Why does OnlyFans have so few critics on the left?

OnlyFans is the same as any other porn platform or brothel: it enables a small minority of mostly men to get rich from the exploitation of women. What’s remarkable, though, is not that another business is making money from sexism, but that so few progressives are interested in criticising it.

The leftist magazine Jacobin, for example, ran an article in 2021 about the site, much of which reads like an OnlyFans infomercial. It argues against measures to ensure that people appearing in adult content videos are doing so consensually and makes no mention of OnlyFans’ role in manufacturing misogyny and sexism. An article written for Queer Majority magazine likewise defends sex work as providing “many with the means of caring for themselves and facilitating the freedom to make their own decisions”. But there is nothing to defend, and certainly nothing progressive about OnlyFans nor the industry it is part of.

For the uninitiated, OnlyFans is a subscription-based DIY porn site which exploded into the mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic. As people spent more time at home and on their phones on Instagram and TikTok, and men were no longer able to access brothels and strip clubs, OnlyFans became a convenient substitute. In 2020, it was estimated there were over a million content creators on the platform; now that number has swelled to around 4 million. The company, which is currently owned by billionaire Leonid Radvinsky and is reportedly for sale, is estimated to be worth anything between $8 billion and $28 billion.

The rise of OnlyFans is part of the wider normalisation of pornography and its increasing accessibility. Violent and degrading treatment of women in much of this material is widespread: one landmark study of 300 popular porn videos found that nearly 90 percent of them featured physical aggression towards women. This has real world implications. As Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl, argues, “inevitably, these kinds of behaviours [filter] out, leading to demonstrable changes in how people [are] having sex in their own lives. A 2019 study found that 38 percent of British women under 40 reported having experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during sex”.

OnlyFans content is contributing to the normalisation and spread of harmful sexual practices, partly because in order to attract more “subs”, creators are pushed to create more shocking and sensational content. This content helps creators increase their market share and make more money, but also usually involves more misogynistic content. This is the logic of market competition, and, as in every other area, the market is willing to do anything for money. This includes the sexualisation of children or the promotion of paedophilic fantasies—many OnlyFans content creators act in “childlike” ways to attract viewers or dress in school uniforms or other children’s clothing. These practices are lucrative business opportunities for OnlyFans creators and bosses, which is much more important than the fact that the real-world sexualisation of children destroys untold numbers of lives.

It seems like a no-brainer that progressives who oppose sexism should recognise the viciously sexist nature of sites like OnlyFans and the porn industry in general. So why is it that when you Google “OnlyFans sexism”, the majority of articles that are critical are from conservatives on the Christian right or radical feminists, who are mostly not associated with the radical left.

There are myriad reasons why the left has been reluctant to take up the issue of porn and the sex industry. One is the hangover of the debates about pornography that took place in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, the debate was between the libertarians, who were for no intervention, censorship or restrictions, and those who, like the radical feminists, teamed up with conservatives to campaign for the state to intervene to restrict the import and availability of pornography. In response to this unholy alliance, much of the left sided with the former, seeing “censorship” and “prudishness” as the greater evil.

This camp championed “choice” for women, and argued that people who were hostile to things such as BDSM, fetish, sex work and the porn industry as sexist were reactionaries who shamed women and men who were just acting out their sexual desires in consensual ways.

These positions were more defensible at the time than they are now. Opposition to the state exercising more control over people’s lives, for example, was and continues to be a legitimate concern for the left. Another valid concern was that state repression and censorship would be used by reactionaries to target the LGBTI community, and that gay porn and erotica would end up banned rather than sexist and misogynistic content. Yet another was the assumption that the main issue facing women was their being siloed off into a domestic, motherly stereotype and having their sexuality denied in the process, which more repression would reinforce.

The explosion of the sex industry since these debates several decades ago has shown these concerns to be largely erroneous, and that the intensification of sexism, not some sort of sexual liberation, has been the most important upshot and social negative of the normalisation of porn. The legacy of progressives having a one-sided approach to these questions historically is now reflected in a widespread acceptance of the sex industry and downplaying of the sexism inherent in it.

