e-girl economy

prostitution or patronage?

Sometimes, if you’re a reasonably attractive woman who’s funny on the internet, men will buy things for you. This happened to me for almost as long as I’ve been online, beginning when I was on Tumblr and had my Amazon wishlist in my bio. In the 2013-2016 feminist era, there was an edge of girlboss reparations political praxis about this which made it widely acceptable, whereas now it would seem gauche.

At one point in my late teens, a man from television was buying me expensive bottles of whiskey on Amazon. He took me to the theatre and in the interval we went to a deserted private members’ club and I was shaking and uncomfortable the whole time so I stopped speaking to him.

I don’t get free things on the internet anymore and very rarely get sent money. I imagine I get less free stuff than a normie Instagram influencer. The only products I’ve been sent are a line of saturated fat-based skincare products and methylene blue haircare. My brand is too toxic for spon-con.

Instead, I’ve used my internet addiction to build a business. I’m not doing anything that I wouldn’t be doing anyway for free, but now I get paid for it. And contrary to the accusations of some on Twitter who say I can’t possibly be funding my lifestyle from writing and must be secretly engaging in prostitution, this is in fact my only income source.

When Emma Garland came on the podcast a while ago, we talked about e-girls and making money from writing about sex or from an internet brand which trades on sex without actually doing sex work. Her Substack,

Gabrielle

, publishes some of the best contemporary writing about sex and desire. I launched this Substack with a 9,000 word essay about sleeping with my tutor at Oxford and I owe my career largely to Mary Gaitskill for liking that essay and recommending me since.

I can admit that I make money by trading on sexual intrigue and suspect that this route is only open to me because I don’t put out. I might make more money doing OnlyFans, but I’d make less money from Substack if I did so. The attraction comes from the denial of gratification, the always-deferred erotic payout. (This is what differentiates the erotic from the merely sexual.)

A few months back, I was hanging out with someone who has a much bigger profile than me and more free Substack subscribers but makes half as much as I do. He said this was because of my simps. I’ve had this response from lots of men and it has caused issues in previous relationships; even when I’m not posting risqué content, boyfriends assume that my online popularity is based on strangers wanting to fuck me and become jealous and possessive.

Other people tell me this is unearned income, like I’m running a scam, or that I should get a real job and become a productive member of society. But most jobs are not productive. I think I’d kill myself if I had to work an office job having pointless meetings and using AI to send emails and write reports which accomplish nothing. When that gen z boss and a mini video went around I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Besides, I’m physically incapable of working one of those jobs, even on amphetamines.

To me, it feels like a return to the way some women made money in the interwar years, when female employment was getting going but a degree of patronage was still expected. Like Jean Rhys, whose former lovers paid her an allowance for years after breaking things off; this was a normal thing to do with women you slept with but didn’t marry, like engagement rings were insurance against a broken engagement. Just as marriage was an economic arrangement, women who didn’t take that more straightforward route were provided for financially. Their social existence, their availability and the effort that they put into being attractive and entertaining were considered worthy of renumeration, a special kind of women’s work. Some were prostitutes in the strict sense; others were simply rewarded for promiscuity and desirability without ever selling sex. Payment was implicitly a sort of apology for the loss of status which resulted from their lifestyle and proximity to sex work.

I didn’t have to try to get into the e-girl economy. It came naturally; I’m the perfect product. Unambitious, obsessive, impulsive, sometimes insane with a tendency to end up in ridiculous and unusual situations, disagreeable and not a team player, attention-seeking, oversexed and terminally online since childhood. Also thin and relatively attractive, albeit in a strange way that’s almost ugly. I would have to try very hard and work against my nature to keep a normie job with a salary and every attempt at this in my early twenties failed disastrously. The reading series I’m organising at Verdurin has occasioned working with other people for the first time in years.

I recently attended a contemporary classical music concert organised by a friend, whose husband, a composer, was performing. Their project is called Vox Alba and the music was extraordinary, really beyond anything I expected and probably the most interesting and evocative contemporary classical I’ve ever heard. It was held in St Ethelburga’s, a ruined medieval church in the City destroyed by an IRA bomb in 1993 and since rebuilt in a way where the modern and medieval elements are clearly distinct. The music, undeniably contemporary, drew on ancient spiritual melodies, Gregorian and Buddhist chants and Renaissance polyphony, mass settings and canticles. A film projected onto the bare white wall flickered with discordant technological images of bodies and lights, playing off the reconstructed stained glass east window which shows the seventh-century abbess with uplifted arms and crosier.

Vox Alba’s mission is to bring patronage back to contemporary classical music, giving a route for composers whose work is unusual and not rewarded by institutions. A similar thing is happening in academia, with research institutes like Pharos in Oxford creating an alternative landscape of institutions where more heterodox work can be done. It is not only necessary that people be willing to do this work, but that other people be willing to pay for it. An article in Rolling Stone this week covered literary imprints publishing work that would be beyond the pale for traditional publishing. This is beginning to happen across the creative industries.

It makes some people very angry that I can make a living on Substack. I think this is because it places me beyond their control. They see themselves as cultural gatekeepers with moral authority to decide which art gets made and, until recently, the structure of the art world has granted them this role and decorated them with status and accolades. The critic is now having a very bad time, finding their power undermined by a resurgence of the patronage model. The main reason I’m self-employed is because of people seeking to get me fired from jobs and expelled from educational institutions; attempts which, though unsuccessful, covered my daily life with a gauze of paranoia and stress. Substack lets me feel untouchable and free.

Substack, Patreon and increasingly X have allowed for an easy, stress-free, highly centralised system of patronage. Alongside these ventures exists the more anarchic, informal model which begins with person-to-person relationships. An exchange of money for entertainment, a degree of artistic control or a parasocial investment. Patronage is riskier than employment, where all the complexities of interpersonal relationship have been stripped away and replaced by HR guidelines and impersonal corporate etiquette. Patronage is sexier, more dangerous, more liable to explode. Perhaps it’s insecurity that gives this economic model its tendency to produce the best art, like all the great works of the Italian renaissance, the astonishing metalwork of fourteenth-century Paris, the greatest English collegiate chapels and cathedrals. Creativity feeds on risk and freedom and is only ever constrained by institutions.

The vibe seems to be shifting again; I think the cultural landscape now being born will work much more on this model. It will be less centralised and will be made up of talented individuals not seeking after institutional approval but free to make whatever work they choose and to pursue every line of thought. All it requires is people willing to put their money where their values are.