This Survivor Wants You to Know the Truth About OnlyFans 

OnlyFans has been increasingly normalized, even celebrated, in mainstream culture. Social media feeds are full of “rags to riches” stories of women who are raking in millions on OnlyFans. Popular TV shows, like Euphoria and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, depict OnlyFans as the answer to women’s financial difficulties.  

But do these glamorized messages really tell the whole story?  

Recently, a young woman reached out to NCOSE, sharing how she was pulled into OnlyFans through economic desperation and misinformation. The normalizing messages about the platform obscured the severe harms from her. Now, this survivor is determined that other people hear the truth.  

Read what she has to say below.  

[Note: normalizing terms are used to describe the commercial sex trade and pornography. NCOSE does not endorse these terms but retains the original language out of respect for the surivor.] 

 
I’m still in my first decade of adulthood, and have never known a world without the internet, and by extension, pornography. When I lost my job (through no fault of my own), I briefly did OnlyFans to survive, and even featured in a few professional films. My unemployed older partner was “sex work positive” and encouraged the decision so I could be “empowered” and the “breadwinner,” who would take care of both me and them.  

My partner had been violent to me before, and after years of confusing neglect, I did what I thought would make them happiest. But when acquiescing to that suggestion ended with thoughts of harming myself to escape my life in the online world, I realized the hard truth that many women like me inevitably learn: this decision, born of panic and self-preservation, will give me nightmares for the rest of my life.  

Through my experiences I learned that people of course support the very things they privately consume: active support of the product’s creation requires ignoring the status of consent of the person featured in it. For many people who watch porn, believing women’s stories about the harms of the industry would require them to introspect enough to feel shame about their own habits and consumption of the female body. And that lack of misogynistic empathy is growing in my generation: recent studies estimate that 70-80% of Gen Z watch porn (see here and here). It’s beyond mainstream now, it’s practically the status quo.  

But no one cares who posted the videos they watch online: they assume everything is posted with consent, and that any video they see was made and is still available online with the full consent of the performer. They assume that it’s okay for a woman to sign a piece of paper forever writing away rights to distribute the most intimate media of herself for less than $1,500 per shoot. They assume that the practice is empowering, somehow, and if a woman regrets it, she deserves the shame. 

To be clear: I’m not a stupid person, and never have been. But for many years, my defenses were worn down by someone I trusted through violence and manipulation, who over time replaced my ideologies with his and overwrote my self-preservation until every decision I made was entirely for his financial and sexual profit. Like many young women, I was taken advantage of and made frightening choices about my personal safety out of misinformation and fear.  

Now, I am terrified of securing job prospects because of how many people pirate and illegally publish my content online, sometimes posing as me to sell my personal images and videos. I’m terrified of men, particularly those who watch porn, approaching me for selfies at work, which could cause me to lose my job (which I desperately need). I’ve been stalked online by people who don’t want me to leave the industry, who actively want me fired from my job so I’m forced to return to making porn for their personal pleasure.  

Everywhere online where I read about brave women coming forward about their stories from the industry, the comment sections are full of awful people laughing at her “idiocy”, making cruel comments about a situation far more complex and confusing than their quick judgements. Even people who are “allies to women” seem to kick us while we’re already down, degraded, confused, impoverished, and hurt.  

I fear for my life, my privacy, and my health. I wake up with intense panic attacks every morning, and pace restlessly in my free time. I cry, all the time. For a while, I even struggled with harming myself, fantasies of disfiguring myself, and passive ideation of suicide, which only lessened when I deleted my OnlyFans account—in retrospect, my body was begging for my brain to listen because of how severely I was betraying it. 

I cannot ever abandon myself again, and I cannot ever thoughtlessly put myself in danger like that again. I had no idea that what was happening to me online and from my partner’s coercion was digital exploitation, and I fear for the millions of other young women who were likewise conditioned and groomed online/on social media to walk this same path. 

Gen Z and Gen A are increasingly accessing content that promotes pornography and camming through social media, but I remind them that historically, the adult industry is ridiculously hard to leave behind…  

There are no worker protections in the United States that protect people from being fired by employers due to previous adult content. Employers are not required to care that you were desperate, don’t care if you were sick with cancer, and don’t care if you did it to afford food for your children. They don’t even care if you were manipulated or exploited into making it by your boyfriend or husband. They judge you at face value, and by absence/presence of content: and until there are laws that extend workplace protections to all former adult entertainers, sex workers, and prostitutes, recidivism into the industry is high.  

I implore to young women: no matter how tight your money is, no matter how negative the prospects seem, starring in pornography will in the long-run only bring harm to you, and you should find safer ways to make money. Friends and partners and family who love you the way you deserve should rather walk barefoot over hot coals than see you put yourself at such a high risk, and if they think porn is “cool”, then they are entirely ignorant to the real harms pornography brings. They aren’t your friends. 

We are so proud of this young woman for speaking out to help others. Please share her story with your networks, so more people can hear the truth!