The Real Problem with OnlyFans
Tags: Sex Work, Humour, Porn, Humor

OnlyFans seems to be the flavour of the week at the hot take factory, which can only mean that the bubble has popped. Actually, that’s not fair — the bubble must have popped a long time ago if the BBC has already aired a documentary about it.

It’s a pity really. If you were hot enough (or not crippled by shame enough) to be insulated from the embarrassment of being seen in your knickers in virtual public, it would be quite a nice way to rake a living:

Wake up. Put on a bit of makeup as normal. Bust a few Russian twists to make your obliques pop. Slip into something lacy from AliExpress and snap a few shots. ?????????? PROFIT

Occasionally you might have to drizzle a bowl of custard over your feet or get your baps out in a graveyard for some custom content, but that still beats a life of spreadsheets and meetings and reports.

Show me a woman who hasn’t considered the pros of “soft” sex work and I’ll show you a liar.

When school was too difficult, we used to joke that we were giving up on our aspirations and to become a strippers instead — bless, as if we had the looks/fitness/tenacious salesmanship for something like that!

And it’s not a new phenomenon, there’s plenty of raunchy media aimed at women that revolves around the fantasy of being a high-class escort (or similar), conveniently only burdened with kind, hunky billionaires for clients.

OnlyFans has simply made this naughty pipe dream accessible to a wider audience. With no need to contact a seedy, potentially exploitative or even dangerous third party to kickstart your sex work career, the prospect becomes much more feasible — all with the added bonus of being your own boss.

You can’t blame many of the young women who get involved for doing so. It certainly sounds better on paper than the doldrums of other classic student jobs like waitressing.

More money. More freedom. Validation on tap. Sign me up!

But there’s a seamy underbelly to this brave new world of homemade pay-per-month porn. No, I’m not talking about the fact that it might wreak havoc on your mental health, unfairly damage your future prospects, or leave you vulnerable to blackmailers, stalkers and general creeps. It’s much worse than that.

These are the real reasons not to do OnlyFans:

1. What if nobody signs up?

You might think there are veritable heaps of men vaguely orbiting you who would immediately jump on the chance to see, as the Indian proverb goes, bobs and vagene (albeit polyester covered).

Think of all those missed dating app connections, strangers who comment fire emojis on your IG posts, long lost almost-flings from your hometown, curious hookups from days gone by… The market is gagging for it! Or so you think.

First of all, most of these men won’t be arsed to sign up for it. Half of them have seen it all before anyway and they know that it’s not worth going through two-factor authentication for.

But, by the time you realise this, you’ll have already converted your previously clean social media profiles into marketing channels for your OnlyFans, boldly declaring your new occupation as proudly and loudly as a sixth former sharing the URL of their new blog that they plan to update twice a week but sadly abandon after only penning a welcome post.

Now they’ve all seen you in your pants with a digitally-applied sticker of a cat over your nipples, but you’ve not got the cash to show for it.

So, a few weeks go by and you already spent the initial £24 of sordid earnings on ASOS the second it hit your PayPal account. You close the RightMove tab of the three-bed semi in Northampton you had your eye on — ah, the naivety of those optimistic, nude-taking salad days less than a month ago.

With no future in sight for your naked endeavours, you quietly delete any mention of OnlyFans from your life and resume business as usual — lying in wait for some well-meaning acquaintance to ask the question you dread the most: “are you still doing OnlyFans? aw, how come you stopped? :/ xx”

2. What if somebody takes out a “Community Subscription”?

What’s the point of paying for a Netflix account when your flatmate has one? What’s the point of paying for the same nudes that your best mate just purchased?

It’s unethical, unfortunate and unfair, but you can bet your bottom dollar that your pictures will be shared with people who haven’t paid for them.

Most women considering OnlyFans don’t have legions of followers generated from other cleaner online pursuits like gaming or hosting a podcast, so every subscriber counts. But your network of potential customers crumbles when you factor in that one snake who pings the new vid of you practising a TikTok dance in knee-high socks round all the different lad group chats.

Soon your cellulite will be scrutinised on Slack, your D-cups dissected on Discord. Cough up, cheapskates, you all owe me a tenner! (Which is coincidentally what I be like when I find out it’s my birthday in Monopoly.)

If they want to slag you off, the least they could do is chip in.

Now everyone you know has seen your intimate content and you’re still poor. Great. Back to square one, only this time you’re paranoid that everyone’s discussing your nipples.

3. Have you seen what some of these women are charging?

Listen, I know the argument about this:

If you’re happy to send nudes for free, you shouldn’t sneer at people who do it for cash.

And I agree.

But you probably actively want to send nudes to someone you fancy, whereas on your fifteenth day of asking BigJay1991 if he’s been a naughty boy this morning and batting away his boundary-breaking, fruitless custom content solicitations, you’re likely to be a bit sick of it.

Blah blah blah an incentive is an incentive, you don’t have to tell me. But £5 or even £20 a month is such a small amount to charge for pretending to care about some random guy’s dick for ~30 entire days.

What amount is the “right” price when the market rate is low, but you know your time and content is worth, to you at least, much more?

While you’d be happy to send some people your nudes for free, there must be people on the other end of the spectrum you’d actively like to price out. Fair enough to let a harmless stranger see your stuff for £30, but that pervy co-worker needs to fork out if he wants to get access to you in your finest M&S unmentionables*.

As with many things in life, OnlyFans isn’t embarrassing if you’re earning loads from it. Less than the price of a Wagamama for two every month, however…

4. What if you get a bit TOO into it?

There are so many external factors that could lead to you having a terrible experience as an amateur soft porn star, as we’ve discussed.

But what about you? What if you LOVE it? What if you’ve found your calling in life?!

You started off sharing shots of yourself in a totally SFW pleated mini-skirt and crop-top combo, now you’re getting paid £2k to shit yourself on cam and being regularly flown out first class to Dubai to suck off a sheik.

You worried that you would have no subscribers but now you’re in the top 0.3674% of creators on the platform, famous beyond your body, destined for a high-end sponsorship, a book deal, a makeup line, etc.

Your parents long-ago transcended shame and are now unabashedly proud of you, bragging to their friends and neighbours about their world-famous glamour model daughter. They won’t even have a clue what you really get up to because it’s all behind a pay wall or too lewd for the MSM — providing they haven’t noticed that all of the furniture in your flat has been replaced with leather-clad BDSM playground equipment.

It was just meant to be a bit of lewd but innocent fun, a way to earn a few extra bob for nights out and clothes and that. Now the first thing you do every morning is take a 56 year old gimp man for a walk on a lead and whip him until he licks your seven inch platform heels clean — and you bloody love it.

Or, you know, you could still be a retail assistant at New Look.

*With thanks to my good friend @58mbr for coming up with this micro-joke ages ago.