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Enslaved on OnlyFans: Women Describe Lives of Isolation, Torment and Sexual Servitude
On an August morning in 2022, a young woman slipped out of a house in suburban Wisconsin and dashed to a waiting police car.
Her hands shaking, she told officers it was the “most brave thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
For nearly two years, her boyfriend had held her captive, prosecutors say. She feared he’d kill her if she tried to leave. But just days earlier, after he’d poured hot grease down her back, she started plotting her escape, secretly messaging family and friends to alert police.
The young woman later explained her desperation to detectives: Almost every night, her boyfriend had forced her to record sex acts on camera to sell online. Among his chosen outlets was OnlyFans, the hugely successful website famous for porn.
OnlyFans says it empowers content creators, particularly women, to monetize sexually explicit images and videos in a safe online environment. But a Reuters investigation found women who said they had been deceived, drugged, terrorized and sexually enslaved to make money from the site. The findings are based on redacted U.S. police complaints and international court files, lawsuits and interviews with prosecutors, sex-trafficking investigators and women who say they’ve been trafficked.
In one prominent case, influencer Andrew Tate, with millions of followers worldwide on social media, is accused of forcing women in Romania to produce porn for OnlyFans and pocketing the profits. He has denied the charges.
Generating less attention are cases Reuters identified in the U.S., where some women endured weeks or months of alleged sexual slavery in ordinary-looking homes in quiet communities. The victim sometimes was a fiance or girlfriend, abused to pad the household budget, fund a couple’s retirement or cover children’s expenses, according to accounts in police or court files. Reuters is withholding the names of women who say they have been trafficked.
The woman from Wisconsin, now 23, was abused by Austin Koeckeritz, who described himself on a blog as “a business owner, an artist, and a student of psychology.” He’s serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking.
“The two years there felt like decades, and I was in pain and alone and ready to die,” the woman said in her first public comments about the case. “I don’t think I’ll ever be fully healed.”
Read the rest of this article at: Reuters
This past September, on the first day of class, an Ontario high school teacher I’ll call Adam attended a school-wide meeting about the province’s new restrictions on students’ smartphones. He and his colleagues had heard lots of buzz about the new rules, which they felt were long overdue, but had little concrete information about how teachers on the frontlines would enforce them.
According to Adam, the previous school year had been a gong show. Students arrived every morning with phones out and AirPods in, bleary-eyed from late nights scrolling. They texted during the national anthem and played mobile games under their desks. They shared pictures and videos of each other, of teachers and of after-school fights. They coordinated mid-period vape breaks in group chats. One student went to the bathroom and returned with an Uber Eats delivery. Any time Adam wrote on the board, he’d turn back around to find students glued to their glowing screens. Engagement had plummeted, grades were declining and, because Adam was constantly policing students’ phone use, his bond with them was fraying. “These kids want to do well, but they’re so lost,” says Adam. (I changed his name because he feared retribution from his administration for speaking to me.)
This year, the province mandated that students were not to use phones in class at all, with rare exceptions. But as Adam listened to the principal explain the new system, he grew dismayed. It was obvious that this was no sweeping ban. The principal urged teachers to be accommodating by default, noting that there was no way for them to know why students were using phones—maybe they were monitoring a medical condition with an app, or waiting on a text about an ailing relative. And though Ontario’s policy required rule-breakers to immediately surrender their devices when caught, the principal implied that teachers would be personally liable if a confiscated phone was lost or damaged. The principal advised teachers to send offenders to the office instead. Adam’s colleagues rolled their eyes. They’d tried that before; it didn’t work. A vice-principal would give students a mild reprimand and send them back to class.
Adam left the meeting feeling deflated. “The general consensus was that they were telling us, ‘Don’t do anything,’ ” he says. Sure enough, within a week, students were back on their phones in classrooms and roaming the hallways watching TikTok. “It feels about the same as before,” says Adam.
This was supposed to be the year that schools broke up with smartphones. Over the past few months, governments around the world—in Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, Singapore, Australia and multiple U.S. states—have introduced regulations dictating where, when and how students could use their mobile devices. So did every province in Canada, except for Newfoundland and Labrador. There had been ministerial announcements, exhaustive media coverage and authoritative emails to parents. It looked like, after years of debate, educators were mounting an all-out assault on electronic distractions.
But as provincial governments jumped on the phone-ban bandwagon, they left enforcement to school boards. Educators had mere months to figure out how to prohibit phones in classrooms where students have become addicted to them, and where, in many cases, the devices have become essential tools for course work. Some boards rolled out coherent strategies; many more did not. Across the country, teachers like Adam told me they began the semester without any guidance from their principals, superintendents or boards. It’s been up to them to decide how—or if—they’ll keep their classrooms phone-free.
