Johannesburg - Adult film actress Xoli Mfeka has set social media ablaze after announcing her “Pornopreneurs” master class that she’ll be conducting. She will share tips and tricks of the trade with aspirant porn stars and adult content creators.
Some of the topics she’ll be addressing include porn creation, how to grow your OnlyFans audience, access to different porn platforms, and boosting would-be creators’ self-confidence.
26-year-old Mfeka has previously revealed in an interview with MacG on Podcast and Chill that the business of creating sexually explicit content is very lucrative, claiming that she earns up to R90 000 a month creating pornographic content.
Last year, the South African Revenue Service (Sars) announced its intention to begin taxing the earnings of Only Fans content creators. Creators like Mfeka will have to pay 15% of their total earnings over to Sars.
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Sars has argued that the taxes imposed on OnlyFans and creators were based on the fact that OnlyFans is considered a foreign company, and they were fulfilling their mandate by imposing vat.
A bone of contention is whether pornographic content creation is considered sex work. If the answer to that is yes, then surely it is illegal and therefore poses at least a moral question on whether Sars can legitimately impose taxes on the proceeds derived from such work.
On whether pornographic content creation is considered sex work, Media Advocacy Officer at Sex Work Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT), Meagan Lessing, described sex work as a self-identifying occupation.
“For example, there are a lot of people who actually do sex work but don't identify as sex workers. So some people who don’t maybe engage in intimate sex or penetrative sex like erotic dance may not identify as sex workers,” she said.
Lessing described the move by Sars as opportunistic and somewhat exploitative.
She said: “OnlyFans didn’t happen in 2020. OnlyFans had been there for a long, long time, and what I think what happened is that when Covid happened, a lot of sex workers migrated to online platforms because of the regulations at the time, and it exponentially increased the revenue.”
Lessing stressed that her organisation was fighting for the recognition of the rights of sex workers and described the move as hypocritical.
“In terms of our work, in terms of wanting to decriminalise sex work, street-based sex workers, brothel-based sex workers, online sex workers, when we advocate for de-criminilisation, we advocate across all those platforms, and we want to, in turn, see government ensure that the rights of sex workers remain and are recognised like every other person on this country.
“So It felt like a violation in some way. You treat sex workers as criminals and with the violations that criminalisation brings, but you also exploit,” she said.
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