K-pop, Sex Work, and Parasocial Intimate Labor

Image by Hyo Lee. Adapted from screenshot of Jungkook sleeping on livestream, June 12, 2023 (Weverse Live, accessed via Allkpop); Eye on Window, New York, 1943, Nathan Lerner (Art Institute Chicago, Gift of David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg); Young Americans are Captivated at the BTS World Tour Concert(translated title), September 6, 2018, by LG Electronics (Wikimedia Commons); Korea KPOP World Festival 53, October 20, 2013, by Korea.net Korean Culture and Information Service (Jeon Han) (Wikimedia Commons); A Wall with Torn Posters, by ISO Republic (Freerange); A Wall with Various Stickers on It. Background Grunge Street Art, Background Textures(Pixaby, accessed via Picryl).

On June 12, 2023, BTS member Jungkook fell asleep while on a Weverse livestream with fans. For 21 minutes, until the stream was turned off, over six million fans around the world watched him sleep. A few weeks later, on July 27, I joined another Weverse livestream in which Jungkook appeared shirtless in bed, teasing the audience with glimpses of his bare back or chest and sometimes pretending to sleep.

This behavior—and the relationship it establishes with the audience—invites comparisons to another form of parasocial intimate labor: webcam modeling, often referred to colloquially as “camgirling” (although, of course, people of all genders perform this kind of labor). Webcam modeling is a type of sex work in which the worker stages erotic performances online for paying or tipping clients. This may include stripping, masturbation, or both. These performances draw on video or photography and can be live or pre-recorded. Emma Maguire notes that camgirling can be traced back to the practice of “lifecasting” in the 1990s in which workers “placed cameras in their home and broadcast their private lives on the internet.” Viewers paid to watch lifecasters cook, hang out—and sleep. In this early form of webcam labor, intimacy and titillation is not generated through explicit sexual acts but through the act of surveillance.

If we examine the parallels between sex workers’ parasocial relationships with clients and K-pop idols’ parasocial dynamics with fans, how might our understanding of labor, exploitation, and whorephobia change? What labor solidarities might exist between K-pop idols and sex workers? The intersection of K-pop and sex work offers a place to reimagine our relationship to the commodification of intimacy and to challenge the normative assumption that renting someone’s body for labor means there are no boundaries on what that rental relationship should entail. One of the goals of this piece, then, is to draw attention to the very real risks sex workers face in their everyday lives—risks that are compounded by the stigmatization and, in many contexts, criminalization of their labor.

Jungkook lounges in bed while interacting with fans on Weverse Live (July 27, 2023).

What is “parasocial intimate labor”? The concept of “parasociality” was first coined by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956 to describe the one-sided relationships that emerge between media audiences and media performers. Although complicated by the contemporary rise of microcelebrity and the blurring boundaries between producer and consumer on social media, this concept of the parasocial has remained influential in contemporary scholarship. A study published in 2022 found that the key ingredients for strong parasocial bonds included “reciprocity”—or rather, perceived reciprocity—and “intimacy,” defined as “when audiences experience intimate emotions in relation to celebrities.”  On this subject, Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas also offer the category of “intimate labor” as a framework for analyzing the interrelated and expansive forms of care work that may not have received attention under feminist constructions of domestic, emotional, or reproductive labor. Intimate laborers “rely on the maintenance of precise social relations between employers and employees or customers and providers,” and they “make their livings through touch, closeness, and personal attentiveness, another name for care.” While intimate labor may or may not encompass emotional labor (the need to manage one’s own feelings and perform certain emotions outwardly), it also brings into view a broader web of labor relations that can involve not just emotional but also physical and informational forms of intimacy.

