LONDON — Amidst increasing calls for government intervention on freedom of online expression, right-wing U.K. tabloid The Daily Mail continued their attack on the adult industry and sex workers with a stigmatizing report using blatantly classist and stigmatizing language.
The report, centering on OnlyFans, was published yesterday under the headline “Website Where Middle-Class Girls Sell Their Bodies,” and written by Beth Hale, a longtime Daily Mail “celebrity and lifestyle” reporter.
This comes on the same day liberal publication The Guardian referred to adult entertainment as “a secret pandemic,” using dangerously dehumanizing language that is identical to religiously inspired “porn is a public health crisis” campaign by U.S. War on Porn activists.
Hale’s Daily Mail article is crammed with stigmatizing language against sex workers who choose to use the OnlyFans platform, echoing prejudiced, dated language from the Victorian era and the early 20th Century, implying that “middle-class girls” and sex workers are two completely separate categories.
'Deeply Disturbing'
Lambasting an OnlyFans model, Hale wrote that even though the model was a fine arts student, now her “daily activities are of a nature that many parents with children of a similar age (she is 20) would find simply horrifying.”
The writer’s condemnation and contempt for her subjects’ life choices is not subtle. “These ‘creators,’” Hale writes with judgmental quotation marks, “are young women […], often with no history of adult work, but with an attitude to sex and their own bodies that is deeply disturbing.”
Hale refers to online sex work as “what some observers might call a form of ‘virtual prostitution,’” a “rapidly mushrooming digital phenomenon with a dark side."
A caption sensationalizes one model’s at-home activity due to COVID-19 rules in the U.K. as “a new endeavour [which] has unfolded under the very same roof where Rosie recently said her last goodbye to her mother (pictured), who died of cancer three weeks ago.”
To further discredit the sex workers’ own testimony that “the platform is ‘empowering,’” and that “far from being exploited, they are firmly in control both of their bodies and their finances,” Hale quotes U.K. anti-porn activist Kate Isaacs.
Isaacs is a London-based, U.S.-raised marketing expert who started the #NotYourPorn campaign, purportedly against “revenge” images being shared on public platforms, but who has morphed into a media staple for any and all U.K. attacks on the entire adult industry.
Isaacs has parlayed her media prominence into participation in policy-making in the U.K., and is influencing members of the Parliament, often with “shocking” statistics about online adult businesses, particularly Pornhub, which do not appear to be properly sourced from any available data.
Bewildered by Sex Work
Although Hale takes Isaacs' questionable claims at face value, she does not extend that courtesy to these "middle-class" OnlyFans models she so clearly pities.
When a model told Hale that she set a limit originally about what she would do, but is now willing to consider other types of content, the writer calls her choices “bewildering, as is [her] attitude to money.”
Hale — who has made a living for almost two decades with headlines like “Shocking Pictures Which Show Tearful Five-Year-Olds Forced to Fight in Kickboxing Contests” — ends her piece by putting the “work” in reference to sex work in quotation marks.
Her damning, judgmental and explicitly classist article is, of course, published alongside several sensual photos of OnlyFans models and exploitative links to other Daily Mail articles like “Ashley Graham Shows Off Her Stretch Marks in New Swimsuit Campaign.”