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Everyone’s Doing It! How OnlyFans is Remaking Porn
MARIANA: Warning: This podcast includes sexual themes and explicit language. Discretion is advised.
GAIL: OnlyFans is a pimp site.
LJ: Being in a gay community, I thought it was empowering that
AMI: If I didn’t have my OnlyFans, I wouldn’t have graduated with my master’s.
GIL: I wanted to do it, and I did it. That’s all it was.
AMI: This is so intimidating. I don’t know.
Audrianne: Fishnet stocking, high heels, oh my God.
AMI: So far, I’ve made, like, over 40,000.
GIL: He was like, “Can I pay you $1500 to come over here and let me screw you?”
LJ: Oh we’re hot, let’s fucking sell this to men for money.
LJ: Everyone else is doing it. We wanna get in on it.
AMI: I want them to see me as more than just like a model – like a OnlyFans model, a cosplay model – I want them to see me as like a actual person.
LJ: There’s some dark sides to it, unfortunately, yeah.
MARIANA: At the height of the pandemic, young people started turning to the internet to do casual sex work on a platform called OnlyFans. They would post nude photos, or videos of themselves … well, you know, having sex … and people pay them to watch it.
MARIANA: OnlyFans lets people subscribe to specific creators. It’s sort of like Patreon, where you pay a person monthly to access a product or service, … but for porn. The money goes straight to the creator – minus a cut to OnlyFans, of course.
MARIANA: It bills itself as a website to give these adult content creators a sense of freedom and independence.
MARIANA: And here’s the thing – it feels like everyone is doing it. … Not just professional porn actors, but everyday people … like you or me.
MARIANA: We wanted to know: Why is it so popular? What’s it really like for people putting themselves – and, especially, their bodies – out there on the internet? Is it fixing the problems in the porn industry?
MARIANA: I’m Mariana Escoto, and this is Everyone’s doing it: How OnlyFans is Remaking Porn.
MARIANA: Over the next three episodes, we're going to dive into the history of porn, introduce you to some OnlyFans creators, and learn why people do it – and why people quit.
MARIANA: So, you know how I said that all the producers working on this podcast knew someone doing OnlyFans? Well, we thought that would make it easy to find sources. But when we first started reaching out for interviews, we found that getting people to talk to us about it was … very difficult.
MARIANA: Here’s a conversation I had early in the project with the other producers of the podcast.
Mariana: I first reached out to this girl I knew in high school – we weren’t particularly close in high school, but we did talk a few times. She had recently followed me on Instagram maybe, like, a month or two before doing this project. And I saw it, like, she would post on her story, like, “Oh, here's the link.” And I would be like, “Oh, that's funny.” I mean, it’s funny like in a, like, “Oh, you do this” way. And I reached out to her, and I was like, “You know, this is what I'm doing, and I was wondering if you’d be willing to talk about your experience.” You know? She never really gave me a response. The second source I reached out to was a friend of a friend, and I was like “Hey, so and so tell you about what I’m doing? Like I’d really love to interview you.” And she's like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I can even like get like other people to come on it.” And she kind of ghosted me, too. And I was like, “Oh, man, like, do you guys want to talk about this or not?”
MARIANA: We tried everything – posting stories on our Instagram asking for sources, DM’ing creators we found on Twitter, even asking family members and coworkers to connect us with people they knew – but for months, we got nothing.
MARIANA: We were getting desperate. We even tried putting up flyers around our college and trying to find OnlyFans creators at local bars. We got some interest, but no follow-through.
MARIANA: We started thinking to ourselves … Why is sex work still so taboo? With so many young people making content for OnlyFans, why are they still so hesitant to talk about it?
MARIANA: Even within our own team, we experienced some of that moral questioning when we took on this topic.
MARIANA: Especially one of our producers, Aaliyah Skipper.
Aaliyah: At the beginning of this project, we decided to go through the topics of sex workers. And I was, like, really frustrated, because, like, because of my religion and faith, I don't really have a connection to like any of this. But I went home to my mom, I was like, “Mom, like, I'm doing this project, like, I can't let anybody down. Like, I don't know what to do. Like, I feel like I'm not contributing.” I was like, “Should I pull out like, I don't know.” And then she was like, trying to get me to open up my mind into a new perspective.
MARIANA: It turns out Aaliyah’s mom had a history she didn’t know about.
