Fellow doom-scrollers on TikTok would know about a new language of liberal feminism circulating on the platform. Over the past few years, it’s arrived in fragments: “I’m just a girl,” “girl dinner,” “girl math,” Palestine and Israel explained as your girl friends fighting, tutorials on soft-life living, and the occasional OnlyFans creator explaining how she paid off her student loans. These trends translate everyday habits and even global politics into hyper-feminized and simplified narratives. While there is nothing inherently wrong with making universal experiences feel playful or rendering complex issues more digestible, the framing of these experiences as distinctly “girl-coded” is where the problem emerges.
Social media’s modern feminist trends have sparked online debate about whether they are actually feminist at their core, or at best, a diluted impersonation of feminism, and at worst, rebranded patriarchal complacency. Even if the intention behind these trends was to create space for women and promote female empowerment, the idea of empowerment itself becomes aestheticized when these narratives circulate through algorithm-driven platforms like TikTok. Nowhere is this tension more visible than in how sex work is framed online, where empowerment becomes something consumable, obscuring the structural realities and risks that shape the industry.
Right now, the topic of porn sits in a precarious seat for Gen Z. Gen Z has grown up online and amid porn, as per internet Rule 34. Most of our generation had been exposed to it by the time they were just thirteen. “NoFap” trends, incel communities, and red-pill followers align with a conservative lean from youth (as depicted by the Netflix show Adolescence and Gen Z voting trends). At the same time, Gen Z has also proven to be the most open-minded to different sexual kinks and greatly contributed to the movement towards “ethical porn,” or creator-owned content produced outside of traditional studios where performers historically have little control over their working conditions and content production. Gen Z has shown their ability to think critically about the sex industry and identify the inherent gender and power constraints embedded within the industry.
This critical awareness has not emerged in a vacuum; it is being shaped by how sex work is increasingly portrayed across film, television, and social media. Media audiences often appear comfortable consuming narratives about sex work—stories about autonomy, financial success, or rebellion against conventional careers. Sex workers lauded Anora for its more accurate portrayal of everyday stripper work, and cam-girl Kat’s season one storyline in Euphoria was deemed empowering as she controlled the terms of her work. This is paired with other cinematic portrayals of sex work, including Hustlers and The Player’s Club, which focused on the lives of predominantly Black and brown strippers.
The empowerment narrative tends to follow white women in these portrayals, while women of color are often depicted through the lens of necessity and circumstance, reflecting broader cultural patterns in how agency and victimhood are racialized within the sex work industry. This same tension carries into how sex work is framed on TikTok, where the loudest and most celebrated voices are often those of white women who can present their work as a choice.
The TikTok ecosystem, in particular, has greatly influenced younger generations’ views on sex work. Popular TikToker and OnlyFans creator Stella Barey gained a large and dedicated female following—a younger generation of women whose affinity for her was rooted in her early 2020 storytelling format videos about her candid, provocative sexual experiences. The mass positive reception led to the creation of her explicit content online. Many of her supporters aren’t even subscribed to her OnlyFans, but instead engage with her TikTok, where she speaks openly about her decision to leave medical school and pursue sex work. She is now crowned TikTok’s horny professor, quoting Sigmund Freud and various sexual philosophers, building a cult following of sex-positive women. Barey presents her work as liberating and financially rewarding, though she also acknowledges that it is not a universally enjoyable or sustainable career.
Recently, Barey founded Hidden, a new app designed to alleviate creator burnout and give adult creators more control over their content. The platform is built specifically to address the failures of other mediums sex workers use—namely, the pressure to self-promote through strict mainstream platforms, the lack of content discovery tools, and the unsustainable demand for constant engagement with fans. Unlike TikTok, for instance, Hidden features an algorithm that promotes older content alongside new posts, reducing the burden to constantly produce in order to be seen. It also takes a smaller cut of creator earnings than OnlyFans and is designed to give performers more ownership over how their content circulates and who profits from it. Hidden is one of the only sex-worker-founded adult platforms in existence, which in and of itself reflects how rarely creators have had a seat at the table in building the infrastructure on which their work depends.
Barey is not alone in reshaping how the sex work industry is discussed online. Other TikTok creators offer different, but related, narratives. Ari Kytsya has been praised for discussing the emotional and structural downsides of sex work, while the creator known as HotBlockChain—now a law student—has framed her experience in the industry primarily as a means of funding long-term professional goals. Ari Kytsya was invited to speak at a psychology class at the University of Washington about the sex work industry. HotBlockChain (Emily Cocea) wrote her personal statement for law school on her OnlyFans and Playboy Bunny gig, and ended up getting accepted into the University of Michigan, a top ten law school. These creators have all been met with general support, initially using social media as a means to advertise their sexual content, yet now leveraging their candid experience in the industry as a form of professional and cultural capital.
However, there are other creators whose sexual context has been largely labeled as “rage bait.” OnlyFans creators Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips have gained viral attention for their extreme stunts, such as sleeping with dozens or even hundreds of men in a short period of time, designed to attract algorithmic visibility and media coverage. These performances, often framed as shocking and excessive, have contributed to a more sensationalized and distorted perception of sex work, reinforcing negative stereotypes that critics, especially red-pill theorists, use to demean women in this profession (despite usually being the ones lined up to participate in these women’s videos).
An emphasis on autonomy has always been core to liberal feminism’s message, and many of these creators have embraced and expanded this framework in their own ways. These creators have openly discussed their experiences, effectively taking huge steps toward demystifying and destigmatizing the industry, and in some cases, sought to reshape it, whether through speaking out against exploitation or by building alternative spaces like Hidden.
Yet, as these narratives circulate through a media environment driven by visibility and engagement, they also shape how young audiences—especially those growing up on TikTok—come to understand the industry. While these portrayals can be empowering, they often emphasize flexibility, financial success, and personal choice, obscuring the structural risks and constraints that continue to define sex work.
Enjoying these narratives does not necessarily translate into support for the real people performing the labor itself. The same audiences who celebrate these cam-girl storylines on television or watch TikTok creators discuss their OnlyFans million-dollar income may still hold deeply ambivalent views about sex workers as workers. As a result, young audiences are left to both consume and stigmatize the labor simultaneously. In this sense, sex work increasingly functions as a cultural aesthetic: something that can be admired, consumed, and debated without requiring genuine political or social support for those within the industry.
Many people enter sex work under economic pressure, and the industry itself remains unevenly regulated and highly stigmatized. In the United States, sex work exists in a legal patchwork—while prostitution is criminalized in most states, platforms like OnlyFans operate in a gray area, leaving creators with little formal recourse when content is stolen, issues with income arise, or platforms arbitrarily remove them. The burden of this legal ambiguity falls hardest on women of color and trans women. By contrast, several European countries have moved toward decriminalization or full recognition of sex work as labor, extending workers' access to healthcare and legal protections. But as the industry stands right now, it still lacks infrastructure, making it ripe for abuse of many of these (often young) women.
Yet these conditions rarely translate into these viral narratives online. Even when creators acknowledge emotional or personal downsides, these accounts can function as a kind of surface-level critique, stopping short of fully addressing the material and structural conditions that shape the industry.
It can be true at the same time that sex work should not be criminalized or shamed, that women should be able to exercise agency over their bodies, and that the sex work industry as it is perpetuates patriarchal oppression. Both stigmatizing and romanticizing sex work are, in their own way, avoiding the harder work of protecting the people doing it. The challenge for younger audiences watching this unfold on their feeds is learning to see beyond the curated narratives and to reckon their own role in it—whether they are the ones buying the subscription or the ones considering a career behind the camera.
