OnlyFans and the new sexual arms race

What began as a platform geared towards subscription content quickly became the dominant force in online pornography and, by 2025, the world’s most revenue-efficient company.

I remember when OnlyFans first entered the mainstream, and people asked the obvious question: why would anyone pay for porn when there are literally millions of free videos online at the click of a button?

The answer is that you’re not really paying for porn. OnlyFans has created a new class of “adult” influencers who sell not just sex, but themselves. 

Many have praised the platform as a kind of liberation: the democratisation of porn. Whereas before, we tended to think of porn production as based around studios with a handful of big names, but generally distant and anonymous performers. Now, the performers are in control and reap the rewards directly.

And, granted, that does beat the old model. Instead of sterile sets with an army of cameramen and a clipboard-wielding sleazy director, women can, hypothetically, film a quick striptease in between work-from-home teams calls and make a passive income.

One of the site’s top creators, Sophie Rain, said this in her tribute to Radvinsky: “That man built something that changed my entire life. Before OnlyFans I was waitressing and barely making rent. That platform gave me everything.”

But is this the reality?

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Yes, some creators like Lily Allen and Megan Barton Hanson make tens of thousands a month. But they already had audiences. For most, the story looks very different…

It is not uncommon if you are a young woman to receive targeted posts from other young women bragging about how making an OnlyFans account helped pay off their student loan, let them quit their job, or buy a big mansion. 

It is both predatory and misleading, because the average creator on the site makes less than $200 a month. Is that really a trade-off worth making – sacrificing the possibility of an ordinary career for what, in most cases, amounts to very little return? It’s a glamourised version of sex work that massively underplays the very real risks. 

That is to say, this creation of sex influencers comes with a darker side: to break through on OnlyFans, if you don’t already have a following, you have to be willing to do what no one else has done – to be more shocking, more risky.

The conflation of porn and influencer culture, which is in itself already a battle for attention, has essentially turned into a sexual arms race, where people are pushed to do increasingly extreme things just to stay relevant – you only have to look at Bonnie Blue to see exactly how that plays out.

She rose to prominence on OnlyFans, and is best known for having sex with over 1,000 men in one day, which was filmed and posted to the site before being taken down as the ages of the men who took part could not be verified. She is currently claiming to be pregnant (after a stunt where 400 men took part in a “breeding mission” orgy), and making more content off the back of this.

Even that wasn’t without competition. Her former friend, Lily Phillips, had previously made headlines by sleeping with 100 men in a day – and reportedly felt undercut when Blue went further.

And even though the stomach churning category of “barely legal” has been a porn subgenre for longer than some of these creators have been alive, there is a newer, more sinister element when you realise that the Onlyfans-to-influencer pipeline goes both ways. 

Underage influencers, such as Lil Tay, who went viral for her rapping and satirical content at just 10 years old, have launched Onlyfans accounts ready to be opened the literal second they turn legal. Tay’s page received over $1 million in subscriptions within three hours of her 18th birthday. 

OnlyFans is a product of our modern day internet, where the battle to top the algorithm produces ever-escalating spectacles. Big Youtube creators like Mr Beast, who essentially just makes real life Squid Game videos, have proven that attention is currency, and the price of earning it keeps rising. And porn is no exception.

The trajectory is only heading towards greater extremity. In a climate where there is a financial incentive to push the limits of what people are prepared to do on screen, the obvious question is where that ends – and whether it ends before something genuinely irreversible and tragic happens.

A final reflection: porn has historically been hidden, stigmatised, separated from mainstream culture. Now porn stars make headlines, and weave seamlessly into mainstream culture. At the same time, it has reduced the incentive to pursue real world relationships.

What it has essentially given rise to is parasocial pornography. We are already inundated with headlines about porn addiction, particularly among younger generations, and its links to things like erectile dysfunction. Repeated exposure to stimulating content raises the threshold for what feels rewarding. The danger is that real-life intimacy starts to feel comparatively dull. 

Young people – mostly men and boys – are already so affected by this that many aren’t even attempting to seek out real relationships. Now add Onlyfans-specific features like messaging, personalised content, and the so-called “girlfriend experience” – essentially paying someone to pretend they fancy you while sending nude pictures – and it becomes a complete substitute for real intimacy. No wonder Gen Z is the least sexually active cohort in modern recorded history.

I often think Gen Z has this uniquely strange relationship with sex – our culture is at once extremely sexualised and also puritanically sexless – and OnlyFans feels like the clearest expression of that contradiction.

But in the end there may be no point in making such a big fuss about it, as AI generated content will probably replace the OnlyFans creator within a few years anyway. As video killed the radio star, so bots will kill the porn star.