Source: Twitter (now X)
Seen the New York Times?
I don’t normally read the NYT because, well, you can’t subscribe to everything. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with work, family, and my current reading load. But I do listen to their podcast "The Daily" because I can do that while multi-tasking. Yeah, I really can walk and chew gum at the same time.
I intend this to be an open discussion, a kind of heart-to-heart talk, but it’s going to offend some readers, so please book off now if you wish. No worries, I understand. We all have our limits.
Anyway, The Times ran an interesting article about the social media platform OnlyFans that encourages people to sell explicit photos and videos of themselves for money, then interact with clients in realtime. The thrust of The Times article is that an ever-worsening economy and global pandemic have driven supposedly respectable folks (like ourselves?) into the porn industry. According to the author, more than a million OnlyFans content creators are pitching to 90 million users at any given moment. It's easy to get started, if you’re inclined to earn your porridge this way.
She's lovely. Image source: Onlyfans tech report
Like Amazon, OnlyFans has exploded into a multi-billion-dollar business practically overnight, growing from 120K to 90 million subscribers in its first 12 months. It currently (2024) has over 120 million subscribers and two million content creators (i.e., models) catering to an average of 420 million active users monthly (source). Some top content creators report earning over $200K monthly, although some earn a lot more.
Source: Onlyfans tech report
OnlyFans takes a 20% cut of content creator revenues, although some augment their income by extra tips through mobile payment plans, making an end-run around the platform. They also contract with outside agencies to field direct mail and telephone calls from subscribers for a fee. The caller usually talks with a stand-in, not the person he or she sees on the Onlyfans page. But who cares? Taking dirty (also known as "phone sex") is fun, regardless. It also shields the real content creator while boosting their income.
Seems like an opportunity.
In a curious conjunction of planets, I came across a similar but more interactive social media platform called Chaturbate on which content creators run webcam sessions in realtime with hyperlinks back to their OnlyFans pages. On Chaturbate, which is free to visitors without any commitment more onerous than a click of the mouse, a viewer can participate in masturbation (both male and female) and full-menu intercourse sessions with the site’s content creators, whom they call ‘models,’ including female, male, couples, trans, exibitionist, and ‘mature.’ Self-love sessions take on new meaning.
Screengrab (Source)
The vast majority of models are young women, although there the gay and trans categories also do well. A model only needs to declare their age on a digital profile, then off they go down the path to fame and riches. I never tell the truth about my age. Would you?
The model earns money by soliciting tokens from viewers who purchase them from the site then digitally toss said tokens at the model as they go through the motions in realtime. Viewers ‘participate’ in the sessions by downloading the site’s open broadcast software (OBS) that allows them to remotely activate a Bluetooth-controlled vibrator called a ‘Lovense’ that the model inserts in her (or his as the case may be) vagina or anus. Activating the device for any combination of seconds costs a stated number of tokens which viewers purchase using credit cards. The whole process is called "teledildonics." Revenue is then split between the site and the model, like Amazon KDP deposits royalties into authors’ bank accounts each month.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, then thanks.
These interactive porn platforms aren’t anything new; they’ve just taken an ages-old concept to a new-new level and, being the thin edge of a wedge, made it more and more mainstream. I won’t go into the morality of selling your naked image or exposing your most intimate activities to public scrutiny (not to mention your family and friends) because morality isn’t my thing. The premise here is that the society we are creating day by day is making victims of us all. Prostitution is arguably the world’s oldest profession, but up until now, everyone wasn’t a prostitute or a john (one who pays for sex).
Now the question becomes: how far am I willing to go to satisfy my economic goals? On Chaturbate, models will set a daily milestone, often $500, sometimes more, frequently running marathon sessions that can rake in thousands over a one or two-day run. I’d really need a vacation (or serious medical care) after that. But hey, different strokes for different folks.
Back in the day
Marble Arch Hotel. Source: Facebook
I recall a time when my office mates and I would revert to the beer parlour at the Marble Arch Hotel in downtown Vancouver, Canada, for a cold pint and a hot roast beef sandwich. The best thing about the old Marble Arch — which has since reinvented itself as a Best Western Hotel — were the pole dancers.
Please don’t get me wrong. What you saw there wasn’t anywhere near as explicit as what you’ll get at OnlyFans or Chaturbate or Bongacams or PornHub or any number of other similar internet sites. It was pretty innocent stuff by today’s standards. The dancers for the most part were unemployed office workers and students and housewives needing a little extra cash. There was one girl whose act included a live tiger. But these dancers usually weren’t also hookers (sex trade workers). For that you needed to go two streets over to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the notorious ‘DTES.’
