Just to make it explicit*, here’s the fundamental issue I have with Bella Thorne bragging about making a ton off cash off of OnlyFans.

Basically, it’s a part of the following dynamic:

1) Sex workers need a place to sell their content, and find one — like, say, OnlyFans

* Hahah

2) Sex worker put blood, sweat, tears, and other body fluids into building their fan bases on this platform — and in turn, build up the platform.

3) The platform is now associated with sex and sex work.

4) Someone who has no interest in doing sex work sees a platform like OnlyFans as a way of presenting themselves as offbeat and cool—everyone has a Patreon, but on OnlyFans there’s a hint of danger and sex.

5) People support this person’s OF in the hopes they can see them naked.

6) The person — let’s say, Bella Thorne — who has never intended to get naked is now making a bunch of money off of fans’ hope that she will get naked, a hope that is built on the literal bodies of sex workers who have been using the site to sell nude photos.

7) Bella Thorne or whoever shittalks sex workers and presents her own success on the platform, which she achieved without getting naked, as a sign of her own superiority — regardless of the fact that *she would not have made the money if people didn’t hope she was getting naked*.

I talked about the process of SFW creators replacing porn performers on OF as “gentrification” earlier, and it’s a good analogy: gentrifiers move to a neighborhood because they want to enjoy the cool vibe that other, more marginalized people created. Then they push them out.

Finance bros want the hipster cool of Williamsburg without the actual hipsters; white people want to live in Biggie Smalls’s neighborhood without Biggie Smalls’s neighbors. Celebrities want the sexy vibe of sex workers without doing sex work or interacting with sex workers.

I don’t actually care if you personally create an OnlyFans, or if your OnlyFans contains nudity or is totally SFW. But if you do enter that space, you owe it to the people who built it up to advocate for them and support their presence, not treat them as disposable.

And also given that — as I mentioned earlier — OnlyFans takes a really huge cut of your money, and you can make money off of SFW content on many other sites comparable to OF that take a way smaller cut, it seems worth asking yourself why you want to be on OF in the first place!