Inside the dark world of student sex work

telegraph.co.uk:

Playboy magazine. ‘Creators’ make money by charging people a subscription fee to see posts. Three weeks after signing up, Kitty already had 370 subscribers, each paying about £9 ($10) a month.

She posts pictures of herself in come-hither outfits: lingerie or bikini bottoms pulled low. ‘There’s been a shift,’ she explains. ‘I’ve got loads of university friends who post on OnlyFans and similar websites.’ And so do some of the influencers Kitty follows on social media. ‘I follow one girl who started posting extreme pornographic content a year ago and she’s made enough to buy a three-bedroom house.’ What was unthinkable has ‘now become normal’.

University students have been supporting their studies with sex work for decades. Jay-Z rapped about ‘chicks wishin’ they aint have to strip to pay tuition’ in Hard Knock Life in 1998 (the year tuition fees were first introduced in the UK).

Belle de Jour (Brooke Magnanti), a research scientist, wrote a best-selling book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, in 2005, about her secret life as an escort after she ran out of money in the final stages of her PhD thesis at Sheffield University.But the subject really came to the fore last November when Durham University was identified as offering training sessions to support students involved in sex work.