91Èȱ¬

When I started doing stand up comedy it was at small open mic nights. In those dank little rooms there would be ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty of us newbies, rattling out the first jokes we’d ever written in the hope that one day, if we did enough of this, we might be able to host podcasts about love, sex work and pornography for a podcasting platform, that at that time didn’t exist, called 91Èȱ¬ Sounds (that may have just been me).

I look back quite affectionately now at some of the hack topics that inspired the jokes. This was the summer of 2014, Tinder dates were an exciting new topic to joke about, and two years on there were still plenty of jokes about the London Olympics floating around (and I do believe I had one of the better ones). But there was one hack joke a lot of new comedians were telling pretty regularly that always stood out to me as being really odd, and it was basically the performer on stage joking about how disappointed their parents would no doubt be that they have chosen to be a professional comedian.

The joke made no sense to me for two reasons - first of all, none of us were being paid to do these gigs, none of us had ever been paid to do any gigs, we were hobbyists, amateurs, rushing from actual jobs to come to these nights and often perform to audiences of 3. The idea of our parents being ashamed of us for being professional comedians, is the same as my Dad telling his mates at the pub that I’m a footballer because I play 5 a side once a week. We weren’t comedians. I worked in retail.

But more importantly I could never understand that joke because, if (and indeed when) I were to become a professional comedian, I couldn’t understand why my parents would be disappointed. Through a mix of having genuinely supportive, loving parents, who enjoy me doing a job that makes me happy, and the fact that those parents never had massively high hopes for me anyway, they love that I’m a comedian. They loved when I worked in retail too - mainly because they could use my discount.

This week for my podcast Jacob Hawley: On Love I’m talking to people who do adult work; performers who make a living from a mix of 'camming', studio porn and selling their own pictures and videos. And the question that comes up most frequently, and that I can tell the performers are used to answering, is ‘what do your parents think of what you do?’

One lad that I speak to is Jack, a guy I actually grew up with.

Years ago me and Jack would frequent the same pubs, the same parties in our hometown of Stevenage, and Jack was always… busy. He was the lead singer of a band that toured internationally, and in his own words ‘if sex is a buffet… I can eat more than most people’.

We lost contact a few years back, but a few months ago I was scrolling through my twitter feed and, of all people, Boy George retweeted a photo of a tattooed man, topless, seductively posing with a cigar.

It was Jack.

I clicked through to find he had 100,000 followers and was now making a living from these kind of photographs.

He sells his content through OnlyFans, he’s grown the fan base he’d already built as a musician, he’s making better money than he’s ever made before and he’s doing it as a parent himself. I asked him if he can ever see himself having regrets in future about the way he’s making a living? ‘Only if I don’t do something sensible with the money for my family.’

I met another OnlyFans creator, Jake Herbert. Jake’s one of the top 0.2% content creators on the site. We met in his Dad’s house and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the way our parents decorate their houses - there’s a certain breed of working class Mum who goes nuts for a sticker placed on a wall with either three words that mean nothing, ‘Live, Laugh, Love’, or a bawdy yet somewhat worrying reference to alcohol dependance ‘Don’t speak to me until I’ve had my morning Gin!!!’.

Jake has a pretty unique story in relation to the ‘What do your parents think of you doing porn’ question, in that his Dad actually appears in some of the pictures with him. They pose topless together, sometimes trouserless, and Jake’s pretty sure this is the reason he’s become so popular.

He’s open about his income. I won’t write numbers here but he makes much more in a month than the average national annual salary. I ask how much he pays his Dad to feature in the pictures, he laughs and tells me he chucks him a hundred quid sometimes.

He doesn’t claim to understand it himself, but people go mad for the photos of him and his Dad. They never do anything intimate together in the pictures, but Jake has a keen understanding of what appeals to his audience.

My podcast is about love, intimacy, human connections and the almost transactional nature of commodifying people’s desires to create and sell this content the way Jake and Jack do can seem a bit cold. I suggest this to Jake. He shrugs, ‘it’s better than my old job at the call centre’.

The reality of the world my generation faces is that university tuition fees are astronomical, the bottom rung has been sawn off of the housing ladder and the job market is oversaturated and unforgiving.

The people who cast the harshest judgement upon sex-workers or pornographic performers do so from a position of privilege.

Do we live in a capitalist society lacking in opportunities, in which young people are commodifying their feelings just to earn a living? Maybe.

Does this need to be radically upheaved and overthrown in favour of a world in which we don’t have to work so hard, and that we can all be free to live the way we wish, without constantly fighting to get by?! Sure, why not.

But in the meantime people have bills to pay.

What I do know is I’ve done gigs I didn’t want to do to pay my rent, done jobs that I hated, promoted things and people that I don’t believe in. Most of us, on a daily basis consume products that were not made as ethically as we’d like. And most of the people who cast the harshest judgement upon sex-workers or pornographic performers do so from a position of privilege. In the first episode of this podcast I spoke to people who make a living through studying, researching or speaking about the porn industry. They didn’t choose to do that because it’s better than their old job at the call centre.

How would my parents feel if I were to do porn?

They might consider that with the money made I could provide a better future for my family.

They might consider that I enjoy the work, and that with the new ways of selling adult content, there is more autonomy and control for the content creators. They are their own bosses and they create the content they wish to make and that they feel their audience will enjoy.

Who knows, if I went on to work in the right places, they might even ask if I could get them a discount.

Jacob Hawley is a comedian and the presenter and creator of 91Èȱ¬ Sounds’s award-winning podcast Jacob Hawley: On Drugs. The second series Jacob Hawley: On Love is out now.

Jacob is also the creator and star of 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4’s Welcome to Britain, a solo show based on his critically acclaimed debut stand-up hour Howl, with a follow up based on his second, sell out Edinburgh show ‘Faliraki’ which will air in 2021.

Jacob has rapidly generated interest as one of the boldest new voices on the circuit with his astute observations and political passion. His live shows have sold out at both The Edinburgh Fringe and at London’s Soho Theatre.

Twitter: @hawleyjacob

Instagram: @jacobhawley