A few years ago, I was at a major porn industry convention to network and develop my business as a cam model. I was also a grad student, and at one point, I ducked into the hotel lobby to catch up on some writing.
Two men came in and sat across from me. They briefly introduced themselves as site owners. I nodded and returned to my writing. Then, they lost sight of me and started a lengthy conversation about laundering money to the Cayman Islands by paying escorts to accompany them on international flights so that they could justify carrying collections of expensive watches and jewelry.
This wasn’t the only time that being a masc-presenting person in a hotel bar or lobby gave me access to the unfiltered conversations of porn site owners. What always strikes me is the profound contempt that so many of these owners—almost exclusively men—have for the models—mostly women—who’ve made them rich.
I’ve never met OnlyFans founder Tim Stokely or owner Leo Radvinsky, but I know they haunt the backrooms and bars at those same conventions. Their announcement that OnlyFans will be eliminating “sexually explicit content” in October reveals the same contempt for models that I’ve become accustomed to. OnlyFans offered sex workers a means of reaching fans directly and a way to leverage those interactions into steady, recurring income through subscriptions, while sex workers created the content that drew users—and their dollars—to the site.
Or it did, until the site abruptly announced it would take all of that away.
The move was a great disappointment to many sex workers, but it hardly came as a surprise to industry veterans. The history of the internet is full of platforms being popularized by sex workers who were then purged as companies attempt to make themselves palatable for investors, buyers, or app stores.
Snapchat grew popular due in part to widespread adoption by sex workers who sold access to “premium” accounts featuring sexual content. Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel repeatedly downplayed the presence of sexual content on the site while intensifying its efforts to ban popular sex workers’ accounts. An article written during Snapchat’s peak popularity noted, “For such a sext-friendly app, Snapchat sure hates sex.” (Ironically, Spiegel’s sister Caroline recently launched an audio porn app called Quinn).
Sex workers were also integral in Patreon’s early growth. While hardcore content has always been forbidden, Patreon’s terms of service stated: “we allow nudity and suggestive imagery,” citing its value as art. Many sex workers rose to the challenge, creating carefully crafted, beautiful nudes for their subscribers and dutifully marked them as NSFW as Patreon required. Many creators also sold more sexually explicit content to the same fans, but conducted those transactions offsite. A breakthrough moment for adult content creators came when Patreon announced that NSFW pages would have equal access to payment processing via Paypal. Within a year, however, Patreon made a full 180-degree shift in policy.
Sensing a cultural backlash against online porn and fearing that payment processors could withdraw from the site, Patreon dropped the language protecting nudity and began a wide-reaching purge of adult content. Adult content creators, desperate to maintain their livelihoods, wrote a public letter arguing that it was unfair to remove them when they had consistently followed the rules. In the end, our pleas didn’t seem to matter and sex workers were driven from the site en masse.
Arguably, the most prominent porn purge in internet history took place on Tumblr. Beyond popularizing the porn gif, Tumblr was remarkable in how it blurred the line between porn creators and porn consumers. Porn curation became an art form in itself. And this pornographic content was not compartmentalized; it flowed alongside all the other facets of life. And, of course, porn performers were there behind it all, creating the video and images that others curating, and connecting with clients in the process.
Yahoo! Purchased Tumblr back in 2013 imagining that they would figure out how to monetize it with ad sales. Instead, Yahoo! itself went belly up and was purchased by Verizon as Tumblr became a sort of unwanted step-child. In 2018, Apple temporarily removed the app from its App Store because child porn had slipped through Tumblr’s filtering mechanism. Rather than fix the immediate filtering issue, Verizon simply banned pornographic content altogether, ignoring (or, perhaps, resenting) that such content was central to the app. Adult content producers were given short notice to archive their content and move on. A year later, Verizon sold Tumblr to WordPress parent company Automattic for a tiny fraction of its original valuation.
Despite this long history of rejection by social media platforms, OnlyFans’ explicit content ban cuts a little deeper given that the site itself seemed purpose-built for porn and that so many sex workers have relied on it as a source of income through the pandemic. In fact, the site owes much of its success to these same sex workers, having exploded in popularity as an influx of strippers, escorts, and other in-person workers moved their business (at least temporarily) online. In light of this history, it was particularly callous for OnlyFans to announce this policy change as covid infections spike again due to the delta variant.
One reason that this ugly cycle keeps repeating is that even when porn sites aren’t trying to raise capital or sell to investors, banks, payment processors and investors play an outsized role in regulating what sexual content we have access to and whether sites can even function. These financial companies make decisions about what can and cannot be displayed in pornographic video clips, and if sites don’t comply, they will freeze funding. (Readers may recall that PornHub was recently subjected to such a freeze by VISA and MasterCard over their hosting of unverified content.) These censorship decisions are made in backrooms with no community input and no accountability. The results are often counterintuitive (e.g., incest is forbidden unless it’s between step-parents and step-children) or downright misogynist (female fisting is considered violent and menstrual blood is treated as equivalent to feces).
