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The Intimacy Marketplace Part II: The New Johns

By Walter Donway

August 30, 2026

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One ardent discussion of “OF” on Reddit included exchanges of this kind:

“You can interact with the ‘models,’ send them money, talk to them, buy custom content made specifically for you, and some have even met up and paid a fee to hook up with them. It’s definitely not just porn.”

“I found out my ex had become a subscriber and regular client of a sex worker on OnlyFans after meeting her in a local strip club. He was paying her a lot of money for videos of her pleasuring herself while saying his name and telling him what she wanted him to do to her. He drove an hour to meet her in person several times to have sex. She was less than half his age and had two young children.”

(One early survey of OnlyFans users found that 63.1% were male, 68.9% were white, 89.5% were married, and typically heterosexual or bisexual.)

The collapse of older stigma is real. OnlyFans’s rise was aided by celebrity participation.

It almost goes without saying that since I rode on the newspaper and magazine pile in the Salvation Army truck, American culture has changed. The collapse of older stigma is real. But it is not the sole factor. OnlyFans’s rise was aided by celebrity participation, disruption of gig work during the pandemic, and the gradual normalizing of payment for self-display across Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and other creator platforms. And peer-reviewed research supports the intuition that social media has altered the cultural baseline. A 2025 study of 164 high-school students found that social-media promotion of erotic-content platforms can make content creation seem accessible and a source of income, especially for girls, although there is a parallel, smaller, gay-porn sector. Paraphrasing here separate research on women’s social-media behavior: Use of networking sites is linked to self-sexualization and self-objectification, while qualitative interviews with adolescent girls found sexualized images of females were experienced as normalized and socially rewarded online.

All right, but that does not mean all sexual self-presentation becomes pornography. It means the symbolic distance between ordinary self-display and commercial erotic branding has narrowed. The old question, “Why would anyone reveal herself?” increasingly becomes, “Why shouldn’t she monetize what social media already rewards?”

The psychology of “creators,” individuals or middlemen, ranges from clearly commercial and pragmatic to experiences of validation, attention, increased self-esteem, or a stronger sense of identity. Some report real sexual pleasure or emotional enjoyment in the work. Studies reveal that webcam models insist that they can experience erotic and affective pleasures while also navigating danger. A 2023 study of 80 webcam workers found that their motives for sexual activity with clients were not reducible to money alone; self-esteem boost, experience-seeking, and other motives overlapped substantially with motives present in their off-platform intimate lives, even if money was more important. Research on “BBW” webcam performers likewise reports empowerment, self-concept gains, and pleasure among some models. This evidence suggests not that women are either secretly thrilled or purely deadened but that public sex work can bundle money, validation, performance, arousal, play, dissociation, ambition, and habit in different proportions for different people.

 

Cost: The Pressure To “Go Further”

The other half of the story is that the platforming of intimacy has costs. A recent Cambridge University study of 21 Dutch webcam workers suggests that the platform context can radically blur the boundary between public and private selves and between commodified and non-commodified intimacy. Performers try to manage those boundaries, but competition undermines them: in a hypercompetitive environment, stricter boundaries can mean losing customers to someone willing to offer more “access,” more personalization, or a more convincing “girlfriend experience.” This is where the apparent voluntariness of exposure becomes ambiguous. Some women do choose the work and value its flexibility. Others may begin there, then discover that success requires escalation, constant availability, or more explicit performance than they first imagined. And some are plainly coerced. Recent reporting from Colombia and the Czech Republic shows that studio systems and trafficking-style pressures do exist.

The other half of the story is that the platforming of intimacy has costs.

In other words, young women (putatively 18) may begin with a kind of Playboy image of coyly seductive, exposed breasts. In the end, often, complete exposure—spread wide open—is required. Oral sex with four or five men. Sex with other women. Anal sex. Bondage. Incest real or faked. And dozens of other categories.

Who then are these girls (we say, women)? Official demographics of these adult-entertainment creators are not public; sweeping claims should be resisted. What narrower studies show is that many participants are adults in their ’20s and ’30s, though older creators are present; women predominate in many samples, but men, trans, and non-binary creators are also present. Geography apparently matters. In richer countries, the work for the creator may be freelance labor or a side hustle. In lower-wage countries, studio-based webcamming can become part of a sort of global labor “arbitrage” system in which women sell sexualized attention to higher-income users abroad. Race, body type, and ethnicity also matter because the market is intensely niche-driven. Studies show both fetish-based opportunities for some women and severe penalties for others. Thus, what looks to us like infinite choice is often an algorithmic sorting system in which search terms, categories, tags, and consumer stereotypes determine who can earn and on what terms. Greek women with full breasts? Nude women hanging by their wrists? Nude Dutch couples? Russian girls outdoors? Black women nude in public? MILFs, lesbians, weightlifters, gangbangs, tattoos, bondage, bukkaki? It is difficult to imagine a search that the algorithmic engine cannot satisfy.

 

The Law West Of Eden

Legal and ethical issues are built into the industry. Age verification, consent verification, trafficking prevention, and content authenticity are increasingly front and center. In 2021, OnlyFans briefly moved to ban sexually explicit content, citing pressure from banking partners and payout providers. Mastercard subsequently reiterated standards requiring adult-content merchants to confirm age and consent and to monitor, block, and remove unlawful content. Since then, UK and EU regulators have moved toward stronger age assurance: OnlyFans guidance requires highly effective age assurance for pornographic services linked to the UK, and the European Commission has advanced an official age-verification approach under the Digital Services Act. These pressures exist because the harms are real. Reuters documented more than 140 complaints, most about non-consensual pornography, tied to OnlyFans:

“In Texas, a woman described being forced to install a home security system after being harassed by stalkers who saw an OnlyFans video of her that went viral. A Nebraska woman said she struggled to go out in public, terrified that people might recognize her from a sex video her ex-boyfriend was selling on OnlyFans for $15. An Illinois woman said she learned that naked images of herself were circulating from her teenage daughter, who saw them online.”

