I've never been a user of OF or other cam sites, but the way I'd interpret the psychology is not that they *believe* you're really filming live, but simply that you're providing the props to facilitate a more immersive fantasy. I think a lot of porn behavior follows this pattern; it's often about finding just enough cover to turn off the part of your brain that's telling you it isn't real.
I will forever read Aella pieces as an Alien finding new ways to be disappointed in humanity for not being logical. "But why can't they just consider how long it would take to set up the cameras and lighting!"
Your insight into how males adapt female like norms when they are the perused is particularly interesting.
I'd like a "profile" of the typical OnlyFans user. I'm curious who uses OnlyFans in an environment where free porn exists everywhere. A deep dive into why some individuals would rather pay for something must mean they are getting something out of the process.
I really want to know how many users are aware that they've been sexting with another dude this whole time (in most cases). But that might be an awkward survey question in the case when the answer is no.
Awesome post Aella. I've long been curious about how camgirl/guy business models work and you answered almost every question I had about it and then a whole lot more. It's heaps more varied and innovative than I'd imagined.
But there's one aspect of internet camming that I've wondered about that you didn't touch on and that's it's transborder aspects.
Seems to me neoliberal economics relies heavily on the fact that work is a lot more mobile than workers, so employment will always tend to slosh to the places where overheads (usually as wages, conditions, taxes and regulation) are the lowest.
I'd have thought camming was an almost perfect example of this and the work would inevitably go to the places where the sex workers get the lowest returns, have the fewest opportunities for collective bargaining and enjoy the weakest protections from predatory employers - whether agents or site managers.
So given the competition between girls you wrote of, how is it possible that sex workers in first world countries are still able to make good first world incomes doing this?
In fact it seems to me that given the OF model you describe, once they'd accumulated a sufficiently large library of pre-recorded performances the site owners could ditch the models entirely and just rely on the warehouses full of minimum wage workers, though instead of paying New York rents and minimum wages they can set up shop in a Manila slum or Rio favela.
One strength for those of us in high-income countries is language. Many English speakers want to be able to communicate with us about their kinks and fantasies. I also speak French and I'm starting to build a small following of people who want interaction in that language.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in South and SE Asia - including Manila - I can assure you there's plenty of good English speakers out of work there, which is why so many companies (and criminal organisations) set up call centres in such places. And of course there's a lot of low income former French colonies too.
Not that you need to be great at English to type “hey babe you horny”, “let me show you what i’m doing” or "HEY BB U UP? MY PUSSY HORNY XOXO LOOK AT ME WET NOW".
Agreed language is important factor. There is fantasy going on here and likely most men want to see a woman they can fantasize as girlfriend therefore, different men might be looking for different mixtures or flavors of girl next-door or crush from high school or girl from coffee, shop library or work School or shopping mall
In this way content provider model, women will be more successful if they trigger a similarity to the viewers, crush or attraction
There's quite a demand for sexual exotica and I'm sure there's warehoused low income workers pretending to be from all manner of nationalities and cultures to meet the fantasy demands of first world English speakers.
I can't say I've seen any reputable stats on it, but given the evolutionary advantages of mating with someone from outside your tribe I'd be surprised if those who prefer to fantasize about those similar to them are a majority. Even racists often prefer sexual partners from the races they disparage.
I get why it's bothersome that a lot of men don't seem to care about personality, but I also think it doesn't suggest an incapability to appreciate it or a lack of desire for genuine connection: they're just going with what's most readily and easily available to them. If anything, it's something I find rather sad about men's condition, that so many of them are so starved of sexual and/or romantic connection that they'll take something very superficial. From what I've seen, men who desire deep connection with women are also ones who've already experienced it (sexually or otherwise). In a sense, they know what's possible and what they're missing out on. But you can probably even fall in love and feel quite deeply if you aren't "overstimulated" with emotional connection, which is a strange situation: Sexually overstimulated with abundant porn and nudity, but "connectionally" understimulated - so less of the stimulus needed for good connection (conversation? Emotional insight and vulnerability?) works for high rewards of feeling deeply connected. So maybe it's not so sad after all?
