December 30, 2024 - 10:00am
It’s as predictable as drag queens on the BBC: the moment a woman in the public eye does something lucrative but degrading, she pulls out the “feminist” card. This holds true for Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans performer who hit headlines after a stunt where she allowed 101 men to have sex with her in a single day, and for OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair, who claims that feminism informs her work. But a recent investigation by Reuters has exposed the criminal, monetised misogyny on the site.
The news agency has uncovered numerous cases of sexual slavery, child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual or “revenge” porn on OnlyFans between 2019 and 2024. With nearly 55 million pieces of content uploaded in November alone, the idea that such crimes can be eradicated from the platform seems fanciful. Meanwhile, Blair, who has boasted to audiences of creating a better world for her two daughters, deflects questions about the company’s core business. Oddly, for the head of a $1.3 billion sex megabrand, she describes the term “porn” as “pejorative”.
OnlyFans was founded in 2016 by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely and sold in 2018 to shadowy investor Leonid Radvinsky. Since then, it has paid over $20 billion to its content creators, who now number 4.1 million. The site snaffles a hefty 20% cut — a digital pimp’s commission.
The pandemic triggered a surge in creators, rising from 348,000 in 2019 to over 1.6 million in 2020. Today, competition is fierce. OnlyFans isn’t involved in the messy business of advertising what’s on the site, leaving the young women who sell pornographic content to hawk explicit pictures across social media to drive traffic to their accounts. Puff pieces spotlight the top 0.1% of creators earning over £80,000 a month, but the average creator takes home just $140.
Reuters’s findings would sink an ordinary brand. Journalists unearthed chilling accounts of women “deceived, drugged, terrorised, and sexually enslaved” to create content for the site. In suburban homes across the US, criminals imprisoned, raped and brutalised women, tattooing degrading words such as “dog” and “toy” on their bodies. Yet, despite these revelations, OnlyFans positions itself as a progressive alternative to traditional pornography, with Blair praising the “freedom” it offers creators to define their boundaries.
The most insidious aspect of OnlyFans isn’t the criminal exploitation or the meagre earnings of its creators. It’s the normalisation of a world in which selling sexual performances is routine. In this pornified landscape, objectification is a given, and commodifying sex is marketed as empowerment. As Lily Phillips remarked in a documentary about her tortuous stunt: “Guys are always going to sexualise me, so I may as well try to make a profit off it.”
This sentiment encapsulates the mindset of pornography’s children. Let down by out-of-touch politicians and careless tech bros, they are part of the generation that has been exposed to scenes of choking online before touching another’s lips. For women like Phillips, sex is not an intimate act but a transaction, something done to them, with financial compensation as the only consolation.
OnlyFans is not simply the next iteration of pornography — it’s the natural endpoint of a culture that tells women and girls their worth is in their sex appeal to men, and that this has a price tag. It is a marketplace where the victims of the porn industry’s earlier abuses are trapped in a cycle of selling a digital facsimile of the sexuality that was stolen from them.
The platform may market itself as empowering, but it thrives on exploitation: genuine connection is replaced by commerce. As society continues to embrace this “normal”, the consequences for our collective humanity become harder to ignore. OnlyFans isn’t just a brand — it’s a reflection of pornography’s triumph over love.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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SubscribeIn a world where we have a female British Transport Police Chief Constable, Lucy D’Orsi, championing the rights of any male PO who identifies as female to strip search women suspects, is it any wonder that the porn industry now feels no shame whatsoever but is free to position itself as blazing a trail for feminism?
Of course it is all a sick lie that forms a fragile cover for some of the vilest crimes against vulnerable people by those intent on making money by any means possible, no holds barred.
That OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair gets away with making out her trade is somehow fighting the cause for women’s rights only signals just how depraved and corrupted our supposedly liberal society has become, but those like her get away with it because we have people in positions of power, “out-of-touch politicians” police officers, legislators, religious leaders etc etc, those who in times past would have held the line against the excesses of human behaviour, have all lost the plot, are cowards or are actually intent on destroying what was once a pretty decent culture that many felt blessed to have been born into.
If young feminism can embrace trans removing women’s rights and freedoms…
…then it can indeed embrace cam pornography.
Feminism is today an unanalysed word and concept. It is criticism free. One of the weird results is that it can mean anything to anyone.
Unherd is full of feminist writers. None of them make any attempt to clarify the terminology they have introduced. Gender being their most well-known creation.
I agree. Another example of using a buzz word that has so many meanings it has become effectively meaningless. Two articles on UnHerd today with complaints about lack of clarity and precision.
None of them make any attempt to clarify the terminology
Or take responsibility, at least partially, for what they have wrought.
