Porn Studies

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20

Competing platform imaginaries of NSFW content

creation on OnlyFans

Emily van der Nagel

To cite this article: Emily van der Nagel (2021) Competing platform imaginaries of NSFW content
creation on OnlyFans, Porn Studies, 8:4, 394-410, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2021.1974927

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974927

Published online: 04 Oct 2021.

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PORN STUDIES
2021, VOL. 8, NO. 4, 394–410
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1974927

Competing platform imaginaries of NSFW content creation on

OnlyFans
Emily van der Nagel
School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University, Caulfield, Victoria, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article investigates the competing platform imaginary of Received 5 April 2021
content subscription platform OnlyFans. A feminist content Accepted 27 August 2021
analysis of news articles, memes, and posts to the official
KEYWORDS
OnlyFans blog reveals that the dominant platform imaginary of OnlyFans; porn; social media;
OnlyFans is one of women selling Not Safe for Work (NSFW), or platforms; content creators;
adult, content – even though there is room for resistance and NSFW
alternative platform use too. The platform’s corporate
communication contests the NSFW platform imaginary by
featuring mostly Safe for Work content creators, which
deliberately attempts to leave room to distance OnlyFans from
NSFW in future. In a social media landscape that often
deplatforms NSFW content, I argue that the way OnlyFans
renders its NSFW creators invisible does real harm to these
creators and their opportunities.

Introduction
The meme is a photograph of a young woman sitting on her couch, eyes wide in an
expression of awkward surprise. Her cat is bent over in front of her laptop, inadvertently
exposing its anus to the camera. It is captioned ‘when you just wanna do your zoom call
but your cat wants to start an onlyfans’ (@ok_girlfriend 2020). That phrase, to ‘start an
onlyfans’, has taken on a particular meaning, sharpened during 2020 as the COVID-19
pandemic saw a huge uptake in digital communication of all kinds (Nguyen et al.
2020). It does not just refer to the practice of signing up for OnlyFans, a subscription plat-
form that allows content creators to charge a monthly fee, plus optional tips, for access to
their photographs and videos. As evoked in the meme, ‘starting an onlyfans’ means
beginning to sell access to specifically adult, Not Safe for Work (NSFW), or lewd
content. The cat’s exposed genitals stand in for what paying audiences can expect to
see from content creators to whom they subscribe.
But a visit to the official OnlyFans blog tells a different story, one that does not connect
with the meme of the accidentally exhibitionist cat. OnlyFans offers generic advice on
creating content for the platform, and does not mention NSFW anywhere on its home-
page. When adult content is absent in OnlyFans’ official communications, but ‘starting
an onlyfans’ equates to NSFW in meme culture, what does this say about how platforms

CONTACT Emily van der Nagel emily.vandernagel@monash.edu

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 PORN STUDIES 395

are imagined, and how do we know what a new platform is for? In this article, I investigate
the platform imaginary of OnlyFans. Karin van Es and Thomas Poell (2020) built on Eden
Litt and Eszter Hargittai’s (2016) work on imagined audiences to conceive of the platform
imaginary: how people understand, and organize themselves in relation to, platforms.
Even the term ‘platform’ does discursive work to situate a digital media intermediary as
a neutral, egalitarian structure that facilitates content without shaping it: Tarleton Gille-
spie argues that the discourse of the ‘platform’ offers ‘a comforting sense of technical neu-
trality’ (2010, 360), while these technology companies are actually powerful curators
profiting from user labour. Platform imaginaries carry underlying norms and ideologies
which inform platform experiences. For example, Snapchat began as ‘for’ sending
nudes, but has been reframed around notions of spontaneity and candid photographs
(Tiidenberg and van der Nagel 2020, 57).
Orienting this around the notion of the platform imaginary has led to the structuring
research question: how is the platform imaginary of OnlyFans created and contested, and
where can we see this platform imaginary at work?
I answer this question by investigating OnlyFans through three different lenses: jour-
nalism, meme culture, and corporate communication. I do this by analyzing 100 news
articles about OnlyFans, 100 memes about OnlyFans, and 100 posts to the official Only-
Fans blog. This article studies platform imaginaries of OnlyFans by using a feminist
content analysis (Leavy 2007; Leavy and Harris 2019), which systematically analyzes
media texts to discover how ideas about people, especially women and non-binary
people, and groups are formed and represented. In this article, I ask whose perspectives
are foregrounded in the creation of the platform imaginary of OnlyFans. While the plat-
form’s corporate communication emphasizes a broad range of content creators, the
dominant perception of OnlyFans is a platform for women creating adult material. I
argue that by contesting this platform imaginary instead of playing into it, OnlyFans is
doing real harm to its NSFW creators by refusing to highlight and support the very
content creators who sustain the platform.