And things have gotten worse, with porn restrictions intensifying and purges accelerating since the 2018 passage of the FOSTA/SESTA law, which ostensibly sought to combat sex trafficking but did so with the blunt tool of holding platforms legally liable if they are seen as too permissive in allowing sexual content. Historically, websites have been immune to liability under section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. FOSTA/SESTA strips this immunity in cases of “facilitation and promotion of prostitution,” concepts which are neither defined in case law or in the bill itself. Recognizing that virtually any sexual content could be used to advertise prostitution, platforms have attempted to protect themselves from this liability with stricter measures against sexual content. These measures have made it increasingly difficult for sex workers to simply talk with one another about their work and share safety tips, let alone advertise. Many sex workers have reported giving up online work altogether and turning to the street as a result.
Given that individual sites consistently prove unreliable, “diversify, diversify, diversify” has been a mantra among online sex workers.
But up until this week, OnlyFans had seemed like it could have been an exception. After all, it has become a household name and arguably achieved a level of social recognition and cultural significance unparalleled by anything else in the porn industry since the 1972 film Deep Throat. While many sex workers have long suggested otherwise, I’ll admit that I, personally, remained skeptical that OnlyFans would follow so many other platforms in purging the sex workers at the heart of the site.
After all, Stokely has a long history of porn startups, and Radinsky, his financial backer, made his fortune as the founder of MyFreeCams, a popular sex camming site. These executives seemed content to get rich from porn money, and despite occasional overtures to fitness influencers and musicians, OnlyFans fundamentally seemed to be a place where people came to sling smut. In fact, OnlyFans’ biggest controversy came not when celebrity users posted sexual content, but when one didn’t.
Stokely and Radinsky, however, seem to have made a calculation that they stand to make even more money if they abandon most of their 1 million existing small-time porn creators who mostly have small followings in favor of a much smaller number of (micro-)celebrities who can pull large followings with content that may be slightly spicier the what’s allowed on Instagram or TikTok.
It has been reported that the timing of this transition was driven by Mastercard’s changing policies, including a labor-intensive requirement that platforms must review pornographic content before it becomes publicly available. While Mastercard is not the only payment processor, there is mounting pressure for others to follow suit. A followup statement OnlyFans sent to content creators appears to confirm these suspicions; it explains “we must increasingly rely on large banking institutions and payment processors to facilitate payments between fans and creators. The new rules are necessary to comply with the requirements of these financial institutions and are the only way to help ensure the long-term sustainability of OnlyFans.”
However, a review of OnlyFans’ social media and advertising reveals a long-standing desire to present itself as a site focused on vanilla content, so these new policies by Mastercard seem only to have accelerated a strategy that was already in place.
I expect that OnlyFans will continue to cash in on its reputation as a sexually permissive space and users’ hopes of seeing sexual content from their favorite influencers, while simultaneously jockeying for respectability by shutting out the people who built that reputation in the first place. Their dream, it seems, is to build a sex work site without sex workers.
(I’m interested to see how MyFreeCams models respond to this betrayal by Radinsky, who continues to own that company.)
Even with the new policy, very successful OnlyFans models are unlikely to give up their pages so long as they continue to have significant income-generating subscriptions. Content will be edited to carefully walk the line of what is permitted. OnlyFans suggests that some nudity will still be allowed, though experiences with such policies on other platforms suggest that this kind of content policing tends to be inconsistent and quickly devolves into an intractable debate about art vs. porn. Many models already reserve their hardcore content for pay-to-view sales, and buyers will now likely be directed off-platform for those.
For other models, however, the income under the new rules may not justify the substantial work required to purge an OnlyFans archive of years of hardcore content, especially when that catalog of content is a major part of what attracts fans and allows established creators to feel relieved of the obligation of making constant updates. (My wife and I are certainly in this latter category. I’m not sure if it will be worth purging and rebuilding elsewhere). Many of us will simply lose the residuals we were earning on the labor that we’ve invested into building a porn brand.
The income loss is likely to hit non-white, working-class, queer, and disabled sex workers the hardest—a problem compounded by the social stigma around sex work that results in an empathy gap that also makes it difficult for sex workers to access social resources. That OnlyFans’ owners failed to even acknowledge these consequences demonstrates how removed they are from the people whose work has made their fortunes.
But if owners’ and managers’ contempt for performers is a consistent through-line in the history of the porn industry, another is performers’ resilience in negotiating hostile and exploitative environments and managing to survive and thrive in spite of them. Sex workers have become master hackers, finding new ways to use technology to their advantage even as the rug keeps getting pulled out from under them.
As porn performer Daisy Ducati poetically put it: “I’ve watched so many platforms come and go over the years and there’s always something new. We’re like the wildflowers of the internet, they can cut us down but we'll just pop back up somewhere else with twice as many. Take a breath, it’s OK.”
The ideal outcome, perhaps, would be to shift business to (former) sex worker-led companies like ManyVids or JustForFans. The reality, however, is that this sort of market transformation is impossible to control or predict. Site popularity generally has more to do with network effects than the features offered.
What is certain is that sex workers will innovate in numerous ways in the coming weeks and months, and, eventually, new online porn markets will reach critical mass. In the meantime, tip extra to those who are struggling and put whatever pressure you can on vanilla influencers to avoid sites that have sacrificed marginalized workers on the altar of profitability after years of extracting wealth.
