Behind the OnlyFans porn boom: allegations of rape, abuse and betrayal - Reuters Investigation

[IwantToRetire]

Combining social media glamor and the business of sex, OnlyFans casts itself as a new breed of adult website. Most big porn sites offer content for free and make money mainly from advertising. At OnlyFans, revenue is generated by its 3.2 million creators, most of them amateurs. They sell content to their subscribers, or “fans,” usually for a monthly fee of between $4.99 and $50. One-off sales of videos and images through the site’s direct-messaging function can be even more lucrative.

The terms are attractive for OnlyFans creators: They keep 80% of their fans’ payments. For OnlyFans, which takes the rest, it’s a goldmine. According to the most recent filing by its British parent company, Fenix International, OnlyFans’ pre-tax profit in 2022 reached $525 million – almost a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Revenue expanded at least twenty-fold to more than $1 billion.

OnlyFans doesn’t know how many of its creators are making “adult content,” the spokesperson has said. The platform says it also features sports, music and other non-explicit material.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/onlyfans-sex-legal-cases/

NB

• the paragraphs quoted above are not as distressing or descriptive as other parts of what is quite a long article.
• So this may not be something that some will want to read.

Bit of a side issue, but the spokesperson's comment about there also being music! And sports! reminds me of Ye Olde Days when people said they read Playboy "for the articles."

Sure, Chad.

people said they read Playboy "for the articles."

I'd forgotten that rationale - as if any one believed it then - let alone now.

I just don’t k ow what to say. It is evil that it exists. Because it exists and people know they make money they’ll do anything.

No shit, Sherlock!
Honestly?

There seem to be an awful lot of young people, particularly young women who think it is a valid way to make money. Something to aspire to.

And despite conversations in public, newpaper reports, the lure seems to be strong enough that they end up finding themselves in a vulnerable position.

Obviously, as it if needs to be said, if men could be relied on to behave with respect towards women, and even if some of us might not like the platform, just as anywhere else that women might want to be, it shouldn't be that in wanting that they are then vulnerable to male violence and exploitation.

The culture we have now, coupled with ease of sharing via the virtual world, men continue to show themselves as continuing to think their rights to be sexually violent towards women and use their bodies to make money is if anything getting more prevalent.

Over 50 years since Women's Liberation had as one of its demand to end violence against women, the situation has not only not got any better, but violence against women and girls is openy celebrated.

Brainwashing

Brainwashing is right. I was sickened yesterday to see a "sex work is work!" badge in a young woman's car. Wanted to ask her, "So, if you lose your job, are you fine with Centrelink requiring you to accept a 'job' as a prostitute or have your benefits stopped?"

Brainwashing

Yes and male entitlement.

Agree. It's so depressing how many young women have just come to accept that being an object is a viable career option.

It is worse than accepting, some see it as empowering...

That's a quick devolvement to women blaming!

Young women aren't making choices in a vacuum, context is everything. This is the society we've created.

Brainwashing is right. I was sickened yesterday to see a "sex work is work!" badge in a young woman's car.

Julie Bindel was once greeted on campus by students chanting "Blow jobs are real jobs"! at her. I don't know what the hell they're learning...

The males are learning to be rapists, I'd guess.

Job centres do not require job seekers to accept sex work jobs, including in Germany.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hot-jobs/

"Claim: Women in Germany face the loss of unemployment benefits if they decline to accept work in brothels.
Status: False."

I've heard conflicting claims about the truth of that. Nevertheless, my point remains: if sex work is work, would women claiming it is find it acceptable to be treated as other jobs and be required to accept such jobs? And if not, why not?

Anything you've heard is false. Countries with legalisation or decriminalisation of sex work/prostitution do not and have never told jobseekers to take up sexwork jobs. The snopes article gives an explanation of how this came about.

Simple answer is because the job involves intimacy so it wouldn't be offered to jobseekers.

That's a quick devolvement to women blaming!

Nobody on this thread has blamed women.

The comments (shorthanded to brainwashing) are about what happens to women in all parts of our lives. Whether through family, school, friends, boy friends, women are effectively coerced to "freely" choose something that is actually oppressive.

And at the same time, what seems to be more and more men are effectively dumping any notion about women's rights in terms of bodily autonomy, and seeing women's bodies are theirs to control, own and abuse.

That's the issue.

That's why the post in on feminist forum.

How, despite all the campaigns, whether grass roots or political, has it happened that a sizeable % of young women genuinely believe sex / porn work is empowering, and that young men just see women as bits of meat.

Let's face it feminism hasn't solved the problem (and no that isn't women blaming). And has been said on other threads in the past what seemed like old fashioned oppressive to women statements about being careful aroung men now seem totally sensible.

But now we aren't allowed to say it, because that would be women being mean to men.

I used to worry a lot about how the (loopy) progressive left has captured various aspects of society, but now I think that the real problem is how Thatcher / Reagan free-market individualism has captured the progressive left.

The idea that it's a good thing for human bodies to be treated as consumer comodities in an largely unregulated free market, and that the primary value of a woman is determined by how much money horny men are willing to spend to see her naked is properly right-wing neoliberal.

And for self-declared left-wingers to claim that it somehow empowers low-income individuals when they have to sell themselves for the sexual gratification of the well-off? (It's all fine beacuse it's a "personal choice" that obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with class inequality). Marx and Engels will be spinning in their graves!

There's been commentary of late about how under the Tories we've headed back towards the Victorian age of financial inequality and widespread, deep-seated poverty. The success of OnlyFans is a good example of that.

I hope you're right, but I remain dubious. It is after all the logical outcome of "sex work is work".