Eva is still Icelandic time. She is back in Athens for two weeks, but her mind wanders constantly to the North Atlantic. He always wanted to make this trip, but he could never afford it. Just now. “The greatest luxury is freedom. I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he tells K.

Before creating one of the most successful OnlyFans profiles in Greece — a subscription platform for posting sexual content — Eva, now 28, dabbled in ads. While studying marketing and communications, he worked 12 hour shifts for 600-700 euros. “In three years I have changed three companies. In one of them I was deprived of insurance for six months, paid with black money. I have a serious chronic health problem and I was worried about care. But their accountant was in trouble…”

One night while fiddling with TikTok, she saw an American woman who said she was making $23,000 a month through OnlyFans. She was the girl next door, just like herself. “I watched. I’ve seen it’s a site like Instagram where you upload posts and stories and go live, just more naked, for which you charge a certain amount.” She has always been confident in her body and sexuality, so one day she turned on the camera. In the first month, he earned 3,500 euros. By setting up a $10 monthly subscription ($8 on average) and charging extra for personalized content, he is now making five figures. “At some point, I had to start a company to justify my money. It was a short run because no one knew about it and I ate the accountants door.” Since the law on sex work in Greece (2734/1999) has not been amended to include online sex work, the purpose of her company is to produce videos and promote them on the Internet.

Eva does not consider herself a sex worker. “I’m selling pixels, not my body,” he says, adding that he doesn’t find either offensive.

“I laugh at what people will say. How long will I live? After that, no one will even remember me. I will make a good life for myself.”

For 24-year-old Marina, the online porn she does on OnlyFans and elsewhere has different characteristics than work, for example. on the street, but that also falls under the definition of sex work. “I work with a look, with a camera, with an image, I don’t have a face to face. This suits someone, someone else, others move from one to another. Many people say that online is preferable because there is no touch in it. However, many sex workers cannot work without being physically present,” he tells me.

I watch her sit across from me, a beautiful petite girl hidden under an oversized coat. She didn’t fit the sex worker profile I had in mind, but that’s what OnlyFans did: they scaled porn to the size of real people. Marina started working as a webcam girl in 2019 when she was looking for a way out of an impasse. “I was a waitress, a nasty, underpaid job, terrible conditions, no fixed hours, no badges, no sense of respect.” When he accidentally found out about cumming, providing live sex services over the Internet using a camera, he decided to give it a try. “The first time was really cool,” he says with a smile. “In my first performance, I was nervous, but when the camera turned on, I let it go and enjoyed it.” Marina had an OnlyFans profile back in ’19, “we all had it,” she says. However, since the 20s there has been a shift in the world towards content rather than live performances. Users preferred to pay for content that they can access in their spare time. In addition, due to the pandemic and restrictive measures, a large percentage of sex work has moved to the Internet. However, Facebook and Instagram have begun to censor sexual content. OnlyFans was the only platform for the distribution of relevant content. It became an outlet both for those who wanted to consume such content and for those who needed to maintain an income when businesses closed.

“Let’s say OnlyFans has not only sex workers, but also a lot of professional performers, from gymnasts to chefs and DJs,” says Despina Chronakis, researcher at AUTH’s journalism and communications and media departments at EKPA, “K.” who is the latest has been studying OnlyFans for two years in collaboration with scientists from Italy and Portugal.“It works with subscription logic and revolves around creating an audience of followers who invest in the service offered.”The platform currently has 170 million mostly male users and 2 million “The gig economy is unreliable in terms of earnings, stability, constant struggle for survival. At the same time, the nature of sex work is not only unstable , but also lacks secure labor rights, has multilayered inequalities, and suffers from stigma. In fact, content creators tell us they keep people around who don’t judge them.” As Marina says, she does not always share with others what she does, because “I think that I can be in danger, even physical.”

However, Marina also lives, well, by working on the platform. How good; “Both OnlyFans and live, how much you give them, they will give you back. The more you work, the better the reward will be. Incomes can be high, but with a lot of work. You don’t open the camera and the money rains down,” says Marina. At first she worked many hours a day, but now she works 6 hours two or three times a week. The money she earns is more than enough, and she also has time to study – she is studying for a degree at the university (the school does not want to be mentioned).

