Natale (00:00)
Okay, let’s talk about OnlyFans. Great. So for any of our listeners who are unfamiliar, can you walk us through what is OnlyFans?

Elisabeth (00:03)
Great. So OnlyFans is now probably one of the more popular pornography sites online, but it originally wasn’t intended to be strictly for adult content. It was just a subscription-based platform where users could post content, and then people would pay to see it. So it’s a subscription-based model. But more recently, it has turned into being primarily used for pornographic purposes and is now very popular both in the public eye and in the media and then just for users who want to view pornography as well.

Natale (00:49)
So for a lot of people who’ve heard about OnlyFans, it’s easy to have an idea that it’s a platform that anyone who’s generating content on this or quote unquote content creators as OnlyFans calls the people who are generating content on their platform are making tons of money, that it’s a super easy way for anyone to make any amount of money.

We’re even seeing young people say, I don’t need to go to college, I’ll just start an OnlyFans because there’s this idea that it’s just an easy way to make money. What’s the reality of that actually look like?

Elisabeth (01:23)
Yeah, well, that’s such a good question. And it’s kind of funny because if we look at any other industry where people are making large amounts of money, let’s say sports, NFL, for example, we know that people make a lot of money, but it’s also we have this healthy skepticism as well that that’s not usual, right? That most people who play football will not achieve that type of success in the industry. And we don’t have that same healthy skepticism as a society when it comes to a platform like OnlyFans. But that makes a lot of sense when you read news articles like, we just looked up some headlines these are some examples. PornStar went from being homeless to making $200k a month on OnlyFans. Tennis Star defends joining OnlyFans, saying it’s the easiest money she’ll ever make. Former ChildStar earns over $1 million within three hours on OnlyFans.

Natale (02:14)
So people are thinking, hey, I’m in a pinch. I’ll just jump on OnlyFans. It’s an easy way to make money. There are no ramifications for it. It’s completely harmless. So we want to just have a conversation about OnlyFans today. It’s something we have gotten a lot of questions about. Many people have a lot of questions about how the platform works, what it actually is. We want to talk about some misconceptions today, much like this one that you can make.

tons of money. Some people are making a lot of money on OnlyFans, but the reality is a little bit different. So you want to talk through the statistics about the reality of what content creators are making.

Elisabeth (02:53)
Okay, so let’s start by looking at those creators that are making a lot of money. 2024 said that only 0.01 % of creators can make up to like 2.3 million a year. So yes, people are making a lot of money, but it’s a very, very, very small percentage. So we zoom out a little bit more. Top 1 % of creators earn one-third of the total site revenue on the platform. So again, all of the money that we see in those headlines is coming from a very, very small percentage of those users. If we zoom out even more, the median account makes $180 a month and the average OnlyFans account only has 21 subscribers. So going back to the $180 a month thing, it’s important to also recognize that it’s a median and not an average. So I think we’re all familiar with average, but median, if you lined up from largest to smallest, the salaries of all the people on OnlyFans, it’s the one right in the middle. Yep. So 50% of the users are earning $180 a month or less.

Natale (03:51)
Yeah, which is just goes to show that it’s not really the reality for most people participating in the platform that a lot of people assume based on again these headlines. So talk a little bit about who is consuming content on OnlyFans, who the quote-unquote fans are. There are some stats from the platform that say 87% of users are male and the majority of those users are straight, white, married men in their 20s. So just to give some context to the primary consumers of this platform, and again that we know the majority of the content on the platform is pornographic. And we looked at some stats for that there were kind of a couple different ranges, ranging from kind of 70 to 90 percent of the content being pornographic but the majority of the content on OnlyFans is pornographic. So even if it started with different intentions or some will claim the platform is for different purposes, we know primarily people are consuming pornographic content and creating pornographic content on that site. let’s talk a little bit about, there’s an idea with the platform that if the content creators themselves are self-generating, it’s coming from an empowered position, they’re putting this out, we already know the majority aren’t making tons of money off of the content that’s being put out, but…

We’ve seen the question: how do people claim it’s empowering to women posting content? That seems absurd. And then we see the other end of that spectrum that’s like, of course this is empowering. So let’s have a little bit of a conversation about that.

Elisabeth (05:26)
Yeah, so that’s something that a lot of people are talking about online. There’s, like you said, a large group of women specifically in the industry who are claiming that they’re reclaiming their power. It’s an act of femininity to put yourself in that position to earn money from your sexuality and from your body. There was even…Jubilee, they do like the middle ground episodes on YouTube. They did one recently with porn performers and then people who are anti porn and one of the porn performers was saying yeah but I want to be objectified. If I’m benefiting from the objectification that people are putting on me then that’s to my benefit and I’m okay with that. So that’s one narrative.

But how is that, can you talk a little bit more about how that’s maybe not as empowering as people say it is?

Natale (06:18)
We hear this conversation also with the porn industry that if someone’s choosing this, they’re completely empowering, but there’s a couple different lenses we can look at this through. If the only option for many people is to sell themselves, is it really an empowered position if it’s kind of the last resort option for people? If they’re forced by economic circumstances to sell themselves, to put themselves in a position to be objectified, is it really from an empowering position?