OnlyFans as a NSFW social media platform

OnlyFans is a content subscription platform for which audiences can pay monthly fees to
access photographs and videos from content creators, who keep 80% of the fees, leaving
20% for the platform. UK technology entrepreneur Tim Stokely founded the platform in
2016, building on his expertise in hosting softcore camming sites (Parham 2019). As a
paid erotic performance mediated by the internet, camming is located within the sex
work industry by Angela Jones (2020). On OnlyFans, content creation is emphasized
over livestreamed adult performances, although the practices of camming and producing
NSFW content for OnlyFans overlap in many ways. Academic literature on camming pro-
vides context for the NSFW content creation on OnlyFans, as the practice continues
camming traditions of employing what Terri Senft (2008) calls micro-celebrity techniques
of self-branding and performing authenticity and intimacy for their audiences. Cam per-
formers deploy their feminine image, usually from the domestic space of the bedroom, as
a tool to access the twin neoliberal goals of visibility and economic success (Dobson
2007). The candid nature of the cam performance is highly valued as a form of intimate
connection, and cam performers are often placed in contrast to professional porn
396 E. VAN DER NAGEL

performers, regarded by their audiences as more authentic and accessible (Nayar 2017),
especially when the platformed connections include messaging as an interactive com-
ponent of the performance.
Despite camming being a logical background to the kind of NSFW content creation on
OnlyFans, the platform itself does not explicitly make this connection. The OnlyFans
tagline, ‘make your influence pay’, deliberately speaks to a broader culture of social
media influencers as internet celebrities who have monetized their fame (Abidin 2018).
In a post to the OnlyFans blog by staffer Steve, he implores influencers – not cammers
or sex workers – to sign up: ‘You create great content anyway and your fans love it, so
why deny yourself the chance to get paid for it?’ (Steve 2018a). Although a generous
interpretation of this framing might be that OnlyFans is working to destigmatize NSFW
content creation by including it as part of influencer and content creator practices, this
article argues that the OnlyFans corporate communication is strategically downplaying
the NSFW-related platform imaginary.
The terms of use agreement addresses content creators first, stating that OnlyFans
allows users to create a profile, upload photographs and videos, set a monthly subscrip-
tion price, ‘and thereby generate revenue from Fans’ (OnlyFans Terms 2021). While its
terms do not mention adult material specifically, use is limited to those aged 18 years
and over. And unlike many other platforms that explicitly ban nudity, including Facebook,
Instagram, and Tumblr, OnlyFans prohibits obscene, illegal, fraudulent, or harassing
content, and the promotion of escort services. There is no mention of nudity, making
this absence a tacit permission. In assuring users that the OnlyFans.com website works
well on mobile devices (OnlyFans Help 2021), it avoids listing the probable reason for
its lack of an app: that Apple bans overly sexual or pornographic material from its App
Store. Already, what OnlyFans does not say speaks loudly.
OnlyFans grew quickly during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April
2020, it saw a 75% increase in sign-ups, with an average of 200,000 accounts created
every day (López 2020). Journalists from Business Insider (López 2020) and Elle magazine
(Downs 2020) have declared the platform is now ‘mainstream’, both referring to its
growth and a mention of OnlyFans in a popular Beyoncé remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s
song ‘Savage’, which drove a 15% traffic increase to the platform in April 2020 (Stern
2020). But what does ‘going mainstream’ mean for OnlyFans, and how are imaginaries
built around a platform that emphasizes influence, but makes its money from adult
material? OnlyFans does not provide official information about who its top content crea-
tors are, potentially to avoid further associations with the adult industry – or potentially to
let a large number of creators brag that their content is highly ranked by the platform. It is
difficult to find accurate information on how much content creators earn, especially how
the income of NSFW creators differs from that of SFW creators. The Influencer Marketing
Hub wrote that ‘without any official figures, it can be challenging to discover the number
of content creators on OnlyFans’ (Geyser 2021), but draws from technology blogger
Thomas Hollands’ (2020) estimation that the median account earns US$180 a month.
Sex and relationships journalist Isabelle Kohn (2021) even wrote about the mystery of
the OnlyFans 1%, musing about the opacity of the rankings and how they are calculated:
by taking into account earnings, subscriber numbers, likes, how many times people re-
subscribe, or some combination of these factors? On third-party websites like OnlyFans
guide Follower (2021), profile browser OnlyFinder (2020), and the Influencer Marketing
 PORN STUDIES 397

Hub (2021), the same names come up again and again as popular creators: fitness instruc-
tor Jem Wolfie, model and socialite Blac Chyna, influencer and cosplayer Belle Delphine,
actress and model Bella Thorne, rapper and songwriter Cardi B, and model Mia Khalifa.
Each charges from US$5 to US$35 a month for access to their OnlyFans accounts, and
makes millions of dollars a month from their subscribers. Of these content creators,
only Delphine directly mentions that her content is NSFW on her OnlyFans page, although
Chyna asserts that she posts for ‘foot freaks’, pictures of feet being a common sexual
fetish. These high-earning, popular content creators are not all offering NSFW content,
but the popular platform imaginary of OnlyFans still focuses on NSFW to the exclusion
of most other kinds of posts.