Also, a slightly wicked aside: I am hoping a side effect of this post is that you laying bare this reality ends up shattering the immersion for some men and prompts them to seek out something deeper for it to truly feel authentic. But I suspect those men aren't the ones reading this post anyway.
As a guy, I try pretty hard to avoid onlyfans because it seems like a trap. (Why pay for porn when so much is available for free?)
The only times when I'm tempted by OF are when my "romance brain" is activated -- when I start thinking maybe there's something special about *her in particular* which would make me want to pay for her content.
So the OF spam on the internet basically gives me practice in tamping down my "romance brain", and resisting the notion that there's anything special about *her in particular*. I'm learning that getting "hooked" on any particular woman is basically a scam which will leave me with a lighter wallet.
I feel like if regular women understood this, they would be pretty opposed to OF.
Same way we're burning through our planet's limited supply of fossil fuels, sometimes I wonder if we're also burning through our planet's limited supply of genuine, good-faith love and affection, with every OF spambot, ghosting, woman on Tinder who's just trying to get Instagram followers, man on tinder who lovebombs women in order to score, etc. The traditional answer to "where did all the good guys go?" is "you ignored them for alpha males", but I suspect "we've burned through much of our planet's limited supply of romance" is more accurate.
I hate to sound too cocky, but there are a lot of men who don't spend a lot of time on OF or mass-produced porn.
Granted my strategy was to write my own dirty stories, which avoided having to pay anyone. I doubt this is going to be a huge draw for most guys.
I actually do care quite a bit about personality, and even seem to display some moderate sapiosexuality, contrary to her experiences with modulating her displayed intellect on OF, where dumb was good. I'd postulate that men spending significant money on OF are not a good sample of the general population, or what the average heterosexual woman is going to encounter.
However, Aella certainly has found some really interesting suggestions that at least some of what we think of as 'male' or 'female' behavior, rather than biological (as says the right) or the product of an oppressive patriarchy (as says the left), are in fact economic!
"I have a lot of positive things to say about men, like I will staunchly defend being empathetic towards them, but this is one avenue in which my hopes about them were repeatedly, regularly crushed." -- In my definition, "empathy" includes figuring out why a person does what they do, always assuming that there will be good reasons behind it.
In this case, as a man, I can easily imagine that the idea here is to avoid shame: It needs to be sufficiently unreal so I can imagine it being real while at the same time avoiding the shame of it *being* real.
I'm not sure, I'd put it down more to survivorship bias.
A bunch of male readers are thinking: "I'd never fall for that". Yep, that's why you're not on OnlyFans - you were filtered out early.
Like the "whales" in the camgirl business, I guess that the men most susceptible to this kind of "drip" tactic are a small subset of OnlyFans users who make up a lot of OnlyFans revenue.
Mobile pay-to-win gaming and sports betting feel vaguely similar in that they're designed to separate a certain segment of people from their money. I am pretty disgusted by all of these industries and how they take advantage of people, but then I remember that people spend $100 B a year on the lottery in the US.
AI generated content and chatbot were not a real thing in 2020, at the current speed I think no real women would do onlyfans by 2030, either completely fake AI women, or real women being 3d scanned then put into a computer model, after all porn is much easier to created than real movies, minimum character, minimum setting, minimum camera angle, would be very easy to generate through AI
If Onlyfans is selling the fantasy of connecting and interacting with a real woman, they will still need real women to serve as the "face" of an account. The messages the woman sends might all be written by bots, but there will need to be some fig leaf of reality.
The technology obviously isn't quite there yet, and many people can spot the AI images, but in another 2-4 years I think that completely disappears, it might even be possible right now if someone spent enough time solving the problem. You already have sites like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ or https://rendernet.ai/ that generate shockingly realistic images. We're not far off from having those some engines generate full conversational AI bots
Look at the latest AI video generators, such as OpenAI's Sora: they are more than capable of generating adult content, were it not for the controls imposed over them. It's just therefore a matter of time.
