We’re seeing enough of these stories surfacing lately that many conventional businesses and institutions may have to grapple with this question. At one rural high school near St. Louis, it was discovered that not just one, but two of the female teachers were operating OnlyFans pages and producing sexually explicit content to earn money on the side. And it’s not just happening at schools. These amateur adult actresses are cropping up in banking, the real estate industry, and many other fields. But particularly when it comes to schools and people who deal with children professionally, should such a discovery lead to their termination? Or do they have the right to continue their day jobs? That’s a question that the AP dove into this week and the answer may be more complicated than we might assume.
At a small rural Missouri high school, two English teachers shared a secret: Both were posting adult content on OnlyFans, the subscription-based website known for sexually explicit content.
The site and others like it provide an opportunity for those willing to dabble in pornography to earn extra money — sometimes lots of it. The money is handy, especially in relatively low-paying fields like teaching, and many post the content anonymously while trying to maintain their day jobs.
But some outed teachers, as well as people in other prominent fields such as law, have lost their jobs, raising questions about personal freedoms and how far employers can go to avoid stigma related to their employees’ after-hour activities.
One of the two teachers at St. Clair High School was suspended. The other one resigned without being forced out. What they were doing with their online content creation work was clearly pornography, but it probably doesn’t qualify as prostitution unless they were bringing in strangers to “perform” and accepting money from them. Some of the parents expressed anger, with one saying that it’s outrageous “to think that it’s OK for children to be seeing their teacher having sex.”
One of the teachers was a cheerleading coach, so she obviously worked with young girls. That only adds fuel to the fire for the school and the parents. But should the school be able to remove them when this activity was taking place entirely away from school property? It doesn’t seem as if this is a case of someone saying that it’s “OK for children to be seeing their teacher having sex.” OnlyFans is an adult website and children of that age aren’t supposed to be able to access it. (Yes, I’m aware that they do anyway.) If any students are watching these performances, their parents probably need to be paying more attention to their children’s content consumption habits.
Everyone is free to be as judgemental as they wish, but this debate seems to cross over into issues of free speech and workforce management. Pornography is still not illegal in America unless it involves children or nonconsensual situations. What if the women in question weren’t teachers but instead worked as tellers at the local bank or at a pharmacy? Would the discovery of their online pornographic performances justify their firing? For that matter, could they be fired if they took a night job as a stripper?
When I first heard about these stories, my initial reaction was to think that of course, they needed to be gone. But the more I consider these questions, the less sure I am. There are currently more than two million people performing on OnlyFans and the vast majority of them are women or couples involving a woman. Some of them are doing it as a full-time job, but many use it as a side gig to make extra cash, in some cases a lot of it. Are we really better off or somehow a more moral society if they all get fired from their day jobs?
I’ll confess that I’m a bit in the dark here because I’ve never visited an OnlyFans site and have no intention of paying for a membership. But I’m finding it rather hard to be too judgemental about the women in this story. Even if we’re talking about a public school, as long as the teachers keep their sexual performances online and away from the campus and don’t get the students involved, I don’t think we should be treating them any differently than if they had taken a gig as an Uber Eats driver in the evenings. Everybody needs to earn a living.
