Is the unrestricted platform OnlyFans a cash cow for liberated women or a setback for the feminist movement?
BY MARINA BLACK
ART BY MARIA VIDAL VALDESPINO
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Aliss Bonython was going on vacation and needed to find a last-minute swimsuit. When she walked into a store at the mall, a white triangle string bikini caught her eye. Cute, she thought. But when she stood in front of the change-room mirror, she grimaced—the bikini could not contain her ample bosom and curvaceous hips.
As a child of the social media generation, twenty-year-old Bonython vented her frustration on Instagram, posting a picture of herself with the caption, “The reality of bikini shopping as a plus-size woman.” When her likes and comments started reaching the hundreds, she realized she was saying what many other women were thinking.
Since 2017, Bonython has created and promoted body positivity content for women of all shapes and sizes. “My Instagram was built on me trying to be more confident, trying to put myself out there, trying to find self-love,” says Bonython. While she has reclaimed her dignity, she realizes that a lot of women are still holding themselves back from embracing and expressing their true selves—just as she had for many years.
During the self-defining period of female adolescence, fifteen-year-old Bonython grappled with what it meant to be an attractive woman. Was she thin? Did she have curves? What was her bra size? Was she tall enough? And perhaps the most important question of all: Why can’t I look like her? Bonython didn’t feel represented by the women on the covers of fashion magazines. Instead, she found diversity on Tumblr, where women of all different sizes—thin and thick—could be seen feeling sexy and loving life. Bonython wanted to be one of them, sharing photos of herself wearing tight-fitted crop tops and lounge pants. She had found her community—women supporting women, spreading love and laughter in the comments, like a teenage girl’s slumber party. Then, it was ruined by men.
As a young girl, Bonython didn’t post sexual content. But that didn’t stop others from sexualizing her. In her Tumblr community, her pre-teen selfies began attracting more attention than she could handle. She deleted her page in an attempt to move on, but as she learned, that’s not how the internet works. “Even if you delete your page [on Tumblr], your photo can be reblogged and seen for even twenty years,” says Bonython. She tried to get on with her life, attending high school and later working as a grocery clerk to save money for college. When Bonython was nineteen, she was bagging groceries when her coworker approached her. “I immediately knew what it would be,” she says. He raised the issue, saying photos of her younger self were circulating at work. Overwhelmed, Bonython wanted to disappear, but she knew she would have to confront her past.
In 2016, when Bonython returned to social media, she was twenty-one, and Instagram was the hottest platform for young adults. She told herself: I’m just going to be entirely open and honest and transparent with the internet and see what happens. Showcasing fashion failures as a curvy woman with a “real body” resonated with any woman who felt she couldn’t fit into today’s beauty standards. Plus-size-friendly brands approached Bonython to wear and promote their clothing on social media. She started recording try-on hauls, where she modelled and reviewed the look and feel of each outfit.
Bonython was a rising influencer in the body-positive and plus-size communities when OnlyFans sent her an email in 2018 promoting themselves as a new way to monetize online content. “The first email they sent, I was just like, ‘Nah,’” says Bonython. At the time, she was busy getting her degree in American Studies and English Literature at the University of Nottingham. When her friend Chelsea vouched for the platform, having made a steady cash flow with her “niche content” from the comfort of her home, Bonython reconsidered the idea. Yet, it wasn’t until two years later, when the world faced a three-year global pandemic and Bonython and her roommate struggled to pay the bills, that she made the move.
In April 2020, Bonython started promoting her OnlyFans to her more than 300,000 Instagram followers, sharing teasers of photos and videos that would eventually breach Instagram’s Community Standards. Bonython remembers thinking: I don’t really know what I’m doing with this. Still, she experienced instant success as her subscriber count continued to climb. This “voluptuous baby girl,” as she became known to her fans, soon started charging $16.99 a month for her followers to watch her change bikinis in try-on haul videos and admire her as a big, beautiful woman (BBW).
Does OnlyFans Support Feminism?
OnlyFans was founded in 2016 by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely, who had one goal for his next venture: to create the next hottest social media platform with a built-in payment feature. Celebrities, content creators, and anyone over the age of eighteen can sell exclusive photos and videos to users (also over eighteen years old) with a monthly subscription and pay-per-view business model. On the website, creators can build rapport with their fans on their main profile page and in private messages. Users praise its simple credit card transactions, which place eighty per cent of the creator’s earnings directly into their bank account while the remaining twenty per cent goes to the company. On top of this, OnlyFans’s Acceptable Use Policy outlines what creators are prohibited from posting—illegal activities, including but not limited to trafficking of minors, violence, rape, assault, the use of weapons or drugs, and such—alongside what they can post: themselves being crude, lewd, or even nude.
When the Covid-19 pandemic upended the job market and locked people in their homes, creators from various genres and niches saw OnlyFans as an opportunity for direct cash flow with more freedom to explore content creation on a more inclusive platform. Some are fitness instructors, musicians, or cooking enthusiasts. The majority, however, are adult content creators, sex workers, and women who need to pay the bills.
