OnlyFans cannot be empowering
Social media – dear God, it was a mistake. There’s all kinds of annoying fretting over it. Ironically, social media is the only platform for sharing how much you hate social media, and as 20-something, college-aged people, we are paralyzed by its presence plaguing our minds. A product of recent neurotic, media-fueled psychological war games is OnlyFans, which is a popular subscription-based adult site. OnlyFans creators can charge their own rates and upload photo and video content for paying subscribers. The site came into prominence around the beginning of the pandemic, and while it is not exclusive to sex workers – interestingly, OnlyFans’s original purpose wasn’t for explicitly pornographic material – the site has become well known for its supply of specialized sexual content.
OnlyFans has imploded and exploded at different times, with obscure scandals involving false alarm NSFW bans and Bella Thorne. Yet, it attracts young creators at high rates, some underage. I cannot attest to a gender experience outside of my own. However, I have witnessed OnlyFans’ heightened popularity among young gay men in particular. This new trend industrializes human desire. It utilizes the vulnerability of youth and commodifies people into an arrangement of images and videos.
While risk is fairly mitigated online via OnlyFans, it is still demanding and draining labor. Someone should not want sex work if they have a way out of it. OnlyFans has provided a stream of massive income for those in need – which is a good thing – but there comes a point when a company grossing billions in revenue must expand its labor pool, exponentially. Money makes the world go ‘round.
Sadly, many gay men are wanting to do sex work on OnlyFans not out of need, but for the satisfaction of desire. They feel so deeply unattractive that they consider OnlyFans as a means of quelling their insecurities. As recent scandals with Facebook have shown, the media is constructed to capitalize on the worst of human instinct. Gay male culture, now looming in the shadows of hookup apps like Grindr, Scruff and others, feeds into OnlyFans’ perverted profit model. OnlyFans isn’t looking for people immune to the social ramifications of being a porn sensation – they don’t care. They want more money, now.
It needs to be said that OnlyFans creators are ravenously attacked and mocked for their profession. It is a despicable cruelty to shame people for sex work, OnlyFans or not. Diminishing their humanity is evil – and the labor of OnlyFans does this more than internet trolls or rude, ignorant people.
To understand the philosophical boundaries of this issue, and specifically sex in visual mediums, you have to understand the mechanics behind it. Writers and philosophers who claim the heritage of great gay literati have shown an early pro-OnlyFans tendency for years. They overlook the adverse effects of so-called “liberation” and claim unashamed personal pride in the face of exploitation.
Camile Paglia is a controversial feminist academic, most famous for her fiery personality and not-so politically correct Boomer perspective. She makes scathing, unsavory remarks about new changes and the direction of the feminist movement, and she’s been wrought through the internet criticism cycle quite thoroughly. A libertarian lesbian heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, Marquis de Posade and Oscar Wilde, Paglia believes that true liberation comes from within the individual, self-actualized through capital and enshrined in the sanctuary of nature. In other, jargon-less words, she believes in the ultimate power of the individual. You make the world better by bootstrapping your way through the thick of it. She claims that people can feel empowered through prostitution and pornography, instead of diminished or damaged from its weight.
In the case of OnlyFans, the individual is harnessing the power of their sexual appeal to make money. While they can make fortunes and live good lives, it is an illusion of autonomy. While many OnlyFans creators may feel empowerment, it is clear this is a glitzy facade.
“So many horrendous downsides and horrendous judgment and it’s been mentally a lot ... but money is freedom ... if it wasn’t for that I wouldn’t do it,” said an OnlyFans creator named Lauren to Muse magazine.
In her books, “Sexual Personae,” “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender” and “Feminism and Glittering Images,” Paglia carries the reader through a crash-course in western art’s influence on pop culture, building upon her psychic, nature-based “Chthonian” theory of human intellectual thought and celebrity worship. Paglia is drawing upon gay traditions, pop culture and media, teaching somebody to see lines, color, scene, context – how art is made through reconceptualization and embodies our own morally ambiguous projections of nature and sex.
I’ll admit, Paglia taught me how to appreciate art. I do not believe in or agree with her much of the time, but she showed me how humanity is intrinsically bound to our ancient roots and behaviors. She claims that liberation counterbalances capital by the psychic powers of blurred, decadent gender boundaries – specifically, the unique homosexual experience. However, human sexuality is not a commodity to be produced and distributed. Popular OnlyFans creators don’t have a singular boss, they have thousands, sometimes millions of microbosses: the subscribers.
Sadly, it’s not surprising that Paglia supported pedophilic organizations and the dangerous relationships between young boys and men. The erosion of overly-constrictive norms is good for society, but it’s the income – not freedom from shame – that keeps the majority of OnlyFans creators from jumping ship.
It is the kind of over the top, self-actualized thinking that powers much of the gay OnlyFans culture, and in turn, the advocacy for OnlyFans not as a last option, but as an possible career. OnlyFans is formal and industrialized. An industry where more capital, and in turn, more human cost, must be allotted. It is no surprise that this “liberation” has yielded gay men a means of twisted sexual hierarchy.
No one should be forced to do porn to make a living. Give OnlyFans creators a way out and I assure you, they will take it.