Progressive-sounding justifications for the sex industry are now commonplace among much of the left. One of these is that porn, the sex industry and kink are OK if they take place between consenting adults. But the oppressed consenting to degrading and dehumanising practices doesn’t make them OK or any less oppressive; it just indicates an acceptance of aspects of oppression.

A focus on consent and the subjective attitudes of participants also doesn’t address the wider social ramifications of the sex industry and its offshoots, or the question of how and why people come to find dynamics of power and violence sexually gratifying. These are important considerations for anyone interested in challenging sexism and uniting the working class to smash oppression and liberate the oppressed.

Another justification is that it is prudish or “busybody”ish to interrogate the ways that women’s oppression is expressed and reinforced in the porn and sex industry. It has become taboo to address the issue, and doing so brings with it the risk of being labelled anti-sex. But there is nothing necessarily left wing, liberating or empowering about sex, and sex has and is used as a means of abuse in epidemic proportions. How sexuality is expressed is also closely linked to how women and men relate to each other, and navigate the systematic social inequality that invariably colours their relationships. So sex has to be understood in its social context, not just blindly championed.

But it’s even worse than that. Many progressives now see sex work as not just a better alternative to prudery, but proactively empowering. They argue that it is the stigma that makes it a problem, not the inherent sexism, and that removing the stigma is desirable so that women can be better exploited without social disapproval. We shouldn’t critique the industry, in other words; we should promote and normalise it.

Obviously, women in the industry should not be demonised, attacked or criminalised. But at the same time, an industry that relies on the eroticisation of non-consensual sex and dehumanised attitudes towards women should legitimately be stigmatised. Its existence has terrible consequences for women and men, and the dynamics between them. Porn and sex work creates a society that is increasingly sexist and tolerant of sexist attitudes and behaviour, which is a profoundly reactionary development.

The sex industry bosses and promoters have done a lot of work to sanitise the image of porn and sex work. In her book Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self, Kajsa Ekis Ekman explores the way this happened over the last few decades. One of the things she points to is the way that the act of sex and the men who are buying sex are never mentioned in accounts of the sex industry written to portray it in a positive light. Discussing an article written by a defender of the sex industry, she writes, “If we didn’t know better, we might think prostitution was a strictly female affair. There is hardly a single word about men”. By not discussing the men, we don’t have to imagine the disgusting men who objectify women by masturbating to images of them, or purchase them for sex.

One agency that manages OnlyFans accounts argued against stigmatising the agencies! “Part of the problem is not accepting sex work as work. This mainly affects the cis women and the LGBTQ+ community, who are often the target of nasty comments and vitriol from those who don’t understand the freedom gained from their sexual liberation.” This is a particularly galling example of a business using progressive language to defend their business model. Agencies, as well as the men who purchase sex, should experience social stigma. Not because sex is something that people should be ashamed of, but because these agencies and men are engaging in sexist, abusive and exploitative behaviours.

The reality of sex work and platforms such as OnlyFans is that they have nothing to do with empowerment and everything to do with a pro-capitalist ideology, summed up by “hustle culture”. According to those on the “grindset”, if you’re not making money via your social media, your body, your house, your car or your ability to do jobs in your spare time, you are failing. For women, the rationale to sell sex online is that if they are going to have sex anyway, they may as well profit from it. Everything is a potential transaction. As it was put in the Atlantic, “it’s considered better to monetize your objectification than endure it without compensation”. The sort of mentality this promotes is directly at odds with the ethos of the workers’ movement, which is that our work is collective and interdependent, as are our incomes and standard of life. This is the material reality that unites workers and many of the oppressed. Seeing ourselves as one-person small businesses runs directly counter to that.

Some women may earn large amounts of money engaging in OnlyFans, but this is not empowerment. Empowerment would mean liberation. That does not mean men having the right to sex or to women’s bodies. We need to fight for a society where women are not systematically oppressed, where they’re not constantly objectified and treated as sex objects. It’s clear that OnlyFans is nothing but a reactionary capitalist industry—it should be a no-brainer for the left to grasp that and to be confident to argue to smash it.