Erotic trades and sex labour in the age of digital platforms: the Brazilian case

Author: Dr. Lorena Caminhas, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the University of São Paulo

Originally published on: DigiLabour

Sex and erotic trades are inherent to the internet (Garcia, 2021). These markets are responsible for orientating and propelling technological innovation and patterns of use, constituting themselves as historical elements of the web since its beginnings (Sanders et al., 2018).

In fact, the interplay between the media and commercial sex can be traced far earlier. There has been a gradual and increasing mediatisation of sex and erotic trades (Caminhas, 2022) since the advent of print media and the emergence of modern pornography (Kendrick, 1995). Mediatisation (Hepp et al., 2015) promotes a geographical expansion and a qualitative diversification of commercial sex and eroticism, allowing the emergence of new services offered through communication technologies and new modes of sex labour. Contemporarily, the widespread presence of digital platforms as mediators of sex and erotic trades has been pivotal. In Brazil, the digital erotic trade has been growing (Silva 2014, Parreiras 2015), increasingly being managed by digital platforms that establish the commercial and labour modalities.

The Brazilian sex techs

Since the rise of altporn in Brazil, there has been the emergence of Brazilian sex techs (for more details, see Parreiras, 2015). Nonetheless, it is only with the development of national erotic platforms that Brazilian sex techs consolidate, implementing a technical and commercial infrastructure to coordinate the digital erotic trade. The first Brazilian erotic platform, Camera Hot, arose in 2010, and the second one, Camera Prive, surged in 2013. Both platforms provide camming services, a modality of live transmissions of erotic and sexual performances. The first national subscription-based platform, Privacy, emerged in 2021.

Brazilian platforms are inspired by international platforms but adapted to the domestic trade, the local sex workers, and the national audience. Camming and subscription platforms differ regarding the services available and the business models. Despite that, it is worth noting that both types of platforms rely on concentration and monopolisation (centred on the ‘winner-takes-all’ rationale) and network effects (depending on social media to thrive).

The national camming platforms are premium platforms, which bet on the homogenisation of available services and charged prices, establishing pre-set chat modalities charged at fixed prices per minute. Although one of the national platforms recently allowed performers to establish their own fees per minute, prices are still set from a minimum amount that platforms determine. Homogenisation is connected to the profit prospect of platform operators, as they capitalise on every sale made on their infrastructures, retaining 50% of performers’ profits. Homogenisation also minimises competition between performers (as they cannot stand out by a singular service) and gives users a sense of multiple options (as they can get the same service for the same price no matter the performer). Furthermore, such a business strategy speaks of the impetus to control and centralise the national erotic digital trade, making the two camming platforms the primary spaces where demand and supply are able to connect and exchange.

The sole national subscription platform (i.e., Privacy) promotes a space where creators are financed by their audience, who pay per month, quarter, semester, or year for having access to all the content a creator produces. This model is based on funding sex workers so that they can keep producing and feeding their profiles with different content formats. On Privacy, it is possible to consume unitary content without paying for the subscription, centrally on free accounts (which are very popular in Brazil). However, unitary content is often more expensive than subscriptions and less advantageous to consumers (but more lucrative to creators).

Privacy leaves the creators free to produce content (since they strictly follow the platform’s guidelines) and establish the subscription prices. The platform retains 20% of creators as a maintenance fee and charges around R$3.50 (US$0.68) for every money withdrawal (except for instant electronic payment, known as PIX in Brazil). This business model bets on the increasing number of erotic creators in Brazil due to the popularisation of the digital sex trade among the middle strata of the population and on the expanding flow of buyers, making the platform profitable because of the large number of people hovering in its infrastructure. As a result, Privacy relies even more on creators’ social media popularity to move the money within the platform. Privacy thus assumes itself as an aggregating infrastructure, allowing creators to summon their audience to a space where they can monetise content forbidden on social media.

