![]() ![]() These defenses overlook intractable harms caused by a growing sex work market. Others focus on moral justifications, pointing to arguments about bodily autonomy, the extra income such work provides, and even the fulfilling nature of the work. Some proponents focus on decriminalizing sex work, arguing that it is a matter of life and death. OnlyFans has continued to expand: TechJury, a software review company, reports that in 2023, “over 170 million users have registered an OnlyFans account, including 1.5 million creators.” This means that purchasable intimacy is scaling: never before has sex been more available for such low costs.Īs the sex work industry grows, debates about it have intensified. The combination of loneliness and financial anxiety created a boom for OnlyFans, the online platform where anyone can join to sell unique content (almost always sexual) to their “fans.” The Guardian reported that the number of OnlyFans users grew from 7.5 million users in November 2019 to a staggering 85 million in December 2020-which is an increase of more than 1000 percent.īut as the world has reopened, much of sex has stayed virtual. ![]() This piece originally appeared at Įric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and a fellow of the Manhattan Institute.When the economy went virtual during the coronavirus pandemic during 2020, so did sex. The sooner universities and other elite cultural institutions get their head out of the sand the better their chance of instituting the reforms that are needed to dampen a growing and justifiable backlash. The university sector’s failure to increase viewpoint diversity or control progressive authoritarianism is eroding trust in universities and fuelling populist resentment. Meanwhile, teaching and research in social science and humanities subjects leans heavily Left. Departments usually determine who gets hired even if a management rep has a seat at the table. Moreover, academics often move into university administration, where they take key operational decisions. Yet managerialism is more of a problem in lower-ranked, less influential, universities. Figures from the business world do sit on boards of trustees. University managers shouldn’t have meddled with the Jones decision and do sometimes exercise influence. Eschewing systematic evidence, Siddique’s one data point is the denial of tenure to Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the New York Times’ much-criticised 1619 Project. ‘Right’ here is redefined in 1980s terms to mean capitalist while the anti-white male cultural radicalism that encompasses ‘woke’ corporate America escapes her materialist definition of ‘Left’. The campus, we are told, is actually shaped by trustees from the corporate world whose Right-wing outlook informs hiring decisions. Siddique’s gambit involves redefining the university as its top layers, rather than its faculty or students. How else can we explain the surge in academic output on race and gender since the late 1980s, and especially since 2015? He baldly asserts that the political preferences of academics have “little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university - including what happens in classrooms.” While survey evidence suggests academics are generally fair in class, their politics most certainly does shape what research questions they ask, the range of answers they report, the orthodoxies they uphold, and the classes they offer to teach. “The modern American university,’ he claims, “is a Right-wing institution”! “The right is not underrepresented in higher education in fact, the opposite is true,” is the astounding claim made by Asheesh Kapur Siddique in Teen Vogue this week. Meawhile, the progressive Left is continuing to stick its fingers in its ears, doubling down on the narrative that this is a Right-wing moral panic designed to divide and conquer the electorate, while denying the overwhelming reality of Left-wing domination on campus. ![]() ![]() A growing number of red states are now legislating to reform or cut the budgets of their state universities. Trust in universities has nosedived in America since 2015 among Republican voters, and the Right-wing media’s focus on the excesses of Left-modernist ideology on campus - from diversity statements to activist dismissal campaigns to no-platformings - is arguably a major reason. Ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary is plainly dishonest ![]()
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