For a reason which I never came to understand, the beer parlour at the Marble Arch was a popular meeting spot for female Japanese students. Somebody told me that these past-their-best-before-date (i.e., over-20) women were the losers in the Tokyo dating game who'd come to Canada to hook a gaijin husband by enrolling in English language courses. I'm inclined to agree because a draftsman in my office married a Japanese girl he'd met at the Marble Arch. I never understood what she saw in that pimply-faced dude, given he was so full of himself; but hey, whatever it takes to relocate, right?
My wife and I spent many a pleasant afternoon there drinking beer, eating nachos, and taking in the acts that, if you ignored the pole, were just an updated form of burlesque. There was never full nudity. Yeah, I know. It was still sexploitation, but give me some kudos for honesty, okay?
Nonetheless, in other ways the beer parlour at the Marble Arch was quite similar to OnlyFans and Chaturbate. To encourage a pole dancer to perform with more gusto, patrons would toss dollar bills onto the stage, and when Canada adopted the Loonie (a hefty 1-dollar coin), you could hurl these pieces quite effectively from the furthest reaches of the barroom.
Image by Alexandr Ivanov from Pixabay, modified by author
Like everything else on the planet, pole dancing soon evolved into lap dancing, meaning that a performer would approach a table to negotiate a grinding session on a patron’s lap. That never happened at the Marble Arch but other pubs capitalized on this new, interpersonal normal. That’s when the office girls and students and housewives became hookers, and the Marble Arch was consigned to oblivion like so many others among this lovely city’s monuments.
Everyone enjoys pornography
Now that we’ve acknowledged that everyone enjoys pornography at whatever level, here’s the point.
Electronic social media platforms are not the same as dark, smoky beer parlours. In the beer parlour culture, patrons know little or nothing of the dancers other than their stage name; they’re only a piece of gyrating meat on a pole, a kind of living, breathing kebob. But like the US government did quite successfully in its effort to identify and arrest participants after the riotous assault on the Capitol buildings on January 6, 2021, facial recognition software and image metadata allows police and extortionists to identify and locate any one of OnlyFans’ or Chaturbate’s millions of models at any given time, at the same time hacking into subscribers' computers and smartphones, leading to arrest (by the police) and even blackmail (by the scammers). Ever been the target of an internet extortion scheme? I have. It isn’t pretty.
When they tried to extort me, the fix was easy. I simply replied to the ransom email that they’d targeted the wrong party and to please Google ‘Rizzuto Crime Family’ if they had any doubts. Never heard anymore from the creeps. But according to statistics, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry and for good reason. Anyone who hacks into your computer or smartphone, and almost any good techie can do it, gets access to your photos as well as your entire contacts list. Imagine the damage they could wreak. And they do.
Nigerian scammers lure adolescent males into thinking they are corresponding with hot, teenage girls. The nonexistent girl pleads for a dick pic, sending the silly boy a juicy screengrab from some porn site as enticement. Then he gets a demand for $500 from the extortionists, warning that they will send his dick pic to everyone in his contact list. They know where he lives, what school he attends, and who his friends are. Like Onlyfans, it's a slamdunk. Wanna be a victim? This is the easiest way. At least one young fellow committed suicide during such an extortion. How many more teen suicides these scammers have caused will never be known as the evidence isn't always obvious and victims' families tend to hide such information.
So, when you put your naked images out there on OnlyFans or respond to that mysterious email or Whatsapp from a hot chick, be prepared to be victimized. Later, when you go for that long-awaited job interview, a prospective employer can decline to hire when an internet search — which is now standard screening procedure — brings up your OnlyFans page and other less gentle reminders of your foolish whims. Someone who fires or declines to hire an otherwise qualified employee or candidate simply because of the existence of nude photos is simply a prude, but hey, that’s reality, isn’t it?
Yeah, I know these so-called content creators and models are already victimized by a broken democracy whose gig economy is always on the verge of tanking. During Onlyfans inception amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, beautiful young women and some men asked themselves why they should wait for a one-time $600 economic stimulus check that a cabal of wealthy Representatives and Senators cynically sat on over the Christmas holidays when they could be raking in three times that amount daily just by masturbating online, while enjoying it to boot? The economy hasn't gotten any better in the meanwhile. Looking at it that way, it’s obvious that our national leaders are making prostitutes and johns out of all of us.
Suffice it to point out that both police and criminals have the technology to wreck our lives. None of it is actually legal, but the police are the police. Hackers and extortionists are vicious criminals. Our mommies and daddies can’t protect us from them.
Now, they have our naked images and videos and the metadata that reveals exactly where we are to a degree of accuracy down to one meter (3 feet). Pole dancing was a heck of a lot safer, if less remunerative.
Author's note: This article first appeared in Medium on January 16, 2021
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