Labour and creativity in NSFW social media

Adult, or NSFW, content creation is an essential part of what Stuart Cunningham and
David Craig (2019) call social media entertainment, an emerging industry of increasingly
professional content creators developing incomes based on interactivity between them-
selves, their audience, and social media platforms. NSFW content, including porn, has led
to much innovation in digital content creation and distribution, perhaps most notably by
being the driving force behind e-commerce (Perdue 2002; Barss 2010). While Cunning-
ham and Craig locate social media entertainment in the relationship between Hollywood
and Silicon Valley, adult content does not always belong in cinemas, on Facebook, or
make it to Netflix. NSFW content is often deplatformed: banned or deleted by social
media platforms as owners appeal to legal restrictions and advertisers who value broad
audiences (Molldrem 2018). Instagram (2021) forbids nudity, which includes ‘photos,
videos, and some digitally-created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and
close-ups of fully-nude buttocks’. As mentioned earlier, the Apple App Store (2021) in
its Safety section lists ‘overly sexual or pornographic material’ under Objectionable
Content – which is why OnlyFans does not have its own app.
Even some platforms that formerly embraced adult content, like Tumblr, or at least
did not specifically forbid it, like content subscription service Patreon, have been
known to change their policies. There have been many instances of technology compa-
nies strategically allowing sex work and NSFW content on platforms while growing their
user base, only to deplatform this kind of content later. Just one example is the ‘TikTok
purge’: after TikTok’s community guidelines were updated to forbid sexually explicit
content and offering sexual content, the platform banned accounts with links to Only-
Fans accounts (Dickson 2020). This deplatforming has been exacerbated by the Fight
Online Sex Traffickers Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA/SESTA),
passed in the USA in 2018. FOSTA/SESTA holds platforms responsible for content that
facilitates the crime of sex trafficking. To avoid legal consequences, Tumblr and other
platforms banned all adult material. This decision dismayed adult content creators
and their fans, who argued that the move disproportionately affected the most vulner-
able members of the NSFW community (Sybert 2021). Even before FOSTA/SESTA, many
payment companies refused to process transactions related to porn, which is classified
as a ‘high-risk’ industry because of its high rate of chargebacks when customers try to
deny they have purchased this material. This infrastructural exclusion only deepens
the stigma associated with sex work: NSFW content creators can be treated as not
398 E. VAN DER NAGEL

just engaging in high-risk transactions, but as high-risk people who can be denied all
kinds of payment services (Swartz 2020).
Platforms justify deplatforming adult content by claiming it stops the creation and dis-
tribution of sexual exploitation. But by making rules against adult content, platforms lose
valuable opportunities to challenge dominant representations of sex and sexuality, and
deny people enjoyable kinds of sexual exploration and experiences (Tiidenberg and
van der Nagel 2020). Jones (2020) argues that the most successful cam models provide
pleasure for others and themselves. While OnlyFans currently allows, and indeed makes
most of its profits from, NSFW content, there is already unease around the longevity of
this permission. Patreon’s unwillingness to engage a more permissive payment provider
meant banning content that includes sex acts like masturbation on screen. Adult perfor-
mers have expressed scepticism that OnlyFans will continue allowing NSFW content
indefinitely, wary of heavy-handed restrictions even as founder Stokely promised Only-
Fans is for every content creator (Ifeanyi 2021).
Deplatforming NSFW on OnlyFans would damage the social capital that content crea-
tors have built. But the way OnlyFans functions, not as a stand-alone platform, but as one
deeply conscious of a social media ecosystem in which people have accounts on multiple
platforms, does reflect the agility that content creators have had to develop in a rapidly
shifting platform culture. OnlyFans is designed for content creators who have an estab-
lished presence on other platforms. As OnlyFans allows for very limited searching, the
idea is that subscribers are coming from links on platforms like Twitter: the audiences
are already loyal. It is a dynamic that Feona Attwood (2012) was investigating nearly a
decade earlier in her studies of altporn: an amateur porn aesthetic aligned with sex-posi-
tivity and body-positivity, but also a practice of combining porn with non-sexual content
in a way that developed intimacy between creator and audience. Through blending sexu-
ally explicit images with blog posts, message boards, and chat rooms, Attwood situated
altporn within a broader participatory culture. This altporn logic emerges in the multimo-
dal, multi-platform practices of NSFW content creators who cannot have a successful
OnlyFans account without cross-promoting it on other platforms, but are not allowed
to post NSFW content on platforms like Instagram. Creators are even having to
contend with increasingly restrictive policies around not including direct links to OnlyFans
on Instagram or TikTok, having to find a balance between creating content that invites the
audience to follow them to OnlyFans and adhering to platform rules (Carman 2020).
NSFW content creators on OnlyFans are cultivating what Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012)
calls a self-brand, part of a neoliberal framework in which content creators demonstrate
their authenticity and build intimacy through presenting a commodified, consumable self
through social media. By doing so, content creators are performing two kinds of labour
that are crucial to the social media entertainment industry: relational labour and aspira-
tional labour. For Nancy Baym (2015, 2018), musicians that use public-facing social
media accounts to connect with their audiences are demonstrating relational labour:
newly demanded efforts in entrepreneurial self-presentation with the goal of fostering
relationships that lead to paid work. Baym notes that the relational labour of musicians
is unique, as they perform to crowds as well as communicating one-on-one with fans.
But there are parallels here with NSFW content creators, who are actively pursuing inti-
macy in their recorded performances and their interactions with subscribers. For musi-
cians and NSFW content creators with social media accounts that signal availability and
 PORN STUDIES 399

