This Leeds student wrote her dissertation on OnlyFans and we’re here for it

It’s called ‘LonelyMans, PhoneyScams, and HornyGrans’

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A Media, Communications and Cultures student at Leeds Beckett has written her dissertation on the Twitter discourse surrounding the and nude haven that is OnlyFans.

Olivia Murphy’s diss, titled “LonelyMans, PhoneyScams, and HornyGrans: A corpus assisted critical discourse analysis of Twitter users; perception of postmodern online sex work on OnlyFans”, discusses the treatment of OnlyFans sex work on Twitter so, naturally, it attracted a lot of attention.

On July 1st, Liv received a mark of eighty on her diss meaning she had landed a first in her dissertation. She tweeted saying: “I received an 80 !!!!!!!! I cannot believe I achieved a first outstanding writing about bullies on Twitter.”

Olivia originally tweeted her diss hand in pic saying she’d been “busy collecting your OnlyFans tweets” for her dissertation. Opinions on OnlyFans are hard to avoid on Twitter. Controversial and popular at once, attitudes towards the online sex work platform vary. From hardcore supporters of women choosing to capitalise off their natural resources to Football Twitter calling these girls whores for charging money for pics, it’s a turbulent time out there.

Liv told The Tab Leeds: “As an avid Twitter user, I experienced first hand just how controversial the topic of OnlyFans was and how it brought sex work into the mainstream. I believe people on Twitter write such horrible things behind a screen that they would never say in real life and I wanted to investigate how these words reflect patriarchal values and what they say about our society as a whole.”

Intrigued by the controversial treatment of online sex work on Twitter, Liv, decided to delve into it further for her dissertation. Then, in pretty meta kind of way, she posted it on Twitter and it absolutely popped off. It currently has over 35k likes and counting.

 

Liv says she was inspired by the sex positivity movement, the naked philanthropist, and justgemma, who used OnlyFans to raise money for charity yet still got demonised by (mostly) men on the internet.”Thereā€™s absolutely no academic literature on OnlyFans so I decided to be the first.”

With all that fascinating content, Liv struggled for 12 hours to cut the diss from 15,000 words to just over 10,000 (we feel you, hun). “This project was honestly a ride from start to finish, I learnt what ‘brand’ of feminism I identify with (individualist feminism) and about the super interesting Madonna-Whore complex.”Ā 

Olivia Murphy, the queen herself

We asked her about the response to her diss topic, and people have been surprisingly open to it: “My tutor was fully supportive the whole way, the media department at Leeds Beckett are fantastically progressive, Iā€™m so glad I didnā€™t get any judgement (although I havenā€™t told my grandparents the title yet lol). Twitter response has been overwhelmingly positive so far!”

The success of her tweet comes just after a Birmingham student wrote her diss on Fiat 500 Twitter, so we’re sensing a theme of women doing bits with fun online dissertation topics. About the success of ladies’ quirky diss topics on Twitter, Liv says: “Itā€™s amazing to see so many girls writing dissertations on things theyā€™re passionate about and Iā€™m proud to be a part of it.

“I would like to dedicate my dissertation to all the OnlyFans models absolutely smashing it and a reminder to everyone else to be kind!”

We couldn’t agree more, Liv. That’s our lockdown reading sorted, send us the link.