By Ros Tibbs
University students, with the rising cost required to survive to be a student, how do you find a stable source of income to pay for food and rent when the loan falls flat? Perhaps you get yourself a job in your local pub where all your classmates go to drink away assignment stress or at the co-op where students shop for study snacks at 3 am. Well, you could. That is if getting such jobs as a student was as easy as our parents make it out to be. Many young girls who are students have realized the struggle to stay afloat with all the expenses university brings and that is why they have turned to a line of work that’s proved to be a lot more co-operative to their schedule and income needs.
Sex work.
Student finance and budgeting website ‘Save the Student’ rallied up 3,300 undergraduate students to survey sex work and found that one in 25 students admitted to performing areas of sex work such as selling NSFW pictures to gather some income. This number seems to be growing with the sudden popularity of the social media app ‘OnlyFans’ where thousands of girls are now posting sexual content in exchange for their grocery shopping funds covered.
As a student myself, I have experienced the financial crisis that being in university brings and has even considered using OnlyFans or other platforms that allow NSFW content to receive a concrete income that can help out.
It’s not only apps like OnlyFans that offer opportunities for these girls to use their sex appeal for financial progression, but many of the most also searched up adult actresses such as Ella Hughes and Dani Daniels have been open about how they got into this taboo line of work and it involves being a student. They make sure to let people know that their narrative begins with being a college/university student, studying for degrees in Business or Law but it proved to assault their bank accounts and bleed them dry. One common story is that they took on starring in adult films as a hidden side job to pay for textbooks and were unable to balance both this and studying so dropped out of education to go into making these films full time.
But how would the sex workers we sit next to in lectures explain it?
As many of the girls in my university are now sex workers, making sense as Kent is third in the highest amount of student sex workers, I asked around to find out about being a student who doubles as a sex worker.
One girl told me that she had to get into sex work when she realized she could either pay her rent or for three meals a day as required, as her ‘student loan wasn’t covering as much as I was told it would and I had to search out other options since finding a part-time job was difficult’. Over time, she grew to enjoy her work relying on her sex appeal as it boosted her self-esteem a great amount and now she’s proud to be a sex worker.
Another got into posting ‘revealing pictures’ on her Instagram to ‘promote body positivity and help people realize’ how things that are deemed as imperfections (stretch marks, cellulite, etc) ‘are completely normal and beautiful’. Having realized she loved taking the photos and building a band of supporters, she decided to make some money off it. This story stood out to me as it breaks the stereotype that sex workers are forced against their will to use their bodies as a last resort to make money to live and highlights how it can be an outlet for self-expression and positive representation.
But not comes the question, how are universities reacting to their students using sex work to be stable financially?
Speaking in terms of mine specifically, there is a growing fear for their reputation as students who attend their facilities use sex work for money as this line of work is deemed as ‘indecent’ and far from encouraged.
This could lead to campaigns such as holding lectures orientated around preventing students from becoming sex workers and instead keep relying on getting accepted into a job that society would classify as appropriate. When communicating this outcome to the students I spoke to, issues of shaming and stigma arose prominently, as the girls argued passionately against this.
I agree that there is a hugely restricting mark of disgrace branded on sex workers, specifically girls who are sex workers but that’s another conversation for another time. It is this stigma that is the reason why most students who do sex work keep their jobs a secret and the statistics around students being sex workers could have the potential to increase.
I feel that if universities are going to address issues of students seeking income in these taboo methods then maybe they should observe the root of this situation. The high demand for money being in university brings. Maybe these girls are tired of having to choose between textbooks or balanced meals. Jobs are restricted and unreliable in student majority areas whereas sending a few pictures on your phone every night is stable. If universities are so worried about students becoming sex workers then they should start constructing methods of helping students reach stable incomes.
These young women are embracing and executing their sexualities, they’re combating the stigma around being a sex worker by being open about it on social media. Dipping into the gender dynamics of it, if the girls are getting shamed for offering sexual content for money then where is the shame for the boys who are willing to fork out so much to buy it? Sex work is a two-way street.
Universities should be doing more to help their alleged beloved students survive financially, not shame them for finding their ways of doing so.