Also, any “feminist” article has to come attached with terms like “misogyny” and “objectification”, which are also, vague, and criticism and analysis free. For instance, natural male biological attraction towards attractive women is “objectification”, but women picking men based on their wallet and earning capacity is not.
Simultaneously, for any of these feminist writers, there is not a lot of mention of personal responsibility and accountability. This one for example, or any of the trans related articles, which don’t seem to touch upon the largely female support base and feminist theories on “biology” that caused the mess.
On the bright side, they have dropped “hegemony”.
There are many things about contemporary feminism that are so ludicrously inverted as to be funny. The entire gender debate is like a global Clown Show Hunger Games, in which intelligent women compete to see who can prepare and swallow the most women-humiliating, misogynist idea involving the switching of penises and vaginas. But the megafield of ‘sexual comportment and activity’ runs a pretty close second in terms of giving feminists an opportunity to be moronically diverting. OnlyFans offers an especially rich comedic seam to be mined. The delusion of an 18 year old who thinks she is empowering herself by dressing up as a 15 year old schoolgirl and streaming herself live to the world begging for a ‘daddy’ to w*nk onto her breasts is poignantly amusing in its witless irony. But an educated intelligent older women who would go to bat for this demeaning garbage on that young w***e’s behalf is…laugh-aloud ridiculous. Feminism clearly belted itself with the Idiot Stick decades ago.
We men, meanwhile, continue to win. Continue to revel and cavort – evermore incredulously, I keep looking around for the hidden camera crew, the feminist prankster reveal – in the sexual delights ‘feminism’ just keeps chucking our way, like cost&guilt-free blowjobs at the Sexual Revolution’s endless Stag Party. (No actual chicks present; just objectified tits-n-tw*ts-n-bums; blow-up AI dollies with three holes, open arms and legs…and a real heartbeat and bodily fluids, bonus!) We get to reduce and sexualise whoever we want, however and whenever we like it. There’s a dirty little YouPorn category/e-window online harbouring every known kink, and if you can’t locate your specific real life love interest there, offering a**l or choking or spitting or bukkake or whatevs in Digital F**ktown, AI now makes DIY cut-n-pasting her face onto a Keily The Pimp-hosted stunt double a breeze!
Thanks, Keily! Ch-ching, eh?!
Ah, lads: to be a horny, shabby, lecherous man in 2024, in the #MeToo internet age, is to inhabit a true sexual paradise. Mouth a few dead platitudes about ‘respect’ and ‘standing with women against male DV’, buy a cheap white ribbon and a #MeToo badge, mutter vapid and craven cliches about ‘gender’ on Graham Norton, wave a rainbow flag madly, pile onto JK Rowling (only safely, in a pack of like-minded manfeminists)…and presto! You’ve just earned a sexual grubbery free pass, gold-stamped by ‘progressives’; permission from ‘feminism’ to be a same-old same-old sexual creep, just another dirty little opportunist getting her knickers off by way of hippy bullsh*t about sexual freedom and empowerment. ‘Grooming’ is of course the correct description of the OnlyFans et al executive patter. Grooming young girls, for a twenty percent flesh cut, so that we men can w*nk w*nk w*nk away, shag shag shag away, without moral empathy or civic obligation or shame or regret or civic foresight or a second thought about our kids’ sexual instruction-by-our-example in general, and that of young girls by older women in particular. All now with the added benefit of being able to claim – po-faced and noble and championed by treacherous female misogynists like Keily Blair and Lily d’Orsi alike – that we are ‘liberating’ and ‘dignifying’ these self-monetising lumps of meat, when we pay them a few anonymous bucks to miserably debase their own sexual bodies so we can jerk ours – equally miserably – off.
Hooray for millennial feminism! Sheer effing geenyus, all you clever go go grrr-girls. Too funny for words. Too too sad, too.
I think it is a bit disingenuous to blame this on progressives or liberals. Surely this is more the double speak of criminals and fascists. No truly thinking person sees this behaviour as liberating or empowering for anyone, men or women. Though some may postulate all sorts of rubbish about it…but it basically comes down to economics. Making money out of those who have no foresight re the consequences of their behaviour beyond some monetary compensation, (a true ‘let the market determine the value’), or those so lonely that they can only buy intimacy to assuage their isolation. It’s an extreme form of a hollowed out market capitalism, where the only value is money, and everything has its price. In this world we are all collateral damage.
Whilst the “feel” of this piece seems right, the problem is the word “Reuters”…a founder member of the MSM whom it would very unwise to trust.
All of the MSM has an agenda…and it isn’t either beneficial, or benevolent towards any but those who pay it…certainly not the general public.
The old school advice “read around the subject” must be taken more seriously nowadays.
