OnlyFans Culture

I've been quiet on this for too long

I’ve kept my mouth quiet about this one for too long and I can’t hold it in anymore.

OnlyFans is destroying a generation of young women. So is modern work culture since it’s so bad it pushes women to OnlyFans. Let me clarify.

Let’s identify the problem. OnlyFans has over 200 million subscribers and around 2.1 million creators, the vast majority of which are in the US. If we assume they are about 75% female, that’s 1.5 million women of about 22 million in the average age range.

That is to say, roughly 6.8% of young women are now doing amateur porn to make a living in the US.

Let’s think through why they do this.

You’re a 23 year old college grad with a liberal arts degree. After spending months sending out countless resumes a day, you finally land a job. You might make $50-80k doing some low level job with little respect, visibility, upward mobility, long hours, and end up with little to no cash or time for fun stuff at the end of the day. I know I’ve at least seen countless TikToks of women complaining about this exact situation. I saw one today of a young woman who couldn’t even afford rent and groceries. This is why 31% of Gen Z live with their parents after college.

Let me tell you. If I had told my father I was moving back in after college in 2006, I would have been disowned. I don’t know a single person my age who did although I’m sure there are plenty.

All that is to say, the modern workplace, as I have discussed previously, has become inhospitable to young people (realistically, inhospitable to everyone). I get it. My first job after college was sitting in-front of a computer in a windowless office for 10 hours a day. I hated it. I’m not going to say that’s a path to success because honestly I got very little from that job and didn’t find my path until I started making companies of my own, but today’s youth were promised something different.

See, I’m not on TikTok but I am on Instagram. And I see lots of shockingly young people flaunting wealth and a vey easy life seemingly without effort. That and scantily clad women seem to compose a large amount of what is actually on IG (although I make a point to avoid the second one). According to my research TikTok is no different, showing the glamorous lifestyles of young women (and fewer men).

Now, I make two primary assumptions whenever I see these things. The first is whatever they are showing off does not really belong to them. There was a Salon article last year that talked about a young woman on TikTok who showed days filled with luxury shopping and beautiful photos of her in a large NYC Penthouse apartment. Turns out, she had 6 roommates and the shopping bags, while real, were not filled with actual purchases. See, I (and since you are reading this I assume you too) know that social media is completely fake. Since the early days of being able to post on Facebook, everyone only shows the highlights of their life, frequently lying and exaggerating in their posts. Everyone has their struggles and except for some people on TikTok, not many people share them on social media.

The second assumption I make is that if a young person is showing off wealth on social media, they have an alternate source of income. And when you go digging through beautiful women’s YouTube shorts, IG reels, and TikTok posts, you almost always end up at the same place.

OnlyFans

For the lucky few of you who don’t know what OnlyFans is, it’s a website where anyone can sign up and sell explicit (frequently extremely explicit) photos and videos of themselves in exchange for a monthly fee from subscribers. It’s Patreon for amateur porn.

The problem is there are enough young women that can make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month (top creators even make significantly more) by working a few hours a day, and then actually live that lifestyle they are sold by social media.

In fact, what you see on social media these days is very frequently just marketing to get you to purchase the explicit content.

So again, you are posed two options as a young attractive girl. Dead end job or a lot more money for less work. The decision really isn’t hard.

Now, I’m not judging them. It’s a very logical choice. But they go in not considering a few things. The first is that there is a limited shelf life to how long people will pay for their content. Naturally, the most successful creators are on the younger side and the kind of beauty that thousands of people will pay to see simply doesn’t last forever.

Second, most fail to realize the long term effects of posting explicit photos online. There are countless videos of women regretting their actions when they are later judged while dating or when their children find out and are bulled at school. The internet is written in ink and someday those photos will probably come back to haunt the creators. But we all know what we were like as 20 year olds. I know I wasn’t making smart, logical, long term decisions at that age.

And lastly, what is most shocking to me, is that this is sold to women as empowering and somehow feminist. My own ex-wife during brunch one Sunday excitedly described all of the money her new married friend was making on OnlyFans. When I told her I didn’t approve, she told me I was being sexist and misogynistic. I was confused and still am. I understand society is trying to be positive about sex work these days but call me old fashioned…I’m not. And I know a lot of other men and women who feel similarly. (Feel free to leave a comment on how the heck selling your naked body to men is feminist). Now, I’m not going to say which one is right or wrong, but I will point out OnlyFans creator base grew 47% last year compared to only a growth of 27% in subscribers. That means more and more women are flocking to get naked on camera for money. That doesn’t seem healthy.

Is this the society we want? Is this the future we want to build?

In the ultimate irony, OnlyFans is of course run by a bunch of men. Their owner is a Ukrainian American who is now worth $2.1 billion and makes around $500 million a year….in cash. So in reality all these women are just making a very small number of men very, very rich.

And that’s somehow empowering and feminist?

I don’t really have a conclusion to this since I rarely encounter any of this in the real world and don’t want to pass judgement. Work sucks these days. Now that I have a growing company I own outright I could never imagine going back to working for someone else. It’s not fair for me to pass judgement on people just taking advantage of their God given gifts, whatever those talents and/or personal attributes are.

What I can say is that I don’t think we want this for our society. It’s unhealthy for women, it’s unhealthy for men, and it’s unhealthy for any remaining moral fabric or the insane dating world (speaking of I always want to write about my thoughts on modern dating but am horrified I will offend…leave a comment if you think I should do it).

So, now you know how most of those attractive women on social media afford that first class trip around the world in their early 20s. I’m really at a loss of what to do about it except keep it out of my own and my family’s life.