Teachers, OnlyFans, and Our Right to Sexual Freedom
December 27, 2023
Public school teachers in the U.S. are woefully underpaid. To make ends meet, many pursue other streams of income; data suggests that teachers are about three times as likely as all U.S. workers to have multiple jobs at once, from retail to cleaning houses. Or, in the case of Brianna Coppage and Megan Gaither, posting adult content on OnlyFans.
Coppage and Gaither, teachers southwest of St. Louis, are far from the only teachers posting on OnlyFans for extra money. But both of them – first Coppage and then Gaither – were recently discovered and outed as adult content creators by their school district. Coppage was suspended and tendered her resignation soon after, explaining that “she had joined [Only Fans] over the summer to supplement her second-year teaching salary of about $42,000.” Gaither used her OnlyFans income to pay off her student loans. In other terms, according to Coppage and Gaither, their careers as public teachers put them in a precarious financial situation, and OnlyFans offered some much-needed support.
Heather Hollingsworth notes that at least one lawsuit has been filed in a similar situation to what Coppage and Gaither experienced. Victoria Triece sued Orange County Public Schools in January 2023, alleging she was banned from volunteering at her son’s Florida elementary school because she posts on OnlyFans. Triece’s attorney sums it up beautifully: “When you start getting the moral police involved in it, where does it stop? At what point does the school have the right to intervene in one’s private life?”
We at the Woodhull Freedom Foundation firmly believe that disciplining, suspending, or terminating teachers who post adult content online is ethically repugnant. It should not concern employers – or, quite frankly, parents or students – what a teacher does to legally earn money outside of school hours. Our right to sexual freedom involves our right – including teachers – to engage in consensual sex work without the threat of adverse employment actions being taken against us.
