The Realities of Student Sex Work
“I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t out of genuine financial trouble, but it’s a shame that was the easiest option.” Over 56,000 UK students are now involved in some kind of sex work according to recent research – but what has sparked this increase and what are the long-term effects?
It’s no surprise that students often find themselves struggling with money at university, and with the increase in living costs, and student maintenance loans not adequately matching the 4.0% inflation rate, there has been a surge in young people taking up online sex work, such as OnlyFans, to make ends meet. OnlyFans is one of many sites where creators can post content behind a paywall where consumers can buy subscriptions and pay creators for more personal interactions, making it safer and more creator-friendly, as opposed to the more ‘traditional’ porn-star route or in-person sex work.
Amy, whose name is changed to protect her identity, is a 20-year-old fine arts student who went into online sex work after her 18th birthday. “I grew up in a working-class family and have never been able to ask for money when I needed it and because I didn’t have a job before lockdown.
I feel like it was an easy decision at the time because I didn’t fully understand how draining it could be,” Amy explains, saying that even though it was far less time consuming than the retail and hospitality jobs she worked in, spanning a full-time working week alongside her degree, she still found herself having to choose between getting enough rest and making money to pay for her rent. “If I don’t make the money on the night it’s been offered, it will just go to someone else.” Whilst online sex work enables creators to fit their work around their degree and social lives, client relationships play an integral role in sustaining a livable wage, and with an oversaturated market and scammers, it is a highly competitive job.
Whilst Amy’s online work has kept her from physical harm, she explains that she’s still delt with dangerous interactions. “Over the past two years alone I’ve had three different incidents of quite severe harassment online due to it, I’ve had to take time out of it for a couple of months.”
This darker side to sex work is often overlooked and rarely mentioned in online spaces, particularly on X and TikTok, where younger girls are shown the financial outcomes and luxuries, but rarely ever understanding the intensity of the job, naively assuming it’s simple and hassle free. Many people fall into scams and end up being taken advantage of. “It's dangerous that people are constantly reinforcing in online and offline spaces that it’s an easy grift when there’s vulnerable naive people who will fall for traps like that. It isn’t regulated enough at all,” Amy says.
With online sex work still in its infancy, the potential implications on this generation of students are not yet known. Students could risk being blackmailed to future employers, believes Brandon Sparks, psychology lecturer at Kingston University. “It can derail someone's career, even though it shouldn’t, they are engaging in legal work. And we’ve seen it happen with teachers. It’s being used as grounds for termination.” With a stigma still attached to a job that has existed for centuries and is consumed by 29% of adult internet users in the UK according to Ofcom, it’s concerning that so many sex workers are then often unable to find and maintain conventional jobs and careers and receive so much hostility.
As far as psychological affects that sex work has on its workers is concerned, research mainly focuses on traditional in-person work, as the online route is a lot more recent and hasn’t had a great deal of investigating. However, in a study done at Cornell University, researchers found that the shift to digital sex work during the pandemic did have significant mental health implications, where one participant in the study said they ‘ended up always being on the lookout for opportunities for filming, even if you’re out doing something else you might think, oh this would look good, this might sell, I feel like my mind was always on it and I ended up focusing so much on it.” The work-life balance becomes blurred as the emphasis on constantly putting out content to keep a stream of revenue, which goes to show that despite sex workers having complete control over when they put out content, it becomes all-consuming and that separation between job and free time doesn’t quite exist anymore. Another participant said that “something about constantly looking at a screen and being on a digital platform and looking at this constant influx of images that have been manipulated, posing a certain aesthetic or dynamic that is quite damaging and exhausting.”
Sex work amongst students is inevitable, and has occurred for many years before the existence of accessible, independent sex work like OnlyFans, but how we approach the conversation surrounding sex work needs to improve in order to generate a safer, less taboo environment for those who participate; whilst also addressing the flawed student finance system in the UK, so that less students feel as though sex work is their only option.