Last May conservative YouTuber Lauren Chen made a worthwhile video about the realities of OnlyFans, the much-hyped autoporning website.
In many ways, OnlyFans is nothing new. Amateur porn sites are as old as the Internet. Cam sites appeared as soon as the bandwidth was sufficient. Before the Internet, there were 1-900 phone sex lines.
But these things were always confined to isolated subcultures. And while the mainstream media may have occasionally reported on their existence, there was none of the cheerleading that surrounds the OnlyFans phenomenon.
Watch Lauren Chen’s video. She spends a little too much time going on about how appalled she is by sex work of any kind. (Yes, Lauren, we get that you are not at all interested in flashing your wares online for tips. Not under any circumstances.) But virtue-signaling aside, she highlights some stark numbers.
To be in the top one percent of OnlyFans creators essentially means that you make about as much as an average fast food worker. And you do this at the cost of starring in an online library of nude photos and videos. These will exist forever, and can be dredged up by blackmailers, jealous partners, and snooping acquaintances at any time.
The stratospheric OnlyFans numbers are for celebrities, and perhaps a handful of outliers.
But what about those outliers? You’ve seen the headlines: “Nurse quits her job to make $20K per month on OnlyFans!”
Chen doesn’t mention this, but the handful of woman-next-door outliers are largely self-reported, or rather, journalist-reported. Are liberties taken with the truth? Well, what do you think?
To be clear, I’m not here to make the case for censorship, but rather for awareness. The mainstream media is selling one narrative (“Instant riches on OnlyFans await!”). The reality is something else. (You probably won’t make much money, and you’ll create numerous liabilities for yourself that will last as long as the Internet.)
-ET