MARIANA: Back when she was a college student in New Orleans, she worked as a cabaret dancer in revealing outfits to pay for school supplies.
MARIANA: So Aaliyah sat down with her mom to talk more in depth about that time.
Audrianne: I went and I auditioned for this dance group. And it was a show, it's kind of like what you would call a burlesque show, which is, if you've seen Moulin Rouge, it’s kind of like that. So it's a little bit ris-risqué. It's just a show. Um, there's no touching or anything like that.
AUDRIANNE: We did the traditional can-can. Um, our outfits were in, like, the little corset, the things like that.
AALIYAH: Yeah.
AUDRIANNE: The corset, um, with fishnet stockings, high heels – oh, my gosh, my poor ankles – and sometimes a, you know, skirt for the traditional can-can. something like that. So, that was kind of like the, the risqué part, part of it.
MARIANA: After Aaliyah’s mom opened up to her about doing can-can dancing when she was in college, it made us realize that the divide between “us” and “them” – people who do erotic work and people who don’t want anything to do with it – well, it wasn’t so big.
MARIANA: Throughout history, everyday people who needed some extra cash could turn to something like can-can dancing or even working in a strip club or as an escort.
MARIANA: OnlyFans might be a relatively new website, but pornography has been around for centuries. And so has the debate over the morality of porn. Let’s start from the beginning…
MARIANA: One of our producers, Julianne Le, spoke to David Church, a gender studies professor at Indiana University who gave us a crash course in porn history, starting with the 1920s.
DAVID: We had what were called stag films, and stag films were, basically, they were still shot on 35 millimeter or 16 millimeter, so regular celluloid film. But there were short, silent, black and white films, and many of them did show actual unsimulated sex.
11:57 MARIANA: These films often featured amateur male performers having sex with professional women sex workers and were shown in brothels and fraternal social clubs.
13:20 MARIANA: By the 1970s, porn was starting to become more popular. Movie theaters showed narrative films with hardcore sex scenes. Films like Deep Throat in 1972 and The Devil in Miss Jones in 1973 ushered in the period known as “Porno Chic.”
DAVID: There's this period referred to as porno chic, when basically these feature length narrative films that were–that contains hardcore pornography were being shown in regular movie theaters.
MARIANA: By the 60s and 70s, the Supreme Court had already established that obscenity was NOT protected by the First Amendment, but was porn obscene?
MARIANA: The 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California established a more narrow definition of obscenity.
MARIANA: Most pornography is protected by the First Amendment—with the exception of anything that involves minors or could be seen as harmful to a minor.
MARIANA: Just as all this was going on, second-wave feminism was on the rise.
MARIANA: Women fought for rights like access to birth control and equal pay in the workplace. Some of these feminists also pushed back against the wide availability of porn. They said commercial sex and pornography were oppressive to women.
MARIANA: In the 80s, things started to change very quickly as the industry shifted from film to videotape. Public pressure forced porn out of the movie theaters, but new technology made it widely available. With the introduction of VHS, the cost of producing porn started to go down.
MARIANA: The 1990s opened a whole different realm of pornography with the rise of the internet and digital video. That’s when we saw the introduction of something called tube sites where people could search for and stream porn.
MARIANA: These were sites where people uploaded pirated content in the early 2000s, but, also, original amateur content.
DAVID: Alright, so digital makes the cost of producing and then circulating content online that much easier. And so by the time we get to the rise of, of so called tube sites, right, like, like Xtube and xHamster, and eventually, you know, more well-known ones like Pornhub, those start to get going at sort of the mid-2000s. And at that point in time, it’s just, you know, sort of a flood of user-uploaded content starts to become available online.
MARIANA: Pornhub is a Canadian-owned website founded in 2007. It came before OnlyFans. It has a number of categories for users to choose from based on what actors look like or act like. . . submissive, dominant, incestuous. It also allows users to leave likes, dislikes, and comments on the videos. It came under fire in recent years when multiple videos of minors being sexually assaulted were reported, and Pornhub didn’t face legal consequences.
MARIANA: After public outcry, Pornhub implemented a rigorous verification process in 2021.
MARIANA: There has always been a market for porn, and it’s adapted to new laws and technologies. But even as it’s become more accessible, it’s still, sort of, stayed in the shadows.
MARIANA: There are — and always have been — people who see it as immoral, depraved, and shameful.
MARIANA: For most people, it’s probably not their first choice on how to make money, but it may be their only choice.
