Sex work and pursuing a college degree have never been mutually exclusive – but especially not now. The pandemic, and the massive job losses it has brought, have left many college students scrambling for alternative sources of income. Enter, OnlyFans.
OnlyFans, a social media platform on which users pay a monthly subscription fee to access content creators’ photos and videos, has skyrocketed in popularity since the pandemic began.
People are flocking to the site to become content creators in order to earn either an additional source of income or replace the income of a lost job. In 2019, OnlyFans had merely 60,000 content creators. As of December, the platform now boasts more than a million creators and more than 90 million registered users.
When you visit the OnlyFans website, you’re immediately greeted by an invitation: “Sign up to make money and interact with your fans!” The loading screen prompts examples of fitness, makeup and photography accounts, but blatantly ignores the main type of content flooding the site: nudes.
Although not directly marketed as a platform for selling explicit content, OnlyFans has become synonymous with digital sex work. The site has made both accessing and selling X-rated content easier than ever before. Anyone older than 18 can sign up to become a creator: porn stars, celebrities and college students alike.
With unrelenting tuition prices to account for, many college students are especially in need of extra revenue at this time. Sentiments of becoming a stripper, finding a “sugar daddy” or becoming an OnlyFans creator to help pay bills have gone viral on social media.
One student posted on the UCLA Reddit page in August asking who else would be interested in starting an OnlyFans to pay for tuition, receiving 222 upvotes and a few eager replies.
OnlyFans sets the minimum monthly subscription fee at $4.99 and the maximum at $49.99, allowing creators to set their own price within this range. The average person on the platform reportedly makes around $180 per month. While top earners on the site rake in millions monthly, many creators struggle to earn the equivalent of minimum wage.
Some UCLA students have seriously begun considering digital sex work as a viable way to cover the cost of tuition. Recently, I spoke to one of these creators.
Since starting her OnlyFans account in August, Student A, a fourth-year student who requested anonymity because of the stigma that often still surrounds sex work, has earned a sizable $75,000.
After UCLA transitioned to remote learning and she lost her on-campus job, Student A decided to become a content creator to improve her financial position. While her main source of income comes from working with one of her parents, she hopes to invest the money from OnlyFans into her financial future.
Upon realizing that the stay-at-home order would keep her mostly indoors, Student A felt it was the perfect opportunity to start her account and earn money from the bikini pictures she was already posting on Instagram.
“I've always been very open with what I post on social media already, posting bikini pics and stuff like that,” she said. “So I'm like, ... why not make money out of it?”
As she got more comfortable posting to the site, photos in bikinis escalated to photos in lingerie and then fully nude content.
At her most active, Student A said she was posting four to five times a week, spending around four hours a week doing photoshoots and filming content. But the most time-consuming part of managing her account is actually responding to messages from her subscribers, she said. It gets so hectic that sometimes she even has her friends help reply to these messages.
Chatting to her subscribers about topics as mundane as how their day was, she has earned up to $200 in tips for these paid private messages.
Student A laughed as she described the stark contrast between her OnlyFans persona versus her personality in real life. While she markets herself as extremely sexual and provocative online, Student A said she’s rather modest and reserved in person.
“That's obviously not who I am in real life, and if anyone were to meet me, they would never guess that I have an OnlyFans,” she said.
Over the past year, she’s had a total of 2,500 monthly subscribers and posted 154 photos and videos, garnering nearly 60,000 likes. Charging each subscriber $13.99 per month, her profit quickly entered the thousands. At the peak of her account when she had around 1,000 subscribers, she recalled earning roughly $20,000 in just two days.
In her profile, Student A advertises herself as a college student selling nude pictures and explicit videos among other sexually provocative declarations.
According to a recent research article from the International Journal for Equity in Health, female sex workers still face many stigmas and get mislabeled as “criminals, immoral troublemakers, sexual deviants and vectors or reservoirs of disease.”
