Why OnlyFans has young British women in its grip
The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early twenties, married to her teenage sweetheart, pursuing a career in recruitment and living in Derbyshire, the county of her birth. As she told an interviewer last year: 'I used to work an office job, nine to five, sit in rush hour, get given 20 days' annual leave. And for a while I'd accepted that. I was like 'OK, this is what life is. This is as good as it can get.''
But Blue (whose real name is Tia Billinger) wondered if life might not have more to offer her. So she left her husband, moved to Australia and pursued a new business idea: having sex with hundreds of (in her words) 'barely legal' teenage boys and uploading the footage to subscription-based, content-sharing platform OnlyFans. 'I just wanted a better life,' she insists. And, in her opinion, OnlyFans gave that to her.
Now 26, Blue has become world famous for the escalating depravity of her stunts. She was planning to host what she called a 'petting zoo' event this weekend, in which as many as 2,000 men would be given sexual access to her over 24 hours, all on camera. She cancelled the stunt after an online backlash, but promised to replace it with the 'craziest, largest livestream ever' instead.
OnlyFans is the most profitable content subscription service in the world. Subscribers pay monthly fees to creators in return for access to images, videos and personal interaction via messaging or video calls. Yet even though the platform generated £4.5 billion in gross revenue last year, the vast majority of its content creators make very little from it. The mean annual income is less than £1,000. Not only are most OnlyFans creators not as rich as Bonnie Blue, who claims to make £1.5 million a month, most of them are barely covering the costs of their electricity bill.
And yet the site continues to attract enormous numbers of would-be stars. Britain is host to 280,000 creator accounts, giving us one of the highest concentrations in the world. Eighty-four per cent of those accounts are run by women, and if they are all (give or take) between the ages of 18 and 34, then we can estimate that just shy of 4 per cent of young British women are selling their wares on OnlyFans. Of course, not all of them will be behaving like Bonnie Blue, but these figures nevertheless demand some kind of explanation.
Men and women with the same kind of psychological weakness can now mutually exploit one another online
It's not as if the work is pleasant. You don't make it big by selling the softcore stuff. The latest competition among top creators is over who can have sex with the most men in a day. In December, British OnlyFans star Lily Phillips – also, oddly, from Derbyshire – filmed herself having sex with 101 of her subscribers in a London Airbnb. In the resultant documentary, titled I Slept With 100 Men in One Day, the cameraman entered the bedroom at the end of the event and was so appalled by the smell that he retched. Phillips herself was reduced to tears by the experience, but this did not deter other women from attempting to beat her record. In January, Bonnie Blue (of course) claimed to have had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours, and last month Australian creator Annie Knight was hospitalised after a stunt involving 583 men.
Whatever OnlyFans is, it isn't easy. For creators like Blue, Phillips and Knight, their 'work' is gruelling, disgusting, painful and dangerous. If you're a beautiful and cynical young woman intent on becoming rich, it would surely be far easier to seek out a wealthy husband, particularly given the fact that a history of prostitution – online or offline – will make most eligible men run a mile. OnlyFans is to the marriage market what a criminal record is to the job market, and yet a significant number of young British women have jeopardised their future relationship prospects. Why?
Mental illness of some kind, perhaps – a crushing sense of insecurity or a drive towards self-harm. Or maybe creators have the gambling addict's inability to weigh up risks vs benefits. It's also possible that some are so desperate for cash they're willing to risk their children or even their grandchildren one day coming across their most hardcore content (in this regard, OnlyFans is a riskier proposition than 'normal' prostitution, since the images remain in circulation forever).
I suspect there's something else at play, too, and it can best be understood by looking at the other side of the OnlyFans exchange – the men paying for it all. Online porn is a classic example of a supernormal stimulus: that is, an exaggerated stimulus that elicits a stronger response than the natural, evolved stimulus it resembles. The relationship between normal sex and online porn is similar to the relationship between normal food and the most ingeniously designed ultra-processed food. Both porn and junk food are supernormal stimuli that scramble the brain, inducing not only a heightened response, but also a desire for more stimulation – the 'once you pop, you can't stop' effect.
I'm reliably informed by various male writers – Sophocles, Kingsley Amis, Russell Brand – that being possessed of a young man's libido feels like being chained to a lunatic. And that's in normal circumstances, without the addling effects of tech. Female sexuality functions differently. Yes, women watch online porn too, and some of them end up addled by it. But when women seek out erotic stimulation it's much more likely to be in the form of smutty novels, which – while they might encourage unrealistic expectations – are hardly addictive.
The online super stimulus that really knocks women sideways is not the consumption of sexual content, but the production of it. Women want to be beautiful as fiercely and obsessively as men want to get laid. I'm generalising, of course, but if you're in any doubt about the strength of this kind of female desire, look at the size of the cosmetics and fashion industries.
Female vanity is not new, and nor is it surprising. Beauty profoundly affects how you're treated in many areas of life. People who are conventionally unattractive suffer all kinds of adversity: they are more often passed over for promotion and more likely to struggle to make friends. Being ugly is not a trivial misfortune – which means, conversely, that becoming more beautiful can radically improve a person's life. No wonder so many women are obsessed with achieving the perfect glow-up.
And bear in mind that silvered glass mirrors did not become widely available until the 1830s. Before then, most people would go their entire lives without seeing a clear image of themselves. They would see blurry images in water or other partially reflective surfaces, and they would know from the responses of other people whether or not they were beautiful. But they could not minutely examine their appearances in the way that a mirror or a photograph permits, and nor could they elicit worldwide admiration in the way that the internet permits.
Image-based social media is a supernormal stimulus for women, particularly young and attractive ones. Posting a sexy selfie is a guaranteed means of attracting sexual attention from men and 'You go, girl' compliments from other women, all of which induce a fizzy feeling of self-esteem in a woman evolved to cherish her own beauty. OnlyFans then goes a step further, giving women access to the sexual attention and money of hundreds or even thousands of men.
Most women are not vulnerable to this temptation, in the same way that most men are not vulnerable to becoming porn addicts. But thanks to the technological sophistry of OnlyFans, men and women with the same kind of psychological weakness can now find their counterparts and mutually exploit one another online.
The result is a cascade of depravity, as the likes of Bonnie Blue compete for more and more of what they are addicted to: sexual attention. Blue insists that she neither wants nor needs our pity, and I'm sure that the men who pay for her content would say the same thing. But I think we should offer them pity anyway. Being on OnlyFans is a curse I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, whatever side of the interaction they find themselves on.
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