On an average evening, Suicide Sage spends an hour on her phone, scrolling through her DMs, scheduling content and checking to make sure that her subs have logged their daily tasks in the Obedience app she has them download. Did they brush their teeth that morning? Did they get to work on time? Did they dress how she told them to? Each of their responses inform punishments or rewards they could receive from her, in the form of paywalled content on the subscription platform OnlyFans.
Suicide Sage — the stage name she uses on digital platforms and at the State Line strip club where she works — is a Spokane-based dancer. Sage did try to work as a bikini barista at Black Sheep Coffee Co. Three of the four other local OnlyFans creators RANGE interviewed for this story feel similarly, that selling sexually explicit content on the app was a critical tool for surviving the pandemic, but now serves as more of a safety net or way to earn discretionary income.
Prostitution is still illegal here, and until new legislation passed last year , state regulations governing strip clubs put dancers at increased risk of economic exploitation.
State regulations combined with the passage of the pair of federal laws known as FOSTA — SESTA , which severely limited the use of online platforms like Craigslist and Backpage for sex work, left those who used digital marketplaces to vet potential clients and safely arrange meet-ups at a higher risk of violence and sex trafficking.
In December , 17 million people used the platform. By the end of , that number had ballooned to almost million users.