You know, women in particular are on this platform where they are being objectified, where they are feeding into a system that’s been created to be exploitative in some ways, which we’ll continue to talk about throughout this. Is it really, you know, empowering? Is it really owning the narrative? And so we’re not here to shame women, especially, but women or men, we’re not here to shame individuals who have chosen this pop or our content creators on OnlyFans,

We’ll kind of talk through what’s actually happening for a lot of people. And I think I would encourage our listeners at the end of this discussion to determine whether or not they believe this system is truly empowering to those who are platformed on this platform.

Elisabeth (07:26)
Absolutely, and I think there are…we’ll talk right now about some of these performers that are claiming that what they’re doing is empowering. And again, it’s not our place to say whether or not someone is actually feeling empowered in what they’re doing. But yeah, I loved your suggestion of as we go through these things, think for yourself, is this actually empowering? If I was in this position, is this something that I would actually feel empowered from? I think Good Place to Start is sort of a household name at this point. Her name is Bonnie Blue.

She first became really popular in the OnlyFans scene by doing something really controversial, which is now becoming more and more the norm, as we’ll talk about. But she was going to high school graduation parties are called schoolies over in New Zealand, Australia area. And her whole setup, her whole stunt was essentially, I’m gonna film content with barely legal teens is what she said. And so to clarify, these are teenagers that are of legal age, but just barely, they’re still in high school. And so that was the way that she first began making money and becoming a bigger player in the OnlyFans scene.

Natale (08:35)
And just looking at, I mean, the way that internet culture is generally, that platforms function generally, it’s what’s extreme, what’s sensationalized, what’s the thing that’s gonna drive views. So she kind of took that approach with this platform as well.

Elisabeth (08:48)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s becoming more the norm is you have to, in order to be those people that are making those millions of dollars, like we talked about that really small percentage, you have to do something that is over sensationalized or something that’s so shocking that people have to view it. And so she’s really, that’s her whole marketing strategy, essentially. She just recently broke the world record for having sex with the most men in 12 hours, which was over a thousand.

Which, if you do the math on that, it’s unbelievable. It’s insane. And she claims that that was an empowering experience for her.

And Bonnie Blue was actually recently banned from OnlyFans because this new stunt that she was going to do was so extreme. Which is funny to say that because you would think having sex with a thousand men in 12 hours is extreme, but this was next level. So she called the stunt the Petting Zoo. Essentially she marketed it as she would up inside of a large glass box. It would be a public event so people could come and watch; they could come and participate, and by participate she means do literally whatever you want to to her. She would have things there that you could use, you can do whatever. Yeah, really just a petting zoo situation. And that’s what got her banned from OnlyFans because it was so extreme that they did not want to have that content on their platform. And so it ultimately got canceled, but we can see how her stunts have just grown over time and gotten more and more extreme and more and more dangerous and that’s something that’s really scary because it is affecting the culture around OnlyFans and pornography in general.

Natale (10:27)
And just going back to the idea of empowerment, again, it’s like to normalize dehumanization to the point where you’re doing it to yourself even, feels very much on the other end of the spectrum from empowerment. Especially if it’s putting you in a situation where you have the least power possible. You’re tied up; anyone can do anything they want to you. It’s really removing any of your personal boundaries or agency. Again, I would just question whether or not that’s actually an empowered position to be in.

Elisabeth (11:00)
Yeah, absolutely. And so there’s, again, this trend of people that are doing these more extreme acts in order to be successful. Just recently, a couple weeks ago, there was a child she began advertising her

OnlyFans content about a week before it came out. This was shortly after she turned 18 and was marketing herself as the youngest girl on OnlyFans. She said that the minute she turned 18 at midnight, she started filming this content. And she made a million dollars in three hours, which is really scary, especially because she openly talked about how she’s had people pre-subscribed for years. Yeah, for years, like since she was 11.

Natale (11:39)
Yeah,

and the comments saying, I’ve been waiting for three years for this, which is problematic. Yes. People are familiar with her as a literal child waiting and anticipating the moment she’s quote unquote, barely legal to self-generate this content.

Elisabeth (11:57)
And what’s the difference between someone who’s a minute before turning 18 and someone who’s a minute after? It’s very concerning how interested we are in really young people on OnlyFans. speaking of, so Lily Phillips, she’s another creator who’s relatively young. She became really popular about a year ago, I believe, for attempting to do 100 men in 12 hours.

Natale (12:24)
In a live stream.

Elisabeth (12:25)
And yes, which is again, 100 men and then to then going to a thousand men with Bonnie Blue. Crazy. But there’s a man who did a documentary about the whole event. I do actually recommend watching it if that’s something that you’re interested in doing. It’s on YouTube. But at the end of the documentary, it’s really heartbreaking to watch her be interviewed after the whole experience. She’s visibly overwhelmed. She has to take a break because she’s in tears.

