Monetising the male gaze: cyber sex in South Africa

"Keep shaming us, it's good for business." 6 South African cyber sex workers pull back the curtain on 'easy money', hypocrisy and fantasy.

This Body Works For Me star Gina via S-Mag

This article is from April 2021. In light of recent conversations about creators supposedly earning millions from OnlyFans and the rise of exploitative management companies (who feature quite often in my email spam folder), I wanted to share this piece I wrote in 2020 examining online sex work in the South African perspective. I since haven’t seen a lot of depth in the discourse that also factors in the African context, particularly one like South Africa, a powder keg filled with high levels of gender-based violence, unemployment, conservative values and internet addiction. (Except the Showmax show, This Body Works For Me which I’ve yet to watch). I’m hoping to revisit this one day and see what’s changed 5 years later. (Also, I wrote this 4 years ago so I may be using certain terminology incorrectly, sorry!)

“My first encounter with sex work was hearing about these ladies in my hometown. They were actually very beautiful women,” says Panty Drip*. “It was [in] very stigmatised language. Framing these women as powerless, framing [them] as having no agency. As absolutely devoid of passion, of dreams. They weren’t like streetwalkers, they would meet men and have some kind of arrangement but all you would hear from other people was, ‘They’re selling their bodies.’”

Panty Drip is a 28-year-old former advertising professional. She likens that experience to the popular Glee meme wherein Sue Sylvester announces, “I’m going to create an environment that is so toxic.” In her former workplace, she became a scapegoat whom everyone was comfortable deadnaming and misgendering. “Living as a trans woman has literally changed my life to make it the most uncomfortable ever. ”

Trying to find a job afterwards was incredibly difficult. “Each time when I would show up for interviews and they would see me, suddenly it wouldn’t go further. So I had no choice but to get into sex work.”

During the height of 2020’s lockdown, all anyone could seem to talk about was sex work. Cybersex work to be specific. In April 2020, the content subscription platform popularised for erotic and adult content, OnlyFans, reported a 75% increase in subscriptions. Our timelines were inundated with stories of webcam models earning R10K to R70K in a day from posting provocative photos and erotic videos online. TV programmes offering new and arguably positive representations of sex workers like HBO’s Euphoria, Netflix’s Bonding and the crime drama Hustlers were on the rise.

Of course, most South Africans were already familiar with cyber sex work at this point but considering how many people had to find alternative sources of income following COVID-19, sex work became increasingly demystified at this time. While there were and are still disproportionate representations of sex workers in media, relying on harmful stereotypes of jezebel sugar babies, lazy young women lacking skills or ambition, and STD-ridden nymphomaniacs set to destroy homes and morality - online sex work is seen as more sanitary and acceptable by comparison.

This is most likely because, unlike streetwalking or stripping, it doesn’t involve physical contact and that makes it less like “selling” the body. Posing seductively doesn’t seem so far removed from taking selfies or ‘thirst traps’ for Instagram - though it’s important to note how often women influencers on Instagram are often subjected to whorephobia merely for allowing themselves to be perceived on the Internet.

However, just in the same way becoming a successful social media influencer involves more than just being attractive, the same applies to online sex work too.

“The biggest misconception people have about online sex work is that it’s easy,” says Gabrielle*, a webcam model from Johannesburg.

“People think it’s like taking nudes for your boyfriend but, like, it’s not.”

Mali*, who was a stripper before lockdown who had to pivot into OnlyFans, speaks to the many skills she’s had to acquire. “Sex work is about selling a fantasy. You have to give [clients] something worth paying for. You also have to be very clear about what your persona is and stick to it. Are you the unapproachable bad bitch? Are you the soft, sexy girl who wants to please the customer at all costs? Are you the controlling dominatrix? Are you the ‘cool girl’ who likes to just hang out and have a good conversation, that just happens to be really sexy and knows how to hit a split? Are you the really, really freaky nympho that deepthroats beer bottles just to prove you can do it?”

The male gaze is an important factor in sex work. This way of looking, where men are empowered at the expense and objectification of women, affects us in everything from our literature, film and music and, of course, erotic media is no exception. Most popular pornography relies on racist stereotypes, infantilises grown women and dehumanises transgender people all in the name of enforcing the patriarchy. One of the most popular porn websites in the world, PornHub has revealed some of its most searched for terms in 2019 as “Japanese”, “lesbian”, “ebony”, “teen” and “bbc”. Ogi Ogas, a neuroscientist, describes to The Atlantic, how sexual fantasies “obey [their] own sense of rules that have nothing to do with propriety, common sense, or even the physical laws of the universe.”

