What the Hell Was OnlyFans Thinking?

A parable about this country's zeal for harassing sex workers

It was an announcement that was ridiculous on its face:

It was like a headline declaring: “Taco Bell to Phase Out Tacos, Bell” or “J Crew To Stop Making Clothes That Make You Look Like a Boxy Sea Captain”. How could a company ban its only product? Why would they do that?

But after not even a week of grappling with those questions, a ridiculous-in-a-different-way headline appeared:

Okay: What the hell happened here? Obviously, I don’t totally know; only the people who run OnlyFans know why they did what they did. But it’s pretty clear that this roller coaster ride was largely the product of an anti-sex work environment that has a right-wing orientation and some left-wing accomplices.

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OnlyFans, if you’re not familiar -- and I’m sure none of us are even though it has 130 million users -- is basically Substack for adult content. Like Substack, subscribers pay content creators who post material directly to the site. Except that instead of posting dissections of cultural appropriation or sizzling-hot Amtrak takes, the content creator might post, say, a video of themselves being studiously fisted, or footage of themselves making scrambled eggs while wearing nothing but a bondage mask and penny loafers. Though they might also have the Amtrak takes -- I don’t know, I’m not a subscriber. And I don’t plan to join now that they’ve demonstrated a shaky commitment to the good stuff.

Some people might judge the models on OnlyFans. Personally, I’m persuaded by Patton Oswalt’s argument that being a stripper is morally superior to being a comedian, so I view the sex workers on OnlyFans as fellow travelers, except that theirs is the higher artform. If you want to hear directly from an OnlyFans model, I highly recommend this Blocked & Reported interview with Aella (who uses just one name, like Beyoncé or Charlemagne). Worth noting: Aella is extraordinarily successful, most OnlyFans models don’t make a fraction of the high-six/low-seven-figure income Aella rakes in. Again, it’s like Substack: Matt Taibbi = Aella, me = a retired truck driver pinching a spatula between his buttcheeks for $3 a gander.

Recently, OnlyFans added some non-porn content; social media stars Tana Mongeau and Caroline Calloway signed up, as did Chris Brown, Cardi B, and the actress Bella Thorne. Call me a cynic, but I actually think this is a pretending-to-be-porn mini-scam; I think some very hot women joined OnlyFans so that some very-gullible guys would think “Whoa, I get to see Bella Thorne do porn!” Oh you poor, naïve horndogs. At any rate: OnlyFans has tried to shift away from porn, but I’m not sure that it worked.

Which is why last week’s announcement was so strange. But, the ostensible reasoning was pretty simple: OnlyFans was worried that they’d lose access to the banking system if they stuck with porn. This is from a Financial Times article featuring OnlyFans founder Tim Stokley:

“The change in policy, we had no choice -- the short answer is banks,” Stokley, who is the company’s chief executive, told the Financial Times.

[Stokley] singled out Bank of New York Mellon as having “flagged and rejected” every transfer related to the company, “making it difficult to pay our creators”.

“JP Morgan Chase is particularly aggressive in closing accounts of sex workers, or…any business that supports sex workers,” he said.

Pretty simple: Banks were already giving them trouble, and OnlyFans was afraid they might get cut off entirely. Plus, though Stokley says OnlyFans is "already fully compliant” with Mastercard’s new rules that apply to adult web sites, it seems certain that payment processors played a role. Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal have previously severed relationships with adult sites, with major repercussions. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, put it:

“Visa and Mastercard, acting together, are currently a chokepoint for online payments.”

Danielle Citron of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative concurs:

"Payment processors have considerable power over sites like OnlyFans and Pornhub."

So, the big question is: Why are banks and credit card companies so skittish? The answer seems pretty obvious: Because any association with porn or sex work is a PR disaster waiting to happen.

Last December, Nicholas Kristof ran a 3,800-word column called “The Children of Pornhub”. The column went super-viral; you probably had it sent to you by three-to-seven aunts. It caused an earthquake in the world of adult content, and what’s happening with OnlyFans is essentially an aftershock of that earthquake.

I have extremely-mixed feelings about the Kristof column. On the one hand, I think some good probably came of it: For starters, PornHub changed its policies so that users now have to be verified before they can upload content, which seems like a good change that will make it hard to post non-consensual content anonymously. They also “revamped” moderation, though that could be huge or nothing, and I can’t find any follow-up reporting about what the “revamping” actually entailed. Finally, PornHub removed the “download” button, which should inconvenience bad actors for about 20 seconds. Woo hoo.

