OnlyFans and the Anti-Democracy of Sex Work

OnlyFans' business model has, until now, tacitly depended on user-made porn

Last week’s announcement that pay-to-play social network OnlyFans will discontinue hosting “sexually explicit” material, is creating some controversy. First, OnlyFans hasn’t yet provided a meaningful definition of “sexually explicit,” on a site whose entire financial model until now has centered on women with their blouses off. Second, what motivated the change? OnlyFans claims that credit card companies brought the hammer down; MasterCard has responded (I’m paraphrasing) “Nuh-uh!”

OnlyFans launched by promising to exclude the intrusive advertising content that often slows social networks like Facebook or Twitter. But its customer base quickly drifted to the one commodity that people are consistently willing to pay for in today’s media-saturated environment, sex. Like pay-cable TV, people are willing to pay out for content that ad-based mainstream media won’t supply. And like drugs, the economic driver for sex work proves persistent.

We’ve seen this happen before recently. CraigsList famously shuttered its “erotic services” personal ads because it feared the federal government would use anti-human trafficking laws to act against them. This fear wasn’t unfounded, since the Department of Justice used exactly such laws to seize and dismantle BackPage, a resource sex workers used to find and pre-screen customers. Both actions were taken to assuage fears of “human trafficking,” a notorious bugbear.

Historically, conservatives have objected to sex work generally, and prostitution specifically, because they believe sex workers and their customers are just bad people. Progressives take a more nuanced approach, expressing concerns about coercion and exploitation, which aren’t entirely unfair. But progressives reflexively lump all sex work with human trafficking, which aren’t synonyms. The reasoning from Left and Right differ; the outcomes, for most sex workers, are indistinguishable.

Internet marketing promised to break this Left-Right duopoly. Remembering the giddy effusion directed toward the nascent read-write Web in the 1990s, I recall advocates like Howard Rheinggold gushing that, because nobody owned the Internet, it diffused authority to individuals. Many early Web advocates were aging ex-hippies, pleased that technology had finally fulfilled their long-dormant promise to seize authority from The Man and distribute it with egalitarian fervor onto the masses.

OnlyFans, like BackPage before it, represents a breakout in economic democratization. Individual women, needing income during the pandemic’s economic shakeout, seized their destinies by offering their services online. The Internet gave them the ability to screen customers, to set the terms of their labors, and to decide when or whether they were prepared to work. Internet sex work is almost Marxian in its dedication to individual empowerment.

If, like me, you internalized a narrative from childhood that sex work is degrading and shameful, this might not seem ennobling. But sex work has low barriers to entry, a legitimate economic expression, and a character of work. You, individually, may disapprove, but that doesn’t matter. Like alcohol, tobacco, and other vices, the economic drivers behind sex work don’t await popular acceptance. These drivers already exist for women needing work.

The MindGeek cartel controls so many adult sites that the market is essentially not free

Equally importantly, when OnlyFans, CraigsList, and BackPage stop supporting self-employed sex workers, the work doesn’t go away. Like with narcotics, large cartels step into vacuums created when governments squelch independent operators. The largest cartel, Montreal-based MindGeek, already controls such a large fraction of online sex work that it essentially sets the terms for smaller companies; like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, startups have to compete directly with MindGeek.

Moralists may applaud OnlyFans’ willingness to deplatform “sexually explicit” content, despite the pledge’s vague wording. But by taking away self-employed women’s ability to flash their tits for pay, OnlyFans has created a backdoor subsidy for MindGeek and other “adult content” oligarchies. Like Standard Oil, DeBeers Diamonds, or Harvey Weinstein, MindGeek has an extensive list of abuse accusations, and because of their market share, nobody dares challenge their misuses of power.

Though OnlyFans sex workers used the corporate-owned platform to find their markets, and paid OnlyFans for the access, the company nevertheless gave women (and others) who needed income an opportunity to set their own terms. It helped democratize sex work. Reducing the number of opportunities to find work, doesn’t make either the sellers’ needs or the buyers’ demands disappear. It simply channels the economic pressures onto MindGeek and other monopolies.

MindGeek is the Al Capone of Internet sex work. Removing a platform honest, hardworking women use to score lucrative sex work, doesn’t encourage them to find other employment, especially in times like these, when other employment is scarce. It simply increases the power of the cartel to exploit, and profit from, the work of disfranchised laborers. OnlyFans’ anti-porn stance makes everyone less free.