She describes the experience of feeling robotic and she said that she started to dissociate and she couldn’t even, she was like, I can only remember a couple of them. You just kind of, it’s all a blur. And then to see her crew and her staff who were so supportive and encouraging during the event. And then she was just left by herself at the end to eat by herself after an event that was probably very overwhelming and I would argue traumatic.

And it’s also interesting in that same documentary, he asks her if there’s a limit to the things that she’ll do online. Because again, a big part of OnlyFans, I guess, that we didn’t touch on super specifically, there’s the content that you can pay for that’s just there as a subscriber. Additionally, you can also contact the performer that you’re subscribed to individually and pay them for content that they make specifically for you. Which I do.

Natale (13:47)
We want to talk about that a little bit more in maybe in just a minute, because I also want to talk about OnlyFans agencies that help manage that portion of the platform. But just going back to this and what these creators are experiencing.

Elisabeth (14:00)
And I think that’s just important for us to know moving forward. And he, in that same documentary with Lily Phillips, he asked her, “Is there a limit to the things that you do?” And she says, yes, like I have morals and there’s, you I do have a limit on what I would do in these specific situations. And then he said, okay, well, what if, like, for example, putting a bag over your head and suffocating was the example that she used. And he was like, well, what if someone offered you a million dollars for that?

And she said, quote, “I would probably bend my morals for that.” Yeah. So we can see that these are, this is dangerous for performers to be incentivizing them with money in this way. One Australian creator was hospitalized after having sex with 583 men in six hours. Another performer needed surgery allegedly after doing a 50 man back door challenge. You could imagine what that is. So we’re seeing that this is actually harmful for these performers and the escalation of these stunts is dangerous and it’s not just, you know, unconventional. Like there are actual risks associated with this.

Natale (15:05)
And this is dangerous for, I mean, a lot of reasons. Obviously, these content creators that are experiencing actual physical harms, but then also as we talked about earlier, it’s this sensationalized content, this extreme content that’s going to get the clicks, that’s going to incentivize people to push to the level where they could be injured in these ways. They’re doing these extremes done, so it’s normalizing this kind of…violent or aggressive or extreme sexual activity, in many ways kind of risky sexual behaviors, only for those who are creating content on OnlyFans, but also for those who are consuming content on OnlyFans. And I think this is important to mention because everything we’ve noted so far talking about content creators could sound a lot like we’re saying, you creating a problem.

But realistically, OnlyFans exists because there are people who are demanding the supply that OnlyFans is creating. And that demand, there would not be the need for this supply. There would not be people putting themselves in these situations where they’re experiencing physical harms. And the demand isn’t just those who are consuming the content online, which we’ll talk about that in just a minute, but in this challenge with Bonnie Blue, 1,000 men participated in this. In the petting zoo, she was going to launch, there are people willing to participate in these things. In many cases, the Bonnie Blues, a thousand men, of these men were masked, hiding their identities because some of them are married, some of them are in relationships, some of them are people that you may know. And this is something that we’ve given them kind of a pass to hide behind something and say, this is crazy that this content creator would do that, but they wouldn’t create it if someone wasn’t there to push for this demand.

Elisabeth (17:02)
And just like you said, yeah, so for the petting zoo activity that was canceled, where she wanted to have 2000 participants, allegedly, according to her, there were over 10,000 men who applied to be a part of that stunt. So exactly like you said, it’s both the audience members who are willing to pay to watch that type of content that is harmful for the creators, and also the participants who are willing to be a part of that as well. And exactly like you said, when audiences and participants reward these types of really dangerous behaviors and stunts with clicks and with money, they are implicit in a system that is encouraging performers to harm themselves online for money.

Natale (17:43)
Yeah, and for consumers, it’s not only encouraging in that level, but It’s normalizing what they expect in their own lives from the people they’re in romantic relationships with or interacting with. It encourages a level of entitlement, it encourages a level of objectification, it normalizes things that are not standard in healthy relationships, especially as we talked about with this barely legal thresholds. This is a platform that is affecting young people. So let’s talk a little bit about that as well. Yeah.

Elisabeth (18:13)
It’s such a great point because I know that there are a lot of people, like we had a question on social media, someone said, are there kids on OnlyFans? What’s the age limit? Have they made it impossible for kids to be on it? I guess we’ll just talk about that. So this is like a brand new study that came out. And the whole point of the study was exactly that. How are kids involved with OnlyFans? What is their perception of OnlyFans? How is that impacting their worldview and their lives?

So they found in that study that a growing number of teens view OnlyFans as an appealing job option, believing that sexualizing themselves is the fastest way to make money. Which again, if we go back to the beginning, it makes sense when that’s what they’re being told, when they’re seeing influencers on social media talk about how much money they’re making and how many trips they get to go on and this cool house that they live in because of their career on OnlyFans.

