In another world, perhaps I would’ve made money from my body. I might have sold photos online or posted short videos with my face cropped out. I might have been happily paraded around on the arm of some well-paying and probably much older client or gone on a few dates with them for extra cash. It is something I’ve thought about more than once, especially recently, with the cost of living crisis raging on and conversations around profiting off female sexuality at an all-time high.
In the last week alone, three friends have told me they’re considering selling photos of their feet on OnlyFans. If they take the leap, so to speak, they’ll be joining the ranks of a roster of famous faces who’ve chosen to join the subscription-only social platform in the name of female empowerment. This week, it was the singer Kate Nash who said she’d make more money selling photos of her bottom on OnlyFans than she would from going on tour.
“You’ve got all this control, and you’re deciding what you want to do and how you want to do it, and people want to pay you for it,” the 37-year-old told the BBC. “Where can we learn from the sex workers? Maybe we can learn something from this industry. How do we get empowered as artists and take a bit more control?”
Last month, her fellow musician Lily Allen revealed that she makes more money from posting photos of her feet on OnlyFans than she does from Spotify streams. The singer currently charges $10 per month for her account, which would amount to at least $10,000 per month based on the number of subscribers she has.
I get it, believe me. If you’ve got the time, the energy, and the assets… I suppose it makes sense, at least economically. Perhaps it’s a net positive in terms of societal attitudes that more women feel galvanised to make a living this way without fear of retribution of judgement that might’ve existed just a few years previously. But there is also a big part of me that worries about framing this pivot as female empowerment.
Consider the fundamental ideology underpinning all this: women have bodies that men will pay money to objectify. That is a systemic fact reliant on the exploitation and degradation of women that has existed for millennia, and any woman choosing to exploit that for personal gain isn’t beating that system but succumbing to it in the exact way men want her to. So even if that woman is making money from it, it’s hard to see it as any kind of win, particularly not a feminist one.
It doesn’t help that these conversations are happening against a backdrop of young women taking part in extreme sexual “challenges” and framing those as feminist acts – one 23-year-old OnlyFans creator claims to have had sex with 101 men in 14 hours. There might be money changing hands here, but it hardly paints an optimistic picture of female sexuality if women are putting themselves through things like this and convincing themselves they’re still in control.
My main fear is that, as it becomes more common for women to use OnlyFans in however big or small a way, we will ultimately only be holding ourselves back by giving more weight to damning and dangerous cultural narratives that reduce women to sexual objects existing solely for male consumption. Whether we feel empowered doing it or not isn’t really going to make much of a difference. It’s still going to galvanise men to view women in a way that oppresses us and belittles our agency outside of sexuality.
Even if it seems innocuous at first, frivolous even, this seems like a gateway to deeper and darker realities. And as we edge closer to a second Trump presidency, when America will be governed by a man who once openly bragged about sexually assaulting women, I think it’s something we should start taking seriously.
So yes, in another world, I might’ve joined in with OnlyFans. But in this current one, I’ll refrain from dipping my toe in. Besides, I have pretty wide feet, anyway.
