I recently binged Margot’s Got Money Problems, and somewhere between the baby, the bills, and the OnlyFans account, I had a realization I was not expecting:

I get it.

To be very clear, this is not an announcement that I’m starting an OnlyFans. My career pivot has not taken quite that dramatic a turn.

But watching Margot try to figure out how to make money while taking care of a baby hit very differently at this particular moment in my life.

Because I have a baby.

And I got RIFed.

Before becoming a mom, I understood childcare was expensive in the abstract. I knew women struggled with balancing careers and children. I knew there were all sorts of structural reasons women left the workforce or looked for more flexible jobs.

But there’s knowing something intellectually, and then there’s sitting there with an actual baby thinking:

Okay, but how exactly am I supposed to make all of this work?

For years, work was one of the most predictable parts of my life. I had built a career I was proud of. I knew what I did. I knew where I was going.

Then I was RIFed.

And at almost the same time, I became a mother.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just thinking about my next job. I was thinking about what kind of work could fit around the life I actually have now.

Can I do it remotely?

Can I control my hours?

How much childcare would I need?

How much would that childcare cost?

And perhaps most importantly: after paying for childcare so I can work, does the job actually make financial sense?

Which brings me back to Margot.

She needs money. She has a baby. She needs something she can do from home. She needs control over when she works. And she needs to avoid paying someone else to watch her child for all those working hours.

Enter OnlyFans.

Again: NOT MY CAREER PLAN.

But economically?

Girl, I see you.

Also, Why Does OnlyFans Get Such a Bad Rap?

Watching the show made me think about something else: Why are we so quick to judge women for making money this way?

Maybe I’m just a millennial who has lived through too many iterations of the internet, but people have been making money from other people’s very specific interests for a LONG time.

When I was in my twenties, there were women making bank selling their used underwear to men.

Was that something I wanted to do?

Absolutely not.

Honestly, I thought it was gross.

But also…to each their own. If someone wants to buy it and someone else is perfectly happy selling it, I have a hard time getting particularly worked up about it.

At least OnlyFans eliminated the trip to the post office. 😂

Now you can create content from your own house, set your own boundaries, decide what you’re comfortable sharing, and potentially make money without arranging childcare just so you can go somewhere else to work.

And that’s part of what struck me about Margot’s story. She’s literally trying to figure this out while caring for—and even breastfeeding—her baby.

Obviously, there is sexual content on OnlyFans, and plenty of creators are doing what most people would consider sex work.

But the internet is also a very weird place.

If some guy wants to pay to watch a woman stuff her face with food, is that sex work?

If he finds it sexual, does that automatically make what she is doing sexual?

And why do we so quickly jump from “someone finds this sexually appealing” to “this woman is demeaning herself”?

I’m not sure I buy that anymore.

There can absolutely be exploitation, pressure, harassment, and safety issues in sexualized industries. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But there’s also a difference between exploitation and an adult woman deciding: These are my boundaries. This is what I’m comfortable putting online. This is what I’m charging for it. Take it or leave it.

And maybe motherhood has made me a lot less interested in judging how another woman makes the economics of her life work.

Motherhood Changes the Math

We talk about women “choosing” to stay home. We talk about women “choosing” flexible work. We talk about women “choosing” to step back from careers, freelance, start businesses, work nights, cobble together multiple income streams, or do work they might never have imagined themselves doing.

But how much of that is really a completely free choice?

If traditional work requires you to be somewhere eight or nine hours a day, five days a week, and childcare eats up a huge chunk of what you earn, the universe of financially sensible choices starts getting smaller pretty quickly.

And then there’s the part that doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet:

Sometimes you actually want to be with your kid.

I waited a long time to become a mother. I chose this very intentionally. I don’t particularly want to spend most of my daughter’s waking hours away from her just so I can recreate the exact working life I had before she existed.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want a career anymore.

Quite the opposite.

It means I’m thinking much harder about what I want that career to look like.

Getting RIFed forced me to ask questions I probably wouldn’t have asked otherwise. Motherhood made the answers matter more.

Maybe the next chapter involves consulting. Maybe it involves going back to school. Maybe it involves building something of my own. Most likely, it involves some combination of things I haven’t completely figured out yet.

That uncertainty can be scary.

But there’s also something freeing about realizing that the traditional version of a successful career isn’t the only version available.

These days, when I hear about a woman finding some unconventional way to make money from home, my first reaction is much less likely to be:

“Why would she do that?”

Now it’s more like:

Does she set her own hours?

Does she get to stay home with her kid?

Does she have to pay for childcare?

And how much is she making?

Because apparently motherhood has turned me into a practical economist.

So no, Margot’s Got Money Problems did not convince me to start an OnlyFans.

But it did make me understand why Margot did.

And somewhere out there, a woman is probably making more money than I ever did in government by eating snacks in bed for strangers on the internet.

You know what?

Good for her.

---