My concerns here are with the subgenre of intimate labor that works through parasociality and relies on workers connecting with their audiences through digital platforms.  Both K-pop idols and webcam models perform intimate labor when they cultivate parasocial relationships and craft romantic and intimate scenes for their fans/clients. BTS has encouraged in their fans a sense of perceived reciprocity by responding to fan comments on Weverse, a platform owned by their parent company HYBE that facilitates fan-idol interactions. BTS has also offered moments of intimate access to the members’ homes—such as Jungkook sleeping on livestream or Jimin giving fans a tour of his bedroom. The BTS brand goes far beyond performances and social media posts: through variety shows and documentaries that gesture toward authenticity, sexy photoshoots, and interactive media like the video game BTS World that allows players to interact with fictionalized versions of BTS members, HYBE has offered BTS to fans as not just our idols but also our close friends, brothers, and boyfriends. As Prerna Subramanian explains, “the K-pop idol industry functions as a service industry, offering fans a partner/boyfriend/girlfriend experience that extends beyond the realm of music and dance.” This “boyfriend experience” is a form of intimate labor that involves the deliberate cultivation of feelings of closeness and connection to produce in fans the experience of being in a reciprocal relationship with their idols. 

The “boyfriend experience” is not unique to BTS or K-pop. American boy bands in the 1990s were deliberately marketed to an imagined fanbase of straight young women (and, to a lesser extent, queer young men) as the ideal boyfriends. Jennifer Moos writes that the 1990s boy band image, as distinct from other celebrity personas, was one defined by accessibility, relatability, and familiarity: he isn’t just a celebrity, he’s the boy next door; he’s likable, trustworthy, and above all, attainable. But while parasociality and the “boyfriend experience” have long functioned as forms of labor and celebrity marketing strategies, BTS illustrates a distinctively contemporary form of parasocial intimate labor that utilizes social media to collapse the distance between performer and audience and to create feelings of immediacy and authenticity. Through social media, fans experience a direct connection to their idol. Watching Jungkook on Weverse sleep, drink beer, sing along to pop songs, or react to fan comments feels more authentic than public performances, since these moments—though themselves carefully staged—showcase a casual, domestic side of the idol that creates the illusion of intimacy.

During his livestream (September 1, 2023), Jimin shows fans the space-themed mood lighting on his bedroom ceiling.

Webcam models also establish parasocial relationships with their clients/fans by staging intimate performances and crafting romantic and sexual fantasies for their pleasure. Webcam models often directly speak to their audience, engage with comments in the public chat, and offer private shows and one-on-one conversations for a fee. Many will also act out specific sexual fantasies that their fans have requested. Since webcam modeling involves no physical contact with the client, the construction of a fantasized relationship is central to the client’s satisfaction. Paul Bleakley explains that the “interactivity” between performer and audience is critical to this type of work and “provides the camgirl industry with a unique selling point, giving these young women the ability to foster positive relationships with clients and encouraging repeat business on a level far exceeding that of mainstream pornographic performers.” In an interview about her memoir Camgirl, Isa Mazzei explains that remembering clients’ birthdays was part of her job. One webcam model tells researcher Angela Jones that sometimes clients ask her to “try on all [her] clothes and panties.” Another describes a client who had purchased private time, and, after orgasm, spent the rest of the time talking with her about Doctor Who. 

Of course, it’s important to recognize that other forms of sex work, including physical in-person sex work, may also involve fantasy, staged intimate romantic or sexual scenes, and performance. However, webcam modelling uniquely relies on performance and the perceived relationship established with fans/clients, instead of treating these elements as incidental or secondary to the work. Unlike other forms of sex work, webcam models primarily sell and construct a fantasy relationship with their audience and client. While BTS does not primarily sell a fantasy relationship (they sell music and dance performances), the parasocial bond between ARMY and BTS is an essential and strategic component of their labor. This reliance on fan intimacy makes their work distinct from other forms of intimate labor. 

Like BTS and other intimate laborers, some webcam models leverage the parasocial dynamic to sell merchandise, which generates additional revenue and, we can assume, strengthens the perceived relationship. The tangibility of the merchandise makes it feel more “real” and can also invite sexual or romantic fantasies of gift-giving or everyday intimacy, such as when a sexual partner inadvertently or deliberates leaves their underwear at your apartment. Bleakley notes that “many well-known performers offer to sell their fans used underwear or sex toys for a premium cost.”