authenticity, the audience’s expectation is performances of genuine feeling, and the rela-
tional labour of connection. Continuing the connection with camming as a precursor to
OnlyFans, success in garnering a profitable audience for NSFW content creation depends
on pornographic excess in combination with an approachable platformed identity. Some-
times this identity performance directly references platform dynamics to evoke authen-
ticity: Sebastian Gorissen (2020) points to porn performer Asa Akira, who has captioned
a post on her members-only website ‘Things I Wish I Could Instagram’ as evidence of
an inter-platform, personal, performance-aware approach.
Content creators of all kinds undertake relational labour in order to achieve success,
most easily demonstrated through visibility, audience size, and profit. On OnlyFans, like
the rest of the social media entertainment industry, this success is uneven. The most suc-
cessful OnlyFans creators are also the most visible, obscuring the majority of accounts on
OnlyFans who have few or no subscribers. Brooke Erin Duffy’s (2016) concept of aspira-
tional labour pulls into focus the disparity between who achieves success in this industry
and who does not. Duffy calls aspirational labour a forward-looking form of creative cul-
tural production that is not immediately compensated, but has the potential to be in the
future. She is mostly describing fashion and beauty content creators, but NSFW content
creation is arguably another feminized field in which aspirational labour takes place. The
few content creators who achieve success in terms of making content creation their full-
time occupation tend to enjoy a relatively privileged position (Duffy 2015). On OnlyFans,
the top creators I introduced earlier were already popular on other platforms before mon-
etizing this visibility through OnlyFans.
This section has outlined the context for the platform imaginary of OnlyFans. Content
creation always requires relational labour, and often involves aspirational labour as crea-
tors strive for success. Doing this work in the context of the ongoing deplatforming of
NSFW content, while OnlyFans does not emphasize its NSFW creators as the driving
force of the platform, makes it a precarious, unevenly experienced form of work. Deplat-
forming and labour dynamics inform the variety of experiences of OnlyFans content crea-
tors that are not always part of the platform imaginary, which, as the next sections
illustrate, centres around misogynistic ideas of women making easy money through
NSFW content.

Methods: feminist content analysis of media texts from, and about,

OnlyFans
To answer my research question – how is the platform imaginary of OnlyFans created and
contested, and where can we see this platform imaginary at work? – I needed to find
where people were learning what OnlyFans was for. I used a feminist content analysis
that paid attention to mediated discourse about platforms, on platforms, and from plat-
forms, so my corpus of media texts draws from news articles, memes, and the OnlyFans
blog.
Platform imaginaries shape what social actors think about, and do, in relation to a plat-
form (van Es and Poell 2020). OnlyFans’ social actors include content creators and subscri-
bers as end users, but also OnlyFans’ owners and staff, journalists, potential creators,
partners and children of creators, and users of other platforms who advance commentary
on OnlyFans as a cultural phenomenon. Feminists who critically analyze media texts as
400 E. VAN DER NAGEL

cultural products are challenging patriarchal understandings of social reality that down-
play women’s perspectives (Leavy 2007), so in my feminist content analysis of media texts
about OnlyFans I considered these social actors. I asked whose perspective the media
texts illuminated, who was cast as the expert on OnlyFans, and who took on a position
of authority as they circulated assumptions about the platform. To find out, I systemati-
cally collected 100 news articles and 100 memes about OnlyFans, and 100 posts to the
official OnlyFans blog.
My collection of 100 news articles about OnlyFans was retrieved from news database
Factiva. I sorted the 787 results for the keyword ‘onlyfans’ in the headline and lead para-
graph chronologically, and then selected every eighth article. I was interested in how the
articles introduced OnlyFans as a platform, and if they interviewed or quoted a content
creator. Most were from UK tabloid publications: 56 of the 100 articles were from the
Daily Star and Daily Mail, perhaps because OnlyFans is based in London.
I searched Google Images for the keywords ‘onlyfans’ and ‘meme’, and saved the first
100 memes the Google Image search returned. I excluded memes that did not bear any
discernible relevance to OnlyFans (acknowledging that the relevance could be an in-joke
not understood by me). Memes are media texts that shape social mindsets by reflecting
deep social and cultural structures. For Limor Shifman (2014), internet memes are a kind of
postmodern folklore, and can tell us about digital culture. Shifman argues that stance is
important to the way memes circulate: the stance of a meme is how the meme creator as
the ‘speaker’ positions themselves, uses language and linguistic codes, and how they
address the meme’s subject. For each meme, I recorded my interpretation of what the
meme was implying about OnlyFans, taking note of whose perspective the meme was
from.
The OnlyFans blog has been posting content from OnlyFans staff since August 2018,
offering tips for content creators on how to make the most out of the platform, and
occasionally profiling creators. By March 2021, there were 160 blog posts available, so I
sorted them chronologically and omitted every third post to create my collection of
100 posts. I noted which kinds of creators featured in these posts, and whether they men-
tioned NSFW content, to see whose perspectives were being addressed by OnlyFans staff.

