OnlyFans is a platform where strangers pay a monthly subscription to simulate sexual intimacy with people they will never meet – a technological innovation that would have baffled every previous civilisation.
On the other side of this transaction are millions of young women (and a few men) who treat this as they might a career in teaching or an entrepreneurial pursuit – weighing the hours, calculating the income, and optimising the marketing strategy.
Imagine explaining that to someone 50 years ago. Better yet, imagine you’ve time-travelled back to a classroom of teenage girls in the mid-1970s and you’re telling them what’s coming. That within a generation, thousands of girls their age will aspire to sell access to nude photographs and videos of themselves, and that newspapers will profile them as entrepreneurs. That a woman called Bonnie Blue will offer her body as a venue for an extreme endurance sport and that this will be treated as a newsworthy achievement rather than a psychiatric emergency.
The classroom of girls – still processing the sexual revolution of the sixties – would surely look at you aghast. This isn’t what they meant by freedom. Their own mothers had fought for equal pay, independence, and the right to leave a bad marriage – real grievances, real reform.
But you’re just getting started, you say.
People will browse potential partners on pocket computers, swiping right if they like the photo and left if they don’t. Love will be reduced to a consumer choice optimised by an algorithm. Meeting someone in person to ask them out will seem quaint, almost Victorian. The device will decide who’s worth your time based on six photographs, a 30-word bio and an aubergine emoji. Someone somewhere else is swiping left or right on your profile too.
Romance – an old-fashioned word by this point – will be something you order like a Chinese takeaway. If the first date doesn’t work out, there are 50 more options waiting in your pocket. Boys and girls alike will learn to treat each other less as people to know and more as problems to solve. For the boys especially, this will build on lessons already learned – that women exist primarily as objects of desire, that conquest matters more than connection. The sexual revolution, meant to free women, will give men new permission to see them as bodies first and people second.
The boys will encounter another distortion. They’ll be told their natural instincts are toxic, that masculinity itself is a sort of pathology. Confused and often lacking role models at home, many will turn to someone called Andrew Tate – a former kickboxer who treats women as collectables and calls it self-improvement. Rejected by polite society for their natural masculinity, these boys will embrace a grotesque parody of it.
But we’re not nearly finished, you say.
Children as young as ten will encounter pornography that would have been illegal for adults in any other age. An entire generation exposed to violent sexual imagery, many of them becoming confused about intimacy and incapable of ordinary relationships as a result.
The mistake at the heart of it, you’d suggest, is this: we assumed removing ordinary barriers would increase intimacy. We forgot that constraint is often what makes intimacy possible. When sex becomes effortless, it becomes weightless. Desire without risk turns into recreation without consequence, soon losing its mystery, even becoming boring. In making sex easier, almost mundane, we removed uncertainty and cost – the very things that made it binding.
All of this will happen in one lifetime.
Some of the girls in our imaginary classroom will live to see it. They’ll be in their early seventies by then, no longer especially surprised to read the latest newspaper report on Bonnie Blue – now claiming to have slept with over 1,000 men in 12 hours. It’ll be on page three of the Daily Mail, wedged between the weather and a celebrity divorce.
And then you tell them the cruellest part. That despite all this sexual liberation, despite the pornography and the dating apps, young people will have less sex than any generation since the Victorians. It will produce a generation too anxious to form intimate relationships – and, in many cases, too screen-addled to care.
The girls listening to you recount these events wouldn’t quite believe you. Everything you’ve described would sound like a parody of liberation.
Yet by the time they reach seventy, their granddaughters will call it progress.
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Wasn’t sure whether to publish this one. It’s not my usual terrain, which is why I’ve framed it as a thought experiment.
When I shared part of it to Notes, it got a very angry response, which suggests this is sensitive territory.
I’ll leave comments open for a while. Happy to hear opposing views. Disagreement is fine – abuse isn’t.
The juxtaposition of prostitution as an act of despair and desparation forced to service the needs of depraved men, to then find some massive percentage of young females have only fans accounts where they profit handsomely from the fantasy life of lonely men. Two totally opposing poles!
Great topic with plenty of room for serious reflection.