The rise of the digital pimp

Mostly when people use the word “pimp” I think they are imagining a man who – perhaps violently – coerces a woman into sex work and takes her money from her, manipulating and controlling her. This is the depiction you would see most often in film and tv, such as in the American drama show The Deuce, set in 1970s New York. 

This type of figure, who acts as a liaison between the worker and clients and at times also a protector is not one that I am familiar with in Australia, because sex work is not criminalised here. But in places where women are at risk of being arrested while working, it makes sense that the economic structure changes so as not to expose the woman directly to the charge of soliciting. When women have no recourse to legal action or protection when a client mistreats them, it also makes sense that vigilante justice would exist, as well as men who want to prey upon that need. 

Under criminalisation, women who choose to go it alone are also often targeted by and pressured to join up with a pimp as they may inspire other women to go solo, a phenomenon that is shown in the 1960 Greek film Never on Sunday. 

The word “pimp” has existed in the sense of a procurer, one who arranges the gratification of sexual lusts, since at least the 17^th century. In the broad sense of the word the managers and owners and receptionists I have worked with in-house have been pimps, though I would not consider them so. 

To me the word has negative connotations of exploitation, and I would think of them as rather facilitators and sometimes even colleagues, as in the case of a number of my managers who also saw clients alongside me. Technically I am simply renting a room from them as an independent contractor, though you tend to fall into a legal grey area as sometimes you are given the demands and directions of an employee without the protections and benefits. 

Prohibitionists take a different view of this, however, and perceive any service offered to a sex worker that is paid for by the workers’ earnings to be pimping, and immoral. In Sweden for example, the originator of the Nordic model or “asymmetrical decriminalisation” as they call it for propaganda purposes, landlords, cleaners, dependent family members (including children), roommates, partners and anyone you choose to work alongside, can be charged with pimping. 

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While not directly criminalising the worker, this legal model effectively makes it impossible for sex workers to live, and isolates them socially, leaving them even more vulnerable. This is an attempt to eradicate sex work under the guise of protecting women, not caring about the actual safety of the women currently in the industry. 

Of course, there are boyfriends of sex workers that do act as a pimp, either by encouraging the woman into the industry or by complacently living off her earnings. This is complicated by the fact that when a job is driven underground legally, it by nature comes into closer proximity with other such criminalised labour. 

In the 2015 American film Tangerine this is shown clearly in one of the protagonists being romantically involved with her pimp – but who else is available for her to date? He moves in the same nighttime economy as her, understands her work and sees her as desirable to date, when many other people would dismiss her, both as a trans woman and as a sex worker. 

The expression “suitcase pimp” to refer to the boyfriends of porn stars who pretend to be of some importance business wise but are actually just parasites living off the labour of a woman, originated in the United States but can be seen most clearly in the Spanish TV show Veneno, in which the sex worker protagonist is shown as more at risk of exploitation and violence from her boyfriend than when she is working on the streets with a posse of other women. 

In Sydney where I work and live, those who have historically run the sex industry have typically been women, due to a loophole in the 1908 NSW Police Offences Act that made it illegal for men to live off the earnings of prostitution, but not women. This allowed infamous brothel madams and gang leaders such as Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh to thrive, and today the tradition continues – there is a pipeline from retired worker to owner of an establishment. 

When I have occasionally met a sex worker in Australia who works under a person, not as part of an establishment but on a more direct basis, usually because she is more marginalised due to language, education or migrant status, she refers to them as her “agent”, a term once used in regard to escort agencies (that I have worked for in the past) and is now popping up everywhere in regards to Only Fans management agencies, which are mostly run by men and that manage women. 

The BBC has reported on the unsavoury methods used by purported agencies to both recruit and control women in the industry, from giving them no access to their accounts to not allowing them out of their house and taking up to 70% of earnings. (As an aside, the highest cut I’ve ever had to give a brothel is 50%, and even then tips for extras were 100% mine on top of that). 

Four men in Czechia have even been charged with human trafficking in relation to an Only Fans management agency that they ran, headed by influencer Adam Kajumi. Andrew Tate infamously ran a course that gave Only Fans management tips before his arrest. 