Racy snaps, misogyny, and advice: platform imaginaries of OnlyFans

Conducting my analysis of this corpus of media texts meant reading and interpreting each
text for meaning, and recording the stance of the text, or how the person whose perspec-
tive was represented imagined OnlyFans. This section presents the results of the feminist
content analysis: the news articles imagined OnlyFans as a platform for ‘racy snaps’; the
memes exhibited popular misogyny from the perspective of an OnlyFans subscriber,
critic, or partner of a creator; and the OnlyFans blog addressed a content creator from
the stance of a supportive platform giving advice on how to garner a profitable audience.

News articles: profiling creators and their ‘racy snaps’

Tabloid news publications most often mentioned OnlyFans when they were profiling a
content creator: typical headlines were ‘OnlyFans Babe Who Earns Fortune from her
Racy Snaps Spills on “Naughty Secret”’ (Younan 2020) and ‘Brit Quits 9–5 Office Job to
 PORN STUDIES 401

Sell Sexy Snaps Online – and She’s on Track to Earn £1m’ (Roberts 2020). One article from
the Daily Star read:
A successful Instagram model with 1.6 million followers has shared her tricks for making it in
the business. Victoria Banxxx, 36, posts revealing content to her massive fanbase online
where she earns up to £16,100 a month. She explained: ‘My OnlyFans followers know I
have a naughty secret – a special thing I do called the ‘Cam Voice’. You’ll just have to tune
in. (Younan 2020)

News articles often emphasized how lucrative it was to post on OnlyFans: 39 articles men-
tioned how much income the content creator made per month, and the figures were
often disproportionately high compared with the median monthly earnings of content
creators. Almost all money on OnlyFans is made by the top creators: while, as previously
mentioned, the median account makes US$180 a month, this is skewed by the top earners
(Hollands 2020). The top 1% of accounts make 33% of the money. This had the effect of
highlighting OnlyFans creators as newsworthy because of their unusual – and unusually
lucrative – occupation, but by interviewing the content creators, these publications were
also framing the content creation work they did in their own terms. Giving interviews to
UK tabloids about their OnlyFans accounts is also part of the relational labour that content
creators perform: commenting ‘you’ll just have to tune in’ addresses a potential new sub-
scriber, revealing the overlap between OnlyFans subscribers and audiences of the Daily
Star, as well as the mutually beneficial relationship between interviewed content creators
and tabloid news publications. News, even tabloid news, is an important site in which
social realities are produced, and 46 of the 100 articles did the work of producing an ima-
ginary of OnlyFans by describing what the platform was with a descriptor, effectively
introducing a new platform to their audience. Table 1 presents the range of descriptors
used for OnlyFans: 30 articles emphasized OnlyFans’ NSFW content in the descriptor,

Table 1. Descriptors for OnlyFans from the news articles.

Emphasizing NSFW Downplaying NSFW
Adult entertainment site Alternative social media platform
Adult membership platform Content site
Adult platform Content subscription service
Adult subscription site Paid subscription platform
Adults-only subscription platform Paid subscription service
Adults-only subscription site Paid subscription social media platform
Adult subscription website Subscription service
Celebrity porn app Subscription website
Controversial website Subscription-based platform
Global pornography phenomenon Subscription-based website
Modern-day peep-a-view
Notorious subscription site
Paid subscription platform known for its adult and NSFW content
Pay-per-view adult subscription site
Racy site
Racy subscription service
Racy subscription site
Subscription-based adult website
X-rated site
X-rated subscription platform
X-rated subscription site
X-rated website
402 E. VAN DER NAGEL

and 16 downplayed the NSFW aspect of the platform by using a more neutral descriptor
like ‘content’ or ‘subscription’.
Calling OnlyFans a ‘porn app’, ‘racy site’, or ‘X-rated subscription platform’ positions the
platform in a particular way. Adult content may often be deplatformed on social media,
but news, especially tabloid news, still evokes the X-rated as a way to grab attention by
promising a salacious story. ‘Adult ratings involve a considerable degree of allure,
affording media products a scent of forbidden fruit’, argue Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light
(2019, 5). To refer to OnlyFans as an adult platform in its entirety, instead of using a
more neutral descriptor like ‘subscription-based platform’, means drawing on the risky
reputation of the NSFW while maintaining a safe distance from adult content. The
NSFW is both alluring and repelling (Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light 2019) – just like the
way nude selfies of women invite desire and evoke gendered dynamics of sexual
shame at the same time. Moving from news articles to memes about OnlyFans means illu-
minating gendered shame as part of the platform imaginary.