Yet the unprecedented harassment and slut-shaming women receive on and offline for using OnlyFans is what perpetuates its stigma. It begs the complex question: Does OnlyFans support the feminist movement?
For sex workers and those already creating adult content, OnlyFans offered a promising digital space to continue working during the pandemic. Sex workers could maintain their in-person rates with OnlyFans’s revenue model while also receiving tips and custom requests in their private messages. In 2021, however, OnlyFans attempted to ban sexually explicit content when third-party financial institutions such as Visa and Mastercard threatened to remove their payment services from the platform after being accused of facilitating child pornography and sexual abuse. The decision was met with immediate backlash from OnlyFans creators, as it was revealed that Stokely and the company’s current owner, Leonid Radvinsky (who obtained ownership in 2018), are both entrepreneurs of pornography websites like Customs4U and MyFreeCams. OnlyFans’s leadership quickly reversed its decision, saying they would update their safety compliance program to tackle sex trafficking and underage content, and officially announced that OnlyFans would allow adult content indefinitely.
This was a win for sex workers and full-time adult content creators, but OnlyFans also attracts people who are looking for a side hustle, assuming it’s easy to make money by posting adult content. Spoiler alert: It’s not.
As the cost of living continues to skyrocket, more people are struggling to make ends meet with one source of income; you need two to actually live, especially as a single woman trying not to use Tinder as your next meal ticket. OnlyFans promises financial and personal autonomy through any means—including nudity—creating an ideal place for women to monetize their sexual liberation. For many women, it’s a ticket to success with proper commitment and dedication to thousands of horny fans. Yet the unprecedented harassment and slut-shaming women receive on and offline for using OnlyFans is what perpetuates its stigma. It begs the complex question: Does OnlyFans support the feminist movement?
A 2023 study conducted by Bridgewater State University recorded experiences of misogyny from fifteen female and non-binary online sex workers to analyze how oppression and empowerment coexist and operate simultaneously in digital spaces. Many participants described sexist encounters rooted in society’s patriarchal structures, including male entitlement that disregards a woman’s boundaries and safety. This manifestation of misogyny showed itself through men refusing to pay for content, requesting discounts, demanding service, or expecting preferential treatment.
Yet, in response to this harassment, there was also empowerment. The study’s participants found that online sex work served as a preferable alternative to dealing with misogyny in person. There is a growing community of content creators who look out for each other on the internet, and creators have personal agency in controlling the output of content.
Although sex workers may feel physically safer using a digital platform, it does not completely mitigate physical harm. Doxxing, for instance, is the practice of “exposing personal information about others which had previously been kept quiet.” While some participants described boundary violations as “just part of the job,” the collective response to male bigotry were actions of self-empowerment: accepting one’s body, reclaiming power over one’s content and identity, and controlling what is posted, who can see it, and how much to charge. With its loose content guidelines, OnlyFans offers creators the opportunity to create their own boundaries within the comfort of their homes.
Third-party marketing reports estimate that seventy percent of OnlyFans creators are women, while eighty-seven per cent of users (or “fans”) are men. Even with these estimates, it’s evident that OnlyFans has provided a space for women to tap into the wealth and thirst of the patriarchy with—generally—more safety. Yet, OnlyFans is undeniably attractive to both amateur and professional creators because it fosters communities of self-empowerment and sexual liberation.
“Where Are the Dildos?”
The night before her eighteenth birthday, the five-foot-four, blue-eyed blonde Maisey Monroe created her OnlyFans account. “It takes twenty-four hours to validate,” she says. Born on November 5, 2002, Monroe was destined to be in front of the camera and to be part of the social media generation. “My mom’s a photographer,” she says, reminiscing about the early days of modelling alongside her sister, “since we were babies.” This Gen-Z “little angel,” as she’s known by her fans, looked up to her older sister, as many younger sisters do. Monroe was inspired by the freedom and fun her sister had while taking and selling her nude Polaroids.
By November 5, 2020, Monroe began populating her OnlyFans profile with nude photos. “For me, as a person, I just always felt a little bit older than I actually am. I felt like I was mature enough, and I don’t regret it at all,” she says. “I was really young, so I was able to charge a lot for videos. I was able to get away with charging, like, fifty dollars for a couple minutes.”
Monroe is not oblivious to the uncomfortable situations some men impose on women who do OnlyFans, but she considers herself more open than most—for the right price.
Today, four years later, Monroe promotes herself as the “Cute Canadian College Girl” to play with (for a fee) on OnlyFans once you’ve finished your homework. “I am pretty premium,” she says, and with a monthly subscription fee of $24.99, it’s pure sex. Licking, sucking, fingering and deep-throat-fucking repeat as you scroll. “Daddy, did you know all of my videos under 5 Mins are going to be FREE,” reads the caption of the platinum blonde bombshell sucking a circumcised penis. “Perks of having the subscription. Better have your renew on!”