Nothing against the women making money from this but I’ll never understand from a male’s POV the appeal of this. It wouldn’t do anything for me and I would feel so lame utilizing it. It makes sense, the vast majority of modern men are losers and I don’t fault women for exploiting the market. However if I ever a see a hot girl on IG with an OF link I’m just going to google her name so I can her nudes without paying
Very interesting article. I also noticed that OF made girls to act like men: actively sexually pursuing and chasing. Yes, OF is terrible place because it’s just chatties who are trying to sell you very expensive and useless content.
Great article, many thanks. One factor I would suggest has profoundly aided OnlyFans' explosion of popularity is that internet dating is such an unrelentingly grim, practically-impossible process to succeed at for most men. The rise of OnlyFans has closely followed that of internet dating: OnlyFans merely reflects the unpleasant reality that it is the closest thing to a sexual relationship that many men can realistically achieve.
There are longer analyses here, basically arguing that internet dating ruined average women, who are now unwilling to consider average men: https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
Extracts from that:
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
- Sociologist Rob Henderson cited statistics from a study on Tinder finding that women “like the profiles of only four percent of the men they see on the app, whereas men swipe right or like 60 percent of the profiles” (see 33:30 minutes into the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ZyQKiwMQw).
Very interesting article. It made me wonder if behind all the anti-relationship propaganda of 4th wave feminism - as in the 4B movement - and in the manosphere - as in the MGTOW movement - there is a desire to move all sex to monetizing online platforms.
I dunno. That may be the way it winds up and maybe the 4Bs' and redpillers get funded somehow by OF through some financial mechanism of which I am unaware. I'm not joking--money sloshes around through a lot of subterranean mechanisms.
But I think these movements were started for honest purposes at least. I was MGTOW avant la lettre for a while out of fear of divorce, and I imagine a lot of the 4Bs are women who don't like what's on offer as far as men go.
Thank you so much for this post. I've been in the industry for over 25 years and adore reading about its history and mechanisations.
When 2008 hit, I moved from running my paysite to in-person work. I briefly tried camming, but it didn't click with me because the in-real-time hustle was too much for me. I retired from in-person in 2016. In 2021 I started working on a cam platform (private show style) and in-person work informed me how I do it to build and maintain connections. I do regret I didn't get to experience the super busy tip type times, though.
This is genuinely brilliant and you are a fantastic writer.
I’m struggling with the last bit. Imo the idea that porn can transcend porniness(?) and attain real connection is just not a thing. This is the whole problem with porn. And sex work. And one night stands. And casual sex. And everything that isn’t “I like you *more than everyone else in the whole wide world*”. Peak orgasms are downstream of the banal daily interactions of a life lived together, intertwined. Settling for porn (or other substitutes) is an implicit acknowledgment of our failure to achieve this desire.
I agree with the critiques of OF, but could these critiques not extend to escorting as well?
Sure the interaction is more genuine, but the clients are presumably paying the escort to be the best version of themselves and the version of themselves that caters the most to the clients needs and desires.
There is plenty of artifice and simulacra there. Sure it doesn't have an uncouth industrial level of scaling to it, but at the heart it's the same thing, just appealing to the customers who would presumably not fall for the low quality mass produced simulation of intimacy, though I suspect there are a group of men who would pay for both an escort and an agency managed OF subscription.
I don't think poorly od anyone doing any of those things, but just saying they all exist along the same spectrum.
I've never been a user of OF or other cam sites, but the way I'd interpret the psychology is not that they *believe* you're really filming live, but simply that you're providing the props to facilitate a more immersive fantasy. I think a lot of porn behavior follows this pattern; it's often about finding just enough cover to turn off the part of your brain that's telling you it isn't real.
Correct.
Just like ‘Harry Potter’ fundamentally isn’t real, yet we want it to be.
Of *course* this is the top comment. A distinction without a difference.
You want a cookie? 🍪
I will forever read Aella pieces as an Alien finding new ways to be disappointed in humanity for not being logical. "But why can't they just consider how long it would take to set up the cameras and lighting!"