Natale (19:02)
Yep, and we know that teens are being targeted. you know that where there is this demand for barely legal teens are being targeted before they’re 18 to be the next generation of content creators on this platform. It’s being so normalized for them again to the point where they’re saying things like I don’t need to go to college. I’ll just start an only fans. And normalized in a way that no one’s considering the harms. It’s just this is an easy job, I can get any time I want it, it’s there, I’ll make lots of money. We’ve seen reports that teen girls ages 12 to 16 report receiving private messages sometimes daily, inviting them to join OnlyFans. That’s wild. And I bet so many parents, parents if you’re listening, have no idea that this is something that’s happening on social media.

Elisabeth (19:50)
And on the flip side of that as well, if you’re a boy and you’re in that same age group, they report being targeted as consumers. So it’s there. They’re targeting every child. Again, the women for producing the content because it is primarily men that do consume it. And then yeah, targeting boys early. As you mentioned in a previous episode that we did, the earlier that they can hook somebody, they’ll have a customer for life. And so the same thing is happening here on OnlyFans is they want to get those boys hooked in that content as early as possible. Even if it is a leak.
Natale (20:21)
And just to zoom out a little, mean, OnlyFans is a massive platform with massive influence. And the way that young boys and girls are being targeted is just reinforcing this idea that girls and women exist to be purchased, exist for male pleasure.

Natale (20:39)
And that men are entitled to purchase women and girls for sex. And this is something that, you know, in the work that we do, we’ve interviewed lots of experts who work with trafficking survivors and those in the commercial sex industry. And this is something that fundamentally, this idea that we have about men and women, people are being exploited because of it and it is affecting people on a broader level. And then when we zoom back in, just on an individual level with these young people who are going through their normal days and learning that this is the way that the world works based on the way they’re being targeted by this platform.

Elisabeth (21:15)
Yeah, it’s grooming.

And then to kind of target the other side of the question, like are kids accessing that content? Absolutely, they are. what we’re seeing, mean, age verification, that’s another conversation, somewhat controversial at the moment. But not even on the platform itself. There are several teens in the study who admitted to accessing the content off of the platform, which means that people are paying for the content and then uploading it to servers like Discord or sending it in private group chats where kids have access to it. So again, for parents, if you think that your kids won’t be able to access pornography or OnlyFans, they can and they do and it is happening in your community.

Natale (21:56)
Yeah, and there aren’t really repercussions for people who are taking that content from OnlyFans and uploading it somewhere else. So it really is something that’s not regulated in a way that teens can and will access this content. further normalizes, again, the existence of the platform, the viability of this as a potential job for them. And it’s causing a lot of problems among young people.

We talked about this recently, but just access on social media. Let’s talk about that.

Elisabeth (22:28)
Yeah, so kind of again going back to that point that we just made where kids are accessing only fans content and on other platforms then only fans specifically so if we look at just the social media trafficking that happens and So, I mean I think a lot of people know this but most of your average social media platforms don’t allow explicit content which means that as a Only fans performer you use social media to create content that is maybe suggestive but isn’t completely explicit as a means to feed traffic to your OnlyFans platform. Another thing that maybe we didn’t mention about OnlyFans specifically, you can’t search for performers on there. It’s not like other media platforms. So you have to, that’s why social media is becoming such a big, what’s the word?

Natale (23:19)
Marketing tool?

Elisabeth (23:21)
Exactly. Yeah. For this platform is because that’s how they feed the traffic to their specific accounts. Yes. So if we look specifically at the social traffic from OnlyFans, 61 % of it comes from Twitter, which makes sense considering that it does allow explicit content on their site. 12 % of their social media traffic comes from Instagram, 12 % from Reddit and 6 % from

Natale (23:48)
YouTube. Yep.

Elisabeth (23:49)
So again, if you think that kids aren’t accessing this content, they have just as much access as anybody else does.

Natale (23:55)
And that’s just the traffic of people clicking through the marketing materials to the accounts. That doesn’t account for all of the content that’s being seen by anyone of any age who’s on social media who’s seeing, maybe not completely explicit, maybe not the exact content that’s on OnlyFans, but enough that they know it’s an OnlyFans creator or they know where this could lead them to if they could access it.

Elisabeth (24:17)
Yeah, and that’s becoming a problem again, like you said, it just normalizes these really harmful ideas for kids. yeah, a great example of this is the Bop House. This is a content creator house similar to maybe what we’ve seen like in the early 2020s during the pandemic, there was the Hype House, which was a creator house. Same thing, but for again, really young female OnlyFans creators.

And what they do is they use this Bop House brand to market each of their individual OnlyFans accounts on those social media accounts that don’t allow explicit content. And so for kids, they see these accounts, they see them as influencers who make a lot of money. Yes, they know that these women make money from OnlyFans. There’s a lot of hype around, so and so left the Bop House, there’s an open spot, let’s all apply to join it.

Natale (25:01)
You know what Bop House is.

Elisabeth (25:13)
Again, it just normalizes what pornography is and it glamorizes it without seeing any of the harms that it could cause. And that’s really harmful for kids to have so much access to that on social media.

Natale (25:25)
Especially without any balanced information about what some of the harms are. It’s only the glamorized version of things. you know, we had the opportunity to interview a woman named Victoria a while ago. She’s done a lot of speaking about OnlyFans because she used to work for an OnlyFans marketing agency. And they were an agency that helped to build the strategies to promote these content creators on social media to leverage their brands to make money for this marketing agency.

