Rich Feminists Are Monetizing Poor Women

How wealth and class are the driving forces behind OnlyFans

By Emily Jashinsky, Washington D.C. Correspondent for UnHerd

The Jerry Springer Show is experiencing a fresh reckoning in the form of a Netflix docuseries that premiered in January. Director Luke Sewell brought together key members of the show’s production team to explore why Springer exploded. One interesting fact is that the show could easily have been killed in the crib.

According to one producer in the documentary, NBC executives absolutely hated Springer’s shocking schtick until big ratings started to come in. Just like that, the C-suite’s moral disgust was suddenly overridden by profits. 

So it came to pass that media players in Chicago spent years mining the so-called “Springer Triangle” for ratings. Producer Toby Yoshimura explains in the documentary, “there’s this triangle you can draw from Tennessee to Ohio to Georgia,” he says, “like the Bermuda Triangle, it was called the Springer Triangle, where it’s like 75% of all the guests in the history of the show came from that region of the country.” 

Jerry Springer visited every battlefield in the culture war, but his show is best remembered for plumbing the depths of sexual depravity. That NBC initially blanched at his content reminds us how quickly corporate America agreed to stimulate our basest instincts for the sake of money, and how quickly that transaction conditioned us to accept a coarsened culture as the necessary byproduct of “female empowerment.”

In no corner of our present culture is this clearer than the dark world of OnlyFans. The site describes itself as an “18+ subscription platform empowering creators to own their full potential, monetize their content, and develop authentic connections with their fans.” Of course, despite the company’s attempts to push a variety of content, it’s mostly porn. 

Though OnlyFans debuted in the 2010s, the site went stratospheric during the pandemic. It got a boost from Beyoncé, who name-dropped the site on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” remix. But even after the pandemic, OnlyFans continues to grow. A 2023 earnings report showed a 19% increase in annual revenue, with a significant increase in users as well. OnlyFans says it raked in $6.6 billion that year. It claims to now have 4.1 million “creator” accounts and 305 million “fans.” 

Media reports repeatedly frame the company’s success as a triumph of upward mobility, as a clever innovation, that is democratizing “sex work” while also empowering non-pornographic creators with an easy subscription platform. However, the coverage of OnlyFans is not universally positive. The site is heavily scrutinized over its record on content moderation, the potential for trafficking, and financial exploitation. 

But it gets plenty of good press too. Most often, an assumption is built into the coverage that prostitution is “sex work,” and “sex work” is empowering under ethical conditions. Regulators and skeptics are treated critically. Celebrities who join the platform are rewarded with nice headlines and less-than-skeptical coverage.

In 2021, ABC News—that is to say, Disney—aired a special on OnlyFans that could almost have functioned as a commercial for the site. With the exception of a fleeting moment to acknowledge some complaints about harassment and inequality, ABC News depicted OnlyFans as a tool of empowerment, an equalizer, and a safer alternative to offline prostitution. 

A Washington Post headline once framed the company as part of “the new American Dream.”

“Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work,” the Post glowed. 

Celebrities and influencers flocked to OnlyFans, using other platforms to cultivate loyal followings of paid subscribers. The middle class, offered a shot at incredible wealth if they could break through the competition, came along for the ride. And while the site enables some users to go from rags to unimaginable riches, and allows celebrities to rake in even more cash, a regulatory filing from the company showed that in 2023 users earned “a mean average of nearly $1,300 per creator.” 

That amounts to less than $4 extra a day, not nothing in a world where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and a Starbucks coffee is approximately the price of a pony, but perhaps not the price of “empowerment” either, even if one glorifies such transactions. A cup of coffee for dirty chats? For foot pictures? For even more? The idea that potential prospects of generational wealth could justify digital prostitution—the selling of your sexuality in virtual spaces—is hardly a point of consensus among members of the public. But that’s not really what academics and journalists take issue with when OnlyFans is concerned. 

According to OnlyFans, 70% of creators are women, and 87% of users overall are men. Studies have found a majority of OnlyFans users are married men. The site also takes 20% of “all payments made on the platform.” 

