Where Are All The Novels About Online Sex Work? Masking for a Friend

Arturo Vidich

June 13

At the start of the pandemic, as many people lost their jobs or were switched to remote, people pursued other passions and income sources, leading to a rise in first-time novelists, and a rise in OnlyFans accounts launched by creators and users alike. OnlyFans, a subscriber-based social-media platform used primarily by sex workers, may be the most well-known camming platform at this point—sort of the Facebook of porn sites. Now, four years later, the brand has become synonymous with dollar-bills, squirting eggplant emojis, and microcelebrity. As the narrative goes: Life got you on the ropes? Time to start an OnlyFans.

I discovered Rufi Thorpe's fourth novel, Margo's Got Money Troubles, while doing research for my own novel, a queer speculative dramedy about a bisexual widower who cams to support himself and his grieving children, when his dead wife comes home. While my novel is about queer sensibilities in contemporary parenting culture, and the lengths we'll go to heal grief, Margo's Got Money Troubles is, at its heart, a coming-of-age novel about self-empowerment and, "Cash, cold and green."

The story centers on Margo, a young single mother who starts an OnlyFans to avoid eviction, destitution. With the mentorship of her father, Jinx, a retired pro wrestler and recovering substance abuser, Margo constructs a persona that attracts steady income, and unwelcome attention. After Margo gets doxxed, her baby's father initiates a custody battle, and Child Protective Services pays her a visit thanks to her own well-meaning (if chowderheaded) mother who disapproves of Margo's digital sex work. Thus, Margo is forced to grow up and defend her family, at which point the story moves seamlessly, brilliantly, into a paperwork novel.

Margo takes place in the early days of OnlyFans, before the pandemic, but after SESTA-FOSTA was signed into law in 2018. This legislation was intended to protect minors from digital sex trafficking, but time has shown that it put sex workers' lives in danger, "by hobbling an online infrastructure they have come to depend on," and pushing sex work away from the relative safety of the internet, back to meet-up apps and the street. IRL sex workers, particularly BIPOC and trans sex workers, are disproportionately at risk for abuse, stalking, and homicide than other forms of labor. SESTA-FOSTA also has had a chilling effect on credit card companies, which chose to adopt more restrictive content policies tied to their payment structures.

Novels about young women and single mothers defying capitalist patriarchy have been written, as have ones that feature sex workers—not to mention an increasingly large number of memoirs, including Isa Mazzei's Camgirl, and a slew of cinema and other art that depict analog sex work and traditional pornography. But I've been hard-pressed to find significant treatment of this emergent, direct-to-consumer labor market in fiction, let alone stories about single parents who cam. It's no minor footnote that for the past quarter century a person can, from the comfort of their own home, generate income to support themself and their family using little more than what they came into the world with. I'd go so far as to say it's critically underrepresented, given our culture's preoccupation with and demonization of sexualized bodies, the amount of porn we make and consume. I scoured the internet and bookstores, reached out to authors with knowledge on the subject, locating precious few examples; I began to wonder: where is all the fiction about online sex work?

As Margo's Got Money Troubles was one of those precious few examples, I wanted to pose this question to Thorpe herself, and she was kind enough to speak to me over Zoom.

"Probably we'll see more of it," she said. "OnlyFans made online sex work more mainstream. Like, I've had conversations with my Mormon mother-in-law about OnlyFans and camming."

Thorpe is a fast talker, her face animated as she speculated on the cultural moment that the online sex industry is having right now, the shifting mores about women and sexuality. "It's the difference between the way Monica Lewinsky was perceived at the time of the scandal and how she is perceived today," she said. "There just wasn't enough nuance in our vision of women and sexuality to have a more interesting conversation. I think that authors didn't see the potential of exploring that terrain because they saw it as, you can only kind of do one of two storylines: victimized woman who's degraded, or Disney-fied Pretty Woman hooker with a heart of gold. I feel like we've kind of evolved culturally and processed women's sexual liberation slightly more. There are more opportunities to make interesting stories that aren't as morally simplistic."

As of this writing, camgirls and boys have been portrayed primarily in books that hew close to genres such as romance, suspense, and thriller, some sci-fi, but seldom in literary fiction, mainstream or otherwise. According to some, Dennis Cooper's The Sluts is the internet sex novel to end all internet sex novels, and that was published twenty years ago. Two more recent exceptions are poet Joshua Whitehead's Jonny Appleseed, about a Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer person who self-fetishizes on the internet for money; and Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans, in which a young gay Black man explores camming to solve his money problems, and discovers a talent and passion for mediated performance art. What sets Thorpe's novel apart, is that Margo has an infant to care for.

Thorpe expressed that she's long wanted to write a Madonna-whore superhero character, but couldn't see a path forward, at first. "The stigma against sex work in our culture is so strong, as well as the veneration and idealization of motherhood."