Memes: popular misogyny

For Banet-Weiser (2018), popular misogyny responds to and challenges the increasing
visibility of popular feminism. I do not mean to set up OnlyFans as an inherently feminist
platform or practice, as there are a variety of approaches to OnlyFans. But the agency and
control that women have over choosing what content to post, and being paid 80% of
their subscription fees, has sparked a misogynistic backlash. Memes often claim that par-
ticipation on OnlyFans is shameful, that the content is not worth the money, and that
content creators must be in service of the male desire for expensive gadgets like the
PlayStation 5. One meme sets out the platform imaginary most often drawn on by
jokes and cultural references about OnlyFans: a three-panel image of a white man
closing his eyes in disbelief, a popular reaction image to express incredulity known as
Blinking White Guy (Know Your Meme 2015). The caption reads ‘me when I sign up for
OnlyFans and see pictures of naked girls instead of ceiling fans’ (Cheezburger 2020), a
pun on ‘fans’ as well as ironically implying the expected content: pictures of naked girls.
Importantly for my investigation of whose perspectives of OnlyFans are considered
when constructing the platform imaginary, only 23 of the 100 memes were written
from the perspective of a content creator. The remaining memes were from the perspec-
tive of an OnlyFans subscriber (22 memes); a critic of the OnlyFans phenomenon (16
memes); a partner of a content creator (14 memes); an observer of the OnlyFans phenom-
enon (12 memes); a potential content creator, someone who was considering joining the
platform (nine memes); a child of a content creator (three memes); and a friend of a
content creator (one meme). There are complex politics of objectification here. One
notable trend involved men with women content creators as partners who were
helping them create content, usually by filming or photographing them, in order to
use the money to buy a PlayStation 5 or similar gadget. These memes usually included
images that expressed reluctance in doing so: one meme, captioned ‘Me helping my
girl film for her OnlyFans’, is a photograph of an unsmiling man holding up a phone,
staring straight ahead, a tear rolling down his cheek (dopl3r 2021). Many memes referred
to content creators as ‘thots’, ‘bitches’, or ‘Instahoes’; implied that children of content
creators will be bullied or shamed; and condoned image-based abuse through the
 PORN STUDIES 403

practice of leaking content. The overall inference that OnlyFans memes communicated so
often was that women degrade themselves through NSFW content creation on OnlyFans
to make easy money – although these creators are also exhibiting agency and control
over how they are seen by their subscribers, which is evidence that they are, in fact,
active subjects (Paasonen et al. 2021). Men who are making memes that foreground
the impact of their women partners’ OnlyFans content creation on them are slut-
shaming, a practice that aims to control women by pushing them to conform to tra-
ditional, heterosexual norms of sexual behaviour – selectivity, controlled desire, passivity,
and monogamy (Levey 2018).
Identifying that the platform imaginary of OnlyFans is grounded in a misogynistic,
patriarchal framework helps us understand why the corporate communication of Only-
Fans seeks to downplay its NSFW creators: the practice of creating NSFW content is not
perceived as valuable or even legitimate. Rather than support these creators by promot-
ing their work, the OnlyFans blog strategically highlights its Safe for Work creators.

OnlyFans blog posts: corporate communication and the attempt to mainstream

the platform
Most of the blog posts are addressed to content creators from the platform, with one
article directly addressing agencies and talent managers. There are links at the bottom
of articles asking readers to join OnlyFans as a content creator. Here, the OnlyFans staff
and popular creators are positioned as the experts. An interview with tattoo artist
Sydney Dyer includes advice to creators just starting out: ‘go for it. If you love yourself
and are confident then dive in and rock it!’ (Chad 2020).
The vast majority of OnlyFans blog posts – 87 out of 100 – do not mention NSFW
content. Instead, they showcase fitness instructors, photographers, artists, actors,
gamers, musicians, comedians, and writers. When NSFW content was mentioned in a
creator profile, it tended to be downplayed, as in the case of Gustavo, who described
himself as a ‘young entrepreneur, polyglot and OnlyFans creator’, and mentioned Only-
Fans was a ‘riskier path’ he chose to take instead of his ‘respectable’ job (Gustavo
2020). One blog post deliberately attempted to distance the platform from NSFW
content, defensively suggesting:
OnlyFans has been the subject of media articles focussed on content creators from the
glamour and adult entertainment industry. However, the reality is that OnlyFans hosts a
wide array of influencers from many different industries across the world. (Steve 2018b)

Comments on blog posts are almost exclusively content creators linking to their own
OnlyFans page, which initially seemed to demonstrate a confusion around who might
be reading these blog posts: creators or fans? But the OnlyFans blog encourages creators
to follow other creators – ostensibly for research, but of course this also involves them
becoming customers of the platform by subscribing to paid accounts.
This section has presented dominant imaginaries of OnlyFans, emphasizing its
expected use and illuminating the heteronormative, patriarchal culture in which it
exists. But as Stuart Hall ([1981] 2019) tells us, resistance is also part of culture. The
next section visits sites of resistance to the platform imaginary of OnlyFans to argue
that there is potential for the platform to push back against these misogynistic framings
404 E. VAN DER NAGEL

of NSFW content creation, and even to purse a communications strategy that champions
NSFW as OnlyFans moves further into the mainstream.

