The Dark Normalisation of OnlyFans.

If OnlyFans was a person, it would have had what is called in modern parlance ‘a year’ because it’s been everywhere, showing up in some of the biggest and most outrageous stories, that whilst didn’t exactly shock us, certainly got our attention.

Whether it was adult film star Bonnie Blue’s quest to sleep with hundreds of “barely legal” lads just out of school which she streamed on the site, Lily Phillips’ documentary, I slept with 100 Men in 24 Hours, attempting (and failing) to break the world record by actually having sex with 100 men in 24 hours and streaming the whole thing, to bona fide celebrities like Lily Allen and Kate Nash joining the site; respectively to make loads of cash by posting pics of her feet for foot fetishists and (more heartbreakingly) to raise money to support a music tour, because creativity doesn’t pay anymore, but sex does.

On any given day, supposed ‘family’ papers who like the Daily Mail and The Sun who love to remind you of those prurient titles when clutching their pearls over something that has outraged them, publish dozens of stories alluding to OnlyFans usually in a positive way. On a random day last week, I counted forty stories that referenced OnlyFans and whilst the Bonnie Blue one had upset them, the rest were about how some D-list celebrity was absolutely coining it with sexy pics and vids and read more like an advert than a warning.

The Lily Philipps one has gotten under the skin of the traditional press not it seems because of both-ways exploitative nature of the story (in truth no one seems to be the winner here), but because she looks like the girl next door, or more to the point a girl you could have gone to school with or might be the friend of your daughter. And to this I say – what did you expect?

Thanks to the internet and our insatiable demand for it, pornography is no longer the LA-based carnival of weirdness it once was in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s and neither is sex work really taboo anymore. It’s in our pockets, living rooms and schools and anyone with an iPhone can become a pornographer or sex-worker. Lots of people celebrate its normalisation and indeed for sex workers, the ability to take control of your own work is a largely positive thing, reducing the need to be exploited by parasitic people. Moreover, if you are rich and famous with a huge following already like someone like Lily Allen and are never going to have to worry again about getting a degree, job or securing you future, joining OnlyFans will be of little consequence and maximum reward.

The danger is for the millions of young people who believe that OnlyFans is a gold-paved road to riches with no consequences – kind of like joining a sexier Instagram or TikTok. At this point it’s a bit of an outdated cliché to tell young people that the internet is forever – but the internet really is forever and with AI at the helm once your content is out there, not only will it appear in some of the darkest parts of the internet, but it can be manipulated in a million ways that was perhaps never intended, and it can and will pop up maybe in two or ten or twenty years’ time when the ‘creator’ has come to regret it. There will be no erasure.

Young people are starting to understand just how much universities, institutions, employers and well just everyone look at their social media to get a sense of who they are when making decisions about them, but AI has just made this exponentially easier and more thorough and with all the emerging programmes its getting easier to collate and accredit every click, comment, video, picture, blog, purchase, screed and spat you’ve had or posted and as dystopian as this all sounds, what you do when you’re young is going to matter even more now in the near and distant future.

I can’t tell you how many girls and boys (this is a site both genders are being pulled into) have made the joke “well, there’s always OnlyFans” when discussing the dire state of the economy and the job market for young people. But as Freud told us, we should take jokes seriously, because there’s always truth in them.

The talented singer-songwriter Kate Nash has five studio albums under her belt with one platinum which means it’s sold in excess of a million, but due to the streaming giants like Spotify kneecapping the of the music industry, she’s struggling to survive financially, funding her tour with ‘pictures of her bum’ – on OnlyFans, naturally. I’m not shaming Nash, but if she’s struggling to make it, this should be setting off alarm bells everywhere for the future of Generation Z and Generation A.

The economic conditions young people are stepping out into unless you have the security net of family money are absolutely brutal with sky-high costs, a ludicrous housing market, a disgraceful rental market, spiralling prices and stagnating wages. Young people are making choices about their future not on the basis of what they’re good at or what they might enjoy, but what might give them a reasonable standard of living (see: Kate Nash).

We are therefore in an absolutely perfect storm, where one industry (ie, the sex industry) seems and can be utterly lucrative, can be joined through a seemingly benign medium (ie, OnlyFans) and they are hammered with stories about six-figure monthly paydays by someone like Bonnie Blue – of course seemingly ‘normal’ girls and boys who look a bit like Lily Philips and Austin Mahone are going to see its appeal.

But as the second cliché goes, if something seems too good to be true – it usually is. OnlyFans is not the benign, mega-lucrative sexy-Insta it’s often portrayed as in the press. Creators are selling sex, and the non-celeb ones who actually make it have to make and post explicit and hardcore content to establish any kind of customer base – it really isn’t jut pretty pictures of your feet or sexy underwear shots the clientele tend to want. And the clientele can be brutal. Having spoken to a number of very young (non-famous) creators on OnlyFans, they all share stories of abuse, harassment, slut-shaming and the demand for ever more hardcore content – content that needs to be constantly made and posted – it’s an actual fulltime job.

And this leaves us with the question of the future. What if a young person posts one video, or twenty videos or a hundred videos and then changes their mind and decided it isn’t a world for them – which is the far more common outcome than the ones making five hundred grand a month. They now have to live with that content being out there forever; for parents to see, future partners to see, future employers to see, and that’s a terrifying prospect for thousands of young people who already regret their foray into OnlyFans.

OnlyFans exists and thrives because there is a huge market for it, and it can be lucrative, but we all need to start taking some collective responsibility for the millions of kids who are attracted to the idea of it.

When you are young, it is often difficult to think about the future except in the most abstract of ways. This generation of young people not only don’t envision the future much, but when they do, it seems dark and this is unsurprising with our current chaotic economy, culture and politics. As Annabelle, an OnlyFans content creator says “who cares about the future, when I’m just trying to survive and have a good life in the today?”

It's time to really start thinking about how we help younger generations feel better about the future, so they don’t make decisions in the present that might torpedo that future before they’ve even begun.