Once relegated to the fringes of society, OnlyFans became a mainstream sensation with serious implications.
“Hey Ossiana, why don’t you do an OnlyFans?”
It’s a question I get quite a lot. While many AFAB individuals would be offended by that question, I’m not. I mean, I’ve worked on and off in the porn industry for the better part of 10 years.
I’ve been a model. I still model. In fact, I just got done doing a lingerie shoot for a friend’s website. Among my friends, I’m known for having an alarming sex drive — one that often can cause injuries if I don’t calm myself down.
To the average person, an OnlyFans seems like a no-brainer. However, I have worked in the adult film industry as a journalist, booker, and yes, consultant. That means that I’m aware of what it means to have an OnlyFans and I’m not beat for it.
Most people have watched the rise and fall of OnlyFans happen. It used to be fairly common for almost every college girl to consider it. As someone who has worked behind the scenes in the adult film world, there’s a lot of things I find alarming about the rise of OnlyFans.
Here’s why I am a little alarmed about how OnlyFans became mainstream.
First off, the fact that it’s become mainstream is a sign of serious economic issues.
I might as well address the elephant in the room: the vast majority of people do not get into sex work just to get their jollies off. Sex work comes with a crazy amount of risk and stigma. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Sex work has traditionally been a course of action for the desperate as well as people who just ended up in a weird situation in life. While there are plenty of exceptions to the rule, sex work is not people’s first choice in a career.
The fact that so many women and men are turning to OnlyFans in a bid to pay the bills is alarming because it means they aren’t making enough to cover the necessities anymore.
I’ve met my fair share of women who felt like they couldn’t pay their student loans without OnlyFans-like work. This is not how it should be.
This is a sign that our income inequality is causing a quiet desperation among people. People are tired of grinding away without a sign of security in sight. They’re turning to sex work as a last-ditch effort to get cash.
Second, I don’t think mainstream America is really aware of how dangerous OnlyFans and camming can be.
OnlyFans and webcam modeling is brutal and dangerous. Read that sentence again. When people talk about OnlyFans, they often assume that it means that you do the following:
1) Exist as a hot girl
2) Flirt lightly, send nudes
3) Get insane amounts of money and praise.
This isn’t how it actually works. You can earn a lot of money, but the actual average OnlyFans model doesn’t make more than $200 per month. That’s abysmally low.
If you want to make serious bank in OnlyFans, you’re glued to the platform 24/7. Your social life will decline. You will be selling a side of yourself — an intimate side of yourself — as a product. It will affect your relationship with yourself. You also will have to deal with a lot of abuse from your “fans.”
That alone can make it a dangerous career for people who have confidence issues or mental health issues. However, it also becomes more dangerous when you realize how unhinged some OF users can be.
Most of my friends have full-scale protocols to prevent doxxing. Why? Because a lot of people want to hurt sex workers just because they can. And they will doxx them to friends, family, and even full-time employers.
Doxxing, of course, is the least of their problems. In my own circle of friends, at least six of them had death threats sent to their email inboxes, home addresses, and houses. Two have active folders of threats with local police departments.
Among the people I’ve met and worked with, at least three died by suicide or overdose because the industry was so rough on them. I am not joking when I say that porn is brutal on people.
We don’t talk about the damage it can do to performers. And we should. And we need to start addressing it and offering support for it.
The mainstreaming of OF also means that the porn industry is flooded and deregulated.
I have had the honor of hanging out with some of the greatest behind-the-scenes people in porn, including Dirty Bob, Evan Stone, and Don Juan de Marko. These are people who helped me really feel the history of porn.
One thing that people don’t realize is how heavily regulated old school porn houses are. Prior to the 1970s and 1980s, hardcore porn was actually illegal due to obscenity laws. The porn stars who made it risked jail time doing so.
Ron Jeremy and Evan Stone? Yeah, they risked jail. When the laws around porn got loosened, porn studios were still heavily monitored and frequently raided. There were no mainstream porn shoots done casually.
