Jenna Clarke: Sexy and selfie sufficient Jem Wolfie calls the shots

In ancient times, people enjoyed burning witches at the stake.

Salem is now social media and there is nothing a mob with opposable thumbs like more than scorching people online. Women especially cop a lot of heat from keyboard warriors who like to criticise them for being too showy, too fake, too exposed or too angry.

One woman in the virtual crosshairs recently was Jem Wolfie. A Perth-based digital personality whose talents include basketball, cooking and fitness.

However, her long blonde hair, Renaissance-like curves and small outfits may have played a more than significant part in helping her build an audience of more than 2.6 million on Instagram.

Wolfie is an internet sensation of our plugged-in, always-on, hyper-stimulated time. The key difference between Wolfie and say, millions of other conventionally attractive young women with Instagram accounts riddled with selfies, is that she has parlayed her content into a career.

A full-time living instead of just waiting for the postie to deliver packages of free stuff from random brands in want of promotion.

For Wolfie, Instagram is the foyer of her life. For a more thorough tour, you have to pay $14 a month and plenty of people are. Over on OnlyFans, a site where subscribers pay a fee to watch and view a range of photos and videos, Wolfie is considered to be the most popular personality.

Most users are men and the platform has been touted as the “paywall of porn” by The New York Times. Wolfie has 10,000 subscribers and followers can directly message and request personalised images for additional fees. Like most young people who came of age in the era of the smartphone, Wolfie knows her angles and how to take flattering, sensual photos.

While other influencers are flogging things like diarrhoea-inducing Skinny Teas and skimpy barmaids in our Goldfields are struggling to make tips thanks to our increasingly cashless society, Wolfie, who may have more skin in the game than most, has so far earned about $2 million in just eight months.

Pretty good for a woman based in WA, where the odds of being financially successful right now are the toughest in the country thanks to our 23 per cent wage gap. An archaic piece of industrial relations legislation which the State Government will hopefully work to amend on recommendation of the Ritter report, which was handed down on Friday.

Meanwhile, the pearl clutchers have been quick to pile on with claims Wolfie is promoting pornography after she appeared in The West Australian discussing her career choice — a switch she made after working 70-hour weeks as a chef and injuring her knee as an amateur basketballer.

It’s a claim she denies and has got used to defending saying: “Anyone who tries to make me think I’m being objectified is so f...... wrong, that’s not how it is because I’m the one making these choices with a strategy in mind.”

That’s not to say there aren’t Reddit threads dedicated to images alleging to be R-rated selfies of Wolfie but the difference with her narrative is she controls both the message and the medium.

If they are legitimate photos, to get that screenshot some sucker paid for the experience and in doing so is just helping Wolfie — at just 28 — complete her dream home with an indoor basketball court and edge closer to a comfortable early retirement. They may have alleged nude shots, but she has your credit card number, mate.

Sex sells. It’s one of the oldest advertising tricks in the book. One that perhaps has been most famously adopted by some of the most successful businesswomen of modern times — the entire Kardashian-Jenner clan.

Kim Kardashian launched her career with a sex tape. She’s now worth somewhere north of $500 million and plans to become a lawyer to help end the Jim Crow racial segregation system in the US.

This year, her younger sister, Kylie Jenner, 21, became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, thanks to a line of lipsticks made famous when showcased on her previously cosmetically enhanced lips.

Wolfie and the Kardashians will continue to be criticised for public displays of anatomy but you can’t knock their business acumen. They are benefiting off their bodies but in this day and age, where porn is freely available and hot physiques online are a dime a dozen, it takes brains to spin a profit.