Competing imaginaries and the stakes of being rendered invisible by

OnlyFans
Each context in which OnlyFans features frames the platform in a different way: news as
the object of titillation and intrigue; memes as a site of gendered shame, stigma, and
slut-shaming; and blogs as corporate communication that emphasizes its Safe for Work
content creators. These competing imaginaries push and pull broader public under-
standings of what OnlyFans is for: lucrative hobby for beginning content creators or
additional revenue stream for celebrities? Degrading pastime for ‘Instahoes’ or legiti-
mate source of income and creative expression? Porn or make-up tutorials? In addition
to each kind of media contributing its own platform imaginary, within each set of
media texts I analyzed there was also resistance to the dominant understandings of
OnlyFans.

Resistance
In her guide to the feminist practice of content analysis, Leavy (2007) suggests that media
texts in a patriarchal society are likely to contain gendered ideas about social reality – but
that media texts can also be sources of resistance to these ideas. For Banet-Weiser (2018),
popular feminism and popular misogyny are opposed to each other and constantly
fighting for visibility in a culture where visibility is a key logic in terms of who matters.
This struggle, and indeed all struggles between conflicting forces to control culture, is
explained by cultural theorist Stuart Hall ([1981] 2019) as a double movement: wherever
there is a dominant culture, there is resistance.
The assumption that OnlyFans creators are heterosexual women was challenged by a
meme that used four images of Vince McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment Chair
and CEO, looking increasingly amazed, each frame showing a more exaggerated facial
expression as he demonstrates his enthusiasm. ‘He’s got an Insta’, the first frame is cap-
tioned, followed by ‘He’s on Twitter/He’s got an OnlyFans/He’s having a SALE’. The
whole meme is captioned ‘Gay irl’ (Me.me 2020). While the assumption that OnlyFans
is for NSFW content is still there, this reframes the expected content in terms of homo-
erotic desire: a man’s enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing another man naked.
Another meme directly addresses the slut-shaming exhibited in other memes with a
campaign photograph of US politician Bernie Sanders, captioned ‘I am once again
asking people to consider the stigmatization of sex work when joking about OnlyFans’
(Ritchart 2020). These memes challenge the dominant imaginary of OnlyFans as a plat-
form where women create NSFW content for men, and where men can simultaneously
enjoy the content and shame its creators.
Among the OnlyFans blog posts, only seven explicitly addressed NSFW, or ‘lewd’
content creators. These exceptions to the often defensive or avoidant stance the
OnlyFans blog usually took contributed immensely to the destigmatizing of NSFW
content creators. A blog post on pole dancers describes it as an ‘art form that
takes an extraordinary amount of strength, sass, dedication and talent’. The post
 PORN STUDIES 405

contrasts OnlyFans’ approach to Instagram deplatforming pole dancing content, like

banning pole dancing-related hashtags by insisting ‘OnlyFans is proud to have a
range of pole creators on our platform […] We will support you and never censor
you!’ (Mascetti 2019a). This is evidence that there is room for OnlyFans to highlight
its NSFW creators.

Mainstreaming
The OnlyFans popular platform imaginary currently centres on women selling NSFW
content. While adult content remains stigmatized (Voss 2015), how will OnlyFans continue
the move from a novelty into a familiar part of the social media landscape? One unlikely,
but possible, potential future involves OnlyFans embracing its NSFW content by openly
declaring that NSFW content creators are welcome, positioning NSFW content creators
as creative experts on the blog, and providing tools for transparent data about income,
followers, and rankings. This strategy could take inspiration from Pornhub, which since
2013 has endeavoured to reframe porn consumption as socially acceptable (Rodeschini
2021). Pornhub has combined the corporate responsibility of philanthropy with playfully
drawing on a pornographic vernacular, notably by fundraising for a breast cancer charity
by donating when people viewed porn from the ‘big tits’ or ‘small tits’ categories. The
public relations stunt promoted Pornhub as a mainstream entertainment brand, with
porn consumption a leisure activity (Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light 2019). But as Silvia
Rodeschini (2021) argues, making porn consumption more socially acceptable does not
improve working conditions for porn performance. Another gendered dynamic is at
work when men are far less stigmatized for consuming porn than women are for
making it.
NSFW content creation is likely to remain a stigmatized form of labour, as long as
the news media continue to focus on the worst cases of abuse, and conflate all sex
work with human trafficking and exploitation (Weitzer 2018). For example, a BBC
news investigation criticized OnlyFans for not having strong enough age verification
systems to prevent children selling explicit content through the platform (Titheradge
and Croxford 2021). In an attempt to distance the platform’s reputation from
attempts to cast it as a hub for sexual exploitation, another potential future for Only-
Fans opens up: deplatforming NSFW altogether to mainstream the platform as a
content creation hub. In early 2021, OnlyFans developed an app that was acceptable
for the Apple App Store by launching OnlyFans TV, a streaming platform that only
allows Safe for Work content, and announced a creative fund that will initially
provide £20,000 grants to four UK artists in the music industry (Griffin 2021). In
mid-2021, OnlyFans announced that it would begin prohibiting sexually explicit
content (Shaw 2021), but withdrew the intended ban a week later, claiming to
have ‘secured assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community’ (Only-
Fans 2021). In the tweeted statement, neither adult content nor sex workers were
mentioned, just the generic term ‘creators’ – another sign that OnlyFans is deliber-
ately constructing a plausible distance between itself and NSFW content, sex
workers, and porn performers. These are all moves which signal that NSFW content
remains under threat on OnlyFans, which has the potential to exacerbate the existing
harm done to NSFW content creators.
406 E. VAN DER NAGEL

