The OnlyFans Phenomenon: Has It Saved Porn Or Made It The New Uber?

If this health crisis has made it clear, it is that porn, in a consumer society like ours, is a basic good.

The worst month of the pandemic was the best for the porn portal portal -Pornhub- with daily growth peaks of up to almost 17%.

The emergency was such that in the United Kingdom sex workers launched a campaign under the hashtag #WanksAsThanks (

as a thank you) to raise funds while providing healthcare personnel with their happy moment of the day by offering them free access to their digital content.

And, in a dubious gesture of onanist solidarity, the aforementioned giant of adult content on the network made its Premium account available to whoever wanted.

Of course, this strategic move received no little criticism.

In an Internet populated with explicit content with all the problems that this entails, it did not seem very necessary to up the ante.

Antonio Marcos, President of APEOGA (Association of producers, editors of works and adult recordings) and creator of the Bonobo awards, is clear about it: “When we started making porn, in the nineties, that was a cinematographic genre.

Today has nothing to do with it.

It has become a factory of making scenes the more donkeys the better for people to bite.

Clicks are only sought to be able to market with that data.

And, along the way, children see that.

Within that panorama, Pornhub is the great dragon that accumulates and sells data.

Right now there is going to be a change in the audiovisual law and we have wanted to enter to expose the problems that exist with minors and they ignore us.

They say that they are not going to put doors to the field ”.

A problem that is closely linked to the fact that free consumption has been systematized.

“Although I sometimes find out that my films have been stolen and published on free sites," explains Erika Lust, independent director of adult film, "users within my community on XConfessions, Lust Cinema, Else Cinema and the Store by Erika Lust they understand why it is necessary to pay for porn.

Good working conditions and fair payments must be guaranteed.

When this happens it is reflected in the movie.

Companies often make movies on low budgets and need to produce as much as possible due to fierce competition and the need to be as profitable as possible.

This leads to a very poor representation of sex on screen.

Fortunately, a growing audience is looking for alternatives to the mechanical porn stereotype outside of these free sites.

They want a representation of sex with more passion, eroticism and context instead of cheap scripts and emotionless stories.

Obviously in an industry based on physical contact the appearance of a virus that prevents precisely touching, the prospects did not seem very promising.

Perhaps that is why platforms such as OnlyFans have emerged as lifesavers for a business that, despite everything, continues to be not only one of the most buoyant in the world but also one of those that does not stop growing (in the last year the consumption of gay porn has grown by almost 5% and the female audience did so by three points).

And it is that as the pornologist and doctor of Social Sciences Dani Mundo says, “porn cannot disappear.

At best, it will take over the new applications.

Porn is proliferating and the Internet is the ideal space for its consumption ”.

But what is OnlyFans?

Founded in 2016 by Tim Stokely (the Mark Zuckerberg of porn), it works as a social network in which

share content - almost always erotic - on demand (80% of the profits go to them, 20% to the company With 60 million users and more than 750,000 content creators, it has become the haven of many professionals, not just sex workers, who find on this platform the best way to generate income without leaving home.

Thus, in OnlyFans you can come across

, of course, but also with diyeis, actors, models, television fauna of all kinds,

or physical trainers ... The fact that the content is not visible has contributed to the success of the platform. You are not subscribed: it could be high-voltage material or it could be one of those suggestive selfies against which Instagram has immunized us.

And in that ambiguity you can find from the adult film actresses Apolonia Lapiedra or Honey Gold to the dj Jacobo Ostos, the actor Tyler Posey, the music journalist Lily Mercer or the rapper Tyga, who a few weeks ago was accused of filtering himself the photo of his penis to get more followers.

And, of course, thousands of anonymous people who use the platform to get a bonus if they get enough subscribers.

A new normal that, according to the writer and journalist Analía Iglesias, co-author with Martha Zein of

(Catarata, 2018) should not surprise us.

“We are living in an age of hypervisualization and entertainment culture that is reaching the limits of hypersexualization in digital.

The networks have encouraged making everything we do visible.

It is that society of transparency that Byung-Chul-Han talks about where everything is visible and everything is illuminated to be optimized and monetized.

It is part of the demand of consumer society: to feel that we have to show everything or, otherwise, we are wasting time ”.

Mundo goes further: “If you hurry me, I would say that social networks are a

derivative

of porn, a social democratic derivative of this genre that, as absurd as it sounds, is still stigmatized.

I think narcissism is our real problem, not porn. "

For many, Onlyfans, beyond a sweet tooth for extra income or a way to escape the hiatus imposed by the virus, is the best way to set the limits in an industry that has historically been dismissed as unethical.

"I think that ethics in porn", points out the porn journalist and actress Amaranta Hank, "is not so much the result or the representation of what is seen.

It has more to do with the behind-the-scenes deal.

In this sense, these platforms seem fabulous to me: we all work more calmly, it is no longer a monopoly of a few producers and each one decides what to do.

Many actresses do very well just with masturbation, without having to do anything hard or shared ”.