Challenging these misconceptions, Student A said she’s been thriving academically the past four years and plans to attend graduate school in the hopes of starting a career in the medical field.
“There are (creators) that do many different things: they run businesses, they're engineers and they have OnlyFans,” she said. “I don't think that having an OnlyFans means that you're lazy or uneducated.”
However, she is currently taking a break from OnlyFans, having not posted since October. Consequently, she now only has about 250 subscribers.
When she explained the reason behind her recent inactivity, I quickly realized my preconceptions about who I was interviewing were wrong.
I expected a brazenly confident person, unapologetic about their decision to start an OnlyFans. Instead, I met someone plagued by her own dilemmas about staying on the site. She blamed this uncertainty for her recent inactivity.
"There’s phases that I go through where I don’t even log in for weeks," she said. "Because sometimes I’m like, ‘Is what I’m doing right?’”
Although Student A said she enjoys the freedom and flexibility of the job and how easily she can earn money from home, she worries about people’s judgments. Although the anonymity of the platform protects her to a certain extent, she fears people she knows from real life will find the account and recognize her.
These moral conflicts affect her mental health, she said, leaving her questioning if the money she’s earning now justifies jeopardizing her future career plans. Although she’s confident that doing OnlyFans will not be a long-term source of income, she fears it could have long-term consequences and hinder her ability to work in the medical field.
“I don't know if what I've done has ruined that for me,” she said.
The platform has also caused her to reevaluate her relationship with her body. She credits her breast augmentation surgery for the initial surge in Instagram followers that led her to create an OnlyFans in the first place.
Having one source of income entirely dependent on her appearance has shifted her perception of her body, she said. The shift has been both positive and negative – a double-edged sword of sorts. Earning money and constant praise for her photos has allowed her to appreciate her body’s beauty and improved her confidence, she said, but the constant scrutiny also begets an incredible amount of pressure.
“Because I have so many people looking at me, there are a lot of times where I do feel like, ‘Oh, my God. I need to look better,’” she said.
In order to maintain a figure she feels is desirable and marketable, Student A said that she is currently trying to lose weight. While she’s never received negative comments about her size, she finds it difficult to film content when she feels she looks fat.
This pressure to maintain a certain body type is very prevalent in the OnlyFans community, she explained, with some creators even resorting to plastic surgery to earn more followers. She even admitted to considering more surgery herself, but ultimately decided against it out of fear of ruining her physique.
Despite these anxieties about both her career and her body, Student A said she’s still hesitant about leaving the site for good. Although she hasn’t fully committed to the idea yet, she knows she has to quit eventually and aims to resign once she graduates.
“I want to have time to get my life back on track to my career,” she said. “But I'm not sure. ... It all depends on what path I take – that’ll decide if I'm going to quit or not.”
As our conversation came to a close, Student A revealed her initial hesitation about being interviewed even under the veil of anonymity. Although her boyfriend and close friends are aware of her OnlyFans work, her family is not. She worries about their reaction, constantly playing the scenario in her head of the moment she tells them the truth.
Her family would never suspect that she has an OnlyFans, so she must decide on her own when to disclose the news, she said. While she does plan to eventually let them know, she said she wants to make as much money as she can beforehand in order to justify the risks she’s taken.
Thus, sharing her story could potentially put both her familial relationships and future employment at risk if someone were to expose her account. Even her friend, another UCLA student with an OnlyFans, warned her against being interviewed for this story for fear of someone revealing her identity.
If this were to happen, Student A worries future employers could be reluctant to hire her or even fire her because of the stigma. Moreover, if her family hears the news from a source other than her, she would lose control over her own narrative and their reactions may be adversely affected.
However, Student A said she hopes her story can continue the work of destigmatizing sex work as a college student.
“I'm a little scared,” she said. “But it's not really fair to assume that just because we're here at UCLA doesn't mean girls won't get into these things – it happens a lot more than people think, and no one should be degraded because of it.”