But her fetish-friendly, live, and naughty shows rake in the most profits. Ten dollar booty spanks, fifteen dollar pussy spanks, thirty dollars cock rates with bigger rewards of tops off or naked twerking when the tip jar reaches one hundred dollars and two hundred dollars. “I make a couple thousand each day just going live, and I feel like I have a community,” says Monroe. “It’s really my personality. I’m very bubbly and welcoming to my fans.” She says hello to everyone who comes to watch. “I’ll acknowledge them and make them feel like they’re worth something.”
Monroe has a great rapport with her fans, especially a man named Alan, who pays five hundred dollars to text her. Monroe is not oblivious to the uncomfortable situations some men impose on women who do OnlyFans, but she considers herself more open than most—for the right price. Men have asked her to send them her underwear and socks, finger her belly button, and even stick her toes in a bowl of yogurt — all of which she’s done. “I don’t think it’s weird for the person who’s acting very serious about it,” she says, “if that’s what they want.”
One female creator, who wished to remain anonymous, has been using OnlyFans to start a career in professional modelling, offering her boudoir portraits from anywhere between fifteen to thirty dollars per photo set. Yet, after four years of intermittent posting, she says she wants to stop using the platform due to the stigma associated with her experiences. “A guy was going to help me with changing my tires,” she says. “I told him I would pay him, and then he made the joke, ‘Can I see your OnlyFans instead?’” Or when her car was damaged and needed body work done: “We were going to work out a cash deal, and then that’s when he slipped in, ‘Could I have some free content?’I said no.” Online, men criticized her for not posting nude content or explicit photos, asking questions like, “Why can’t I see more?” or “Where are the dildos?”
“I’ve just learned to deal with those people,” she says, choosing instead to manage each request in a way that stays on-brand and within her comfort zone.
Despite these encounters with male chauvinism, she still praises and supports OnlyFans for the agency and safety it provides women in the sex industry. “It is still a hard thing for a lot of people to respect and understand,” she says, but she keeps coming back to OnlyFans because it helps pay the bills. That’s why it seems that everyone and their sister is thinking about selling faceless nudes or feet pics on OnlyFans: “Those couple hundred dollars, they can go a long way in this economy, right?”—referring to the pressures of skyrocketing rents, unattainable mortgages, overdue credit card payments, unpayable student debt, and excessive job precarity among entry-level positions.
Whether you have twenty subscribers or two thousand, there is always economic instability, even if you don’t post enough content or don’t post enough of the right content.
Only for Whom?
After uploading a few photos of herself to OnlyFans, Bonython saw that hundreds of subscribers turned into thousands of dollars. She thought: If I invest properly in the right type of content, then I can make something out of this. “The thing is, I had put content out there at a very young age,” she says, referring to her experimental teenage years on Tumblr that detractors still bring up. “For me, it wasn’t too far between what I had already done.” Within six months of starting her OnlyFans, Bonython was back to recording herself on camera and talking about her day—but this time, she took her shirt off. Satisfying fifteen hundred subscribers is a constant balancing act. She says it requires “figuring out what works for me and what boundaries I can push and still feel okay.”
Bonython had hoped to gain subscribers and fill her wallet, but to do both, her fans wanted her to indulge herself. “A lot of my followers are into feederism content,” she says. Feederism is a fat fetish subculture that eroticizes weight gain and feeding. “But it’s kind of born out of hate for a lot of people,” says Bonython. Still figuring out her boundaries, Bonython experimented with eating copious amounts of food on camera to satisfy the cravings of her fans, but she realized it wasn’t for her. “I’m not interested in creating content so that people can shame me or be hateful and get off to it,” she says, “because that’s so fucked up.”
Feederism, as it is demanded from women, can be seen as misogyny, and both men and women heavily targeted Bonython for her authenticity in the body-positive community. This caused her to wonder: How can active weight gain be a body-positive message? She had embraced her curves long before OnlyFans and, once again, had to reclaim her identity from people’s prejudices and snarky comments about her body. “They want to believe that you are this one person,” she says, “rather than a complex human being with different emotions and different fears or dreams.”
But who are we to judge when an adult decides to legally and ethically create, produce, and sell their own personal NSFW content? Sex sells, people buy it, and female creators have tapped into one the world’s oldest professions through digital means. OnlyFans empowers women with financial and bodily autonomy, providing a space to rebel against the patriarchy and exploit it to their own advantage.
However, it also attracts misogyny from fans who incessantly demand nudity and from people who object to this line of work. It has become the household name for amateur adult content creators where feminist empowerment and oppression feed off each other and exist simultaneously. Has OnlyFans improved the modern practices of feminist empowerment? If you want to fight the patriarchy without your shirt on, then absolutely. But whether OnlyFans helps in moving the feminist movement forward is more nuanced.
A lot of responsibility falls on the women producing the content, but what about the people who are paying and asking for nudes in the first place? Thirsty, horny, sexually charged men throw money at their favourite internet personalities, hoping she’ll take her top off and do whatever they ask. When asked, most OnlyFans creators are willing to create adult content if the price is right. It’s unfair to judge and discriminate against sex workers and female creators when they are simply responding to demands from the fans who pay their bills. The question isn’t why women are using OnlyFans, but why society feels women can’t profit off their own nude content without harassment.
