What You Should Know Before Joining OnlyFans
Rae Szereszewski is a latex fetish wear designer, sex educator, event coordinator, podcast host and OnlyFans creator.
Photograph: courtesy of Rae Szereszewski.
When Rae Szereszewski isn’t educating the public about sex or coordinating events at the Swing lifestyle club where she works, she posts “spicy” content on her OnlyFans — mostly nude photos of herself doing yoga or posing in playboy-style centerfolds in latex attire. While Szereszewski doesn’t post “penetrative porn” on her feed, as she describes it, she occasionally takes requests for custom-made “d*** ratings” wherein her clients send her a picture of their genitelia in exchange for feedback. Szereszewski, an outspoken brunette with a piercing gaze, started her OnlyFans account in August 2021 with the support of her husband, both as a creative outlet and to earn some extra money. She views the platform as a positive development for sex work because it puts the control back in the creator’s hands. As she sees it, the stigma still attached to online sex work is the real problem.
“People should be allowed to make whatever type of content they want on the internet. It doesn’t tell you anything about who they are as a person,” she says. “For the majority of people I know, they’re feeling great about it. I’d say that, for many people, it is empowering and it’s fun.”
While Rae’s work on the platform earns her $400 to $1000 monthly on average, she knows many active OnlyFans creators who make thousands of dollars on the platform. At the same time, Rae acknowledges that running an OnlyFans account is like running a business: making money on the platform takes real work and promotion.
“Most people should not expect to get on OnlyFans and be rich,” she says. “You’re competing with the fact that porn is free.”
Though she may not be your typical OnlyFans user, Rae is one of many working women who turned to OnlyFans for extra income during the pandemic. At a time when many lost their jobs while others felt isolated and lonely, the UK-based company registered unprecedented growth, with a 553% revenue increase in 2020, according to the Financial Times. Users also grew from 20 million before the pandemic to 120 million over a 12-month period. Although the initial growth was spurred by celebrities, influencers and career sex workers, out-of-work women and young people looking to make extra income quickly followed to capitalize on this boom. The platform, which allows users to produce and share explicit content for a monthly fee, has achieved mainstream popularity and become a pop culture staple in just a few years.
In its latest controversy in October 2021, the platform announced that it was banning explicit content, sending shockwaves through the industry, and provoking outrage among millions of creators who threatened to leave. This massive pushback led the company to reverse its decision just days after the initial announcement, a reversal that some have attributed to the new political clout wielded by the platform’s sex workers and others have interpreted as a purely profit-driven decision by a company that has never fully embraced the sex work that makes up most of its revenue.
“I saw this as a sex worker win that they changed their mind. That’s a nice change in society for once,” says Rae about the controversy.
Rae uses her OnlyFans account to post nude photos of her wearing latex, doing yoga or posing in playboy-style centerfolds.
Photograph: Rae Szereszewski via Instagram
Other OnlyFans creators enjoy the flexibility that this kind of work affords them.
Morgan*, who requested that an alias be used to protect her identity after her personal information was doxed earlier this year, had dabbled in online sex work in the past but OnlyFans made it a real job for her. She produces fully X-rated content and, for an additional fee, custom videos for her subscribers. Though she doesn’t consider sex work personally empowering, she likes being able to make her own schedule and work from home.
“Sex work is real work.” says Morgan. “I have to perform and present as a professional just like I had to do when I did hair for example. Instead of asking my hair client, “How can I help you today?” in that fake customer service voice, I’m asking men on the internet how I can help them get off.”
Morgan was drawn to the seemingly private nature of OnlyFans with its subscribe-to-unlock feature, which offered some level of gatekeeping, as opposed to other online sex work methods like camming where models are visible to all viewers who stumble on their page. Her clients are typically in relationships or married and subscribe to OnlyFans because of the parasocial aspect of the site.
“I think the personal connection is what sets OF apart from traditional free porn,” says Morgan. Subscribers can directly message and have conversations with the creators they are following. Some just want to talk about hobbies, some want to vent about their wives — it just depends.”
Some of the requests Morgan receives are sometimes not even sexual in nature, as in the case of her clients who pay her good money for soda drinking and burping videos.
Some creators argue that the question of empowerment is the wrong debate to have about the issue. V., a Los Angeles based creator who uses OnlyFans primarily as an artistic outlet, believes the platform is slowly helping to remove the stigma around sex work by providing anyone with an opportunity to dabble in it.
“Sex work doesn’t have to be empowering,” says V. “I’ve worked retail and had to work a bathroom and that’s made me feel like trash. Every job has its own discomforts.”
V. uses her OnlyFans as a tool to convey her artistic vision. Photograph: Courtesy of V. via Instagram.
But Dr. Angela Henderson, sociologist at the University of Northern Colorado specializing in commercial sexual exploitation, warns against the dangers and false promises of a potentially exploitative platform.
“We regularly gather data from sex buyer message boards: they use OnlyFans to screen individuals and to promote and groom them for in-person prostitution and sex acts,” says Henderson.
Her research focusing on sex buyers has led her to the dark underbelly of OnlyFans and its seductively dangerous trappings. Data collected from online message boards shows how this platform has morphed into a tool used by sex buyers and traffickers to recruit young creators who otherwise would have never engaged in the commercial sex trade.
“They will subscribe to content on OF and use the messaging platform to try to talk young women, men and everybody into engaging in in-person commercial sex acts,” says Henderson. “They will on purpose go after young and naive girls that they can talk into having unprotected sex.”
As part of her research with a detective who had access behind the paywalls of OnlyFans, she learned that pimps have capitalized off the platform by moving their girls on the platform during the lockdown when they couldn’t force them to have in-person sex:
“One pimp in particular made $192,000 off of one victim in three months.” says Henderson. ”We saw video evidence of traffickers and pimps raping their victims on OnlyFans and that content was for sale.”
Morgan has personally experienced the dark side of OnlyFans.
“I’ve gotten several death and rape threats,” she says. “One message I will always vividly remember is one that was over ten paragraphs long describing in detail how he wanted to rape me and hurt me. I’ve also gotten countless messages of people body shaming me too. Sex work is not for the weak of heart.”
As for Szereszewski, she hosts a podcast about sex that she hopes to monetize alongside her OnlyFans content. She ultimately believes the focus should be on harm reduction rather than on eliminating online sex work:
“Humanity has always put their naked body on display for other people to see, says Szereszewski. "It’s going to continue to happen, so why don’t we just focus on doing it in a safe way rather than on trying to stop it entirely?".
Rae Szereszewski: “People should be allowed to make whatever type of content they want on the internet.” Photograph: Courtesy of Rae Szereszewski via Instagram.