Women do whatever they want because men are always to blame – this is the essence of modern “feminism”
It does seem that no matter how many twists and tuns and non sequiturs are needed, the guilty hat always ends up on the man’s head and the victim hat on the woman’s.
Any way you look at it, this is women taking men for a ride – or rather, not taking them for a ride but getting them to pay the ticket anyway.
Western society continues to cannibalize itself after ‘emancipating’ women turns out to actually be enslaving them as sexual objects.
The only religion that can stand up to this widespread filth and protect the honor and decency of women is Islam.
This is one reason why more and more women are converting.
I hope this statement is irony.
And if they don’t comply… you kill them.
How wonderful.
But wait, I thought chivalry was degrading to women?
Only if you’re not prepared to be chivalrous with hard cash!
Onlyfans issue seems to be that in enabling women to make money, it has also opened an opportunity for some of them to be exploited for that money. The question that needs to be asked before blaming Onlyfans is how many of these would have been exploited in similar ways had Onlyfans not existed.
Excellent point. I think that there’s nothing wrong in consensual behavior between consenting adults, even if economic transactions are part of the deal. There is definitely no way we should countenance rape or slavery or any of the other vile behaviors mentioned in this article but what we have to answer is that to what extent is OnlyFans responsible vs. the actual perpetrators. Do they actually encourage or enable said crimes to take place or do the crimes occur and they happen to profit when the perpetrators use their site to generate content. Should they be responsible for policing their content? These are serious questions that lawmakers should be stepping up to answer.
I am not sure that ‘consent’ and consent alone provides total insulation from any other moral considerations. People give ‘consent’ for all sorts of reasons: ignorance, inexperience and immaturity, peer pressure, desperation, lack of choice, being manipulated, a promised reward financial or otherwise, hope of love etc etc. That is why analysis of power dynamics is important. Much ‘free’ choice between ‘consenting’ adults is likely to not be very free nor consenting. If you are aware that someone is consenting to something they don’t truly understand, are you duty bound to enlighten them? Or stay silent if you can make a profit out of them?
With respect, this logic opens up a different can of worms. Having a free society presumes individual people have agency and are therefore responsible for their choices, including consent. If we can question the validity of sexual consent, why can’t we ask similar questions of other decisions that imply individual responsibility. Should accused murderers be able to cite peer pressure, immaturity, etc., as mitigation for their crimes. We do allow such excuses in certain cases of extreme mental illness and with young children. Legal contracts can be canceled if it can be proven one or more parties were under duress. The problem is that sexual activity is usually in private between two individuals making such extenuating factors impossible to prove through evidence in court. That’s unfortunate but it doesn’t change the underlying principles. A free society depends upon the assumption of individual agency and individual responsibility. A free society cannot protect people from their own bad decisions and still be a free society.
Is your answer to outlaw certain sexual practices as was once done for religious and moral reasons? Does that really mitigate the risk to women in becoming victims of predators? Does it make the difficulty in proving sexual misconduct any easier? I fear all this will accomplish is the same sort of prudish puritan obsession with what happens in other people’s bedrooms we thought we had left back in the bad old days.
The problem is not so much money, which will always go where there are profits to be made, but the legal ways in which money can be made.
20B to content creators. That sounds like a business, albeit one I’d rather any female relative did NOT pursue, but still a business.
I feel like this is a more serious issue that calls for a much more serious approach than the one used by this author, whose tone gives one the distinct impression of an angry mob on the march to burn some witches. There is a serious debate ongoing about the extent to which digital publishing services should be held responsible for the words/actions/and views of the people who provide the content. It warrants a more thorough understanding and consideration of the various issues because it’s not limited to pornography.
There was a phenomenon a few years back where people would post videos on Youtube of ‘helping’ turtles by scraping encrusted barnacles off their backs, and sometimes other stuff like pollution or what not. How this stuff got stuck on the turtle or how the turtle had survived in this condition was never addressed. Turns out people were just catching wild turtles, gluing stuff to the shells, then filming themselves removing the debris. Is Youtube now responsible for however many counts of animal cruelty despite having no prior knowledge of the crime or participating in any part of the criminal act other than providing a forum for the sharing of video?
Is Facebook responsible for blatantly false content circulated by its users? Should they be allowed to censor such content or forced to do so by the government? Is WordPress responsible for someone starting an antisemitic blog or denying the Holocaust? If we give these content providers the responsibility and obligation to police their own content, might they impose forms of censorship out of political favoritism or economic self interest?