Your insight into how males adapt female like norms when they are the perused is particularly interesting.
hello fellow Alien
I'd like a "profile" of the typical OnlyFans user. I'm curious who uses OnlyFans in an environment where free porn exists everywhere. A deep dive into why some individuals would rather pay for something must mean they are getting something out of the process.
Same dude I can’t wrap my head around it
Because if it’s free, people don’t value it.
I really want to know how many users are aware that they've been sexting with another dude this whole time (in most cases). But that might be an awkward survey question in the case when the answer is no.
Awesome post Aella. I've long been curious about how camgirl/guy business models work and you answered almost every question I had about it and then a whole lot more. It's heaps more varied and innovative than I'd imagined.
But there's one aspect of internet camming that I've wondered about that you didn't touch on and that's it's transborder aspects.
Seems to me neoliberal economics relies heavily on the fact that work is a lot more mobile than workers, so employment will always tend to slosh to the places where overheads (usually as wages, conditions, taxes and regulation) are the lowest.
I'd have thought camming was an almost perfect example of this and the work would inevitably go to the places where the sex workers get the lowest returns, have the fewest opportunities for collective bargaining and enjoy the weakest protections from predatory employers - whether agents or site managers.
So given the competition between girls you wrote of, how is it possible that sex workers in first world countries are still able to make good first world incomes doing this?
In fact it seems to me that given the OF model you describe, once they'd accumulated a sufficiently large library of pre-recorded performances the site owners could ditch the models entirely and just rely on the warehouses full of minimum wage workers, though instead of paying New York rents and minimum wages they can set up shop in a Manila slum or Rio favela.
One strength for those of us in high-income countries is language. Many English speakers want to be able to communicate with us about their kinks and fantasies. I also speak French and I'm starting to build a small following of people who want interaction in that language.
As someone who has spent a fair amount of time in South and SE Asia - including Manila - I can assure you there's plenty of good English speakers out of work there, which is why so many companies (and criminal organisations) set up call centres in such places. And of course there's a lot of low income former French colonies too.
Not that you need to be great at English to type “hey babe you horny”, “let me show you what i’m doing” or "HEY BB U UP? MY PUSSY HORNY XOXO LOOK AT ME WET NOW".
Agreed language is important factor. There is fantasy going on here and likely most men want to see a woman they can fantasize as girlfriend therefore, different men might be looking for different mixtures or flavors of girl next-door or crush from high school or girl from coffee, shop library or work School or shopping mall
In this way content provider model, women will be more successful if they trigger a similarity to the viewers, crush or attraction
Depends on how you swing, doesn't it?
There's quite a demand for sexual exotica and I'm sure there's warehoused low income workers pretending to be from all manner of nationalities and cultures to meet the fantasy demands of first world English speakers.
I can't say I've seen any reputable stats on it, but given the evolutionary advantages of mating with someone from outside your tribe I'd be surprised if those who prefer to fantasize about those similar to them are a majority. Even racists often prefer sexual partners from the races they disparage.
I get why it's bothersome that a lot of men don't seem to care about personality, but I also think it doesn't suggest an incapability to appreciate it or a lack of desire for genuine connection: they're just going with what's most readily and easily available to them. If anything, it's something I find rather sad about men's condition, that so many of them are so starved of sexual and/or romantic connection that they'll take something very superficial. From what I've seen, men who desire deep connection with women are also ones who've already experienced it (sexually or otherwise). In a sense, they know what's possible and what they're missing out on. But you can probably even fall in love and feel quite deeply if you aren't "overstimulated" with emotional connection, which is a strange situation: Sexually overstimulated with abundant porn and nudity, but "connectionally" understimulated - so less of the stimulus needed for good connection (conversation? Emotional insight and vulnerability?) works for high rewards of feeling deeply connected. So maybe it's not so sad after all?
Also, a slightly wicked aside: I am hoping a side effect of this post is that you laying bare this reality ends up shattering the immersion for some men and prompts them to seek out something deeper for it to truly feel authentic. But I suspect those men aren't the ones reading this post anyway.