She ended up leaving the agency once she really kind of got a look behind the curtain to see what things were really like.

I would encourage any of our listeners to go check out that episode with Victoria Sinis on the Consider Before Consuming podcast. But she speaks a lot about what she saw behind the curtain, which was really that to these marketing agencies, the quote unquote content creators are a product for these agencies to sell and it’s a product that makes them money.

Elisabeth (26:02)
Great.

Natale (26:24)
In most cases, they are not terribly concerned with the well-being of the individuals. And then as you mentioned earlier, there are a couple of ways that consumers get content on OnlyFans. It’s either to pay to access their account or to pay for content that’s created for them personally. And so a tool of these agencies was to manage those private communications and

In many cases, means that they have a team of people, think of like customer service for a big company. It’s just a team of people responding to the messages. So it’s not the content creator someone thinks they’re talking to, someone thinks they’re having a private interaction with. It’s Steve who’s been hired by this agency to respond to a message. And what we’re seeing with that is some of the individuals who are consuming this content are developing what is called parasocial relationships, where they believe they are in a relationship with the content creator because there is someone on the other end who’s responding to their messages, who’s interacting with them, who’s maintaining whatever threshold of communication they’re subscribing to or paying for. And it’s causing them to truly believe that they are in a relationship with these people, which has led to also a host of other harms, especially for individuals who themselves are in relationships with people. Again, the majority of consumers aren’t only fans are buried, I believe is what the statistics said. and so we have individuals who are then interacting with these separate relationships that they think is with a creator. It’s actually with whatever person happens to be responding to messages that day. and it really just goes to show kind of this whole machine goes to show how depersonalized the human being behind the content on OnlyFans can get. And again, not every person is going through an agency. This is not what every person’s experience is. But there are a lot of people who are on OnlyFans who are working with agencies. Probably the majority of those that are in that top tier we talked about that are making the money are the ones working with these agencies.

And it just is, it’s not what it seems to be for most people. And that’s something that we think is worth talking about because it’s, the reality is very different than the picture that’s being painted.

Elisabeth (28:48)
Yeah. I love that you talk about it’s just like a well-oiled machine to sell a person as a product. And that’s what it is. And there are so many different elements to that and puzzle pieces that make that whole thing work.

Natale (29:00)
We can call that empowering all day long, but I would question whether or not that truly is. If you were the person who was being dehumanized and depersonalized to a product, would that feel empowering to you? That’s a question for each of you to answer individually.

Elisabeth (29:19)
Great questions. And another important thing about that too is like these are causing legal issues as well. have been several lawsuits filed by individuals who feel that they were victims of fraud because they were told that they were speaking with this creator one-on-one and it happened to be Steve, like you said, from some other country. So that’s causing more problems there as well. Yeah.

Natale (29:43)
And beyond that, for those who are paying for quote unquote relationships with these individuals, that’s also resulted in stalking of harassment of these content creators because people believe the reality is different than it actually is as well.

Elisabeth (29:57)
Yeah. And Reuters, they just recently published a whole series about exposing OnlyFans for exactly what’s happening behind the curtains. And in one of those articles, they interviewed a creator and she told her story about being on OnlyFans for a time and then ultimately decided to leave the platform.

But she did have one fan in particular who was really engaged with her, spent a lot of money doing those personalized one-on-one chats and requests like we just talked about. Anyways, over time he eventually found her outside of the platform, kept messaging her, she kept engaging with him in that way. Anyways, long story short, she ended up discovering that it was a family member who was paying for that content of her.

Natale (30:32)
She was making money. Correct.

Elisabeth (30:42)
So again, it’s, is this actually empowering? Is this safe for people to be posting themselves in really intimate ways online? Is that something that’s safe and empowering for these creators?

Natale (30:55)
And you mentioned something else as well is when you decide, I think I don’t want to continue doing this. I want to walk away from it. Can you actually walk away if the content lives online?

Elisabeth (31:07)
Right, and has been distributed in Discord and Telegram and whatever.

Natale (31:12)
You mentioned something, going back to the lawsuits for fraud. I want to talk a little bit about trafficking because as we know, the legal definition of trafficking is a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud or coercion, or in which any participant is under the age of 18.

Like with any other way within the commercial sex industry, OnlyFans, pornography, trafficking happens. We know that it happens, we know that it’s happening on OnlyFans. So let’s talk a little bit about what that looks like.