What I don’t like about Kristof’s column is that it greatly oversimplifies the issue and is so inflammatory that it makes reasoned, analytical discussion of the very-real problem of non-consensual content basically impossible. Kristof describes non-consensual porn found on PornHub in horrific detail, but only briefly alludes to the fact that unspeakably awful stuff is on every site that allows users to upload content, from YouTube to Facebook to Gingerbreadhouses.com. Here’s Emma Hardy of the Internet Watch Foundation, a group that works to remove child sex abuse imagery from the internet:

"Everyday sites that you and I might use as social networks or other communications tools, they pose more of an issue of child sexual abuse material than Pornhub does.”

The question should be whether a company has adequate processes to find and quickly remove non-consensual content. But Kristof doesn’t really grapple with that question; he treats the presence of illicit content as ipso facto proof of malfeasance. Instead, he devotes most of his word count to grisly stories of abuse, including a brief mention of a murder that had nothing to do with Pornhub. He also, strangely, doesn’t seem to understand that sometimes porn is make believe -- I hope you’re sitting down, Nick, but the number of HOTTT MILF STEPMOM(S) BANGING FOR GAS MONEY in real life is actually quite low.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Kristof’s anti-porn porn incited a moral panic. Soon after the article ran, PornHub suddenly removed more than 10 million videos -- that’s one full college freshman hard drive worth of porn videos -- from its site. MasterCard, Visa, and Discover cut ties with Pornhub. That presented a major problem for consensual sex workers making money through the site, who suddenly had no way to get paid (during a pandemic, let’s not forget). Some of those people were forced to move to other sites like…wait for it…Gingerbreadhouses.com. And also to OnlyFans.

And now, the moral panic has followed them to OnlyFans. In May, the BBC ran a piece about teenagers beating OnlyFans’ verification process by using fake IDs. And, as first reported by The Verge, the BBC was working on a follow-up article, and OnlyFans’ seemingly-sudden announcement might have been an attempt to beat the BBC to press. Sure enough, the article dropped shortly after OnlyFans’ announcement.

The BBC article samples heavily from Kristof; it’s basically Can’t Touch This to Kristof’s Superfreak. The article’s hook is “leaked documents” (the press can’t not shit their pants over leaked documents!) that allege that OnlyFans is more tolerant when successful accounts post “illegal content”. “Illegal content” sounds really bad -- and I’m sure that was the BBC’s intent -- but it seems that “illegal content” actually means “in violation of OnlyFans’ terms of service”. The article seems to imply that the content in question is child pornography, but the more you read, the more you realize that it’s probably not. Content featuring a gun or a knife would be “illegal”, no matter how the weapon was used. So would content that appears to show incest or exchanging sex for money (again, and I can’t believe I have to say this to grown adults: Sometimes porn is not real). At one point, the article sternly intones:

The BBC has seen examples of some of this banned content. In one video, a man is seen eating faeces.

Okay, so maybe Chris Brown ate a turd. I don’t know what he’s up to. But Chris Brown eating a turd -- and maybe getting a finger-wagging e-mail from OnlyFans that says “hey, Chris, that’s strike one” -- is a long, long way from child pornography.

But again: This issue has been oversimplified and discussed in a panic-inducing way that makes rational debate impossible. You can’t ask “is there a way to change a site’s policies that doesn’t hurt sex workers?” or “what reasonable expectations can we have for content removal?” without sounding like you’re siding with sex traffickers and child pornographers. In much the same way the hyper-woke dominate discussions of race because people are terrified of being called racist, the anti-sex work crowd is controlling this debate because to suggest that there may be some nuance or practical considerations at play is to risk being called a monster.

And make no mistake: Much of this crusade is being driven by people who are blatantly anti-porn and anti-sex work. Josh Hawley -- not most people’s idea of a feminist -- is active in this space. In his article, Kristof cites the anti-PornHub activism of “an organization called Traffickinghub, led by an activist named Laila Mickelwait.” At the time of Kristof’s article, Mickelwait was the “Director of Abolition” for a group called Exodus Cry, which seeks to abolish all sex work and porn. Mickelwait previously held an unpaid position at a church whose pastor once said that homosexuality “opens the door to the demonic realm” and who argues that Supreme Court rulings in favor of abortion rights and marriage equality will invoke the wrath of God. I’m relaying this information to convey that when Kristof says “this isn't about porn,” he might only be speaking for himself, not his allies. Mickelwait was active in the campaigns against Backpage, Pornhub, and OnlyFans, using the same narrative each time, namely: “Companies are profiting from abuse!” For the record, I don’t even really get the obsession with the “profiting!!!!” part -- if people were posting horrific content pro-bono, wouldn't that still be just as bad?