In response to Reuters’ findings, an OnlyFans spokesperson said that “in the few examples where bad actors have misused our platform” OnlyFans “removed the content swiftly, banned the user and actively supported investigations and prosecutions.”

Thus, many now say that the commercial future of the industry depends not just on demand, but on platforms proving that what they monetize is indeed adult, consensual, and lawfully distributed.

Women in the millions expose themselves online because digital systems have made self-exposure easier to produce, easier to sell, easier to normalize, and easier to imagine as work. But those choices are made in an economy of unequal earnings, collapsing barriers between private and public life, algorithmically sorted niches, and still-powerful intermediaries. The porn industry today is neither simply liberation nor simply victimization. It is a new labor market built on sexual display, social-media logistics, and the sale of authentic-seeming connection at scale. A fair inference from the evidence is that the old stigma has not disappeared; it has been repriced. Enough stigma has fallen away to enable entry by millions, but what remains shifts the long-term reputational, emotional, and legal risks back onto the individual performer.

 

The Monetization Of Intimacy

The great innovation of modern pornography is not explicitness. It is the monetization of intimacy itself. Once intimacy becomes a marketable product, then pornography, influencer culture, AI companions, and parasocial relationships begin to look less like separate industries than variations of the same business model. Playboy sold sexual imagery and a mass-market message or brand: the beautiful, sexy girl next door. Yes, today’s sexual imagery (and video action and live webcam action) are incomparably more erotic, unrestrained, immodest, and focused on bodily functions and bodily fluids. But today’s defining characteristic of pornography is intimate interaction. Playboy sold images. OnlyFans sells attention. The Playboy bunny never knew you existed. The modern “content creator” uses your screen name, replies to your messages, brings your name into a custom video, and focuses on the relationship.

I am not a minstrel singing of a new era of romantic love. Certainly, it all begins with monetizing visibility and intimacy. But visibility and intimacy distinguish the brand from older forms of pornography. Likewise, the digital age has transformed marketing of sexuality from a scarce luxury good into a labor market. Playboy and its imitators employed a few models; OnlyFans and the digital sex industry at large employ millions, many self-selected, and largely leave production to them or their managers. Sexual display has become gig work serving millions of customers. What was once fantasy became labor. The modern pornography industry resembles Uber or Etsy more than it resembles Playboy. Millions enter, few prosper, algorithms determine their visibility, and they largely bear the risks.

Why are so many men willing to pay? Yes, buying the illusion, but also the partial reality, of a relationship.

Why are so many men willing to pay? Not because images and videos of naked women are suddenly available. Naked women are available online everywhere for free. Men seem to be paying for interaction, buying acknowledgment. Yes, buying the illusion, but also the partial reality, of a relationship. Does the rise of the OnlyFans business model tell us more about loneliness than about sex? Does the industry prosper because it sells companionship to a society increasingly unable to obtain it elsewhere? It certainly is not the sole manifestation of that condition: the upsurge of work from home or digital commute, the-long lamented decline of American church attendance as a social expectation, the dramatically declining American marriage rate with the share of married-couple households dropping to a historic low of 47%; and more generally, a drastic reduction in face-to-face socializing, a surge in solitary living arrangements, declining participation in civic and religious groups, and heavy reliance on digital communication over in-person bonding.

 

Coming in out of the Cold

An NPR report: Across all age groups, time spent with friends has plummeted. Especially younger Americans (ages 15–24) have reported a massive decrease in face-to-face peer interaction compared to prior decades, and frequent replacement of in-person connection with social media and other online activities.

So, which comes first: the decline in social relationships, resulting in retreat to online life? Or online relationships leading to a decline in social relationships? The consensus seems to be “a chicken-and-egg problem. Researchers view it as a bidirectional, self-reinforcing loop. Pronouncements from the U.S. Surgeon General’s office and the American Psychological Association, for example, see a vicious cycle.

Yes, the design and addictive nature of digital platforms actively pull people away from potential meeting places. Time spent scrolling, gaming, or streaming directly replaces time that used to be spent on face-to-face interactions, volunteering, or hobbies.

Algorithms are engineered to maximize screen time, offering instant dopamine hits that make real-world socializing feel high-effort by comparison.

Algorithms are engineered to maximize screen time, offering instant dopamine hits that make real-world socializing feel high-effort by comparison. And, at the same time, heavy reliance on text-based or curated online communication can make in-person interactions feel unpredictable, awkward, or anxiety-inducing, leading people to withdraw further.

This perspective suggests that “in the beginning” structural changes in society left people isolated first, and they turned to the internet to fill the void. Traditional, accessible community spaces—like churches, bowling alleys, local diners, and civic clubs—have steadily shut down or become too expensive. Longer work hours, longer commutes, and car-dependent suburbs leave people physically exhausted and isolated at home. And so, this line of thought goes, when physical communities fail to provide connection, individuals turn to online forums and social networks to find niche groups of like-minded people they cannot find locally.

The two forces accelerate each other. People might turn to social media because they lack local community spaces. But spending hours online further erodes social stamina and replaces potential real-world interactions, deepening isolation.

This is Part II of a two-part article.

 

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