In the second season of the series Bronca, Josh (Oscar Isaac) is the manager of a country club going through a midlife crisis. Things are not going well with his wife, played by Carey Mulligan, and his almost only consolation is the moments of self-pleasure he gets with his laptop, always connected to Onlyfans.
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If Josh were a real person with a credit card in his name, he would be one of the 377.5 million users of that platform, who spend more than 6 billion euros a year keeping it afloat. Although the website was born in 2016 as an example of the so-called “creator economy” and was intended for athletes, influencers, and comedians, the founders took less than a year to lift the ban on pornographic content. And so Onlyfans became what it is now, the largest network for circulating sexual videos in the world, and a place where, unlike traditional porn, the subscriber and the creator can interact via chat.
In fiction, introducing a plot around Onlyfans has become a way to raise issues around sex work, economic precariousness, and what society expects from young women. Even before the highly debated third season of Euphoria, now airing on HBO Max, a frame of one of its lead actresses, Sidney Sweeney, had already sparked controversy on social media. She was seen dressed as a sexy baby, wearing diapers, and spreading her legs in front of a camera. Cassie, the name of Sweeney’s character in the series, now lives in a McMansion in the suburbs with her partner, Nate (Jacob Elordi), but wants to pay for a big wedding that is not “ghetto,” and for that, she uploads videos to Onlyfans, dressed as a baby or a puppy.
Levinson is accused of applying a misogynistic view on the matter, of looking for an excuse to shoot scenes with an almost pornographic aesthetic with one of the most controversial actresses of the moment – Sweeney is a favorite of the MAGA movement, which sees her as an ideal of a white and traditional woman – dressing her up as a standard male fantasy and making other characters, like Elordi’s, humiliate and insult her. The series already explored a plot related to Onlyfans in its second season, centered on the character Kat, played by Barbie Ferreira, and did so in a less sordid way.
Also Industry, the HBO series about young bankers in the City of London, had its Onlyfans moment incorporating a story similar to others we have seen in the news: one of the young financiers, SweetPea (Miriam Petche), is fired by her company when it is discovered that, to earn money, she has a side job as an Onlyfans model.
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“The motivation is always more economic and, on average, Onlyfans workers earn much less than people think,” says sociologist Mariam Chellouchi, who in 2021 presented the thesis Erotic work on Onlyfans in Spain: experiences and debates from feminism . Her research, which included interviews with almost 60 workers, was conducted during the pandemic, when the platform was expanding. She found that many of them earn little, less than 200 euros a month, and those who then reached 3,000 did so by underemploying others who handled chats with subscribers.
Chellouchi also denounces in her thesis the different forms of economic and digital violence to which workers are subjected, for example, when subscribers share their photos outside the platform, that is, breaking the consent framework, and when they receive all kinds of insults on their open social networks. “Some of them consider themselves sex workers and others do not. In that case, their motto is usually: I sell my photos but I don’t touch anyone. And they all share that there is a stigma.”
Elle Fanning’s character in the series Margo tiene problemas de dinero also justifies herself this way to her mother, a former strip club waitress played by Michelle Pfeiffer, when she finally confesses how she is earning money to support her baby, being a young single mother. In the Apple TV fiction, created by veteran David E. Kelley, the protagonist has to leave university after getting pregnant by one of her professors, who neglects the child, and discovers that a way to channel her creative talent (she wants to be a writer) and at the same time pay for her son’s diapers is to write penis reviews (the more negative, the more income she gets) and scripts for her nude videos, under the pseudonym The Hungry Ghost.
Alauda Ruiz de Azúa is also preparing a project about the phenomenon
The Spanish version of the phenomenon will arrive when the series Alauda Ruiz de Azua has in hand premieres after the acclaimed Querer, which will mark her return to television fiction after Los domingos. The cast and other details of the project have not yet been revealed but it is known that Ruiz de Azua and Eduard Sola, the most employed and awarded screenwriter in Spanish audiovisual, are working on a story also centered on women who create content for Onlyfans. “It is a phenomenon that challenges the traditional perception of pornography and online sexuality. We feel that right now there are many more questions than answers around this type of transactions and relationships,” said the director when the project was presented.
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