‘I don’t think of it like porn it’s more of a side hustle’

As OnlyFans creators hit payday, Chloe Combi looks at how this is making the femosphere as toxic as the manosphere for teenagers and how we can protect them from its influence

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Last week, I found myself deep in conversation with some students in year 9 and year 10. These teens are completely typical of their age group. They have dreams, aspirations, worries, families, friends, and smartphones. None of them are more online or more connected than any of their classmates.

They are mid-teenagers, and they are all aware of OnlyFans – ostensibly a social media platform, but one on which sexually explicit pictures and videos are sold to subscribers. It’s increasingly associated with famous influencers, or “creators”, and the students I spoke with all have their “number” – the amount of money it would take for them to consider becoming a creator themselves. They’ve thought about it a lot, and talked about it with their friends, discussing in detail how many followers they’d have to accumulate in order to create sexual content and post it online for cash, popularity, and fame.

Of course, many say that nothing would entice them to sign up to OnlyFans (or its many imitators) when they turn 18 – but many don’t. They have their number. For Ebony*, 14, that number is “$4m [around £3m] and probably 1 million followers”, she tells me, going on to explain: “Maybe because then you could have sex, like once, maybe, and then get a Boohoo deal or a Sephora deal and be set for life.”

OnlyFans is a subscription-based platform where “creators” post mostly sexual content for paying subscribers. It was founded in 2016, and has seen a stratospheric rise over the last decade. Like TikTok, OnlyFans gained major prominence during the pandemic, when people were scared, bored, and looking for ways to supplement their reduced (or vanished) income.