On the surface, OnlyFans looks like autonomy. A woman, a camera, a smartphone, set your price, set your rules. It’s marketed like entrepreneurship, like you’re your own boss. But let’s be real. This is a mechanism of exploitation. Marxist feminist critiques nail this point: “free choice” is a smokescreen. Most women aren’t logging on because it’s their dream career, they’re doing it out of financial necessity. And when the system boxes people into selling themselves to survive, that’s not empowerment. That’s exploitation, plain and simple.
Let’s look at the math. The average creator on OnlyFans makes between $150 and $180 a month. That’s it. Not life-changing money. Not even bill money. Meanwhile, the top 1% of creators take home anywhere from 33 to 60 percent of the platform’s entire revenue. That means the headlines about million-dollar payouts? They’re outliers. They’re bait. The reality is most creators are hustling for scraps while the platform and a few celebrities pocket the big cash. That’s not entrepreneurship that’s a power law distribution, where the rich get richer and everyone else stays broke. And the money isn’t the only problem. The work itself takes a mental and emotional toll. Studies show sex workers, including OnlyFans creators, report high rates of depression, anxiety, and even PTSD.
Why? Because the job isn’t just uploading a picture. The real money comes from interaction. Constant chatting, custom requests, roleplay. For some creators, 70% of their income comes from responding to messages. And what are those messages? Harassment, abusive comments, vile fantasies. That’s the daily reality. Again this isn’t empowerment. This is emotional labor at its most toxic where your paycheck depends on how much abuse you’re willing to tolerate.
So who really wins here? Not the average creator. Not the men paying for a false sense of connection. The winners are the platform itself raking in fees and commissions and the celebrities who treat it like a side hustle. Meanwhile, the women selling their intimacy are left with digital footprints they can’t erase, psychological scars, and no retirement plan. Someone younger, someone hungrier, will always be ready to replace them.
So let’s stop pretending OnlyFans is some revolutionary path to empowerment. It’s the same transaction that’s been going on for centuries selling intimacy for survival just dressed up with hashtags and smartphones. If you want to call that empowerment, fine. But I call it what it really is: a system that preys on loneliness, desperation, and instability, while the real money flows upward to the very few.