Elisabeth (31:42)
Yeah, great question because a lot of people think that because it’s content that you are uploading yourself that it has to be consensually and ethically produced. But what a lot of people don’t think about is just because you don’t see someone holding a gun to your head while you’re in the video doesn’t mean that you’re not being forced or that there’s not other factors at play here. And so Reuters, again, in that series that they did, they were really, really good at uncovering a lot of these lawsuits and police reports and a lot of these things that are happening behind the scenes that we don’t hear about. And what they found in their investigation was, yes, there are people being sex trafficked. There are people’s rapes and non-consensual acts of assault that are being uploaded and watched on these platforms. There are children that are being uploaded onto these platforms. Like those crimes are happening on OnlyFans. And unfortunately, because of the nature of the platform, because it is subscription-based, it is impossible to even estimate how much crime happens on that platform because there is a paywall there. And so it makes it a lot harder for police and other investigators to seek out those crimes and see how much they’re actually happening. One story that we can kind of chat about specifically about sex trafficking on OnlyFans, there was a woman, she was held captive by her boyfriend for about two years and in that time was forced to create content for lots of pornographic sites like OnlyFans was the main platform I think that he used to exploit her.

really awful. She was forced to work 60 hours a week. She earned almost half a million dollars from the content that was put onto these platforms. And her abuser would just take that money for himself. Anyways, he ended up being charged with sex trafficking and was sentenced for 20 years in prison.

And so think about that, that’s two years worth of content that she was forced to create. She was working six years a week. So much of that content that people were consuming and paying for because they made so much money from it. And I bet not a single person thought that what they were watching was trafficking, was a trafficking victim or was unconsensual or, you know, people, it’s hard to know.

Natale (33:50)
And even beyond that, someone might say, that’s not the norm, you know? And the truth is, that is happening. That’s something to consider. There are individuals under the age of 18 that people are uploading content of. That is something that matters. But also, when we interviewed Victoria, who worked at the marketing agency, she mentioned the concept that when people reach out to say, okay, I’m gonna pay you for this custom content for me, and they’re asking about things that previously a content creator said I would never do these things. And then it’s the same as for the bag over your head, someone offered you million dollars, would you do it? If someone’s being put in that position, especially when they’re working with an agency or someone who is kind of managing or helping handle them in many cases, like this boyfriend was handling her, not unlike a traditional pimp in selling of sex.

There are people persuading individuals to engage in things that they didn’t previously feel comfortable in. And that is, you know, when is it force? When is it coercion? A consumer just watching whatever is uploaded can’t know really what the actual process was, or someone who’s paying for that custom content can’t know what the process actually was. And so we had a comment, if you want to share…

Elisabeth (35:04)
Yeah, somebody said, honestly, people talk a lot of trash about OnlyFans, but really it’s the most ethical way to source pornographic material. Yeah. Is that true?

Natale (35:14)
So this really goes into kind of the broader question about the ethics of pornography. And again, we’re not here to shame people. There are people who choose to pursue pornography in the mainstream porn industry. Zooming out from OnlyFans now. Let’s look at the mainstream porn industry.

We also know because we’ve spoken with many former porn performers that even individuals who willingly entered the industry, you know, ended up being coerced into something by an agent, being pushed, their boundaries were pushed and pushed and pushed until they couldn’t come back from them. And in many cases, to cope with some of those things, individuals develop a drug habit or, and then once they’re drugged, they’re pushed further and further and further. And so it’s something that’s like, is it really empowering? Is it really ethical? Even if we said, you know, 100 % this content was made by someone who consented to exactly what happened, they uploaded it themselves, the claim that people typically make of this is ethical. Well, is that content used to groom a child? Is that content used to… Is a child seeing that content?

And is it affecting someone individually? Is it affecting relationships? There’s so many ripple effects from pornographic content that it’s not just an easy, this is totally fine, there are no ramifications for this situation.

Elisabeth (36:38)
So I guess for our viewers, is there a way that you can know, either on OnlyFans or on any other platform, is there a way that you can know that what you’re watching is ethical or is better than maybe some of other content?

Natale (36:51)
Is there a way you could guarantee it? All of the experts we have ever spoken to have said no. There is no way to guarantee that exactly what you’re seeing on the other side of the screen is what it seems to be. mean, things are photoshopped. AI is involved these days. There are often, we’ve heard from so many former performers who have said, yeah, there’s a full video of me telling…the camera that I consented to everything that happened to me. And it’s added to the end of a video, even though it was taken at the beginning of a video. And everything that happened in the video, I didn’t consent to, or I didn’t know what it was gonna be, but they recorded this to cover things. And someone watching this doesn’t know that. We wanna believe what we see, it’s not always what it…

Elisabeth (37:40)
What’s the phrase?

Natale (37:42)
It’s not always what it seems to be. That’s what we’re getting at.

Elisabeth (37:46)
Yeah, and thank you for sharing that because I think, I mean, we know that people have this misconception and they don’t really understand.

And these are some comments that we’ve seen on our own content. So oftentimes from performers or past performers who talk about the abuse that they experienced in the industry or how they were trafficked and people come at them and say, no, that’s not true. You’re lying. So here are just a couple of examples. This is just one site people, the entire industry is not sex trafficking. It’s rare.

Another person said, tell me how many of these porn trafficking stories the girl was kidnapped off the street? Zero. Don’t be stupid. Do you believe in unicorns too? So we can just see that as a culture there is just such a large misunderstanding of what trafficking is. Like you already talked about that. You don’t have to be kidnapped off the street like so many people think in order to be trafficked. This is the first person who said, it’s rare for trafficking to happen in the porn industry. It’s not.

