Unveiling The Digital Bordello

This thesis explores the portrayal that is presented by Dutch legacy media of women who are engaged in digital sex work on OnlyFans. OnlyFans has emerged as a site of controversy and empowerment amid rising cultural visibility of platform-based sex work. The platform is often framed as a symbol for entrepreneurial freedom, because it promises creators' financial autonomy as well as direct audience access. Still, its media representation shows cultural issues since it involves gender, labor, and sexuality. Drawing from forty articles within four major Dutch newspapers, this research investigates legacy media discourses depicting women engaging in sex work upon OnlyFans. Critical discourse analysis joins content analysis in this study. It pinpoints these four major themes: affective labor and precarity, platformization and infrastructural control, gendered bias and moral concern, and entrepreneurship and empowerment. Simplified narratives do repeatedly depict women across these frames, not as complex laboring subjects, but as tropes: the self-made entrepreneur, or the emotionally available caretaker, or the morally endangered woman, or perhaps the platform-dependent content creator. The findings revealed that legacy media has a tendency to foreground women's autonomy frequently but only when it aligns with neoliberal values as well as postfeminist ideals of consumer agency, visibility, and self-management. Emotional labor, central to digital sex work, is reframed as a natural tendency, excluding its economic and structural demands. Media coverage rarely addresses the algorithmic, financial, as well as reputational constraints around creator success. Journalistic portrayals distribute risk unevenly. They attach danger, coercion, and moral judgment predominantly to women. These frames work to stigmatize in addition to discipline. Some forms of labor, even when fully legal, do remain socially deviant because of how these frames suggest it. As this thesis contributes to feminist media studies, public understandings of platform-based sex work are actively constructed by Dutch legacy media. It argues that these portrayals are not neutral reflections but discursive interventions that shape how sex work is legitimized, governed, and judged. Through a blend of postfeminist expression, neoliberal values, and gendered framing, the media frame women's digital labor simultaneously visible and marginalized. OnlyFans, as a culturally unstable site, reveals the shifting terrain where gender, labor, and digital economies intersect - and where media discourses play a key role in writing the rules