I watched with fascination the seemingly symbiotic relationship that existed between Only Fans creators and far right influencers in Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manopshere documentary, in which streamers use women from Only Fans to generate more views and controversy. The Only Fans girls get more subscribers, which then results in more revenue or kickbacks for the streamers themselves.

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Alex deLuca’s piece on Clavicular for Miami New Times, addressed allegations that he is running his own Only Fans agency. In one stream an Only Fans girl says she is “…literally signed with Clav.” Another woman said she was approached to sign with him but turned it down. Clavicular’s own girlfriend has become an Only Fans creator since dating him, potentially adding to the long history of men financially profiting off of their girlfriends.

There is a terrible hypocrisy to these streamers and influencers who constantly denigrate women, and particularly women sex workers, yet are happy to leech off of them. There is an exceedingly predatory aspect to it, as so many of the women are young and naïve, that leaves me seeing streamers and Only Fans agencies as especially insidious modern incarnations of pimps. 

And I mean pimp in the most derogatory, useless sense of the word as I don’t think they are even doing the job of procuring income – they are just living off it. It is ironic to me that my in-person work is stereotyped as far less safe and far more exploitative than online work, when the latter is rife with such relationships and is made even more precarious by the current influx of AI, something that my work is thankfully resistant to. 

There are always going to be those who see an opportunity to prey off of others, especially in the meeting of new technology, stigmatised work, gendered labour and the gig economy that we see in Only Fans. It’s created a class of women – or to be more accurate, hasn’t created, but rather made more visible – that is in new territory, highly exposed and unsure of how to navigate it. And these pimps, who are also in new territory and probably equally unknowing but prepared to front as all-knowing, are not only taking their pickings amongst the hordes but also trying to grow their stable by having even more women enter the profession. 

I have nothing against online work, and I think at its best it’s all the things that people say it is; allows women to choose flexible hours, from the safety of their own home, and to access financial stability and wealth they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I also understand that creators with big accounts can’t possibly run it all themselves, it becomes completely unwieldy, and a business beyond them. 

A good friend of mine who is in the top 1% of earners always has an agency managing her account, so that she can outsource all her conversations with subscribers to “chatters”, who are generally from the Philippines. This means they can be paid poorly.

But one of the aspects of sex work that appeals to me is that it is not capitalistic, in that I am living entirely off only the labour of my own body, with no passive income coming from the labour of others. This is a point of pride for me. She is always changing between agencies though, dissatisfied with the service, in the same way some model friends of mine change between theirs. 

It may not be possible to reduce the rise of the middle man in this burgeoning economy of creators and streamers and influencers, especially as there is in some cases a need for it, especially with bigger accounts. It also operates across international borders, and is subject to so many shifting laws because of that. 

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Decriminalisation of sex work in NSW (and other parts of Australia) had a direct effect of limiting the need for pimps in the sense of an individual man, and with the rise of the internet and the ease of advertising oneself on there even parlours and brothels are slowly disappearing. 

That is something I bemoan, as I always think there will be a place for working together with other women under one roof. It gave me safety and community that I’ve never felt as an independent worker even if some of the managers were not ideal. 

There is also a lower barrier of entry for in-person in-house work. Some women may not be able to afford the outlay of paying for photos and an advert and a hotel room to work from. But they can afford to catch a bus to a shift where they can borrow shoes and clothes left behind from other workers – that was certainly the way it was for me when I started. 

And their ID is not digitally recorded, forever and indelibly associating them with sex work as it is when you sign up for Only Fans, a record that we know is somehow available to border protection officers. 

I do think it is a perfect storm for charlatans to exploit, partially because the work is so stigmatised, meaning that more legitimate and professional agencies don’t want to touch it. I also think that the gig economy itself engenders exploitation, as we have seen with Uber. 

At least when I have worked at a brothel I have had direct access to those making money off me. I could raise complaints or issues, and could move freely to another brothel if the working conditions didn’t suit me. I wasn’t signed to a company with a market monopoly. I had no need of a middle man who would wrestle on my behalf but who would make money off of me in the process.