Culture

Men Are Shaming Mia Khalifa For Joining OnlyFans Without Realising She Isn’t Even Making Porn

Even if Mia Khalifa decided to use OnlyFans for explicit content, it is still her body and her choice.

by Michelle Rennex  28 September 2020
MIA KHALIFA ONLYFANS

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On September 18, Mia Khalifa announced that she was joining the subscription-based social platform, OnlyFans.

In an Instagram post with the OnlyFans platform open on her laptop, Khalifa wrote “I have a full time job… as an accountant”, which has become a common way for sex workers — and mainly OnlyFans creators — to identify themselves on TikTok.

Often only associated with sex work, OnlyFans is actually just a platform where creators can offer pay-to-access content to fans of their work — ranging between things like custom classes on how to use Photoshop to one-on-one personal conversations behind a paywall.

However, despite the phrase and the app being linked to sex work, Mia Khalifa has shared that she isn’t re-entering the porn industry through OnlyFans. Instead, Khalifa plans to share “safe for work content, kinda” with the $11.99 USD monthly subscription price, but explicitly stated that she would not be posting any nude content.

View this post on Instagram

I have a full time job… as an accountant 🙂

A post shared by Mia K. (@miakhalifa) on

During her first week on the platform, Khalifa wrote a thank you message to those who had already supported her new venture. Explaining that OnlyFans is how she would be herself “outside the perimeters of conventional social media”, Khalifa said she saw the platform as “Instagram without the terms of service”.

“I am finally growing into my self-confidence in who I am and the decisions I make for me,” Khalifa wrote. “Even though I will not be creating nude content… I want to take my power back and just post what I want and what makes me feel good.”

Naturally, when headlines that one of the world’s formerly top-ranked porn stars would be joining OnlyFans started to circulate online without the full context, men started to criticise Mia Khalifa’s choice to seemingly rejoin the porn industry that she had spent the last few months denouncing.

Mia Khalifa Is Anti Porn-Industry, Not Anti-Porn

While it is true that Mia Khalifa has been very vocal about her short, but terrible experience in the porn industry, the former sex worker and now-sports commentator was never against the work itself but rather the exploitative nature of the industry.

Only working a three-month period over 2014 and 2015, and producing just 11 videos, Khalifa is still one of the top adult stars in the world. But being pressured into making controversial videos — like wearing a hijab throughout one adult film — has had a negative impact on Khalifa’s mental health. Beyond terrorist group, ISIS, threatening her at the time, Mia Khalifa claims that she is still bullied for these videos to this day and had only ever earned a measly $12,000 USD for her troubles.

But instead of letting attention around these videos die off on their own, Mia Khalifa alleges that a number of porn sites continue to advertise and promote her six-year-old videos to make people think she is still active in the industry. As a result, the ‘Justice For Mia Khalifa‘ petition was started as a way to request that these adult sites return Khalifa’s domain names and remove her videos the internet.

Further explaining her stance on the industry through an Instagram story in June, Khalifa implored women who want to do porn to simply do so on their own terms.

“Those 11 videos will haunt me until I die, and I don’t want another girl to go through that — because no one should. Long story short: don’t do porn. And if you do, don’t do it with a company. Do it for yourself, on your own terms,” Khalifa said.

“And if you consume porn, make sure it’s ethical and not from giant corporations who profit off exploiting women. Like your groceries, shop local and direct from the creators.”

OnlyFans Vs The Traditional Porn Industry

Despite Mia Khalifa’s stance on sex work being very clear, men seem to have immediately run with the idea that because Khalifa criticised the porn industry, her decision to join OnlyFans was hypocritical.

Despite stating that she’s not even producing porn on OnlyFans and Mia Khalifa constantly sharing her negative experiences within the porn industry, men continue to claim that the industry “didn’t force her to do shit” and begun to call Khalifa’s move over to OnlyFans “ironic” and “stupid”.

Clearly lacking the ability to comprehend topics beyond a 10 word headline, these men failed to understand that Mia Khalifa’s plight to have her porn films scrubbed from the internet was directly about the manipulation she faced as a young woman in the adult industry, not the work itself.

Mia Khalifa is not against sex work, she is against the toxic environments created within the porn industry that prey on young, impressionable women. OnlyFans is such a celebrated platform because it gives women, who happen to be interested in sex work, full control over what they do and how much they are paid for their work.

And again, it’s all irrelevant because Mia Khalifa has stated that she isn’t even producing porn through her OnlyFans anyway. So this judgement by men who feel “cheated” by Khalifa creating a subscription service while trying to get justice for the abuse she faced in the adult industry doesn’t even make any sense.

However, even if Mia Khalifa had decided to join OnlyFans with the sole purpose of producing porn, that is her choice to do so. Women having full autonomy over their own bodies, and being the ones who decide what they do with it, is no one else’s business. And it is especially not the business of horny men who just want free porn.