Letter to the Editor - Response to “Why is OnlyFans Being Glorified?”

This letter to the editor is written in response to “Why is OnlyFans Being Glorified?,” published in Volume 114 Issue 2.

Zoë Feigelson and Helen Mancini are juniors at Stuyvesant.

In the last issue of The Spectator, Khandikar Mushfikuzzman wrote a thinkpiece about the cultural conversation surrounding OnlyFans. In this letter to the editor, we continue the conversation by drawing attention to an opposing perspective. Mushfikuzzman wrote, “Though it is a person’s right to make their own life decisions and sex working platforms cannot be banned, we can’t just sit around acting like it isn’t one of the biggest issues facing society.” We contend that OnlyFans is a step towards a kind of sexual liberation that is too often scapegoated in order to shame women out of their autonomy and work. 

During the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, women en masse claimed medical, political, religious, and social power over their own bodies. It cut through quasi-moral arguments about the dangers of untamed, sacrilegious feminism with a simple request: autonomy.  Homosexuality and the right to choose were largely decriminalized, and the invention of the birth control pill revolutionized healthcare. Mushfikuzzman believes that “While sexual liberation movements opened doors in cultural, medical, and political fields, they also spiked many issues and even created new ones, such as unwed births, divorce, porn addiction, pedophilia, sex trafficking, and objectification of women.” We agree that our cultural moment is riddled with societal addictions, systemic abuse, and institutional exploitation. However, we contend that the right to have children without marriage and legal divorce are important tools for women (and not public health crises), and find the accusation that pedophilia and sex trafficking have grown because of the sexual revolution to be absurd—those issues have long been entrenched in society. But we agree with Mushfikuzzman that the revolution brought about important social change and marked the genesis of our 21st-century ideas about sexuality. Indeed, without the work of preeminent feminist writers and activists like Estelle Griswold, Pat Miginnis and Marsha P. Johnson, we would not even be able to have this conversation in a school paper!

To be clear, the discourse on OnlyFans is not a reflection of either the realities of public perception or of the entire industry. Sex work as a whole is still widely looked down upon, and workers face a myriad of legal issues including criminalization, police brutality, and poor governmental advocacy. Even before dissecting the cultural impacts of sex work, our biggest priority should be granting fundamental rights and justice to those facing these pressures. After all, it is not so-called “glorification” that is leading people toward OnlyFans in such large numbers. The sex work business has actually been booming since 2400 BCE (when, of course, there was no second-wave feminist culture to propagate ideas about sexual freedom). Its first documentation in Mesopotamia marked sex work as the “oldest profession,” and it has gone through fluctuating periods of popularity through differing economic climates ever since. For example, England during the Industrial Revolution saw extremely high rates of sex work because of the low wages offered to working-class women in factories and the high demand among middle-class men. Similarly, this decade’s uptick in sex work has been largely the result of a labor crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic caused mass job loss, and so the sudden skyrocketing of online platforms turned people toward OnlyFans. There are much larger systems at play than cultural discourse on sex work. Mushfikuzzman’s assertion that OnlyFans is merely “a easy and fast way to earn money, status, and popularity” for young girls is a glaring oversimplification of its function within our economy and the lives of creators.

Throughout its long history, sex work has been unsafe. Dangerous porn sets, risk of diseases, and exploitative executives have all posed serious risks to the health and autonomy of sex workers. The model of OnlyFans, which allows sex workers to create and own content from their homes and gain a steady income, circumvents many of the exploitative forces within the sex work industry and can bring safety and liberation to workers. The subscription fees also restrict young viewers from consuming content as easily compared to sites like PornHub. According to content creator Jasmine Rice, “[OnlyFans] is very much about bodily autonomy, and what you want to post—what you’re comfortable with posting.” As a great deal of women’s sex work has been managed and exploited by men, this new format is an important step forward.

Of course, OnlyFans is guilty of many institutional shortcomings that must be recognized. The OnlyFans company takes a 20 percent cut of all money made on the platform and has been alleged to inadequately prevent sexual exploitation of minors and trafficking victims. Furthermore, OnlyFans content can be leaked to shadier sites that post content without regulation or consent. Therefore, in terms of empowerment, it is unquestionable that the creators of OnlyFans, and not the platform, should be considered radical. “I don't think the app itself is empowering us,” Jasmine concludes. “Empowerment comes from us, us making the site what we want out of it.” 

This notion of profit and empowerment contrasts with Mushfikuzzman’s analysis of gender. He writes that OnlyFans creates “a ruthless cycle of men sexualizing women, which leads to women profiting off that sexualization, furthering the objectification of women.” There is a fallacy here: a woman selling sexual content online is not selling away her body; rather, she is selling a performance, and therefore, profiting off of this content does not reduce her body to a commodity. The idea that boys are “taught that […] women are sexual objects” because of the “hyper-sexualization of their gender” on OnlyFans (or any online media for that matter) is unfounded. By this rhetoric, any performer or artist online should also be thought of as a commodity, but they are not. The feeling of ownership and subsequent objectification of women that male viewers experience is not the fault of the content creator but rather the male consumer’s inherent desire to control, patronize, and subjugate the woman on screen. Stopping the creation of all sexual content online is impossible (especially with the ability of animation and artificial intelligence to take the place of human beings), but even if this were the goal, these entrenched patriarchal dominance dynamics are older than sex work; they are only taking on new forms.

Criticism of OnlyFans should focus on industries, monopolies, and algorithms at play rather than targeting individuals. Instead of wielding morality to police women’s sexuality, we should be working towards actual liberation and empowerment—that is, protecting human rights and correcting our own stigmas.