Should OnlyFans Posts Make You NSFW?
Managers should stop online scans for job candidates' risky content. A little paradoxically, the transparency and authenticity of our work cultures demand it.
Hey, welcome to the Mode/Switch!
What personal/professional boundary do you fight hardest to keep?
Do you ignore your emails after 5 pm? Do you clear your status on Slack? Do you blur your background in remote meetings—especially after your partner ran through a Google Hangout a few weeks back, wearing a towel?
Here’s a harder question: What about other people’s private/professional boundaries?
This week, this work-culture newsletter discusses a common hiring practice: managers who scan job candidates’ socials, looking for sexualized pictures.
Below, you’ll skim a trend, a study, a story, and a shift that could help our working communities do a better job of treating professionals like the humans they are.
A Trend
Back in 2023, the Mode/Switch asked, “Why’s everybody got a side hustle?” And now, a couple of years later, “the most lucrative side hustle” in the U.S. is OnlyFans, a digital gig platform for content creators. According to Business Insider, fans paid content creators $6.5 billion in 2023.
A Gen Z worker with a lot of tuition debt can conceivably make more doing OnlyFans content than driving Uber—though, as with so many corners of the attention economy, most of the income goes to a few creators. (Bella Thorne, according to The Tab, has been making $11 million a month.)
A lot of OnlyFans content is sexualized, and it’s, far and away, men who use the site. But it’s the women who are getting fired. (See this Guardian piece.)
Doing a little background research, I talked with a Gen Z professional, who noted that although being a “porn star” is stigmatized among rising generations, hosting an OnlyFans account connotes a more respectable hustle.
Still, as this lively Reddit feed suggests, OnlyFan creators may struggle to get hired for their next conventional job. And even if you’re not on an adult content site, playful online imagery can be risky.
A Study
“Sexy Social Media Photos” is not a phrase I see much in peer-reviewed research, but in an essay for The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, two social scientists set up an experiment to see if “self-sexualized” social media pics affect the hiring process.
The researchers ran 4 studies in total, asking 813 participants to judge the worthiness of men and women candidates for a scholarship or a job based on a self-sexualized photo or a semi-professional photo.
Their findings? The study brings forward evidence for a “sexual double standard.”
“Attractive” women fared better than male counterparts in semi-professional photos. But women with “self-sexualized” images did 39% worse than male counterparts.
So, what many hiring managers see as an acceptable practice—social media-screenings—increasingly looks like a quiet form of sex discrimination.
A Story
A friend wrote me this week to chat up a rom-com show, Younger. The still-Netflixable show centers on a woman professional and single mom who, at 40, pretends to be 26 to get a job in a big-city publishing firm.
So, I checked it out, and it’s a lot of fun. The script moves fast. The acting’s agile. The concept’s fun. And it offers a perspective friendly to the Mode/Switch Pod: work-culture problems through an intergenerational lens.
The show also provides us a story for this week’s newsletter.
If you watch Season 6, Episode 10, “It's All About the Money, Honey,” you’ll see a woman professional, in a board room full of men skeptical about her social media plan. She invites them to follow her on Instagram so they can see just how successful social media content can be. To her surprise, not only do they follow her, but they vote yes on her proposal.
That night, exultant over beating sexist odds, she sends a cleavage pic to her boyfriend. But instead of DM-ing it, she posts it to her feed for the world to see.
The next day, those same men in the board room, having seen the pic, still support her proposal—but only on the condition that she’s off the account and out of the picture.
A Shift
It’s hard not to be a little judgy of people who post risky content. It’s hard not to think, They should have been more careful. It’s their fault, right?
But when it comes to social media scans in the hiring process more than one thing can be true at the same time. It is true that people post too much stuff on social media, and it is also true that managers take advantage of those posts in sexist ways.
So my mode/shift this week: instead of being a single-truth candidate evaluator, keep twin truths in mind for hiring processes in your working community.
We should post less of our lives online. As Anne Helen Peterson has lamented about her social media habits in the 2010s, “the way millennials were incentivized to repeatedly, sincerely share their lives — in the name of connection, for the profit of massive conglomerates — is bonkers.” Peterson’s not talking about sexualized imagery necessarily. Still, the widespread willingness to post private-life stuff to Instagram or TikTok works on a disconcertingly similar logic whether it’s your two-year-old kid or parts of your body. Too often, major social media companies change their algorithms so that your imagined audience of followers and friends transforms into strangers and voyeurs.
We need hiring guidelines that mirror revenge-porn laws in the broader society. An HR org called HTGroup noted that some personal factors like sexual preferences, religious commitments, and other personality stuff “shouldn’t play a role in employability in most cases (it’s illegal for some to be considered at all), but once those hints are thrown out there, they’re difficult to ignore.” As University of Iowa researcher Chad Van Iddekinge has pointed out, hiring processes used to attend to on-the-job behavior. But hiring managers now depend too much on social media scans. A Harvard Business Review article cites Iddekinge: “There should be a clear distinction between what people do during work and what they do outside of it.”
If you’re like me, you feel the slipperiness of this compartmentalization. But what if the health of our workplaces depends on this personal/professional distinction?
A few final thoughts
C’mon, you’re thinking. Are social media scans so bad? What’s the harm in shrinking the candidate pool on the basis of a risky photo? It was the candidate who posted a silly pic, and now our overworked HR team has one less dossier to review.
I would have thought that myself before talking with a millennial professional in my orbit. She told me to peer forward into the murky future of work for a moment.
She sent me to a study from the American Academy of Pediatrics that says that 1 in 4 teens have sexted. As my friend noted, these pictures don’t go away. They get screen-shotted and archived and then they show back up in the world when an ex turns vindictive. This reality’s likely to impact hiring processes for decades to come.
So, if we care about work culture, we have to think all this through carefully, whether we’re managers or just participants somehow in the candidate evaluation process.
And while you’re at it, watch out for a growing number of other digital practices that blur the professional/private lines alarmingly. To name just two examples: sexual harassment in digital spaces and mandated NDAs that compel arbitration in sexual harassment cases. Such boundary-blurring’s asking more wisdom than we’re giving.
We talk a lot about “bringing our whole selves to work.” But for most of us, bring-your-self-to-work-day is an ideal. A good working community depends on our daily authenticity, yes. But we’re each making choices which of our many selves we’re going to bring and which parts of our messy lives we’re going to mention. Doesn’t it follow, then, that we shouldn’t demand a hidden purview of our candidates’ private lives? Should we expect a more radical transparency in our candidates than we ourselves are willing to bring?
-craig