to be poor, but if what one earns is much less than what one needs in order to have the basics, then they are poor.
It’s a fucking sad state of affairs, if you ask me.
Doesn’t speak well about our priorities as a society.
It is a Fucking state of affairs indeed.