So when banks and credit card companies started pushing the site to add layers of oversight amidst fears of trafficking and child exploitation, the Post fretted over “creators… from marginalized backgrounds” and one expert asked, “Do we really want private businesses, in this case financial institutions, to act as arbiters and guardians of our moral codes?”

The answer to that question, for what it’s worth, is so obviously yes. It’s what companies do by actively maintaining ties with OnlyFans. It’s what NBC did by broadcasting Springer. It’s the argument fusionist conservatives made for years about the free market that consumers would punish unethical businessmen in competitive environments.   

However, the myth that classical liberalism’s neutrality prevents us from rendering moral judgements—whether it’s NBC or OnlyFans—has been perpetuated. We’ve been conditioned to see these companies as mere hosts. This was even more complicated in the frenzied days of cancel culture, during which conservatives found themselves in the position of defending morally compromised artists and thinkers, all while reckoning with an ever coarsening culture. But of course, pornography isn’t the same as “free speech” as the Founders conceived it, and no business is morally or legally obligated to host it either. 

Jerry Springer and OnlyFans both rely on the same ideological justifications. They depict adults in a post-sexual revolution America acting of their own volition, capitalizing on a clear consumer demand for their output. As Charles Murray documented in Coming Apart, people in positions of power are disproportionately college educated and culturally progressives. In other words, they’re well-resourced people who see themselves as feminists. 

In 2020, Pew found women with bachelor’s degrees and higher were much more likely to say the word “feminist” describes them well than women with some college education or less. “About seven-in-ten women with at least a bachelor’s degree (72%) say the term feminist describes them very or somewhat well, compared with 56% of women with less education,” Pew reported. This is consistent with other surveys. An Economist/YouGov poll once found that while less than 40% of all women consider themselves feminists, “more than two-thirds of women with family incomes of $100,000 or more would call themselves feminist, as would 53% of college-educated women.”

In 2023, Mic profiled “feminist porn boss” Erika Lust on the rise of OnlyFans. Lust’s firm embrace of the website captured the feminist argument well. “Platforms like OnlyFans allow adult creators autonomy over their bodies, boundaries, and conditions of their content’s production and distribution,” she contended. “Sex workers can create their own brands; they can create and sell their content in the safety of their homes, with people they want to work with.”

Lust added, “Thanks to these platforms, many performers (especially women) are less dependent on porn studios — therefore, they feel more empowered to call out predatory behaviors from companies, directors, or agents. In general, these platforms normalized the consumption of paid, ethically-made porn.”

If, for the sake of argument, we deal with only those cases of OnlyFans users freely creating and consuming pornography, the arrangement remains exploitative. A 42-year-old billionaire is profiting off mass adultery and prostitution, and the media’s concern is mostly focused elsewhere because we’ve been quickly conditioned to accept false notions of agency and empowerment peddled by Lust and swallowed whole cloth by cultural gatekeepers with class-based sympathy for the feminist left. These arguments are even more compelling to executives when they come with fat paychecks, as was the case with Jerry Springer.  

OnlyFans is rarely understood through the lens of class. But if we take a step back from the last 65 years of sexual history, we see educated journalists and academics uncritically parroting a corporation’s marketing pitch of “empowerment,” and selling it back to desperate men and women with less means than a Columbia professor or Buzzfeed writer and much more trouble making ends meet.

Hardened ideologues of the libertarian and fourth-wave feminist variety may be comfortable encouraging this setup. Everyone else should feel no special obligation to host or promote it. That we’re hardly even asking these questions is a clear statement on the class dynamics of America’s elite: powerbrokers in boardrooms, newsrooms, and classrooms are in such deep agreement on the empowering nature of pornography that they gloss right over that part of the debate, assuring people with less means that their souls won’t suffer a bit if they need to make a quick buck. 

We needn’t get bogged down in legitimate arguments about free speech to make a very simple point: wealthy people are openly profiting off exploitation, especially of socioeconomically disadvantaged women. Unlike the early days of Jerry Springer, our elites seem to have no shame about this endeavor at all.