Natale (38:41)
It’s not rare. And that just to break this down further, so many people when you think of trafficking, think of like the movie taken. Like the most extreme scenario, someone’s ripped from their bed at night or pulled off the street or thrown into a white van. And the truth is, force, fraud, or coercion, or if someone’s under the age of 18, that’s it. And so, so often in these, in this commercial sex industry, so commercial sex, a sex act in which, or…an act in which sex is exchanged for something of value. So money or even if someone’s getting a video that’s then making them money because they put it on a platform where advertisers are paying lots of money to be on that platform, that is a commercial sex act. So force fraud or coercion, that’s happening often in the porn industry as a whole, especially in the mainstream porn industry. And again, it’s driven by the demand. It’s driven by the demand of what people want to see, and what they’re putting their money behind and putting their clicks behind and their views behind. And then also, someone’s under the age of 18. And just going back to OnlyFans, there are reports of CSAM or child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. Let’s talk about that briefly and then talk about what that looks like in the porn industry as well.

Elisabeth (39:55)
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s like what we mentioned, right? There’s a paywall there. So investigators, they can’t know how much illegal content is actually hidden within those subscriptions on OnlyFans. And that’s problematic. And yes, there are lots of accounts that were suspected for having CCM or sexual exploitation material of children. And they were removed from the platform, which was great. But we’re seeing that those things are happening.

This is really tragic. A 16-year-old girl started talking with a man online who then later trafficked her and she was being trafficked into pornography on OnlyFans specifically. And so how they found her was they found her videos of her being abused on OnlyFans. So that content is happening on there even for people who aren’t posting content of children. There are

So many people, again, it’s that demand, right? There’s a demand for content of children. So there are lots and lots of accounts of people who are pretending to be children. They’re of age, so the content is legal, but just the idea of making yourself look like a child, act like a child, et cetera, to earn money that way, I think that says a lot about our culture and our society that, again, there is a demand for that content. And it’s exactly like what you said, how…

I lost my train of thought real quick. Mom, mom, mom, mom. Yeah, and we get so many people, again, who say things like, if women would just stop producing that content, then all these problems would be completely solved. And that’s just not true because we’re seeing things like, it’s exactly this, like content, sexual content of children is already illegal. That’s already illegal. So you cannot legally or lawfully make that content.

But there’s still a demand for it. And because there’s still a demand for it, kids are still being trafficked and abused and exploited to create content to meet that demand. And that doesn’t happen just with children. That happens with all of these other areas in pornography. And so that’s why you cannot know as a consumer that what you’re viewing is actually consensual or ethical. And that’s why the problem is so much larger than just the performers. It really comes down to the demand.

Natale (42:05)
Yeah, I mean sex trafficking, well trafficking generally is a multi-billion dollar industry across the globe. It’s a big issue. And we know from Polaris that porn is the second most common form of trafficking. So that’s huge to say of the vast number of people who are being exploited across the globe, pornography is the second most common form of trafficking.

Elisabeth (42:33)
Not even sex trafficking, just trafficking.

Natale (42:33)
Not even sex trafficking, just human trafficking.

We interviewed someone who worked on this issue on a global scale and he mentioned that this extreme content exists. The demand for this extreme content is…

being fueled because it’s making people money. And it’s not something that a lot of people want to consent to willingly. That’s the reason people are being trafficked into this because to meet the demand, you have to have a person who is willing to be harmed in many cases, who’s willing to put themselves in these positions that are extremely exploitative, extremely violent, extremely degrading. And that is part of the reason that people are being trafficked into this. And then also the demand for explicit content of minors and it’s why children are also being trafficked. So children and adults across the globe are being trafficked in pornography and and it’s on the con it’s on OnlyFans it’s on mainstream porn sites and so many people are seeing it having no idea what’s actually happening again on the other side of the camera.

Elisabeth (43:37)
Yeah, exactly. And I think going back to what you were just saying about this demand that’s increasing, that’s another reason why these big stunts that we’re seeing on OnlyFans are so dangerous is because it’s not only raising the bar for what performers are expected to do in order to get attention and success, but it’s also for consumers, right? The bar for what they’re expecting this content to be is also rising. And that’s really concerning when you have stunts like having sex with 2000 people in 12 hours.

Yeah, and what happens if nobody wants to do that anymore? Do you think like the content? You know, do you think the demand for that content is just gonna go away?

Natale (44:15)
Especially when, as you mentioned earlier, young people are being targeted by the porn industry. And so with each generation that they can normalize this with and get someone hooked, we know that pornography consumption is something that escalates for many people. So often people are exposed really young, they will consume regularly and over time, they need more extreme content, more hardcore content to kind of get the same chemical reaction in the brain, right, to accomplish the same thing that it once did. And that is what drives people to these more extreme, to viewing things that, you know, research shows people are ending up consuming things that initially would have disgusted them in some cases, and then it’s something that has been normalized. So when we raise generations of people to normalize this content, the demand’s not going anywhere if we continue to perpetuate this.

