Last week the company said it would ban porn, starting Oct. 1, citing pressure from banks and payment companies. They just reversed that.
They apparently decided, “Fuck those guys if they don’t want our business. The money from porn is so sweet that we can BE a payment company, if necessary.” It seems that their bankers and billers backed off, presumably not wanting to eschew their share of those sweet, sweet porn bucks.
As I see it, OnlyFans facilitates willing exchanges between buyers and sellers, and everyone wins. The women who provide the content are prospering, the clients are satisfied, OnlyFans gets a nice cut, the payment companies and bankers make money and the government gets tax revenue. The services are provided virtually, so they create no public health challenges, preventing society’s high sheriffs from applying the logic they often apply to sexually-oriented transactions in the flesh-and-blood world. There may even be a health benefit from keeping the clients in the virtual world and off the streets, thus avoiding physical contact with strangers during a pandemic. Moreover, the transactions are not publicly accessible, so there is no chance that children or the general public will accidentally stumble upon XXX material. The explicit material on OnlyFans doesn’t seem to be harming anyone. I say let ’em do their thing.
The banking thing was bullshit. They use CCBILL which you’re familiar with. Zero problem there. They handled TWO BILLION last year. No problems with money.
Stokely is a moron who’s killed other startups in the past. He wanted to go “legit” and thought he could by building it with sex workers then selling subscriptions to Instagram for celebs who already have instagram to people who no longer think they may one day break down and show porn of themselves.
He threatened to dump porn, and it became clear quick that all of his money would go bye bye. First good decision he ever made, he chose to continue being filthy rich.
Every newspaper in the country covers the potential loss of 60,000 coal miner jobs. No one bothers to report about a million onlyfans workers forced out of their job. Because America loves to slut shame.
In all fairness, I doubt many of those girls would be out of a job. They may have lost some money as they migrated their fans to whatever new platform or (more likely) platforms replaced OnlyFans. All in all I think it’s a good thing options like that exist since as sex work goes it’s about as safe as it could be. Whenever I read or hear someone say that women who engage in sex work because they need the money are not really consenting to the work because of financial coercion, I have to laugh. That’s because I have never heard anyone of those people offer up some other way for those women to overcome their financial difficulties. “That woman had no choice because she had to feed her children.” So by making prostitution illegal, are they saying the children should starve? Former NYC mayor Ed Koch liked to call himself “a liberal with sanity.” I consider myself a libertarian with sanity. Let only fans operate as it will, so long as it keeps out the underage kids.
I pretty much agree with you. Though as I understand it, Only Fans has been criticized in the past for not keeping underage girls off the site. They have to do a better job of that, though as a former high school teacher I can say that there are probably a not insignificant number of underage girls that would try to get on. I am not saying it would be a large percentage, but large perhaps in absolute numbers. Back in 2005, one of my 9th grade students got suspended for watching a video of herself having sex on a computer in the school library. In a sort of good news /bad news sense I can say at least she was 18. I remember it was 2005, because in 2004 students kept asking me who I was going to vote for. I didn’t think my personal politics were something I should bring up in school. But the day before election day I admitted I was a Republican. I figured that even though I was trying to be evenhanded, the kids had a right to know where I might be biased in case I didn’t do as good a job of acting unbiased as I hoped to. But a year later, as a class is about to start, I here this particular girl yell out “he’s a what?1? Yo Mr. McChesney are you a Republican? I HATE FUCKING REPUBLICANS!” I thanked her for letting me know and asked her to take a seat. If you are wondering, I am pretty sure she failed my class (It’s been 16 years) but because she didn’t do any of the work, not because of her political opinions. She may very well have an Only Fans site today, but if so I don’t want to know about it.