These are very hard questions that lawmakers in this digital age need to step up to answer. Any legal framework that holds OnlyFans responsible for the horrible crimes committed by their content providers establishes legal precedents that won’t necessarily stay confined to the realm of pornography. We need a set of legal guidelines that balances the need to protect individuals from crimes with the need to protect freedom of speech and the freedom of consenting adults to pursue sexual activities without government oversight. Altogether this article seems to sidestep any serious look at the issues in an attempt to shock the reader with tales of unspeakable crime and the depth of human depravity.
This is a bit of a smokescreen. What Onlyfans shows is that a significant number of women are willing to use their sex appeal to extract money from men. Not all women, but a surprisingly high number. Especially when most of the risks associated with more traditional sex work have been removed.
We could turn around the quote above as:
Were men able to operate a similar sting on women, the women would be described as vulnerable, victims and exploited.
A sizeable number of the models on OnlyFans are men, though their customers are not women but gay men. The man who owned P’Nut the squirrel (who was seized and killed by New York state’s animal control officers) was one such male model, and he outearned his wife who also posed on OnlyFans.
Precisely. The whole article is slanted towards how those awful men are coercing those poor girls to extract easy money using their bodies, instead of doing any useful or productive work.
Look at it from the point of view of those men – constantly told how natural sexual attraction to women, approaching women for a normal relationship, is “toxic”, something can label them as a criminal at the whim of the female “victim”.
But pay money to those same girls, and they are happy to gratify random men with meaningless, gross sexual displays on a computer screen.
So who exactly is the victim here? Those making easy money by being shameless, or those paying their hard earned money for a shallow substitute of normal relationships denied them?
The article talks of a “culture that tells women and girls their worth is in their sex appeal to men”.
Instead, those women and girls are the ones telling men the only thing they offer is sex appeal, and the only thing they value in men is their money.
When feminists sought to liberate women they had some pretty fixed ideas of what those liberated women would be like, and how they would behave. But that isn’t really how liberation works, especially if it involves liberation from accountability for their own actions. Liberation is defined by the liberated not the liberators.
Women pull out the feminist card because this is what they think feminism is: freedom from social restraint; freedom to do whatever they like. What did you expect: dungarees and no makeup?
This article fails to consider that men are exploited by the platform. The women that take thousands from hapless sad losers know what they’re doing. I’m betting that many of these guys are autistic and have learning difficulties. Only Fans is degenerate and it should be banned. A nationalist government that valued ethnos and community wouldn’t allow it.
https://theheritagesite.substack.com/
The blurb for this article states: “OnlyFans is exploitation dressed up as feminism. The site hides its criminal misogyny behind a progressive facade.”
I didn’t read the article! I wonder when we may see an article on Uherd which discusses misandry?
It seems as if onlyMen have so far written a comment on this article. Well.. one more to go from myself..!
My comment is on the commentators. I sense a lot of pain and grief towards women in some comments. I can understand these feelings and relate to them up to a point. What I don’t understand and can’t relate to, is a sense of complete anti-feminist view that becomes half-blinded. While this article is clearly drawing a line of opposition against a derailed feminism that exploits women in the name of a phony freedom, commentators use it as an opportunity to.”attack” on the very essence of all kinds of feminism. I could follow a critic on presenting a problematic foundation of feminism, but what I see here, is lonlyMen’s tears..! I am empathetic for this feeling but angry-tears against feminists are not very helpful. Especially here on Unherd, when you have women columnists trying hard to resist excesses of feminism and/or even regret many factors of the history of feminism. Kathlin Stock and Mary Harrington, to name but a few, do not fit in the anti-feminist picture as presented here by some commentators. As for Mary H. she has even called for the creation of a regressive feminism, reaching as far as to question the anti-conception pill, notably the pillar of most feminism movements and arguably a tool to women explosion and porn victimisation of women..!
So, please guys, before we throw the stone, let’s be a little more thoughtful on what our aims are..!
Ladies and gents alike, I warmly wish you a very happy New Year in earnest..!
I think if male commenters were being anti woman rather than anti feminist I would be more worried. Feminism is a doctrine (or family of related doctrines) which anyone (man or woman) is free to disagree with in whole or in part. And many disagree not simply because they disagree with the programme, but because they think feminism has got the facts wrong.
However, and here I agree with you, it is wrong to tar all the female voices on Unherd with the same brush. The ones you name are critical voices within feminism. Perhaps they are even in the process of breaking with that movement. In any case they are worth reading.
Comments are short however and “feminism” is often a shorthand for a set of relatively dogmatic ideas which are pretty clear from the context.
Thank you for this comment David..! I see it as complimentary to my remarks..!
OnlyFans isn’t just about porn, or at least it wasn’t. In fact, when it was launched it had nothing to do with porn at all. The point is that whether it exists or not, the murky side of our human character remains and will find other outlets to broadcast its depravity. OnlyFans is just a medium, a gateway to reveal human nature and the human condition.