So as an example of this, we have an interview on our podcast with a survivor of girls through porn exploitation, trafficking. There’s a lawsuit for anyone who doesn’t know. I encourage you to go listen to that interview. But for anyone who doesn’t know, girls through porn is a very popular mainstream porn website. There were women like the survivor we spoke to who were targeted for fitness modeling. They believed they were showing up somewhere for fitness modeling. Once they arrived,

They were essentially forced and coerced, in some cases drugged, kind of held against their will. Many were sexually assaulted. They were coerced into signing things that they didn’t consent to or agree to. That content was filmed, uploaded to the site, Girls Do Porn, and disseminated. And for many consumers, that content was something that they thought, this is a mainstream site. This is totally…safe and ethical and normal. And this lawsuit had many plaintiffs who were sexually assaulted, who did not consent to what happened, what was uploaded. And we’ve heard from people who’ve watched our interview and left comments saying things like, I used to watch that all the time. I had no idea. And I think that is really at the core of so much of what we’ve talked about today is you just really can’t know what someone is experiencing on the other side of the screen, no matter how it’s painted to

Elisabeth (46:29)
Yeah, that’s so well put. And it’s really unfortunate because those are some really nice comments that we get of people who are regretful and wish that they had known. Unfortunately, there are also more comments of people who don’t care. And who verbalize that on an interview with someone who was trafficked and raped. And they say, well, I don’t care. It was hot anyways. Or like, you were stupid for going in the first place, you knew what you were doing, et cetera. There’s also a genre of comments where people are saying, okay, great, well, I’m gonna go see, I’m gonna go look this content up so I can see for myself whether or not you were lying.

Natale (47:12)
I’m gonna be the judge and jury of whether or not you were exploited, essentially.

Elisabeth (47:17)
Yeah, I’ll re-victimize you by watching it again and then come back and let you know.

Natale (47:22)
Yeah,which I think really speaks to this culture that we’ve spoken about earlier of entitlement, right? This idea that these people in this content are products that someone is entitled to, they are objects that someone is entitled to for their own sexual gratification or for their own sexual pleasure. And that’s concerning. That’s not okay. And for anyone listening who maybe consumed that content or has consumed other content, that later has been found out to be exploitative. If you are one of the people who says, I don’t care, I would really encourage you to take a step back and look at why you don’t care that a human being is being exploited.

Elisabeth (47:59)
And if you’re the type of person that did watch that content and you do feel bad because of how maybe you contributed unknowingly to someone else’s assault, that doesn’t have to define you. That doesn’t mean that you are implicitly a bad person. And we appreciate that you’re doing that reflection to think about how your actions maybe impact other people and especially when you don’t know about it. And we appreciate you taking the time to consider before consuming in the future.

Natale (48:28)
There are lot of resources out there that can help with, obviously, pornography consumption can be a compulsive habit, an addictive habit, and there are a lot of resources to help break that habit. And there is research actually that also shows that individuals who learn about the harms of pornography, who learn about the fact that people are being exploited through this, are motivated to create change because so many people are targeted by this industry when they’re so young and have no idea these harms, but still develop a compulsive habit. And so it can be something that’s difficult to break. And there are resources that can help with that.

Elisabeth (49:02)
Yeah, and so that’s a big reason why a lot of this is we’re not fighting the people who are consuming porn. We’re fighting the normalization of pornography. We’re fighting the exploitation that occurs in pornography. And so that’s just kind of to go big picture one more A reason why it’s important that we look at how platforms are contributing to these issues, platforms like OnlyFans, platforms like those social media platforms that either allow this type of content to be happening on their sites or allow it to be marketing that type of content. That’s harmful.

Natale (49:33)
I want to thank you for having this conversation with me today. And I want to thank our listeners for sticking around and participating in this. It’s not easy to hear these things, but this is how we create change. This is how we create a culture where people are not exploited, where young people are not targeted by the sex industry, where people are not trafficked, where people do not feel like their only option to make money is self-generated, exploitative content. And also a culture where the demand that fuels all of this doesn’t exist. want people to be able to have healthy relationships and healthy relationships with themselves, with others, both romantic and interpersonal relationships generally, and a healthy outlook on others in society and in our communities, healthy communities. And so we can all take steps by having conversations like this to help fuel change, to learn more about these issues. But also we know so many people out there do have experiences with OnlyFans, with the porn industry, not just those who have participated as performers or content creators, but also those who have consumed content on these platforms, those who are partners of those who have consumed content on these platforms. And one of the ways we can create change is by sharing true stories of what people have actually experienced. So I would encourage any of our listeners, if you have a story that you would be willing to share with us, if you’re interested in commenting, if you feel safe to do that or sending us a message, you can visit our website, fightthenewdrug.org or ftnd.org. And on our contact page, we have a form. You can submit a story, can submit anonymously.

If you’re interested in sharing your story on this podcast as well, please reach out. We would be honored to be able to help platform these stories that can help create this change.

Elisabeth (51:15)
Thanks for fighting with us!