Read the rest of this article at: Maclean’s
On March 20, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband’s psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack. Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event. The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarizes one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the “narrative” of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others.
Of course, a narrative is a “story,” and “stories” are neither logic, nor ethics. It is a dream you continue to have. You might, in fact, not even be aware of it. But, just like breathing, you continue incessantly to see this dream. In this dream you are just an existence with two faces. You are at once corporeal and shadow. You are the “maker” of the narrator, and at the same time you are the “player” who experiences the narrative.
Translated by Matthew Carl Strecher
The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. What drew him to this work of reportage also animates his inventions. Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.
Read the rest of this article at: Esquire
At a wide desk in a bedroom somewhere sits a figure, her back facing the camera, supported by an ergonomic white office chair. Her head is bracketed by puffy, white noise-cancelling headphones. Her wrists rest on a foam cloud as she plays a pixelated farm-simulation video game called Stardew Valley on a handheld Nintendo Switch. She is surrounded by screens. An expansive computer monitor in front of her displays footage of another game. A monitor to the side projects an animation of some friendly forest landscape, with animals flitting among gently swaying trees. On the wall, lights the shape of geometric tiles cast a soft glow in changing colors according to whatever is onscreen. On floating shelves above her rest small potted plants, signs of organic life amid a tranquil technological ecosystem. Her keyboard has keys in pastel colors that clack like a typewriter’s; next to it rests a glass mug of grass-green matcha latte. You can find proliferating versions of this figure across TikTok and Instagram, under the hashtag #cozygaming. She is completely ensconced in a serene environment, a self-contained digital and physical cocoon. Her accessories, the room’s soothing décor, and even her soft clothes and fuzzy blankets complement and extend the world of her games. As one cozy-gaming content creator put it, “Like someone having a bubble bath and candles and a glass of wine, you’re turning a typical normal activity into something more relaxing.”
Cozy gaming has become not just a social-media genre but a life style. The trend can be traced back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nintendo released the latest iteration of its Animal Crossing series, in March of 2020, just in time for quarantined players to hide away as they built cutesy, cartoonish islands populated by anthropomorphized creatures and shared them with one another. The game, which has sold nearly fifty million copies to date, became emblematic of pandemic escapism, offering a kind of parallel virtual society in which interaction was still possible. Around the same time, a law student named Kennedy started posting videos of herself playing Animal Crossing and other, similarly soothing games, under the name @cozy.games, eventually accumulating six hundred thousand followers on TikTok and countless imitators.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
At the end of We Who Wrestle with God, Jordan Peterson tells the reader that the book is a “response to the brilliant Nietzsche”. For the Canadian psychologist and leading prophet of the counter-cultural right, the woke movements on which he wages war are not the fundamental cause of the crisis he believes has overtaken Western civilisation. The malady of the West is the collapse of meaning that befalls human beings when their values are unmoored from any transcendental order – the condition Nietzsche diagnosed as nihilism. The remedy is fearless self-examination, an agonising struggle against despair that points to a realm beyond the self. But is the realm Peterson discovers separate from his struggle? Or is it a therapeutic fiction, invented to rebuild a self shattered in traumatic encounters with the madness of the age?
Thirteen years in the making, this compendious volume –the first of two, Peterson tells us – consists largely of commentaries on Jewish and Christian scripture. Reflections on the Genesis story of the Fall, Cain, Abel and the meaning of sacrifice lead to a two-chapter meditation on Moses, over 100 pages long, and a final chapter on the story of Jonah who, instructed to convert Nineveh, ends up being swallowed by a whale.
In the section on Moses, Peterson refers to the Israelites who “regressed to the paganism of possession by instinct”, worshipping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountaintop communing with God: “The narrative here… indicates the fundamental problem of truth or even social agreement arising from mere consensus, in the absence of any true correspondence with an intrinsically structured reality or a priori cosmic order.”
An “a priori cosmic order”, however, is not the biblical deity, the creator of the world and humankind. Such an order could be the timeless realm of Plato’s “forms”, or – as Peterson acknowledges when he cites the Taoist tradition – the impersonal “way” of Chinese thought. Why identify this “intrinsically structured reality” with the God of Abrahamic religion? In the introduction, or “Foreshadowing”, Peterson tells us:
“The Bible is the library of stories on which the most productive, freest and most stable and peaceful societies the world has ever known are predicated – the foundation of the West, plain and simple.”
Read the rest of this article at: The New Statesman
