My good friend Robert Stacy McCain — The Patriarch Tree on Twitter since his old rsmccain account got trashed by the pre-Elon Musk regime — wrote about, in less than flattering terms about a ‘sex worker’ styling herself “Aella”. It seems that she had a birthday gang bang, sexually taking on 37 men on her 32^nd (?) birthday. Mr McCain concluded:

That’s my theory, anyway. It is difficult to find any logical explanation for why someone would deliberately seek notoriety as a whore, but that’s the best I can do, based on the available information. As for my use of the venerable English noun whore, it is always preferable to euphemisms like “sex worker.” If you don’t want to be called a whore, don’t be a whore.

The definition of whore Mr McCain linked is a “woman who prostitutes her body for hire,” and while he wrote about the morality and eventual social repercussions of prostitution, especially in the internet age, I had a slightly different take.

Rush Limbaugh used to say that feminism was created to give ugly unattractive women access to the workplace, but Only Fans has enabled pretty girls to make many thousands of dollars by doing whatever on the internet. Newsweek addressed that claim that there are about 1.4 million American girls with Only Fans accounts, concluding that the number is a reasonable guesstimate. The OF girls could be defined as prostituting their images, without having to prostitute their bodies.

Of course, the shelf life of the OF girls is pretty short, but perhaps tens of thousands of dollars a month for showing their tits or more compared to $15 an hour as a clerk at Seven/Eleven? And it’s a lot safer than being a topless dancer at a local strip club! Yes, some will choose the more moral path, but the economics of the situation are staggering, perhaps enough to explain 1.4 million women just in the United States, around 2% of American women between 18 and 45 who are (supposedly) posting content on Only Fans.

It should be noted that some of these ladies might not be posting sexual content, but the numbers are still staggering.

But OF girls wouldn’t exist without the men who are willing to fork over $10 or so a month to subscribe to watch. It’s safer for the men, too, and cheaper than buying overpriced drinks and stuffing $5 bills in the g-strings of girls who still have no intention of f(ornicating) them. The privacy and safety of their own lonely and lousy apartments while they ‘abuse themselves’ for the same end result of going to a strip club? Yeah, that’s an economic winner!

The economics of ‘sex work’ in the twenty-oneth — no, not a typo, but a Picoism! — century seem pretty compelling: safer for the pretty girls, and safer, easier, and cheaper for the incels — or sometimes even married men — who watch them.

But, as with all things, there are the unintended consequences. The 5s, the average girls, the ones who don’t have great bodies, the ones who get lost in the crowds, wind up wondering where all the good men are, while the average guys, the male 5s, think that they’re in the right league to expect the 8s and 9s, because they were paying $10 a month to sixteen different OF girls in their late teens or early twenties and the OF girls simpered just enough to make them think they had some chance. Mr McCain had noted, years ago, how the self-proclaimed “supreme gentleman,” Elliot Rodger, the incel who murdered six people and wounded fourteen others before killing himself because the pretty blonde sorority girls weren’t interested in him. Mr Rodger, who was born into privilege, could easily have found a girlfriend had he been willing to look at girls who were in his league might be an extreme example, but I have to ask: how many guys seduced over the internet by 8s and 9s are unwilling to look at women who might be reasonably be possible mates for them?

So then the real 5 girls are more likely to give it up to any man interested, and some get knocked up and have a kid. Now we have average looking girls with a kid, looking for a decent, husband-material boyfriend, and the results are just what you’d expect: fewer marriages, fewer good marriages, and more loneliness and poverty for both adult men and women.

The OF girls themselves? Well, they’re pretty, so they will have more options, more men looking at them in real life. Some will decline to get involved with a former OF girl, some will never find out that the girls they like did Only Fans, and some men simply won’t care. But we do know that marriage rates and households headed by married couples in this country have been dropping precipitously. That is an economic as well as social problem, because unmarried people are generally poorer than married couples. Single women with children have a tremendous poverty rate.

Economics and culture are invariably intertwined, regardless of whether people want to believe it; culture impacts how well people do economically, and cultural choices, including those taken at a young age, have downstream effects.