The Housing Crisis: A Chokehold on Love

Will I ever be able to afford to buy a house? This is the question that follows millennials around. For the most part (by no means without exception), we were born in to pleasant neighbourhoods; our parents offered realistic deposits and reasonable monthly repayments in exchange for the start of their adult lives. The total market value of our childhood homes was the same as what we are now expected to pay as a deposit for our own.

I will begin this post with an anecdote: as touched upon in previous posts, my mum left Sunderland to join her brothers down south in the year 2000, bringing with her a toddler, a newborn baby and very little else. At this stage in her life, she had frugal money from the sale of her and her ex-husband’s house and a part time administrative role. In spite of this, she was able to bypass renting almost entirely and secure a new home for the three of us on the sea front.

Over the course of the next few years, mum worked hard despite having two young children and ended up acquiring a mortgage for 31 Ash Close (a 3-bed semi in a lovely area, great local schools, transport links, etc). We were a single parent family and yet even as recently as the millennium we were able to access affordable housing.

These days, you’d struggle to convince a solicitor that you’d be able to meet the mortgage repayments even if you did manage to save up the astronomical deposit. As is painfully clear, if you were a 30-year-old woman with two dependant children and a modest income from a part-time job it would be almost impossible.

That is, unless you had a partner. Entering in to a relationship with someone is no longer propelled by compatible personalities and physical attraction, it also presents the tantalising prospect of a second income. In fact, I propose that modern dating and our consumerist world advocates looking for a mate based primarily on income.

As a young woman, I have been advised on multiple occasions to ‘marry a rich man’. NOTHING makes my teeth grit more than this comment. Marry a rich man Charlotte. Don’t even THINK about marrying for love.

Putting the blind fury to one side, it’s got me thinking. Why do my family and friends think this is good advice? The answer is cold but quite simple – they want me to have a house and holidays and a ‘nice life’. Without a solid second income, in the world as it is today, they know that I’ll never be able to own a beautiful house like the one I grew up in. I’ll have to bring up my children in rented homes until my parents die. Incredibly bleak.

So, what am I to do? Find a boyfriend with a great income. Fine. Then what? Move in with him even though I’m not ready because I’m 23 and getting too old to live at my mum’s?

This is the crux of my observations: in 2020, the housing crisis is forcing couples to move in together too soon because of financial constraints. Sadly, I think this naturally leads to more break ups, or worse, settling for someone long-term who doesn’t make you happy just because they can offer you stability. I know I have a reputation as a hopeless romantic (Taylor Swift fan, poet, English grad… the list undeniably goes on), but don’t we all deserve to spend our best years with a partner that enriches our lives? Don’t we all deserve genuine, passionate, grinning-like-an-idiot love?

Surely safe shelter is a basic human right. We are the first generation that doesn’t have (true) access to it. There are vacant buildings and residual fat cats from generations gone by who own multiple properties and let them out to us at extortionate prices. We’re on salaries that mean we can’t rent and save simultaneously. Fuck, most of us can’t even keep our heads above water most of the time. Even with two incomes it’s a struggle. But here is my point –  under the current government, with one, it is impossible. We move in with our parents or our partners… or we drown.

The OnlyFans Enigma

We enter the new decade with a renewed sense of purpose, a feverish enthusiasm to begin ‘living our best lives’. Whether this entails bagging a new job, travelling to new places or getting fitter, in our consumerist world its highly likely that it involves making and spending as much money as possible. 

Someone once told me (rightly or wrongly) that in order to be successful in life, you need to reflect on what services you can deliver well and sell them. For some people, their assets are their skills; they are ardent organisers, gifted artists or good with children. They possess a particularly logical brain or a natural talent for sport. One thing every single one of us have ownership over, though, is our own body.

I blithely consider myself a millennial snowflake, I really do, and I’d love for the underlying message of this post to be ‘do what you want, it’s your body’… But I just can’t shake my anxiety as I wait at the photocopier at work and overhear students (it’s an FE college so they’re 16-18) talking about posting nudes for money.

I think OnlyFans and similar platforms are the latest manifestations of a dangerous message: that human value is, above all else, youth, physicality and sexuality. In a social media obsessed generation, I find myself saddened by the poisonous effects of these sites on our self-esteems. The benchmark is becoming smoother, thinner, taller, curvier, more muscular, more tanned…

In this vein, OnlyFans represents yet another way for insecure young people to seek validation and an illusion of self-worth. I use the word ‘illusion’ because I saw one young woman offering a ‘January sale’ price of £2.50 a month… That’s not empowering, it is downright degrading. I know you want me to soften that statement to make this post more PC, but I just can’t. I find it frankly alarming that you could slap a price tag of £2.50 on pictures of your vagina.

Think about that. I just heard COLLEGE KIDS talking about doing this kind of thing. Perpetuating the ‘do what you want, it’s your body’ mindset is insidious. It is literally true – as I said, we should ALL have sole ownership over our own bodies – but do these kids really know what is best for them or how they’ll feel about this in later life? Some do, granted, but not all. Even worse than that, some know these things but do it anyway because they’re from working class families and they want more money for an iPhone 11 or a PLT order so that they’ll be admired by their peers.

Whether you care to acknowledge it or not, young female (and LGBT+) sexuality is still very much a paradox. We are obsessed with it, but it is held firmly by the hand of shame. This is what everyone knows in their hearts but doesn’t want to come out and say online – people would be horrified. Your hairdresser, your cousin’s girlfriend, your old school mates. Or worse, your parents. 

I’ll be brutally honest, there are times I think the positives and negatives of OnlyFans even out. I mean, people are out here making my annual salary in a month from selling nudes. I work ridiculously hard for a modest amount of money. I want a house, a new car, to travel the world.

Personally, the only factor which overrides the financial benefits is the social cost. I couldn’t have my grandad thinking of me like that. My friends. My colleagues. It wouldn’t matter if I told them ‘I can do what I want, it’s my body’. They’d lose their minds. Grandad would break down and cry. 

 

Of course, that’s worst-case scenario, but when you post intimate content on a public platform it does engender a risk of people in your ‘real life’ seeing it. It might be ‘OnlyFans’ on your subscribers list, but don’t tell me your psycho ex or your brother’s mates couldn’t make a fake account, obtain your nudes and show people or even use them to blackmail you. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, I piss people off now and again. OnlyFans gives rise to a blindspot that could have grave consequences.