Ms Ryan's Profession.
The death of a Giant and how we're all victims now.
One of my favourite writing exercises is Will Storr’s idea of the sacred flaw which traces your characters’ problems back to their own faulty ideology. It’s a more overtly psychological version of the idea of a hero battling their shadow but I especially love the way it hinges on the irony of a character mistaking a weakness as their strength. The sacred flaw is not the anger they wish they could control or the problematic drinking they know is ruining their life, it’s the quest for honesty that has left them isolated or the kindness to strangers that has seen them neglect their family.
Storr suggests an exercise he calls The Hero Maker that explores how this sacred flaw makes the character feel virtuous, how it makes them feel like “David faced by Goliath”. We are all exceptionally good at making ourselves the noble victim of a difficult situation, whether that’s Trump “the most victimised President in history” or Keir Starmer being let down by his staff again. We live in age of grievance where even billionaires whine about being misunderstood.
A small but stand-out example of this Daviding of a Goliath is the recent exit of real life giant “Giant” from the BBC Saturday evening show Gladiators. Giant, genuinely born Jamie Bigg, has left the flagship family entertainment show after the BBC became uncomfortable with his decision to go public about his new relationship with OnlyFans creator Taylor Ryan. In an interview following his departure, Jamie proudly remarked “I class myself as a role model and one of those values as a role model is to stick by the people I love”. An honourable sentiment that sits badly around his recent separation from his wife and children. Amidst the brutal dizzy chaos of the western world’s dementia era, this is a small sad story but some of the players within it are powerless and blameless and none of those are the ones on tv.
Still, it’s easy to mock the words of a 40 year-old body builder and fire fighter who has left his wife of 11 years for a 28 year-old, but introspection was hardly his niche. My point, or rather Will Storr’s point, is that we are all constantly performing precisely this sort of mental weight lift to keep ourselves feeling righteous. The BBC’s position bares little scrutiny either. Their moral high ground is constructed from the need to shelter their family audience from the inappropriate aspects of Ms Ryan’s profession. I won’t pretend I’m keen to explain what OnlyFans is to my own kids, both devoted fans of Gladiators. However, when Series 4 swings round, does it feel less or more likely that I’ll have to think of excuses to explain Giant’s absence? It’s not as if Bigg’s “going public” about the relationship meant Taylor Ryan joining him in spandex as a new Gladiator (possible names, “Ring Light”, “Screentime” or “Infinity Scroll”). Call me incurious but I’ve survived three years watching him wallop amateur athletes with an oversized cotton bud without ever before knowing his real name or having the slightest idea of who he has sex with. Could this state of happy ignorance not have persisted? I imagine a BBC spokesperson would argue that it was Bigg himself who brought the matter to a head but the “reveal” of “Ja-ylor” (as no one at all is calling the couple) amounted to some pictures on his instagram feed which my children would never have seen.
The circular prurience of it all is astounding. We don’t want people to think about how she gets naked online so let’s fire him because then all the newspapers will be full of stories about how she gets naked online. Her subscribe rate must be through the roof.
OnlyFans is a controversial platform, but with 280,000 creator accounts registered in the UK, Taylor is far less of an anomaly than her boyfriend with his 30inch thighs. Some suggest as many as 1 in 4 women under the age of 35 have earned income through camming or private video. In this economy there are good reasons too, after all, Taylor isn’t going to be fired and is more than able to look after her new partner now that he has lost his job. Describing her real talent as “marketing”, Taylor has been on OnlyFans since 2018 and, as well as branching out into comedy, runs a second business coaching others as to how to make online sex work pay. Under capitalism consent is a contentious issue but she is no David.
So much of the subtext, so much the text of this tabloid farce has been rooted in the fact that she’ll show you her boobs for $10.99 a month, the conversation never reaches the commodification of intimacy. That’s the reason I don’t want to have to explain OnlyFans to my kids and it’s also the reason I don’t want them on instagram. The translation of relationships into a fungible objects is increasingly we’re all doing and yes I am about to tell you how if you take up a paid subscription to this substack you will now receive a new podcast version where I will help solve whatever narrative problems you may have. This route seemed a more economical viable option for me than sending you nudes, in much the way I’m guessing Taylor’s numbers would dip if she started talking about the Heroes Journey.
In 2013 a BBC survey of 160,000 people set out a more fractured social model of 7 classes rather than the traditional working, middle and upper. These ran from the precariat through the traditional working class, the emergent service workers, the technical middle class, new affluent workers, established middle cass and the elite. I wonder what this model looks like if you put together everyone whose economic life in someway depends upon a personal brand. Everyone who sells not just their time, not just their labour, their skill or their learning but, in order to succeed in these areas, must sell something of themselves. The need to be entangled in parasocial relationships cuts across perhaps all 7 of those “new” classes from 13 years ago, except perhaps the traditional working and technical middle class. In this we have completed the transition from consumer to product. Perhaps we are all victims after all.
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