OnlyFans creator Emily Mai opens up about the internal divisions within the community. 

It’s very clear that the adult entertainment industry faces external judgment. Every day it seems like there’s another headline announcing new legislation to regulate (or try to eliminate) the industry, or new social media changes that will impact creators, or it becomes a plot device for another prestige drama to show how far a girl has fallen in status. 

But what most people miss is the judgment that happens inside the industry. 

Emily Mai has worked across stripping, topless waitressings, and online content creation over the course of a decade in the industry. She is, by any measure, someone who has seen the full spectrum. And what she’s observed in club changerooms, creator group chats, and unspoken social dynamics of every corner of sex work is a hierarchy so entrenched it has its own name. 

The whorearchy. 

“For me, ‘whorearchy’ is the sex workers’ term for hierarchy,” Mai explained. “Different people will see different types of sex work as being better than others.”

The basic structure will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in any industry with internal status divisions: the people at whatever rung they occupy tend to look down on the rungs below while defending their position against those above. In the adult industry, this plays out along several fault lines. In-person versus online, explicit versus non-explicit, full service versus content online, high-end versus survival sex work. And each category has its own justifications for why it’s more legitimate or more respectful than the others. 

Mai first noticed it while working as a topless waitress alongside growing her online presence. “I noticed it in the club because some girls would do full service,” she said. “There would be girls saying, ‘You better not be offering those services here.’ Then they’d look down on dancers who were doing full service outside the club.”

The irony she observed was sharp. The same women who looked down on their colleagues for seeing clients privately would quietly pursue their own high-spending regulars the moment the opportunity arose. “As soon as they got a really well-paying client themselves, suddenly they wanted to give him their phone number.”

That dynamic didn’t end when Mai moved into content creation, where it takes a slightly different form but runs on the same engine. “You would hear people saying, ‘I don’t sleep with men for content’ or ‘I only do solo, I’d never do boy/girl,’” she said. “There would still be women within the industry judging each other for their choices.” The judgment flows in multiple directions simultaneously, with creators who do explicit content looking down on those who charge less, with creators who don’t look down on those who do, and with in-person workers dismissing online creators as not “real” sex workers. Everyone has a position and a rationale for why their position is reasonable. 

What Mai finds most corrosive is a specific category of denial she’s encountered repeatedly. Creators who have convinced themselves that what they do doesn’t qualify as sex work at all. “There are quite a few sex creators that I’ve met in my time who have convinced themselves what they do isn’t a form of sex work,” she said. “They just share nudes and bikini photos, and they have little chats and in their minds don’t believe it counts. But it does — they’re still providing sexual intimacy to these guys, and there’s a transaction happening.”

The distinction she draws is not between what people choose to do, but between stating a preference and weaponizing it. “There’s a difference between vocalizing your preference, saying ‘I don’t do boy/girl so stop asking me for it,’ and bragging like ‘oh I made $50,000 this month, and I didn’t even have to f*** myself.’”

Beyond the interpersonal ugliness, Mai believes the whorearchy has real consequences for safety. When sex workers publicly distance themselves from others in the industry, they’re reinforcing the exact stigma that makes the whole industry less safe for everyone. Every creator who says she’s different from others is handing ammunition to the people who want to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable, protected and unprotected, worthy and unworthy. 

“The industry would be a lot safer if there weren’t a hierarchy among sex workers,” Mai said. “When people say, ‘I’m not like those girls. I don’t sleep with random men; it affects how people outside the industry view everybody.”

The external stigma and the internal hierarchy feed each other. The judgment that comes from outside the industry doesn’t just land on individual creators. It gets absorbed, internalized, and redistributed within. Sex workers who distance themselves from other sex workers are, in Mai’s analysis, doing the work of their critics for them. 

Her suggestion? Solidarity as a practical safety strategy, not just a political value. “We should all be keeping an eye out for each other and taking care of each other because we are such a targeted community.”

The whorearchy is real, but it’s also a choice. One that the industry keeps making at its own expense.