Margo is Rufi Thorpe's pandemic novel. She wrote the first fifty pages in a hotel over a three-day weekend with a single pizza to nourish her. After that, like me, she spent much of the early pandemic managing Zoom school for her children while researching the more taboo corners of the internet. "Being obsessed with sex work during the time when I felt the most stuck in the house the most—constantly mommy, mommy, mommy, like I'm not even a person—and then to be able to open my laptop and go into something that would be totally like morally unacceptable should it accidentally appear in Zoom kindergarten? It was a way of getting to still be my artistic self at a time when I felt kind of claustrophobic," Thorpe said. "It was like a secret tunnel that I was digging towards the future I wanted."

I was curious: did she have any doubts about writing a sex worker mother, and if so, how did she handle them?

"There is so much about motherhood that our culture seems to get really wrong," she responded. "And the fear that sex is somehow antithetical to motherhood or that their mothers being sexual beings is going to damage children is one of those beliefs that's sort of mysterious to me. To tell a breastfeeding mom that her child needs to be protected from the sinfulness of her breasts is the ultimate absurdity."

Thorpe recounted that, coming up as a writer, she was advised multiple times that you can't use money as a major plot driver. "I think it's just like a holdover from literature being orchestrated by rich white men. Like, if you're going to write plots that are remotely like people's lives, it has to be about money."

While the specific circumstances that compel a person to create an OnlyFans may vary, the underlying desire is the same: live well. Unfortunately, few OnlyFans models are financially successful, with only the top 1% of creators making six-figures or more. In other words, 95% make next to nothing. So then, why do it?

Reading a Rufi Thorpe novel is like attending a masterclass on causality in fiction. Few authors write as deftly about navigating the systems that control our lives. It's tricky business, writing the internet we all have a love–hate relationship with. Authors have to figure out how to make the universal personal, needing to design compelling parasocial relationships that defy passivity and the low-stakes action of staring at screens. Get them in a room together, goes the adage heard in many a fiction workshop. Or, as Kendall Roy of Succession says to his ex before his father's funeral: "You're too online, you've lost context."

One of Thorpe's solutions to the too-online problem finds its stride in the epistemological. While Margo fields insults and death threats from faceless men, she also strikes up a tender, truth-laced correspondence with a young male client named JB who pays her $100 per response to his personal questions. The romantic tension between Margo and this man ratchets up in parallel to the custody narrative, and her art-business career. By the end, JB has gone from client, to lover, to something far less conventional in one of the more satisfying romantic arcs I've encountered in a while.

That said, if you're looking for steamy hardcore smut such as the internet offers up in great supply with the click of a mouse, you may be disappointed to discover Margo is not that kind of sex work novel. Thorpe clarified that's because she wanted to portray sex work as work. "I was really aware of wanting to refuse the prurient interest of the reader who might be approaching this hoping to see her be sexually degraded. And I also didn't want the book to come off as anti-sex. My main concern was about her becoming a businesswoman, about becoming an artist."

Putting such ideas into fiction is a path worth treading, and not only for entertainment. According to Heather Berg in Porn Work, Marxist labor theory often excludes sex work because it's viewed as immoral. A similar stance occurs in certain feminist circles, too, that sex work is incompatible with respecting women. Few labor groups are as routinely discriminated against, shamed, threatened, criminalized. But for Thorpe, fiction isn't really the place for moralistic stances.

"Fiction writers are little trash pandas," she said, and yes, reader, I laughed at that comparison. "We don't know more than other people. You're trying to write a book that's smarter than yourself, but like, I don't know anything. I'm gonna write about what obsesses me and the questions that I don't know the answers to. Sometimes I worry about fiction having this moral duty, that fiction writers are expected to be saints in some way. I feel it causes fiction writers to be really disingenuous about their own moral failings and dishonest and inauthentic in a way that is unappealing to me."

This perspective drives the writing throughout Margo. One of the most brutally honest lines in the novel comes after Margo has set up her OnlyFans account and started to generate content: "As dehumanizing as running an OnlyFans was supposed to be, that was how dehumanizing waitressing actually was."

Have I mentioned the novel is flavored with pro wrestling? It might not seem to have much in common with sex work, but both are multi-billion-dollar international entertainment industries, and as performance forms, both online porn and pro wrestling dispense with the fourth wall. Viewers are included, given a role.

"All the parallels are there," Thorpe says, drawing lines in the air with her hands. "Persona-building, taking risks with your physical body in order to make money. Ravishing Rick Rude was a wrestler whose whole deal was that he was hot. He'd come out in his Chippendales outfit and be all, your women want me, this is what a real man looks like. Wrestlers are aware that they're up there in their panties, you know? Like when they go over the stanchions, everyone's trying to grab their—"

Here the Zoom call cut out and we concluded our chat over text message, but you get the picture. Internet sex work in fiction is more than just a hook. When done well—like it is in Margo's Got Money Troubles—it's a portal to desire that plays out across emotional landscapes. And if we can never truly be ourselves in parasocial relationships, why does it matter if one or both of us is naked, or masking our identities? For Thorpe, mask-play is at the center of art-making because it allows for safe and free expression. She believes that when inhabiting artifice there's a point of no return. Hold a pose long enough and you fuse with that persona. You become somebody else.