OnlyFans Changed Sex Work Forever

Every day, hundreds of men pay  Dannii Harwood  to enact their sexual fantasies and boost their self-esteem. Sometimes her clothes come off. Sometimes she dresses up as a nurse or a dominatrix. If a guy is a regular customer, she likely knows his birthday, the names of his children and his pets — even when to call after a surgical procedure. He may pay her to help him achieve an orgasm, though she is not a prostitute. He may purchase erotic videos from her, though she is not a porn star. Ms. Harwood is one of the top earners on OnlyFans, where subscribers — mostly male; straight, gay and beyond — pay models and social media influencers a fee, generally $5 to $20 a month, to view a feed of imagery too racy for Instagram. With that access, subscribers can also direct message and “tip” to get pictures or videos created on demand, according to their sexual tastes.   Models who join the site often presume that their subscribers will increase in number if they post more often and make the content more explicit. The “more often” part is true. The “more explicit” part is not.   Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times   At a time when  anyone with a smartphone or small studio  can become his or her own pornographer, and content is often free, the hottest site in the adult entertainment industry is dominated by providers who show fewer sex acts and charge increasing fees depending on how creative the requests get. That’s the first paradox at the center of the OnlyFans phenomenon. Jem Wolfie and Matthew Camp, Businesspeople The most popular OnlyFans personality is Jem Wolfie, of Perth, Australia. She can’t help but laugh when people call her a “fitness model.” As she noted in an interview, “70 percent of my fans are men.” So the bulk of them aren’t looking for exercise tips, although she may provide them, for an added fee (along with healthy recipes — she used to be a chef). According to OnlyFans, she has 10,000 subscribers who pay $10 a month for access to a feed in which she shows off her Kardashianesque proportions, squatting in really tight leggings and squeezing her breasts together, strategically covering her nipples. “I’m a thick girl,” she said matter-of-factly. “Basically, OnlyFans is online go-go dancing,” said Matthew Camp, a 34-year-old model on the men’s side who broke into the business a decade ago writhing on platforms around downtown Manhattan for the party promoter Susanne Bartsch. If the four main quadrants of the gay approval matrix were  daddy , twink, bear and boy next door, he seemed to sit smack in the center, not falling neatly into any of those categories but appealing to the potential audiences for each. With a G-string and a strobe light, he could make as much as $1,000 on a good night. Porn studios like Lucas Entertainment began calling. Mr. Camp was intrigued. “Having sex for money is appealing,” he said. But $1,000 seemed low for something that would sit on the internet and brand him for life as a porn star. So he turned them down and instead used a PG-13 feed on  Instagram  to build a following of more than half a million. About a year ago, as the club scene continued its slow death, he moved to Hudson, N.Y., and signed up for OnlyFans. Weeks often went by without him posting a single picture or video. He didn’t show a full penetrative sex clip for the first nine months, yet he still regularly took home more than $10,000 a month. “Tumblr was filled with the most extreme sexual experiences you could see,” he said. “And I think a lot of people were turned off by that. It’s not what they’re looking for. They want more intimate experiences. They want a boyfriend experience. They want to fantasize about someone that they want to have sex with and not feel disgusted by it.” How the Internet Destabilized Pornography From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, dreamers in the porn industry, centered in the San Fernando Valley of California, openly described their multi-million-dollar futures in the business. There was actually a history of this happening, at least for a small number of models signed to lucrative long-term contracts with studios like Vivid and Wicked. They could make north of $5,000 a scene and shoot a couple of those each week, according to Brian Gross, a well-known industry publicist. That income could be supplemented with five-figure sums doing nightclub appearances around the country on the weekends, he said. Jenna Jameson — the Julia Roberts of straight porn — even parlayed her notoriety into a memoir released by HarperCollins, “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,” which was a New York Times best seller. The title turned out to be eerily prescient. As its publisher, Judith Regan, pointed out: “Porn went the way of all media.” It turns out, everyone could do it. Except that because porn was an industry of people already living on the margins of society, the effects for the performers were in many ways worse. The primary culprits were so-called tube sites: YouTube-like platforms that aggregated stolen pornographic content, disseminated it for free and sucked up revenue from banner and video ads.