Being a digital sex worker ain’t all it’s cracked up to be
My daughter trained alongside another girl at a gym down south for a while. One day the girl pulled up to the gym in a new, high-end BMW and when asked about it, smiled at my daughter and said, “OnlyFans.”
The same thing happened at the gym I go to. There is a group of couples that come in together all the time, which I speak to off and on. All of a sudden, all the women got very pronounced body enhancements in areas I’m not going to call out by name. Soon afterward, whereas that group used to arrive at the gym in Toyota beater cars, they began showing up in Range Rovers and Tesla Cybertrucks.
OnlyFans to the rescue.
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If you’re not aware, OnlyFans is an online platform and app created in 2016. Its creator spins a story that says their platform caters to all kinds of content. Photos, videos, and live streams are posted by “content creators” — anyone from fitness trainers to crocheters — who use it to monetize their profession or pastime.
According to Fortune magazine, OnlyFans announced record-breaking revenue in their last report, rising to $6.6 billion and increasing its user base by 28% to over 300 million users. According to independent reports, of that 300 million plus users, 70% are male, and of the 4.1 million creators on the platform, 84% are women.
If you have the common sense of a basset hound, it’s easy to do the math and see that, while all “professions” are welcome on the platform, it isn’t the crocheters who are generating that kind of revenue, but rather the oldest profession in the books. Nearly 3/4 of those 4.1 million creators focus on adult content.
And some of them really rake it in.
An article in the Wall Street Journal says that, while only 1% of content creators earn over $100,000 a year on OnlyFans, the pinnacle of the platform can be very lucrative.
For example, model Sophie Rain who says she grew up attending church every Sunday with her family in Tampa, Fla., claims she made over $43 million on the platform in 2024. The Australian rapper Iggy Azalea tops the highest-earning OnlyFans accounts and told the Los Angeles Times that she made so much money in her first month she “couldn’t even say how much it is.” Rapper Cardi B reportedly earned over $9 million a month at one time and actress Bella Thorne made history in 2020 when she was the first person to make $1 million in a single day after joining OnlyFans. Lily Allen, a British singer who had two platinum-selling albums in the 2000s, posted on X last year that she earned more money selling pictures of her feet (!) on OnlyFans than from streams of her music on Spotify.
With such financial possibilities and outcomes dangling in front of women, hey, why not dive in – what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, lots.
There’s always a dark side
Wall Street Journal’s Mary Harrington notes that the OnlyFans user base first exploded in 2020 when mandatory lockdowns put the squeeze on real-world social interaction. The platform, she says, aims to offer more than just a sexual release and pretends to be a relationship — “a subscription girlfriend, if you will, without any of the inconveniences that come with a real one”.
However, that “relationship” isn’t working for either side.
For the women, the “ick” factor of what they’re doing and experiencing from their male viewers can become overwhelming. Harrington notes that OnlyFans creator Alex le Tissier recently described how navigating the growing and ever-depraved requests of an enlarging fanbase can feel “like doing a deal with the devil.”
Sounds about right.
Maybe that’s why Cardi B. and Bella Thorne deactivated their OnlyFans accounts (or maybe they had made what they considered enough money). Harrington says “Many creators discover too late that they don’t want to become what the audience is paying them to be.” OnlyFans is quick to tout “freedom” as their platform’s benefits, but that liberty quickly turns around on the female content creators.
And as the economic historian R.H. Tawney wrote, “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.”
For men, the digital sex experience is stripping them of their ability to have normal relationships with in-the-flesh women. A medical paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information ties the meteoric rise in erectile dysfunction in men to porn. Moreover, Dr. Robert Weiss, in an article published in Psychology Today, agrees, bluntly stating four facts: “1. The amount of porn a man watches is linked to ED; 2. More porn equals more ED; 3. Heavy porn use is linked to dissatisfaction with real-world sex; 4. The constant fantasy/satisfaction cycle with heavy porn use leads to emotional and psychological disconnection with live partners.”
So, there’s damage on both sides of the OnlyFans fence, but that’s not surprising. God has hardwired the consequences of sin into sin itself, and the ongoing punishment of it for repeat offenders can be devastating.
This can be especially true when it comes to sexual sin. Those duped into sexual offenses often describe how they’re never really the same because of it, and there’s a reason for that.
Way back in the book of Genesis, God describes how He designed sex to be when He said, “A man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). The Hebrew word for “join” or “cleave” carries the imagery of not just simply affixing two things together, but rather a mixing of the two — much like flour and water — which produces a third substance that can’t be returned to its original state (“one flesh”).
Can that “mixing” happen today with digital sex experiences? I can’t say for certain, but with the wreckage that’s happening today online, it makes you wonder.
Avoiding such catastrophe comes down to obeying the Bible’s warnings about illicit sex and looking to God for our ultimate fulfillment. Tim Keller says that, while many secular thinkers say spirituality comes from repressed sexuality, the reality is unbounded sexuality often comes from repressed spirituality; we look to sex and love for acceptance when what we need in that area ultimately comes from God alone.
In the end, writer Louise Perry is right when she notes, “How should we behave sexually?” is really just another way of asking “How should we behave?”
With the damage occurring right now on OnlyFans, the answer is turning out to be, “better.” Hopefully, we’ll all wise up before it’s too late.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
