When thinking of the impact of COVID-19 one will quickly mention its devastating consequences for artists, theatres, restaurants and even airlines... But how has COVID impacted sex work? While strip clubs and shoots have been shut down, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased both demand and supply for pornographic content online. And the platform OnlyFans is the perfect example.
Dannii Harwood, an OnlyFans content creator
©Molly Matalon for The New York Times
While 2020 has been a catastrophic year for many enterprises, there is one company that has profited immensely off of the pandemic. OnlyFans.
The online platform OnlyFans was created in 2016 as a means of providing subscribers with restricted access content to their favourite creators. In other words, users pay monthly subscriptions to those content creators, who receive 80% of collected fees, and in turn produce exclusive content for their subscribers.
How does OnlyFans relate to sex work?
When the term “sex work” pops up, one generally relates it directly to prostitution, or monetary sexual services and exchanges. Yet, this term encompasses a broader range of activities, and could be defined as “the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for material compensation. It includes activities of direct physical contact between buyers and sellers as well as indirect sexual stimulation”(Weitzer, 2000).
Although it is not officially related to sex work, the vast majority of the content available on OnlyFans falls into the second category, meaning “indirect sexual stimulation”. Indeed, OnlyFans is famous for hosting mainly sexual and pornographic photos or videos.
Subscribers, mostly male, pay influencers, models, celebrities, and even pornstars, a fee ranging from $5 to $20 a month to access pictures and videos that would be censored on Instagram. For an extra fee, they can ask content creators for private clips or photos, often according to their sexual preferences.
OnlyFans’ economic boom
As the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have made us spend more time at home, they have also increased our online usage. Whilst it’s easy to assume that companies such as Netflix and other streaming sites would profit off of this, as it turns out, they were not the only ones. The digital pornography industry has flourished, and OnlyFans was no exception. In fact, both OnlyFans’ subscriber and creator count have skyrocketed during the pandemic.
In December 2020, the count was up to 90 million users and more than one million content creators. Considering the fact that this number didn’t go any higher than 120 000 in 2019, such growth is exponential.
In addition to this, the company’s LinkedIn headcount went from 78 in April 2020 to 455 in February 2021 - an increase of 483% in less than a year - a raise that most likely traces back to the platform’s need for management.
The new face of sex work
The popularity of OnlyFans and the significant rise in its figures can be explained by the fact that the platform has revolutionised sex work.
OnlyFans was created at a time of turmoil for the porn industry, when most porn actors and actresses were unable to make a living from their activity. Not only did the platform allow them - and newcomers - to stay afloat and potentially increase their revenue, it also offered a new alternative to porn consumers. By paying and accessing private content, OnlyFans subscribers have a more “intimate experience,” one that is personally designed for them.
Turning to OnlyFans to survive the pandemic
However, the significant increase in the number of content creators hides a more uncomfortable truth.
The pandemic has pushed hundreds of thousands of households and individuals into precarious economic positions, more specifically affecting women by taking a devastating toll on the economic sectors - retail businesses, restaurants and health care - where female workers were prominent.
In the US, due the lack of financial support packages from government, women flowed into online sex work to get their financial security and independence back. While unemployment figures were rising dramatically in the country, and non-essential economic sectors were shutting down, OnlyFans’s creator and overall user numbers tripled to more than 1 million and 90 million, respectively, with approximately 500,000 people now signing up everyday.
Be it struggling mothers, non-essential workers, or employees whose pay was reduced, many turned to OnlyFans to get through the COVID-19 pandemic as a source of financial security. The same goes for “regular” sex workers, for whom the platform became a safety net, since nightclubs and stripclubs were shut down or off of business.
As a result, while most economic activity was slowing down, OnlyFans’ numbers were skyrocketing, According to the Japan Times, the company is becoming a “billion-dollar media giant”, which paid over $2 billion to content creators to date.
Controversies
Just like any other type of sex work, the platform is a topic up for debate within the feminist movement.
From a more liberal standpoint, creating content on OnlyFans is considered as an empowering experience: it is a way for creators to reclaim their body, to go against the socially constructed idea that the female body and women’s sexuality should be private and shameful. Publishing pornographic videos or photos on OnlyFans is a choice that no one can deny nor criticise.
Yet, as we've previously shown, falling into online sex work during a pandemic and an economic crisis is not always a matter of choice as much as a financial necessity for many women. Not only that, many OnlyFans content creators report having suffered from stigma and are afraid of others’ reactions to their activity. Indeed, hate, slut-shaming and sexual harassment is part of the daily lives of several creators.
Hence why, from a radical perspective, OnlyFans might not be empowering in any aspect. Indeed, we are bound to find, yet again, the resounding expression of patriarchy in a capitalist society, which profits off women’s economic vulnerability and turns female bodies into monetary products, whose ultimate purpose is to satisfy men’s desires and fantasies.
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