So, to be clear: There is an anti-porn, anti-sex work contingent in this country trying to harass sex workers out of business by pressuring banks and credit card companies to cut them off. They’re aided by journalists who collapse the complex issues surrounding sex work into simplistic, moralizing narratives. The result is a climate in which it’s hard for sex workers to make a living, and it’s not at all clear that the issue of sexual abuse -- which we should be taking extremely seriously -- has been addressed in any real way.

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The good news, in my opinion, is that sex workers seem to have won this round. For now, at least, they’ll continue to have a site where they can post the wonderful smut that -- we shouldn’t forget -- is slightly more popular than oxygen. But why did things play out like this? Why did OnlyFans do a 180?

I have three guesses, which aren’t mutually exclusive:

1. OnlyFans got behind-the-scenes assurances from financial partners. This is what OnlyFans says happened, and maybe it’s true -- people tell the truth sometimes. I suspect it’s at least a little true, because without it, not much else matters.

2. OnlyFans realized how phenomenally stupid their plan was. If Keebler had denounced adult content, you’d think “Okay, whatever -- I didn’t know they made that, and they’ve still got the cookies.” But OnlyFans is an adult content company; maybe their leadership really let that fact sink in over the past week. They did seem to be floating ideas that tested the limits of the “there are no bad ideas in brainstorming” ethic:

“Hey, OnlyFans subscribers! I know you signed up to interact with models who will travel with you on a journey to the darkest reaches of your sexual psyche, but here’s a recipe for Crêpes Suzette that will have you saying: ‘Très Bien!’ Come for the facials, stay for the flan!”

I barely have words for how stupid that is. Some investors might have felt the same way, and they might have said so to the people running OnlyFans. Also gobsmacking was OnlyFans’ new content guidelines, which seemed to allow for only the most tasteful of nudes, i.e. 1990s Cinemax-style soft porn. And look: That stuff might have flow in the early ‘90s, when finding porn was like acquiring weapons for the French Resistance -- there was a whole network of contacts and trusted sources and deep-woods dropoff spots (I was a teenager back then, I lived this). But that won’t work today; nobody’s paying top dollar for pictures of boobs. It’s a classic “How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?” situation.

3. Outcry from OnlyFans models and other people changed their minds. Several articles reported on the negative reaction from OnlyFans creators and Twitter -- it seemed to be pretty intense. It might have been enough to make OnlyFans reverse course; nothing affects a PR disaster like a countervailing PR disaster.

It should be noted that the narrative this time was a bit different than it was with Backpage and PornHub. Specifically: In those instances, the anti-corporate narrative was at odds with the pro-sex work narrative. The left loves a good anti-corporate narrative; when the story is “this corporation is evil!”, we’re going to hop on board that train 99 times out of 100. This time, the “this corporation is evil!” narrative put anti-corporate leftys in alignment with pro-sex work people, so you basically had a united front on the left. The Laila Mickelwaits of the world ran the same play three times, but it looks like it didn’t work the third time because they weren’t granular enough in their strategizing (God I hope they don’t read this).

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I’m very happy to see the sex workers win this one. Count me among the growing number of people (now a majority!) who think sex work should be decriminalized.¹ If we accept that consensual sex work exists -- and many people, mostly women, tell us that it does -- then maybe we can have an actual dialogue about how to make sex work safer and crack down on sex trafficking.

I think that dialogue would include questions like: Is it practical for content to be reviewed prior to posting, and if not, what's a reasonable expectation for how quickly it can be removed? Is there a risk of regulating a porn site so much that it becomes lame and no-one uses it, at which point the darkest-web site with the least scruples becomes the site everyone uses? What about "fingerprinting" technology, which Kristof waved away but which sounds very similar to what Apple just built -- could that suss out non-consensual content? And, of course, the big question: What if Chris Brown wants to eat a turd live for his fans? Should we stop him? Or is that -- in a way -- what the American Revolution was all about?

I don’t know the answers to those questions (except the last one: Yes, that’s what the American Revolution was all about). But I know that we won’t find answers as long as our “dialogue” is actually a thinly-veiled attempt to shut down sex work and porn by scaring banks and credit card companies into cutting adult content creators off. Maybe the fact that sex workers won this round is a sign that we’re getting closer to creating places where they can fuck, suck, ride, grind, fingerblast, squirt, deepthroat, scissor, and occasionally even Romanian-butterfly (if the tips are good enough) without fear.

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***Poll for Tuesday***

I’d like the next column to be about…

1. The pressures one feels when they’re building a news media thing (e.g. this newsletter) [VOTE FOR THIS]

2. The child-pornography-scanning software that Apple has decided to use but that other companies are rejecting [VOTE FOR THIS]

3. Weed’s legal a lot of places now…how’s that going? [VOTE FOR THIS]

1. Actually, I think it should be fully legalized. The more we take sex work out of the shadows, the safer it becomes.