As a guy, I try pretty hard to avoid onlyfans because it seems like a trap. (Why pay for porn when so much is available for free?)
The only times when I'm tempted by OF are when my "romance brain" is activated -- when I start thinking maybe there's something special about *her in particular* which would make me want to pay for her content.
So the OF spam on the internet basically gives me practice in tamping down my "romance brain", and resisting the notion that there's anything special about *her in particular*. I'm learning that getting "hooked" on any particular woman is basically a scam which will leave me with a lighter wallet.
I feel like if regular women understood this, they would be pretty opposed to OF.
Same way we're burning through our planet's limited supply of fossil fuels, sometimes I wonder if we're also burning through our planet's limited supply of genuine, good-faith love and affection, with every OF spambot, ghosting, woman on Tinder who's just trying to get Instagram followers, man on tinder who lovebombs women in order to score, etc. The traditional answer to "where did all the good guys go?" is "you ignored them for alpha males", but I suspect "we've burned through much of our planet's limited supply of romance" is more accurate.
I hate to sound too cocky, but there are a lot of men who don't spend a lot of time on OF or mass-produced porn.
Granted my strategy was to write my own dirty stories, which avoided having to pay anyone. I doubt this is going to be a huge draw for most guys.
I actually do care quite a bit about personality, and even seem to display some moderate sapiosexuality, contrary to her experiences with modulating her displayed intellect on OF, where dumb was good. I'd postulate that men spending significant money on OF are not a good sample of the general population, or what the average heterosexual woman is going to encounter.
However, Aella certainly has found some really interesting suggestions that at least some of what we think of as 'male' or 'female' behavior, rather than biological (as says the right) or the product of an oppressive patriarchy (as says the left), are in fact economic!
"I have a lot of positive things to say about men, like I will staunchly defend being empathetic towards them, but this is one avenue in which my hopes about them were repeatedly, regularly crushed." -- In my definition, "empathy" includes figuring out why a person does what they do, always assuming that there will be good reasons behind it.
In this case, as a man, I can easily imagine that the idea here is to avoid shame: It needs to be sufficiently unreal so I can imagine it being real while at the same time avoiding the shame of it *being* real.
I'm not sure, I'd put it down more to survivorship bias.
A bunch of male readers are thinking: "I'd never fall for that". Yep, that's why you're not on OnlyFans - you were filtered out early.
Like the "whales" in the camgirl business, I guess that the men most susceptible to this kind of "drip" tactic are a small subset of OnlyFans users who make up a lot of OnlyFans revenue.
Mobile pay-to-win gaming and sports betting feel vaguely similar in that they're designed to separate a certain segment of people from their money. I am pretty disgusted by all of these industries and how they take advantage of people, but then I remember that people spend $100 B a year on the lottery in the US.
AI generated content and chatbot were not a real thing in 2020, at the current speed I think no real women would do onlyfans by 2030, either completely fake AI women, or real women being 3d scanned then put into a computer model, after all porn is much easier to created than real movies, minimum character, minimum setting, minimum camera angle, would be very easy to generate through AI
If Onlyfans is selling the fantasy of connecting and interacting with a real woman, they will still need real women to serve as the "face" of an account. The messages the woman sends might all be written by bots, but there will need to be some fig leaf of reality.
The technology obviously isn't quite there yet, and many people can spot the AI images, but in another 2-4 years I think that completely disappears, it might even be possible right now if someone spent enough time solving the problem. You already have sites like https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ or https://rendernet.ai/ that generate shockingly realistic images. We're not far off from having those some engines generate full conversational AI bots
It's already being used to generate Instagram 'models', many of whom/whose creators are making a fortune.
Further, some actual women are using AI to artificially 'de-age' themselves, thus extending their service life. One example is Maria Tretjakova: https://www.babepedia.com/babe/Maria_Tretjakova / https://archive.ph/sgjxj
She has reinvented herself as Olivia Casta: https://www.instagram.com/oliviacastaxx/
Look at the latest AI video generators, such as OpenAI's Sora: they are more than capable of generating adult content, were it not for the controls imposed over them. It's just therefore a matter of time.
