In February last year, COVID-19 shut down strip clubs across the country, forcing employees to find another way to make ends meet. Some of them left the industry entirely, while others decided to take their work online. Rizzie Mayberry was one of those people.
“I was going down my Twitter timeline, and I saw little ads like ‘Subscribe to my OnlyFans,’ and I thought, why not? I need the money,” she said.
OnlyFans is an online platform that bills itself as a content subscription service for everything under the sun: think fitness advice, DJing tips, yoga and everything in between. You pay a monthly subscription fee for access to a creator’s videos and photos, and you can send them tips if you like what they do. Since the pandemic began, it’s seen a massive spike in creators who are sex workers– and people seeking out their content.
The switch from in-person to online, Mayberry said, was surprisingly simple: a tripod and a ring light from the 99 cent store was all it took to turn her bedroom into a studio. She did her own makeup, and did the decor for her own shoots– flowers were a favorite– but privacy was sometimes hard to come by.
“I live with three of my younger sisters, so they would always come bursting in and I would be like ‘Oh my god,’” Mayberry said. “‘Knock before you come in!’”
OnlyFans was her primary source of income for two months before she quit. Mayberry said she couldn’t handle the pressure of doing it full-time.
“I just couldn’t be in a sexual mood all the time, you know? I’m more of a private person, but I also grew up on the internet, and it was a difficult balance for my mental health.”
These days, she’s taken her love of flowers in the studio to her backyard and spends most of her time gardening and selling personalized body butter she makes at home with her produce.
Since its meteoric rise during COVID-19, OnlyFans has been lauded for creating a safe space for people of every race and persuasion to explore– and monetize– their sexuality. But more and more creators have been voicing concerns over the platform’s profit model and its safeguards for creators.
One of the major reasons Mayberry left the platform was because she felt it wasn’t doing enough to secure her content.
“You know how, on Netflix, when you screenshot something and the screen will just be black? Well, it’s not really like that on OnlyFans. Anyone could just screenshot your pictures and save them to their phone, and repost it anywhere,” Mayberry said.
A simple Google search for “OnlyFans leaks” brings up over 142 million results.
In response to an email from Annenberg Media, OnlyFans said that they were “firmly in the fight to protect user content. Takedown success rates have been over 75% across offending image hosting sites, torrent providers, and cyber lockers.”
Looking at OnlyFans’ front page and scrolling through the creators it highlights, you’d have no idea it was even being used for NSFW purposes. There’s fitness accounts, yoga influencers, makeup artists and even DJs– but neither hide nor tail of the sex workers that made OnlyFans money during COVID. Mayberry says that lack of recognition makes her feel like the platform is unresponsive to their creators’ concerns.
“They really try to promote themselves as, like, being for anything and everybody. But I feel like that’s why sex workers don’t get as much support. It’s almost like they don’t want to tie themselves to us,” she said.
Security issues feed into a wider dialogue about OnlyFans’ sustainability as a full-time platform for creators– something that’s become increasingly strident as vaccination rates rise, infection rates fall and the world heads toward a semblance of a new normal. OnlyFans thrives off of hierarchy– in their Twitter bios, creators often brag about being among the top 1% or 2% on the platform, although it’s unclear how OnlyFans decides who gets that title and whether that corresponds to a pay rise as it would in most other companies.
XBiz, an online publication that reports on trends in the adult industry, has been following the switch to virtual sex work since the pandemic began. JC Adams, a news manager at XBiz, says the world of online sex work is the Wild West right now, and these security issues make it doubly hard for sex workers to survive in an industry that’s marked by intense competition.
“When you explode in popularity, the more there are going to be people that see an opportunity to steal and monetize your intellectual property without your participation,” Adams said. “OnlyFans has been fairly hands off with these security issues, you know, so I would say content creators on the adult side probably would like more affirmation from the platform judging from what we’ve heard from that community.”
OnlyFans’ presence in the mainstream is— somewhat paradoxically— also making it difficult for creators to survive financially. When former Disney Channel star Bella Thorne joined the platform last year, she earned over $1 million in 24 hours, forcing OnlyFans to severely limit how much creators could earn off of photographs.
“After she joined OnlyFans, it started going downhill for a lot of creators I knew. It used to be that you could take your money out pretty much every day. But after [Thorne] joined and broke the platform, you can only pull your money out once a month,” Mayberry said.
JC Adams and millions of other creators are worried celebrities will outshine them on the platform and cause OnlyFans to shift its focus to people who arguably do not need the money as much.
“There’s a real concern that OnlyFans will want to shift their focus to celebrities and push out the millions of sex workers that are making their living from OnlyFans,” Adams said. “If you’re a content creator the question becomes, ‘How do I distinguish myself?’ If you’re looking to cover your rent and your college tuition, it’s hard because there’s just so much competition.”
According to Cyndee Clay with the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition, creators need plenty of starting capital to start an OnlyFans presence.
“OF [OnlyFans] is a great resource for some, especially during the pandemic, but not neccessarily for all sex workers, especially low income people of color who have limited access to technology,” Clay wrote in an email to Annenberg Media.
It was like Club Rizzie. It was lit for a few months. It was really cool.
Rizalyn Mayberry
The London-based company is also notoriously impenetrable. OnlyFans does not publicly release statistics on the diversity of their subscribers or creators across race, gender or sexuality, and refused to release this information to Annenberg Media.
However, it still remains one of the most visible and popular alternatives to in-person sex work– something that remains risky as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to claim lives every day.
“I loved it so much, you know? You can set your own prices and make your own rules. It’s all about you, and you don’t even have to touch anybody like you would at the clubs. It was like Club Rizzie. It was lit for a few months. It was really cool,” said Mayberry.
The self-published, human aspect of OnlyFans is also particularly important to the queer community. Jonathan Katz, a professor of queer studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says that online sex work can be literally lifesaving to those who aren’t able to express their sexuality more freely.
“The appeal of online sex spaces is that there’s actually both a monetary and communitarian advantage. It helps find others like yourself, and I think that distinguishes it from straight sex sites,” said Katz.
As the popularity of OnlyFans continues to swell, however, Katz worries this will lead to queer people being pushed to the fringes of the platform and fetishized for appealing to specific niches.
“This is an audience that if they encounter something that doesn’t seem specifically tailored to them, will be offended. And of course, I’m speaking specifically of a way that queerness often causes a kind of panic among heterosexuals,” said Katz.
This may well be a problem that isn’t just limited to OnlyFans, however. With a set date for a return to safe in-person interaction still up in the air, Adams believes OnlyFans may well be rendered obsolete by what he calls the “platform wars.”
“It’s the Wild West right now, you know? There’s a new platform popping up every other week, offering more features or more safety for creators than another platform,” he said.
But whether the future of sex is virtual or not, he believes the people behind the platforms need to take more responsibility for their creators.
“Sex work is work. It may not be a field that you want to get into but nevertheless, millions of other people do,” he said. “They deserve the same protections as any other taxpaying American worker receives.”
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