Those big porn houses? They still stick to major regulations, including:
- No drugs. A lot of porn houses have a strict no-drugs policy and will send stars that arrive under the influence home. With that said, this is a waning practice today.
- Regular STI testing. You can’t shoot at a major porn house like Brazzers without having testing done every two weeks at a Talent Testing-certified testing service. They check your stuff on databases. They also test for COVID-19. If a SINGLE person in the industry tests positive for an STI, there’s an industry-wide stop on production. No other industry has health standards that are anywhere as strict.
- Condoms. Yes, condoms are a thing in porn, though some houses moved so they can skirt that requirement.
- Consent and discussions. So, I will be the first to point out that this doesn’t always happen the way that it should. Sexual assault on set is still a problem, but the thing is, there are still some kind of guidelines there that help protect stars and plan things out. Stars also tend to discuss their experiences amongst themselves to give others a heads-up.
These rules and regulations seem pretty basic, but they serve purposes. They make an already-risky industry slightly safer for performers. They also help keep people who shouldn’t be in the industry out of there.
The problem with OnlyFans is that it makes it impossible for indie models to deal with those regulations. So, their safety is up to them. OF and similar platforms don’t require tests, don’t have much reputational protections for studios, and also require models to discuss shoots ahead of time.
A lot of sexual predators and traffickers use OnlyFans to harm victims, make money off them, and more. It only takes one run-in with a bad guy to cause a lifetime of suffering for these models. OnlyFans and other platforms can only do so much to protect models from people like that.
The lack of regulations and monitoring in the webcam/digital content industry is what makes the market easy to flood and what makes it so damn hard to protect stars today.
But, it doesn’t end there.
With a regular studio shoot, they take care of the marketing for you. OnlyFans doesn’t. It’s all on the models. This leads a lot of naive women to advertise their accounts via dating apps, which can put them at risk of bad things in their local vicinity.
In a word, OF-style sex work offers triple the dangers with far less income potential for a typical user. You can thank the flooded market and the “open gate” entry for that.
Lastly, there is a lot of anger that’s misdirected at women and OnlyFans — anger our society is not ready to address.
I really wish I could explain the sheer amount of hate and vitriol typical OnlyFans models endure. But I don’t always have to do that. Most women have noticed a pointed rise in hate speech toward women since 2016.
There’s a definite connection between women’s earning power versus men’s and the amount of misogyny in the air. The more women have been winning in the workplace, the angrier many men feel.
There’s a distinct correlation I’ve noticed with the rise of porn culture in mainstream America here.
Traditional men’s jobs have been vanishing. Wages that were once a man’s pride and joy no longer cover basic expenses. Meanwhile, women have been making gains as men lament the futures they thought they had. Men turned to porn and OF for that escape from reality.
Then, the very men who end up jerking it to porn end up getting angrier because they realized, “Oh shit! I just spent my rent money on this girl. I can’t get that money the way she did and I think she had fun tipping me.”
That anger is palpable in certain men.
And that anger needs to go somewhere. Sadly, it’s often directed at women who they assume have an “unfair advantage” when it really should be at the corporations and politicians that took away their stability, good jobs, and resources.
OnlyFans and cam models have been acting as the “socially-acceptable” punching bag of men who feel like they were cheated out of a future. The truth is that the men who rail against women feel unattractive, unwanted, and left out of society.
We, as a society, are not ready to collectively face the true enemy of men: the kleptocrats that suppress wages, destroy dreams and jack up prices. Women are not the enemy. Performers are not the enemy.
The enemy is the kleptocracy we have.
The enemy is the elephant in the room we’re excusing by hating on models.
But, we’re not ready to talk about that yet, are we? We’re not ready to talk about it until it’s such a big squeeze that it’s no longer capable of being blamed on anything else.
No, until it gets to the point where most of us are crushed, we’ll have a society that still blames models and performers who are just trying to make cash in a playing field that is totally flooded by a glut of desperate people. And that, my friends, is a losing game for everyone.
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