Such merchandise has a more physical and sexual connection to the body of the laborer when compared to BTS merch, which is less likely to have touched an idol, although sometimes idols personally throw merchandise items to fans during live concerts. Nevertheless, both practices gesture towards the broader business model of parasociality. In each case, merchandise works to reinforce the emotional bond between the performer and the audience. For example, BTS Line Friends are heavily marketed as having been designed by BTS members themselves, which creates in fans a sense of their direct connection to the idol. While the business of crafting and marketing fantasies differs across contexts, both camgirl models and K-pop idols construct emotional connection to sell products and then sell more products to further reinforce that connection (see, for instance, loyal fans buying merch specific to their bias “boyfriend”). As is evident from the HYBE-approved thirst traps that BTS members post on their social media and the plethora of erotic fan fiction stories featuring specific BTS pairings (“ships”) on sites like Archive of Our Own (AO3), there is also an explicitly sexual—and, at times, deliberately cultivated—dimension to the parasocial relationship between BTS and their fans. 

Fantasies become dangerous when the line between reality and fiction blurs—when fans fail to understand that the feeling of intimacy they are paying for is limited to a specific time, place, and transaction, or when they feel shortchanged and believe they are owed something more for what they have paid. Discussing the “surveillance-based relationship” between BTS and ARMY—a dynamic that we can connect to the surveillance intimacy of “lifecasting” webcam models—Subramanian writes that “the BTS-ARMY experience of feeling intimate/seeing the idol intimately . . . can inadvertently reinforce the perception of artists as consumable objects of intimacy.” It is this objectification, fueled by the perception that what is being bought is a body rather than a performance, a person rather than a persona, that renders intimate labor driven by parasociality dangerous.

Here, we also need to address the power imbalance between K-pop stars flirting with fans on Weverse and webcam models or other sex workers interacting with clients. Jungkook possesses financial and cultural capital that gives him greater autonomy when it comes to managing these parasocial interactions. In contrast, webcam models work in precarious labor environments and face stigma and legal restrictions that lead to increased vulnerability and a greater risk of violence. Their work is constrained not only by local laws but also by the terms of service of the platforms that they use, whose agreements may change without warning, sometimes banning sexual content entirely.  Consider, too, the gendered double standards that workers have to navigate online, such as male nipples being permissible and female nipples being deemed obscene and, depending on the platform, more likely to result in a ban. Even webcam models who report high levels of job satisfaction describe negative and even traumatic experiences with clients: they experience doxing, are forced to see something they have not consented to see, or receive death and rape threats, all of which take a significant psychological toll. Due to social stigma, webcam models that are outed or doxed often experienced offline discrimination and harassment, stalking, and even suspension or termination from their other jobs. 

We must also acknowledge the systemic inequalities of class, gender, and race that structure sex work more broadly. Historically, sex work was viewed as facilitating a “release” for men, who could “use” poor women of color so as to not spoil or sully the virtue of the wealthy white women they would marry. Such sexualized racism continues today, as both Black women and men are represented as hypersexualized objects for white consumers. Undocumented migrants, barred from employment by racist and xenophobic immigration policies, may turn to sex work as a source of income. Not only do these sex workers experience the risks of intimate violence that come with their line of work, they also face potential arrest and deportation. The threat of state violence further compounds their vulnerability, since they are unlikely or unable to seek legal protection from stalkers and harassers. 

Though they also perform parasocial intimate labor, BTS occupies a starkly different position. BTS members flirting with fans online are not as immediately or intimately harmed by the currents of patriarchal imperial capitalism that structure other forms of intimate labor. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez points out that BTS and “other workers in the broad category of entertainment—such as the [Asian women killed in the 2021 Atlanta massage parlor shootings] and [the] women who continue to [engage in militarized sexualized labor at US bases around the world]—have devastatingly distinct experiences of care work and mobility.” In the aftermath of the Atlanta shootings, BTS condemned the violence by sharing their own experiences of anti-Asian racism. But the group’s statement, as Gonzalez notes, failed to acknowledge both the racialized intimate labor that was targeted by the shooter and its parallel with BTS’s own work as entertainers. This failure suggests that the “intimate care work [that massage represents] is perhaps too shamefully yoked with prostitution.” What we see developing here is a hierarchy structured along both gendered lines and distinctions of labor, in which the intimate labor performed by BTS is more valued and less stigmatized than the intimate labor performed in massage parlors. The same value hierarchy arguably informs the distinction that we draw between Jungkook’s interactions with fans on his Weverse livestream and a webcam model’s interactions with their clients. 

