I was talking to a friend the other day about an OnlyFans content creator. I always tend to specify the type of person I’m talking about. To me, there has always been a distinction between a porn performer (someone who works in commercial porn productions), a webcam girl (someone who webcams at sites like Streamate), and a content creator (someone who creates content for their OnlyFans). Then there are phone sex operators, strippers, and authors of erotica who offer titillation in written form. Oh, and we can’t forget escorts.

One can be any combination of those mentioned above. In other words, a porn performer can also be a content creator. But a content creator may not necessarily be a porn performer.

I do this because you can’t lump everyone together. They are very different things. An issue that a porn performer may have might not apply at all to a content creator. They are all three very distinct industries on their own.

Today, however, people like to use the more generic term “sex worker,” which lumps everyone together. The argument is, by using the generic term “sex worker,” it avoids a whorearchy.

The whorearchy is the hierarchal system by which sex workers too often order themselves from “elite” to “inferior.” The woman who walks the streets is always at the bottom of this hierarchy. Who’s on top, though, is contested.

In other words, no one whore is better than another. Just because you sell sex in one way doesn’t mean you’re any better than a person who sells it in another. Ultimately, we are all whores, which makes us all equal. — That’s the argument, at least.

The problem is there really is no one fits all solution.

Yes, we both sell sex in one form or another, but the way that we sell it and our consumer bases are often very different. So does that make us truly different? The answer is complicated.

The mainstream media loves to talk about the adult industry or porn biz as if we were one big thing. But in reality, there is no one unified adult industry. We aren’t all the same. Gay porn production is nothing like mainstream porn production. We don’t share the same talent pool, the same production values, or testing protocols, and we don’t market our products to the same consumer.

The adult industry is a generic term used by those who don’t understand how we really operate. It’s like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It just doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try.

I am an adult content creator. No, don’t get too excited, I don’t star in my own movies, nor do I post naked pictures of myself, but I do make audio erotica, and I write naughty stories, all of which I share with my OnlyFans subscribers.

Does that, however, make me a sex worker? Because that is how I’m labeled. But let’s look at what that word means — according to the dictionary.

Yes, my work involves sexually explicit behavior. However, it goes on to clarify, especially prostitute (sense 1).

So while I do work that involves sexually explicit behavior, I don’t offer sexual intercourse in exchange for pay, but in a more general sense, I guess I can see how it would just be easier to have one generic term to call us, in the same way that mainstream media uses one generic term for the industry we work in, the “porn business,” even if in reality those things are strictly true, they are sort of close enough.

I am a content creator, porn producer, blogger, and adult performer rights advocate — but if it makes it easier for someone to say sex worker, it’s not really the end of the world.

I mean, it’s not exactly accurate, but in the end, when does the media really care about accuracy when it comes to porn?