Not long until the sex robots! (See Futurama, Don't Date Robots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uE96qUlJ_4)
Nothing against the women making money from this but I’ll never understand from a male’s POV the appeal of this. It wouldn’t do anything for me and I would feel so lame utilizing it. It makes sense, the vast majority of modern men are losers and I don’t fault women for exploiting the market. However if I ever a see a hot girl on IG with an OF link I’m just going to google her name so I can her nudes without paying
👁️👄👁️
Very interesting article. I also noticed that OF made girls to act like men: actively sexually pursuing and chasing. Yes, OF is terrible place because it’s just chatties who are trying to sell you very expensive and useless content.
That’s a really great point. It completely reverses the dynamic - and there is a lot of pussy chasing that wallet.
Great article, many thanks. One factor I would suggest has profoundly aided OnlyFans' explosion of popularity is that internet dating is such an unrelentingly grim, practically-impossible process to succeed at for most men. The rise of OnlyFans has closely followed that of internet dating: OnlyFans merely reflects the unpleasant reality that it is the closest thing to a sexual relationship that many men can realistically achieve.
There are longer analyses here, basically arguing that internet dating ruined average women, who are now unwilling to consider average men: https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
Extracts from that:
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
- Sociologist Rob Henderson cited statistics from a study on Tinder finding that women “like the profiles of only four percent of the men they see on the app, whereas men swipe right or like 60 percent of the profiles” (see 33:30 minutes into the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6ZyQKiwMQw).
Source: https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
Well said. Women played in part of success of other women.
Very interesting article. It made me wonder if behind all the anti-relationship propaganda of 4th wave feminism - as in the 4B movement - and in the manosphere - as in the MGTOW movement - there is a desire to move all sex to monetizing online platforms.
I dunno. That may be the way it winds up and maybe the 4Bs' and redpillers get funded somehow by OF through some financial mechanism of which I am unaware. I'm not joking--money sloshes around through a lot of subterranean mechanisms.
But I think these movements were started for honest purposes at least. I was MGTOW avant la lettre for a while out of fear of divorce, and I imagine a lot of the 4Bs are women who don't like what's on offer as far as men go.
There's some truth in that, Hermes.
Thank you so much for this post. I've been in the industry for over 25 years and adore reading about its history and mechanisations.
When 2008 hit, I moved from running my paysite to in-person work. I briefly tried camming, but it didn't click with me because the in-real-time hustle was too much for me. I retired from in-person in 2016. In 2021 I started working on a cam platform (private show style) and in-person work informed me how I do it to build and maintain connections. I do regret I didn't get to experience the super busy tip type times, though.
This is genuinely brilliant and you are a fantastic writer.
I’m struggling with the last bit. Imo the idea that porn can transcend porniness(?) and attain real connection is just not a thing. This is the whole problem with porn. And sex work. And one night stands. And casual sex. And everything that isn’t “I like you *more than everyone else in the whole wide world*”. Peak orgasms are downstream of the banal daily interactions of a life lived together, intertwined. Settling for porn (or other substitutes) is an implicit acknowledgment of our failure to achieve this desire.
Drugs is artificial fun
Onlyfans is a artificial connection , hundreds of millions of lonely men in the world !
Dopamine Dealers.
I agree with the critiques of OF, but could these critiques not extend to escorting as well?
Sure the interaction is more genuine, but the clients are presumably paying the escort to be the best version of themselves and the version of themselves that caters the most to the clients needs and desires.
There is plenty of artifice and simulacra there. Sure it doesn't have an uncouth industrial level of scaling to it, but at the heart it's the same thing, just appealing to the customers who would presumably not fall for the low quality mass produced simulation of intimacy, though I suspect there are a group of men who would pay for both an escort and an agency managed OF subscription.
I don't think poorly od anyone doing any of those things, but just saying they all exist along the same spectrum.
The difference is you are actually interacting with the girl.
This is disgusting, nothing good can born from it. This kind of systems should dissapear and their owners and responsibles strongly punished.
womp womp