This value hierarchy can, to a degree, be explained by whorephobia, a term that makes visible society’s systemic discrimination against sex workers. At its most extreme, whorephobia is the dehumanization of sex workers to the point where they are murdered, their deaths  uninvestigated, and their murderers acquitted. Consider the example of Robert Pickton, a Canadian serial killer who murdered 26 women, many of whom were sex workers or Indigenous women. Despite having appeared in court for the attempted murder of a sex worker as early as in 1997, Pickton would not be convicted for his crimes until 2001. The state’s systematic refusal to investigate missing women and prosecute a serial killer who reportedly began killing in 1995 clearly demonstrates the lack of value placed on the lives of sex workers and Indigenous women in settler Canada. 

More commonly, whorephobia manifests as discrimination against sex workers and as support for the criminalization of sex work, which makes labor conditions extremely unsafe for workers and thereby contributes to the risk of abuse and murder. Whorephobia draws lines around which forms of emotional and sexual labor are socially valued and which are devalued: celebrities who flirt with their fans are praised for “creating a dynamic of shared appreciation” but camgirls are “sluts” or “whores.” In popular culture,  sex workers are often depicted as traumatized or emotionally damaged. Mainstream social norms dictate that hugging a fan or touching a fan’s hand is “good” but giving a hand job is “bad.” While I am not claiming that sex work is inherently liberatory or feminist—in fact, as I have noted above, it is inevitably structured by class hierarchy, patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy— and my analysis rejects the essentialist “oppression/empowerment paradigm,” we must recognize that social norms dictate how we judge particular forms of emotional and physical intimacy and that these norms and stigmas exacerbate the vulnerability and risk that sex workers experience. 

Decriminalization would be a meaningful step towards mitigating violence against sex workers. This is distinct from legalization, which only licenses certain sex workers, ultimately creating a two-tier system in which legal sex workers are relatively protected while unlicensed sex workers continue to face extreme vulnerability and violence. While decriminalization does not dismantle the systems of violence that first created the conditions for exploitative and risk-laden sex work, it does allow sex workers to seek redress for harm and create safer labor conditions for themselves (for instance, by working in groups rather than alone), since they are less likely to be subject to police violence. Webcam models benefit from decriminalization as opposed to legalization, since, as Jones explains, “more regulation will mean closer monitoring of models’ performances and more surveillance,” ultimately resulting in “less bodily autonomy.” 

But let us return to our wealthy K-pop celebrities. Does their social and financial privilege truly keep them safe? Why does Jin have to say things like “don’t attack, please” to his fans at the 2024 hugging event? Stalking is also a common experience for BTS members. In December 2023, Jungkook went on Weverse and explicitly asked fans to stop following him, stop sending food to his house, and stop waiting outside his house. Recall that 22-year-old American pop star Christina Grimmie was shot and killed by an obsessed fan in 2016. While BTS are not under threat of police violence or deportation, nor are they struggling financially under precarious working conditions, I want to return to the danger of objectification and to the misconception that fans/clients might have that they are purchasing a body or person instead of a performance or fantasy. I want us to recognize that under a global capitalist and imperial system that objectifies, dehumanizes, and treats workers as disposable, the potential for violence exists in any parasocial relationship and in any form of intimate labor, even if that violence is not always realized. 

What would BTS say about the shootings in the Atlanta massage parlors if they were actively resisting the social norms and harmful hierarchies that they benefit from and are at times rendered vulnerable by? I imagine them writing something else, something that acknowledges the vulnerability and even danger of parasocial intimate labor, especially as it has been compounded by systemic sexism and racism. I imagine them drawing a connection between victim blaming assaulted or murdered sex workers and making dismissive jokes about “delulu” fans. I imagine BTS claiming the massage parlor laborers as comrades and colleagues and connecting their own work to that of other intimate laborers, including webcam models. I want to build labor solidarities among those who perform parasocial work—whether legal or illegal, emotional or sexual. I want to recognize shared conditions  among those whose labor exposes their bodies and agencies to infringement, regardless of whether they stage intimate scenes for fans or for clients. I want to see BTS and K-pop stars, to whom society has assigned financial and cultural value, draw attention to the devalued work of these less visible, more precarious, parasocial intimate laborers.  Ə