podcast recs on the intersection between influencer culture and sex work?
So I was having a conversation with my sister about influencers, because we had seen a TikTok where this influencer had a gorgeous brownstone and hosted events for friends (she literally has a 'vinyl' room, art studio, back patio, all that and lives with her fiancé) and we were trying to figure out what they do. They're just super bougie content creators that wear high fashion clothes, post about art, travel, lifestyle content. There's brand deals, there's a lil website where she reviews products or otherwise just goes on about how nice her rich little life is. Very happy for them both by the way, but we got talking about what exactly is behind it. How are people affording all these clothes that are basically only seen on runways? Luxury furniture? Brownstones that they are renting? I have a theory that a lot of influencers are also doing sex work (I do not look down on sex workers by the way, I'm mostly just curious about the dichotomy of the two) because for most of these rather young people, they live in luxury homes/apartments in the most expensive cities in the world and I had seen a video a while back where someone claimed that people who can afford to live in nice apartments in NYC are either nepo babies or selling drugs - both of which make sense to me. I study a lot of modern internet culture and like to anthropologically place all the subcultures on the internet as well as the relationship between them and the hierarchies within. But I just can't find any one video essay or podcast that discusses this same theory. Because there are too many influencers, especially micro-influencers and no shade to them but nobody knows you outside of your bubble of followers, and most of them followed after seeing one video right, so they probably don't keep up with your content. I refuse to believe that all their wealth is coming from the brand deals because I know the online advertising space is also quite finicky. Selling data is obviously super profitable and that's how social media platforms make money, but are TikTok posts enough to pay for a whole outfit that head-to-toe costs five figures or more? Maybe I'm just being naive, I'm very happy to be proved wrong, but I absolutely need to hear someone else's thoughts on this!
TLDR: does anyone know if there's a podcast episode that talks about influencer culture, particularly in the pipeline between social media influencers and sex work, escorting, 'yacht-girls'?