And it is that curiously this porn on demand seems to differ a lot from the patterns that govern traditional porn.

There are no requests for violent sex and yes, for example, use of condoms.

It's not so much about getting free and wild porn (that's what the rest of the internet is for) as it is about getting to know your idol in a more intimate way.

For some, like Lust, phenomena like this could set the tone for a new porn.

“The fact that

and directors of

adult

less dependent on the industry makes them dare to denounce poor working conditions and episodes of sexual abuse or racism from the industry itself.

And it seems that, in a way, the big porn companies are trying to adapt little by little to a new way of making movies with more awareness, more values, and more inclusivity ”.

But this business model (which is too reminiscent of Glovo, Deliveroo or Uber) is far from being a panacea and is just the umpteenth reflection of the current job insecurity.

On the one hand, this atomization of production supposes the destruction of an industry.

One more.

"I will not be the one to defend the porn industry," says Iglesias, "but this phenomenon is making even more precarious workers who sell their labor power or rent a piece of their body while capital is being concentrated.

I mean the capital of Silicon Valley, the technology companies, the owners of the algorithms.

It is still another step towards technocapitalism, that place where the redistribution of capital is always upwards.

Each crisis is one more degree of concentration of money in five or six hands.

The development of digital life, do-it-yourself and providing content to the webs for free makes the professions lose meaning ”.

Consequences that are already being seen.

Gay porn actor Dani Robles says: “I've been working on this for six years.

This job allows you to have a lot of free time, high income (especially in gay porn), travel frequently, visit places ... Many people want to live like this and this causes a

, but the fact that there are so many makes them producers are allowing themselves a price war ”.

According to Marcos, the

applied to porn is a mirage: “This type of platform makes their spokesmen say that they earn a lot of money [Daniela Blume has affirmed that she has earned 20,000 euros in one day through her account OnlyFans] and it's not true.

Of course, the platforms manage to fill their servers with sexual images that their owners do not control ”.

The umpteenth consecration of that perverse work philosophy of 'so much you sell, so much you are worth' or the deceptive 'be your own boss'.

"It works like a social network: the more you get involved and the more active you are, the more benefits it gives you," explains Robles.

Without forgetting that it is still digital content and, as such, susceptible to being

.

Although OnlyFans rules prohibit taking screenshots or recordings and there are those who argue quite naively on the other hand, like Robles, that no one would share content that has cost 200 euros, the truth is that this past March 1 was leaked, 5 terabytes of adult content from that network (about three million images and 750 hours of video) and it doesn't take much effort to find some of that supposedly private content on forums like Reddit.

It seems that

, that term coined a few years ago and that refers to blackmail based on the threat of revealing intimate information about the victim, has stopped worrying the 'pornonative', as they are called in the book by Iglesias and Zein .

In any case, these are practices and customs that only add to the great problem of pornography: flooding the Internet with explicit content without a filter of any kind.

It is surprising to see how a 'white' social network like Twitter is infested with sex videos despite the fact that a new, much stricter regulation came into force this January.

A matter that is not at all trivial if we consider that a few weeks ago the Save the Children association published an alarming report that indicated that more than half of young people have their first contact with pornography between the ages of 6 and 12.

In this sense, Marcos seems to have found a solution.

It is called Vivex.TV and it is a website that, in addition to preventing access to minors and committing not to commercialize user data, is committed to feature films and pornography that does not include violent scenes against women.

“You have to deconstruct porn because what exists now is not cinema, it is violence.

We want Vivex to be the example of adult web pages, explains Marcos.

We have created a method by which entering certain data of the DNI, it lets you pass if you are of legal age and if not, no.

There are films from the beginning of the last century, from 1990 to here, something by Jaime Chávarri ... It is our defense of pornography as a genre ”.

And it is that perhaps the current situation is just one more step in the drift that the industry undertook years ago, when it forgot that porn was a cinematographic genre that made movies and not a supplier of scenes to which stronger and that has allowed things as terrifying as images of actual rape leaks on some platforms.

“The porn industry is still androcentric: it's run by white, cisgender, middle-aged straight men," explains Lust. "So what's on screen is what looks sexy to them.

Porn has become anatomy: breasts, cocks and vaginas, blowjobs, deep throats and cumshots.

The woman is a horny nurse, a horny cop, a horny housewife and the men are sex machines whose sole purpose is to penetrate.

It's as if there are only men shooting action movies in the cinema.

Where are the creative people in porn?

Where is the Almodóvar, the Sofia Coppola, the Jane Campion of porn?

You don't need to be exposed to just one type of pornography with aggressive language, unrealistic situations, and non-consensual sex presented as nothing bad.

Pornography is meant to be entertainment but, due to the terrible sex education, it ends up being the only exposure to sex that many people receive, especially young people who do not have the critical capacity to understand that what they see on screen is pure (and harmful) fantasy.

Sex in real life should not imitate pornography, pornography should begin to imitate real sex. "

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