The stakes of being a NSFW content creator rendered invisible by a platform

As Angela Jones (2020) reminds us, camming is an industry in which people find decent
wages, friendship, intimacy, community, empowerment, and pleasure – and exploitation,
discrimination, harassment, and stigma. As a platform capable of highlighting and show-
casing its successful NSFW content creators, especially within an existing platform imagin-
ary that understands OnlyFans as a NSFW-first space, to ignore these content creators
continues an ongoing pattern of discrimination. Georgina Voss’ (2015) work on the por-
nography industry argues that those who are stigmatized because of their work in porno-
graphy risk taking on a devalued identity, which means being socially discredited and less
able to access social, economic, and political resources as a result. The stigma that comes
from working in adult industries often comes from a perceived incompatibility between
what Viviana Zelizer (2005) calls two ‘hostile worlds’: economic activity and intimacy,
which are seen to corrupt each other – but Zelizer instead argues that the economy
and intimacy can actually sustain each other. Denying NSFW content creators the
chance to be featured, promoted, and supported by OnlyFans denies these creators
opportunities to find their audience, and this discrimination can extend to other platforms
and contexts as well. NSFW content creators having their Safe for Work TikTok account of
dance routines with friends deleted because of the connection with OnlyFans (Dickson
2020) is an example of NSFW content creators not just being invisible to OnlyFans’ brand-
ing efforts, but being denied the freedom to represent themselves on social media on
their own terms, make content, make a living, connect with others, and live a public
life free from stigma and shame.

Conclusion
This article has taken on a feminist content analysis to argue that the contested platform
imaginary of OnlyFans means its NSFW content creators are marginalized through an
emphasis on more traditional creatives. NSFW creators have been important to the
growth of the platform from its launch in 2016 to 2021, especially during increased inter-
est in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Through a content analysis of news articles, memes,
and blog posts about OnlyFans, I have provided evidence of a popular platform imaginary
that casts OnlyFans as a place for women to show off sexually and make easy money,
usually viewed through a misogynistic lens of women degrading themselves in the
process. This imaginary is strategically downplayed by official communication from Only-
Fans, which emphasizes its Safe for Work content creators in an effort to gain broader
appeal and therefore a larger subscriber base. Attempting to steer the platform imaginary
away from NSFW is likely part of a long-term strategy to eventually remove NSFW content.
This analysis supported my argument that OnlyFans not actively supporting NSFW
content creators means profiting from their labour while minimizing their creative contri-
butions to the platform, denying them opportunities, and further entrenching the stigma
of working in adult industries.
Giving NSFW creators a voice is an important part of future research on OnlyFans and
NSFW content creation. A limitation of this article is that I have not spoken directly with
NSFW content creators, which will be important for future research into OnlyFans, and to
other platforms that offer NSFW content. Future research can build on this foundation of
 PORN STUDIES 407

the platform imaginary of OnlyFans to ask content creators about their experiences with
the platform. This could include questions around how content creators knew what the
platform was for, what made them sign up, how they make decisions around how to
present themselves, what to post, and how to cross-promote their OnlyFans account
on other social media platforms. As Alan McKee (2006) has discovered, insights from
those consuming porn are also important, and there is also room to survey or interview
OnlyFans subscribers to see what draws them to, and keeps them on, the platform. This
could expand the work done in OnlyFans blog post ‘What Do Fans Want From an Only-
Fans Creator?’ (Mascetti 2019b), which found that engaging, relatable personalities
draw in subscribers who already follow the creator on other platforms and want to
support them to keep producing content.
Platform imaginaries help us understand the foundation of platform cultures. For now,
the platform imaginary of OnlyFans that emerges through meme culture reveals a persist-
ent misogyny in the framing of NSFW content creation. But imaginaries, especially of plat-
forms still becoming part of the mainstream, also contain resistant ideas and practices.
The platform imaginary of OnlyFans has the potential to be challenged by meme
makers, social media users, journalists, academics, platform owners, corporate communi-
cators, critics, and content creators: they are all actors that push and pull the imaginary to
contribute to what a platform is for. While platform imaginaries can guide our thinking
about what is possible on a platform, including more perspectives on, and experiences
with, platform use will give us a fuller picture.

Submission statement
This article is not being considered for publication by any other journal. This research
received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

ORCID
Emily van der Nagel http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2994-4542

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