Renting Digital Prostitutes

Is the digital woman even human?

Another porn star committed suicide this week: Kagney Lynn Carter, who was 36 years old and died by gunshot to the head.

The reaction to the news on social media was both incredibly elucidating and inhumanely vile. Common comments revolved around proclaiming that nobody should care about a whore dying and declaring that poster was going to masturbate in her honor.

The ugliness of the reaction reflects the perversity of the business and the reality of how the clientele view their rented virtual servants. Women complain about being objectified, but they’re on the money when it comes to pornography. The porn star is a virtual sex stimulant, not a human being. It is a person who you see and hear, but not one whom you feel or smell; the virtual body exists only on demand in the context of the user’s desire and is put away once it has served its purpose. The digital prostitute does not just divorce sex from its purpose, but sex from people.

In the words of Chef, “A prostitute is not someone you pay to stay, no you pay for her to leave afterward.”

Sooner or later, most women in the industry realize that the whole thing is a bait and switch. The attention they get (whether through traditional porn or things like streaming and Onlyfans) is not the love they want. It is a type of prostitution—a way of monetizing the gap between men’s desire and the sexual release that comes through the matriculation of it. The money they get for it (if any) is temporal. There is no 40-year career of sex work and while some women work into their 40s, the truth is that the vast majority of them have a short shelf life. Porn is about novelty, and you can only be novel to a man for a brief time.

When the attention and money wanes, what do porn stars have to show for it all? Can you go back to a normal life after that?

If you are a woman considering a career in the digital prostitution realm, either for the attention or the money, keep in mind you can have hordes of “fans” and when you die, most of them will barely care, will laugh at you the way they laugh at a dead squirrel, or just go jack off to your old content for the perverse high. For the few men who have a parasocial attachment to you, they might mourn, but if they got their fantasy (you, presumably), what would they do with it? Chances are, your biggest fans would have sex with you but never date you and certainly not introduce you to their mothers. Men may get attached to their favorite prostitutes, but they don’t marry them.

Men don’t date whores; they pay them for sex.

This is probably why porn stars, if they are able to have a romantic relationship, tend to pair up with other people in the industry. Normal people don’t compartmentalize their partner’s sex into “work” and “fun” and “love.” It all goes together. People may be able to compartmentalize their own sexual experiences (or think they can), but it is not usually so for another person. If you want somebody to accept that you are in the industry, the easiest place to find him is in the industry itself.

And it is a very dirty industry that, like the clientele, uses up women and discards them. At 36, Carter had been in the industry a relatively long time, probably enough to be on the other end of the “used up” pipeline, brutalized to the point of despair. Young women get sucked into doing things that they can’t, due to the nature of the internet, ever undo. The men behind “Girls do porn” were put on trial for sex trafficking because of the way they trapped young women into having sex with them, and it was nominally legal because they turned on a camera.

You are a prostitute. You are hired to provide a service on demand, and when that demand for the fresh face decreases, you’ll be paid less and asked to do more perverse acts to get your paycheck. Porn stars age quickly because of what they have to do (drugs) to tolerate such constant dehumanization. It is mentally and often physically traumatic to work in the porn industry. Just look up what women have to do to prep for certain scenes.

There is a deep irony, too, to the way it is all displayed. The woman is shown experiencing pleasure, but the reality is usually far from pleasurable, and is in most cases painful. The positions are there to stimulate the viewer and show him something, not to give the vicarious flesh stand-ins enjoyment. The same thing applies to Onlyfans, which is better only in that it gives the woman an opportunity for more money in exchange for hyping up the parasocial relationship with lonely, broken men. And livestreaming? There is no way a woman is enjoying getting dildoed and vibrated for hours on end. It’s a performance; in other words, faked for the fantasy of men.

The new paradigm isn’t just selling a brief sexual fantasy, but the illusion of a relationship. You see it with strip clubs, if you’ve ever been in one. The women there sell the fantasy to men that a woman is interested in them. It’s all talk and compliments leading up to a “private dance” where the hapless men think that, somehow, they are going to get laid. Camwhoring is that on another level, a heightened stimulation by allowing the user to direct the fantasy. It’s addictive, but it’s illusory, and, in the end, it’s just prostitution.

Once you leave that industry, the prospects for normal life don’t get much better. Most men will only be interested in dating a former porn stars temporarily, basically to have access to “exciting” sex, but any balanced and self-respecting man will not want to endure the public embarrassment of being with a former sex worker. Because of the permanent nature of the internet, the record of your body will be available to friends, family, children, etc. forever. Imagine your little brother getting teased because his friends found your only fans or chaturbate profile. Imagine being a teacher and getting hauled into your adminstrator’s office because your students found nudes of you from when you were 21.

Porn harms men, too, but that harm is not so visible, not so unforgiving, not so irreversible. Harmed relationships can be repaired. Impotence can be cured by stopping porn. Distorted views of sex can be healed over time. Mild porn use may not even be visible just like occasional drug use. But for women, one bad choice can last a lifetime. For me, porn is a private vice. For performers, it is a very public one.

All this leads to the kind of strange reactions that men have when a porn star dies. It’s a person he knows, in a sense, since he has carnal knowledge of her at least visually. There might be memories and imprinting there. The human being has to be reduced to an object almost for the sake of sanity. When a man looks at porn, he has to put away thoughts that the woman is somebody’s sister or daughter, that she has a real life where there are real consequences to her choice to rent herself to you.

It’s frightening when you think about it, and the whole thing is just a piece of our current atomized, disconnected culture. The body is not real. The person on the internet is not real. They are there for a moment, then gone, and then you are alone again. The trip to the digital is temporary and immediate, a way to fulfil impulses that were delayed in the past. Onlyfans makes you money when you are 21. What about when you are fifty? Who is going to be with you then?

I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon or Ko-Fi, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.