{"id":4720,"date":"2025-01-18T17:20:08","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T17:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/?p=4720"},"modified":"2025-01-19T02:34:10","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T02:34:10","slug":"opinion-selling-sex-is-feminist-and-other-lies-told-on-onlyfans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/?p=4720","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: \u201cSelling Sex is Feminist\u201d… And Other Lies Told on OnlyFans\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>4 Minute, 31 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n

It is not feminist to turn degradation into a business model. Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans performer who made headlines for allowing 101 men to have sex with her in a single day, claims empowerment. So does OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair, who insists that her billion-dollar porn empire is built on feminist ideals. But a recent Reuters investigation has torn that lie apart, exposing a cesspool of criminal exploitation\u2014where abuse, coercion, and trafficking are monetised under the guise of “choice.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The findings are horrifying: sexual slavery<\/a>, child abuse material<\/a>, and revenge porn<\/a> proliferate on the platform. With 55 million<\/a> pieces of content uploaded in a single month, the idea that these crimes can be eradicated is laughable. Meanwhile, Blair, the CEO of the $1.3 billion porn empire<\/a>, she is oddly squeamish about the word \u201cporn,\u201d calling it \u201cpejorative.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

OnlyFans is not new. It was founded in 2016 by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely and later sold to shadowy investor Leonid Radvinsky<\/a>. Since then, it has paid over $20 billion<\/a> to its creators, while keeping a pimp\u2019s commission of 20% from every transaction. The pandemic saw a surge in desperate young women turning to the platform, with creator numbers jumping from 348,000 in 2019 to over 1.6 million in 2020<\/a>. Today, competition is brutal. The site doesn\u2019t promote content, leaving women to debase themselves for visibility\u2014flooding social media with explicit content to drive subscribers. The lucky 0.1% rake in over \u00a380,000 a month, but the average creator<\/a> takes home a measly $140. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reuters\u2019s report should have been a death blow. Women deceived, drugged, terrorised, and enslaved<\/a> to create content. Criminals imprisoning women in suburban houses, branding them with degrading words like \u201cdog\u201d and \u201ctoy.\u201d<\/a>And yet, despite this, OnlyFans continues to brand itself as a progressive alternative to traditional pornography. Blair talks about \u201cfreedom<\/a>\u201d and \u201cchoice<\/a>\u201d while ignoring the grotesque coercion beneath the surface. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the most insidious part of OnlyFans isn\u2019t the criminal exploitation. It\u2019s the way it normalises a world where selling sexual performances is routine. It\u2019s the way it turns women into commodities and packages their degradation as empowerment. Phillips, in a documentary about her 101-man stunt, shrugged: \u201cGuys are always going to sexualise me, so I may as well try to make a profit off it.\u201d<\/a> This wild chase for cash doesn\u2019t seem to end. In her most vile act yet, Lily filmed herself exiting a hotel room with male bodily fluids on her face<\/a>, then confidently walked through the streets of London, openly displaying her stained appearance. This is the mindset of a generation raised on porn\u2014children of an industry that taught them sex is a transaction, something done to<\/em> them rather than with<\/em> them, where the only consolation is financial.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

OnlyFans is not just the next iteration of pornography; it\u2019s the logical endpoint of a culture that tells women their worth is in their ability to arouse men. It is a marketplace where the victims of the porn industry\u2019s earlier abuses are now trapped in a cycle of selling a digital facsimile<\/a> of the sexuality that was stolen from them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it\u2019s getting worse. In the age of PornHub and OnlyFans, stories of young women \u201cbreaking records\u201d by having sex with hundreds or even thousands of men in a day have become grotesquely normal. Bonnie Blue, a 25-year-old OnlyFans star, claims to have shattered the \u201cworld record\u201d for group sex, sleeping with 1,057 men in a day<\/a>\u2014beating Lisa Sparks\u2019s 919-man stunt in 2004<\/a>. Phillips had hoped to outdo Sparks with her 101-man session, but now she\u2019s eyeing 1,000 men in 24 hours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s be clear: this isn\u2019t sex. This is industrialised degradation. This is male consumption taken to its brutal extreme. The descriptions are nauseating\u2014two to five minutes per man, groups of five, individuals granted 30 to 45 seconds each. Once you strip pleasure from sex, once it becomes pure commodification, what\u2019s left? Only the spectacle of misogyny itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even other sex workers are horrified. OnlyFans creator Kassidie Kosa called Phillips\u2019s antics a form of self-harm<\/a>, warning that pushing these limits isn\u2019t sustainable or healthy. But the industry rewards extremity, and as the stakes get higher, women are driven to go further. The result? A dystopia where female self-destruction is just another form of content. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is what \u201cfeminism\u201d has become under capitalism. Not liberation, but a race to the bottom, where the most abused woman wins. As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Pornography<\/em> (1981): \u201cThe object is allowed to desire if she desires to be an object: to be formed; especially to be used.\u201d In 2019\u2019s Females<\/em>, Andrea Long Chu took this further: \u201cTo be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the world OnlyFans has built\u2014a world where the feminist project is dead, where women are not liberated but further entrapped, where selling your body is the last refuge for those failed by an indifferent system. And the most tragic part? Many of them believe it\u2019s empowerment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: Let\u2019s Talk About Porn<\/a> by Charles Deluvio, 2018 \/\/ Unsplash Content License<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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It is not feminist to turn degradation into a business model. Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans performer who made headlines for allowing 101 men <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":4728,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,6,66,67,12],"tags":[542,65,541,342],"class_list":["post-4720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorialtab","category-featured","category-gender","category-gender-2","category-latest","tag-exploitation","tag-female-empowerment","tag-female-rights","tag-feminism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewitnessexeter.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}