Despite having different business models, camming and subscription platforms have three main consequences for the Brazilian digital sex trade. First, those platforms turn sex labour into a combination of artisanal and industrial modes of work. That is, the autonomy and flexibility that are hallmarks of the artisanal modality of sex labour in Brazil are connected to industrial management elements, such as sex workers becoming individual micro-entrepreneurs (MEI) or legal entities and opening commercial bank accounts to manage their business. Rand (2019) draws attention to the rise of ‘sex entrepreneurs’, who, in addition to managing working routines and dynamics, are prompted to establish their self-brands and create ‘individual enterprises’ to operate in the platform-based erotic trades. In this regime, workers become more dependent on self-branding to increase their sales potential, and they must develop their market niche to move their accounts on different platforms. Second, sex workers take charge of various stages of the commercial sex production process, leading and organising the creation, the distribution, the advertising and the sale of services and content. Finally, the platforms promote atomisation and compartmentalisation of sex labour. Sex labour comprises small and successive micro tasks and activities carried out by workers on behalf of a dispersed, contingent, and floating consumer audience – getting closer to crowd works (Schmidt, 2017). These consequences considerably increase working time and effort, as workers are pressured to produce and manage multiple processes simultaneously and engage on platforms and social media continually and effectively to succeed in and profit from the digital erotic trades.

Datafication of sex labour

Brazilian erotic platforms collect and process data from sex workers to measure their performance through a set of metrics. Camming platforms base their metrics on workers’ numbers of reviews, followers and likes, amount of content and performances sold per month, and length of time spent on the platforms. In short, metrics evaluate popularity and sales potential, displaying workers’ performances in a way the audience can grasp. Metrics also organise platforms’ infrastructures (Keilty, 2017) and build up rankings that define the visibility or invisibility of sex workers. Workers with high metrics tend to garner more visibility overall. The tab division by gender, which is at the basis of Brazilian camming platforms, reflects which performers usually achieve better metrics: white cisgender women overall. Thus, the datafication (Mejias & Couldry, 2019) of erotic labour relies on axes of difference, among which gender and race are the most prominent.

Privacy also promotes datafication over creators. Metrics establish top creators and categorise them, measuring their performances through the number of subscribers and sales per month. The number of posts, photos, videos and likes of each creator feed metrics, monitoring their attendance, potential for engagement and capacity to get subscriptions. The stimulus to competition is a primary effect of metrics, pushing creators to strive to achieve better percentages and get more subscriptions, moving up from categories within the platform. Further, metrics affect the creators’ potential to be verified by the platform since only creators with minimum metrics (the platform does not disclose the parameters) go through the verification process. Privacy promotes its creators through the most relevant profiles tab, using metrics to decide whom the platform will foreground. This tab displays verified and the most lucrative creators, usually white cisgender women. Lastly, it is worth commenting that on camming and subscription platforms, datafication constitutes a new mode of producing coercion on sex labour, prompting workers to seek to improve their numbers and thus their chances of succeeding.

Towards a growing precariousness?

The idea that digital platforms deepen labour precarity and promote a degraded and unsafe working environment is commonplace in Brazil. Expressions such as ‘uberization’ pull ahead by showing this growing movement towards precarity and instability. While such an idea speaks to occupations that once had some degree of formalisation and protection, it is less potent when it comes to historically informal, precarious, and even marginal jobs, which are at the lower scales of the moral division of labour (Hughes, 1958). In the latter case, an interplay of ambivalent elements is much more common. Precarity and instability components combine with autonomy and safeguard components, including (partial) formalisation components. In the Brazilian platform-based erotic trades, the ambivalence between these different elements is quite apparent. Along with the increase in working hours and efforts, there is a high level of independence to control various stages of the production process that were previously managed only by companies. Along with the constraints imposed by datafication, there is a greater sense of security in sex labour and an ongoing formalisation of such work through terms and contracts. Indeed, the supposed benefits integrate into the platforms’ profitability aims but also with Brazilian sex workers’ aspirations for greater independence and protection. Against this backdrop of increasing platformisation of sex and erotic trades, it is vital to highlight the ambivalences that platforms bring. As platforms push work instability and informality, they also prompt a safer and more regulated working environment for sex workers, turning sex labour into a viable, profitable, and attractive to hundreds of thousands of Brazilian people.

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