As porn addiction becomes normative across Western culture, pornographic content is constantly evolving and taking new forms in order to give porn-sick addicts the dopamine hits they need.
The rise of OnlyFans is one aspect of this. OnlyFans is a subscription-based video platform founded in 2016 in London, England, by Tim Stokely, and initially explicit content was not permitted. Instead, the platform was designed to help performers, artists, and other entrepreneurs get their content to a dedicated fanbase. Content creators kept 80 percent of their subscription fees and could also collect tips.
In 2017, OnlyFans decided to permit pornography, and the platform’s popularity exploded. In 2021, TIME magazine put OnlyFans on its Time 100 Most Influential Companies list. Overnight, the site became a hub for “sex workers” – digital prostitutes – and its hybrid monetized social media-porn platform set-up drew many young women into setting up profiles and selling explicit images and videos. Social media itself has been growing increasingly explicit, and for many OnlyFans was a way of monetizing content they were already producing on other platforms, and to a dedicated, paying fanbase.
During COVID, OnlyFans exploded. In May 2023, OnlyFans had 3 million registered creators – and 220 million registered users. OnlyFans became synonymous with porn, and boasted that because creators were in control, they avoided much of the abuse that defines other major sites like Pornhub.
However, the U.S. Congress investigated OnlyFans in 2021 for “insufficiently preventing child sexual abuse material” from appearing on its platform; the platform decided to stop offering pornographic material. The decision only lasted six days as both porn creators and porn users erupted in panic and rage.
As I have noted before, OnlyFans creators are now competing against each other in order to come up with the content their addict customers want, and porn addiction always escalates into more extreme content. If creators want to keep their fan base, they have to degrade themselves more and more; many of them agree to do so (Haley Strack called this “the depraved OnlyFans arms race” at National Review).
OnlyFans is now a prominent cultural example of the sexual revolution’s greatest extremes, with a non-stop stream of headlines informing repulsed and titillated consumers that OnlyFans “models” have slept with 100 men in one day, and, most recently, over 1,000 men in 12 hours.
It won’t stop there, either. Porn addicts crave novelty, and OF prostitutes can either get off the treadmill, or push the boundaries further. OnlyFans is following in the footsteps of Pornhub, and in that direction is only screams and darkness.
But OnlyFans is still a rapidly growing cultural phenomenon. Over 1.4 million American women use it; 2 percent of American women aged 18-45. Fortunately, some of this content is non-pornographic, despite OnlyFans’ primary reputation as a porn site. But OnlyFans is making its “creators” as famous as the porn stars of former days – and far, far richer. From Newsweek:
For example, 20-year-old Sophie Rain revealed this week that she made $43 million on OnlyFans after only creating content for the platform for the past year […] She previously disclosed on a podcast appearance that she was making as much as $4 million a month…Corinna Kopf said in October that she would be retiring from the site after earning $67 million in three years, according to Yahoo. Her monthly earnings hit $1 million five times in the time period between June 2021 to February 2022, with the lowest amount still being a whopping $600,000.
OnlyFans has successfully moved prostitution online. In the porn era, prostitution is banned in most Western countries only in theory, but laws are hopelessly outdated in the digital age. Young women are still making money selling their bodies; men are still greedily sending them money and consuming them. The women are safer because the men aren’t physically present, but everyone involved is being degraded and broken, nonetheless.