“However, let me clarify,” she says, “that sex work didn’t come about because I had bad times at work. This is what I thought before. Circumstances just let me get started.”

Boundaries between sex work and exploitation

“Sex workers don’t sell their bodies, they sell specific sexual services,” explains Christos Sagredos, president of the Sex Workers Empowerment Network, which fights to fight stigma and make sex work a legal form of work. “If it’s not a conscious choice, it’s not sex work. If there is no consent, it is exploitation, human trafficking.” According to him, sex workers have chosen this work as a source of income. “However, just as we expect to hear from a doctor that he is doing this to contribute to society at large, we also expect from a sex worker to hear the tragic story that led him there. We don’t want to hear from anyone that they are doing this for the money.”

According to Lisa Tsalikis, a professor in the Faculty of Communications and Media at EKPA who has studied the porn industry for years, more and more sex workers around the world are talking about the conscious decision they often use to fund their education. “We are not doomed,” they say. This is what we like, this is what we are good at, we are no less moral people, we demand the right to our sexuality, we demand fame. According to him, the goal of the movement is to destigmatize the sex business, which in the minds of the majority is intertwined with human trafficking. In this context, many argue that OnlyFans, in which the creators themselves open the camera, press the “Upload” button, and expose themselves to the point they want, works liberating and empowering.

From a feminist perspective, pornography has always been divisive. “I am absolutely for the right of every person to earn money the way he wants, as long as it does not violate the rights of others,” Lena Fuchitsi, founder of the feminist platform Womanlandia, told K. “The concern surrounding this issue is not about the safety of women active on OnlyFans or elsewhere. This is not even discussed, because there is a tacit recognition of what they wanted and received. Women should be attractive and sexy, appear semi-nude and nude in advertisements, but not emphasize their nudity. Those who use the system of their own free will and not as anonymous bodies are treated with great cruelty.”

When police intervention was needed…

Marina talks about the “democratization of pornography”. “We represent ourselves the way we want, not someone else in the studio. It has a lot of creative joy and empowerment.” However, as Mr. Sagredos says, OnlyFans hasn’t completely eliminated the middleman. “The platforms themselves may end up as intermediaries as they keep the amounts as they used to be offline.” In fact, as Eva says, the platform keeps 20% of the creator’s income, and the state another 22%. “Again, the money is good, but it’s not easy. You pay for this with your mental health. You know strange situations that require special handling.” Eva was scared twice. When fans spotted her in real life knowing everything about her. The second time he had to call the police for help.

And Marina faced stalkers, “but not with something uncontrollable.” The biggest problem she faced was the video leak. “It’s possible that in 10 years I will choose another job and these will appear, and I will find them in front of me. It’s not that I’m ashamed of what I’m doing. That’s how society treats us.”

Eve philosophized about it. “I laugh at what people will say. How long will I live? After that, no one will even remember me. I will arrange a good life for myself, and not the one who will judge me. When I realized that I would be working 9 to 5 every day and would retire in the blink of an eye, I went berserk. And now I’m laughing. In your most productive years, you spend half a day in the office and two hours in traffic. And you wake up at 65. This is a reality that does not suit me. Others may be fine with this and want to spend their time on Earth this way. Of course, I am not encouraging anyone to do sex work. There are a thousand ways to gain dignity. When I worked for 600 euros for 12 hours, I had less dignity than now, when so many people see me naked.”

The girls say they enjoy their freedom. “My standard of living has changed, but I wouldn’t do it just because of that,” says Eva, who is also a graduate student with OnlyFans. “I wake up and say that I want to make 10 videos today or nothing, and no one will tell me anything. I am not very interested in material goods, although I bought things for the house – the first was an air conditioner – and helped my family, but nothing like freedom. I remember one Monday I was sitting in the office and thinking how nice it would be to go for a run. Now I run on Mondays.”