MARIANA: Sites like OnlyFans made that choice available for far more people.
MARIANA: When OnlyFans started in 2016, it was supposedly a place to share art, recipes, physical fitness, and music content.
MARIANA: But it quickly became a venue for porn actors to make extra cash when their industry was losing money.
MARIANA: Then, something changed everything – a global pandemic.
MARIANA: In March 2020, people were suddenly stuck at home, out of work, bored, lonely – glued to their computers.
MARIANA: Our producer, Julianne, talked to Lynn Comella, a gender and sexuality professor at the University of Nevada. Lynn says the lockdown made people turn to new forms of income.
MARIANA: OnlyFans seemed easy enough to participate in – all you needed was your phone.
LYNN: During the height of the pandemic, when all sorts of economic sectors just shut down, a lot was being written about, you know, how the pandemic was impacting different kinds of work, and that included sex work. There certainly was an uptick in people opening accounts on OnlyFans – traffic to OnlyFans really jumped.
MARIANA: When we were doing research for this podcast, it seemed like everything we read in the media was either about people making tons of money on OnlyFans or having their lives ruined.
MARIANA: But what about everyone else?
MARIANA: Finally, after countless attempts, we got someone to talk to us … and then we got more people to talk to us. Like LJ.
MARIANA: LJ started her OnlyFans account in 2021. She's 23. She has a mullet and talks in a baby voice to her large rescue dog, who wears a pink, white, and orange lesbian pride flag around its neck. She also happens to be my coworker.
LJ: I, if I get these fliers done in time, I might stop by and drop those off today.
MARIANA: Cool, cool. Thank you so much.
LJ: Of course.
MARIANA: We talked for a while at work, and then eventually she agreed to do a series of interviews.
LJ: Right at the end of 2020, going into 2021. It's a little intimidating,so there were a few starts, and then, like, “No, we change our mind – okay, we're gonna do it.”
MARIANA: LJ and her girlfriend Kayela decided to join OnlyFans together.
LJ: Everyone was talking about it. You know, it was, like, all over Twitter. We're like, “Okay, like, this is kind of like the new norm. Everyone's cool with this. Let's try it out.”
MARIANA: LJ and Kayela said they did it as a way to spice up their relationship.
LJ: So, for us, we really tried to keep it to, like, what we like to do, so more like, just genuinely like us, like having sex or, like, certain kinks that we have – tried to keep it as, like, what's the word … authentic?
MARIANA: LJ connected us to some other creators she knows, and then some of our other leads started to pick up, too.
MARIANA: One of our other producers, Gerardo Chagolla, sat down with Gilbert, a classic SoCal guy who rocks a mustache and likes to go surfing. He said he did it as a personal challenge, as an adventure – and maybe also as a way to hook up with women.
Gilbert: I'm a very, again too, I’m a very open person, just try new things to get going out adventuring. You can't buy stories, you can't buy experiences, everything else you can buy. I love being able to say like “I did that once,” “I've done that,” “I did that,” that kind of thing.
MARIANA: And finally, our producer Aaliyah talked to Ami, a full-time accountant and cosplayer, who is probably most representative of OnlyFans creators. She treats it as a part-time job, putting a lot of time into building a following and posting quality content to earn extra income.
AMI: In 2021, I graduated with my master's in accounting, which was, oh my gosh, like I barely made it. But if I didn't have my OnlyFans, I wouldn't have graduated with my master’s.
MARIANA: We talked to these creators about the most inappropriate requests they’ve gotten, the people in their lives that know they do only OnlyFans — and the ones that don’t — and whether they plan to stick with it.
MARIANA: All that – in the next two episodes.
MARIANA: This podcast was written, reported, and produced by me, Mariana Escoto, Aaliyah Skipper, Julianne Le, and Gerardo Chagolla. Original score was composed by Andy Van Driesen.
MARIANA: Additional audio editing by Jenny Kim.
MARIANA: Our editorial advisor is Jessica Langlois. Jill Replogle is our audio storytelling consultant. Additional technical support was provided by Joseph Pavlenko and Ryan Osborn.
MARIANA: This project was supported by California Humanities Emerging Journalist Fellowship Program.
MARIANA: For more information, visit www.calhum.org. It was produced in the Fullerton College student newsroom and radio studio.
MARIANA: Any views or findings expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of Fullerton College, California Humanities, or the National Endowment for the Humanities.