In the world of erotica, satisfying desire is the only endgame, even if that desire involves violence, hate or crime and so anything from race, gender and age can become commodities.

What makes cybersex work empowering for some, however, is having control over the male gaze. When performers step before a camera, they are still pandering to the wants and desires of a predominantly cis-gendered heterosexual male audience but they are in complete control of their actions, their framing, their hair and costume and who is allowed access to that. The male gaze is inescapable, most women will be sexualised no matter if they’re smiling in an Instagram selfie or walking down the street in a nun’s habit but, at least with cyber sex work they can earn a profit.

“I had already always taken nudes and explicit videos for fun,” Decadent Deity*, a 22-year-old nonbinary sex worker from Johannesburg reveals. They primarily sell custom content to clients through OnlyFans, KiK and Tumblr. “But I had never found a reason to show them or post them and so I think it’s a way for me to do something that I genuinely already enjoyed because doing that makes me feel quite sexy actually and get paid at the same time.”

For most, sex work is just an extension of how our hustle culture always tells us to monetise the things we already love to do. Of course, the nature of sex and sex appeal has its limitations even for those for whom it’s incredibly liberating, especially the further you are from white, cis-gendered and able-bodied.

“You kind of have to sell yourself as a caricature and allow yourself to be someone’s fetish,” Diamond*, a transwoman and former sex worker, says. “Years of that can really [mess] with your brain if you aren’t one hundred percent aware of what you’re doing.” When it comes to trans performers, clients are often more willing to pay for more femme-presenting non-binary performers to perform as women or AMAB (assigned male at birth) performers to fulfil gay fantasies instead.

“Sex work for T-girls is limited,” Panty Drip adds. “Ideally I would have wanted to work in a strip but they don’t take girls like me. They think it wouldn’t work with their clients.”

Decadent Deity adds that just like with most jobs there are good and bad clients. “There are crazy people too. [I once had] a white client who didn’t tell me that they had a slave kink and they ended up calling me a slave halfway through the job.” Despite their requests for the client to stop, he refused and threatened to withhold their pay for the rest of the session and went on to say he would sell their content online.

“Even though he didn’t use any racial slurs, I just understood that because I’m black and trans he wanted to make me small for pleasure.”

In The representation of sex workers in South African media: Danger, morals and human rights, authors Hunt and Hobbard found that in South African media, sex work is still discussed in terms of those selling their bodies and rarely as a transaction involving two parties. In this perspective, sex workers are the only agents and thus, when sex work is discussed as a moral issue, sex workers are the only ones to blame as opposed to their clients. This can also spiral into victim blaming when violence is committed against sex workers, as violence against them is viewed as a result of their already immoral and/or illegal behaviour.

Gabrielle, also Black, shares how white sex workers are often the only ones who achieve the overnight riches and fame we see in headlines. “I think people are less tolerant with me because they think I deserve less respect,” she explains. “I’ve seen white girls charge five times what I charge. I could never get away with that.”

The race disparity also affects how certain sex workers are covered in the media and treated by the public. In SWEAT’s 2020 Say Her Name report, the organisation reveals that while sex worker deaths are rarely reported in the media, the ones that do receive the most attention are often those relating to white cis-women such as the 2018 murder of sex worker, Siam Lee.

Finding community is an essential part when it comes to addressing this wage gap as well as all the necessary support that the job requires. When Panty Drip was still in sex work, she relied on another friend in the business. “We’d come to each other like ‘Have you seen this dude’ or ‘Do you know this one’, ‘Block him, he’s a time waster who just wants free nudes.’ It was kind of a sisterhood and we’d help each other navigate mental health as a sex worker, as trans girls living in the city.”

There are also online forums and groups on Reddit and 4Chan where performers offer safety tips, navigating manipulation and scams as well as how to shoot and frame content. There are still hierarchies, Diamond reveals. As someone who got her start as a streetwalker, she wouldn’t reveal that to her online peers. “In my experience, the cyber sex worker community is very condescending sometimes I feel like they look down on the people who are in the streets.”

Even though the internet makes it seem like the world is becoming more sex-positive, sharing their work with the people around them can be life or death. “The thing about South Africa,” begins Mali, “is that just because something is ‘normalized’ or talked about more openly doesn’t mean people legitimately accept it 100%.”

“I feel like we live in a society that is very prudish in public but loves to consume the real nasty, filthy shit in private,” Diamond says. “Everybody who shames the community is fucking us and buying our shit behind closed doors.”

“Keep shaming us, it’s good for business.”

*Names have been changed for obvious reasons.

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