Only Fans’ brings thousands of young people closer to prostitution in Latin America

Letícia tried to work on the pandemic without having to expose her body. She wanted to start an organic cosmetics company, but the economic stagnation generated by covid-19 hampered the initiative. Dela Pequena Brincalhona, as she promotes herself on social media, is 19 years old and lives in the Dominican Republic. Due to the lack of employment, a month ago she opened an account on Only Fans, a platform whose users access the mostly erotic content, paying a subscription. “Everyone in my country uses it,” she says. Like her, thousands of girls in Latin America daily sell nude photos or homemade videos masturbating. Some just show their feet and hands to fetish consumers. The sale of content for sexual purposes has opened a debate among young women, who wonder if what they do is prostitution or not.

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With the hashtag #OnlyFans, countless girls offer posts on Twitter and Instagram. Some do so explicitly with the promise to upload more images after paying for the subscription, which typically costs five or six dollars (between 26 and 31 reais) a month. Others are sexier – and keep their best content for those who pay. “Young people are entering sexual platforms like Only Fans in the pandemic. It's something that came up as an opportunity to survive in the quarantine, when they can't work and the only thing they have is the Internet. So they say 'okay, let's work on the Internet',” says Georgia Rothe, an analyst at the regional NGO Asuntos del Sur.

Rothe, a 25-year-old Venezuelan lawyer, says sites like this have become her country's only job many girls can get. “We see a lot on Twitter. They are on Only Fans and publish their profiles with monthly subscriptions of $5, but in Venezuela $5 is a lot of money. And they wonder if selling a nude or a photo of their feet is prostitution or not,” she says.

Leticia doesn't like to think of herself as a prostitute. “I wanted to start a business without having to involve my body, but people never had the money to buy something they needed, like hair or body products,” she says.

Many of her acquaintances were inside the platform, and she ended up giving in to her surroundings. “I joined because they asked me to,” she explains, referring to the comments she received on the networks before even thinking about selling a selfie.

When there is a sexual exchange in exchange for money, and this is agreed, it is sexual work, says Livia Motterle, an academic at the Center for Research and Gender Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “The person who enters these platforms seeks to satisfy a fantasy, and the photo fulfills that fantasy. It's very small sex work, a fragment of a much larger world.” For some girls it is difficult to admit, says the researcher, because "society thinks it is something bad, it is not recognized as work and they suffer public stigma."

According to Motterle, the pandemic has brought nothing new; it only amplified the gender inequalities that already existed. “The economic motive is 90% of what drives a woman to engage in sex work, and the economic crisis magnifies this phenomenon,” she says. Only Fans was born in 2016, but it only became popular with the arrival of covid-19 and confinement. Dozens of famous and professional photographers have also opened their accounts. The site was mostly inundated with pornography produced by women and, to a lesser extent, by gay men. The platform's head of operations, Thomas Stokely, said in a May interview with BuzzFeed that it registered about 200,000 new users and 7,000 content creators every 24 hours.

Latin America was one of the first regions to participate in the phenomenon, with three countries among those with the most users in the world: Mexico, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. “It is necessary to see what are the realities in gender issues experienced in these three countries and what messages are sent to the girls, pressuring them to do this, forcing them to choose between 'I protect myself from the virus or I protect myself from hunger'”, she says. Laura Salgado, activist with Defensoras Digitales, one of the organizations that promoted the “Olimpia Law” [which punishes crimes related to digital harassment] in Mexico.

With the pandemic, several international economic organizations warned that Latin American youth, especially women, would be one of the groups most affected by the crisis in the labor market. Apart from the figures, it was not known where this prediction would lead.

“If [young women] were out of work because of the pandemic, it is necessary to see what led us to sell our photos on platforms that continue to encode us,” says Mexican lawyer Yunuel Castillo. Specialist in digital violence, she believes that phenomena of this type have two faces. “One is the empowerment of women and the other is the lack of opportunities. We need to analyze why they do this.” Castillo says it is necessary to train girls in digital security so they can avoid risks, such as sharing their photos off the site.

In addition to being a gateway to sex work for many girls in the pandemic, sites like Only Fans represent a job opportunity during the health crisis for those who prostitute themselves off the Internet. “We need to recognize that this type of work has allowed many women to survive these months,” says Livia Motterle, who has been studying sex work online for years. “Most of these platforms exploit female workers. Some are enriching themselves at their expense”, says the academic. Each of the women who sell your content sets the subscription price. And she only gets 80% of the money; the other 20% goes to the website.

Maybe that's why Leticia chose to market her photos on WhatsApp as well. She sells her images directly to the customer, uploading the content after the money is deposited into her bank account. “Only Fans gives us very little, so I traded on the outside,” she says. This space doesn't prevent her photos from being passed from cell phone to cell phone without any kind of control, but she hopes that it will only be until the pandemic passes.