Is Britain too squeamish for OnlyFans?
When Iggy Azalea joined OnlyFans, she admitted that most industries make money off of sex anyway. But in the UK, we can’t seem to accept the platform is following a tried and true method: sex sells, writes Sascha O’Sullivan.
“I made record labels so much money off my body,” said Iggy Azalea, the Australian rapper, last month, “(I only got) the smallest cut off my own f***ing body and my own work and my own ideas.”
Now she posts naked picture online, and it’s not record labels taking a cut of her profits, it’s OnlyFans, the subscription-only social media platform famous for, well, sex, or what its chief executive officer Amrapali Gan occasionally calls “spicy content”.
But let’s be honest: it’s sex. It is either scantily clad or completely naked women, with the occasional comedian or musician thrown in there.
Azalea joined the platform to own the money already being made off of her body. Unlike record labels, OnlyFans only takes 20 per cent commission.
The rapper was unabashed by her nudity: “I’m going to post pictures like that anyway because I like it and I think they’re beautiful, and I like my breasts. F***ing sorry!”
She knows sex sells, OnlyFans knows sex sells, the music industry and every other entertainment industry knows sex sells. But here in the UK, we still can’t quite admit it to ourselves.
When OnlyFans has conversations with politicians and other businesses in the US, the discussions are about the business model. Unlike other platforms, there’s no ads, there’s no algorithms, and, especially important to Americans, there’s no China.
In Britain, the dominant concern is that it’s a platform packed full of sex. In December last year, Conservative MP Laura Farris accused the platform of wanting to dodge its obligations, and refusing to accept that “it exposes (children) to harm.”
She said: “It relies on the fallacy that the user is in control, and operates an exploitative business model predicated on that false promise.”
OnlyFans has been fierce in its rebuttal of the idea it doesn’t care about kids on the site. Keily Blair, the chief operating officer, who was previously a lawyer in charge of cyber and privacy, said there were more checks for kids getting onto OnlyFans than there were for them using a fake ID to get in a club. Speaking to City PM, Blair said: “As well as your ID, we’re also checking your social media profile before you come in to see you are the same person that you are on the rest of the internet, and we’re also checking in regularly, so if you’re in the club for three hours, once an hour, we’d be like, can I see your ID again, please?”
OnlyFans won’t say so, but children are ingenious. They will probably game the system to look at the pictures Iggy Azalea won’t post on Instagram. They would do the same if they were trying to watch porn elsewhere on the internet.
Recently, there has been an outcry over the prevalence of choking during consensual sex among 20-something-year-olds. It was blamed on the porn industry and a generation who grew up with almost unencumbered access to it on the internet. They’re probably right; the writer Amia Srinivasan has written eloquently about the impact of porn on modern views about what is acceptable or desirable during sex. But these were kids growing up long before OnlyFans.
In Grotte de Cussac, in the Dordogne river valley in France, there is a palaeolithic engraving of a woman dating back to around 25,000 years ago. She is depicted with a derriere that would make Kim Kardashian jealous. People have found ways to look at sex in whatever forms they have at their disposal. It just so happens that we’re not carving into rocks, we’re on this odd contraption known in common parlance as the World Wide Web.
As Blair says: “It is a part of our society, it is a part of our society that is for grown ups, not for kids, let’s be very clear, but if it is part of our society people deserve a safe platform, where they get paid to be in control.”
She added: “As a society, we are moving towards being open and having those conversations about sex.”
But in the UK, we’re still too squeamish to admit it. In an interview with The Times, Gan was accused of pretending OnlyFans wasn’t making money off of sex. But the main qualm the interviewer seemed to have was with the fact the posts with less nudity garnered less money – or “tips” as they’re called.
There are fair concerns about OnlyFans. Where there is sex, there is likely to be exploitation, there will be people trying to game the system for darker, illegal content. OnlyFans has a mountain to climb to keep that off of their platforms.
There was also a bizarre moment when OnlyFans wanted to stop being the sex platform, and kick off “adult only” content. They were quickly forced to capitulate after sex workers accused them of making money off of them, and then rejecting them to be more socially acceptable. Blair seems to have learnt that lesson. She now says they are “very proud to have adult content on our site”.
OnlyFans revenues grew by 160 per cent last year. They’re the only tech company not currently in the midst of mass layoffs. We’ve been happy for the music industry to make money off of sex, ditto for TV and films. Succession, currently airing to much fanfare every Monday night is packed full of sex. As Blair says, there’s “more sex in Bridgerton” than on some of the content on OnlyFans. But the moment someone admits to actually doing the thing everyone was doing already, Brits giggle behind their hands and then grand stand against it.
Azalea has 17 million followers on Instagram. In most of her pictures, she’s almost naked anyway. Why shouldn’t she be able to profit off of her own body?