About 2% of young women are selling themselves on OnlyFans. Way more men are buying
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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It seems surprising given the narrative both conservatives and liberals spin about the sexual revolution, but young Americans are not just retreating from the trappings of marriage and child-rearings, relative to generations prior. Additionally, young people, ostensibly liberated from the oppression of sexual mores and social obligations, are retreating from real-life sexual relations entirely.
Just 30% of teenagers surveyed by the CDC in 2021 said that they had ever had sex, down from 54% two decades prior. This could be a good thing, as evidenced by our decimated teen pregnancy rate, if it didn’t reverberate against other positive social development. Barely half of Gen Z teenagers studied by the Survey Center on American Life reported ever having a boyfriend or girlfriend, and more than a third of poll respondents in indigo-blue California aged 18 through 30 reported having zero sexual partners in the past year.
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While part of the problem is pornography, which the overwhelming majority of American adults of both genders reported watching in a Journal of Sexual Research study in 2018, a newer and more pervasive substitute for both virtual sex and artificial intimacy is OnlyFans, a content subscription service dominated by sex work. Unlike traditional pornography, which is primarily produced by professional sex workers and distributed by pornography companies, casting at least a semi-formal veneer across the industry, OnlyFans “content creators,” as the company refers to them, tend to be amateurs looking to make a quick buck. They do so often in the hope of remaining anonymous and sometimes, sadly, out of financial desperation.
Crucially, OnlyFans encourages a sort of parasocial relation that regular pornography does not. Whereas subscribers can become deeply invested, even emotionally invested, in the lives of the content creators to whom they directly pay and surveil, those content creators do not even know the individual identities of these invested subscribers. The emotional tragedy and travesty write themselves.
As a matter of statistics, just how great is the scope of the OnlyFans phenomenon? We did the math, and the good news of this otherwise sordid affair is that OnlyFans remains a minority sport in the country.
Of the 3 million “creators” on OnlyFans, the site reports that 67% of revenue goes to Americans. While the overwhelming majority of revenue goes to a minority of high-performing content creators, let’s assume, on average, that this revenue share can be extrapolated to mean that roughly 2 million Americans are OnlyFans creators. According to the site, 70% of creators are women, and 30% are men, translating to approximately 1.4 million American women and 600,000 American men.
Adults aged 18 to 45 — nearly all of the users of OnlyFans — comprise little more than a third of the U.S. population, or just shy of 119 million in total. This means that we can (again, very, very roughly) deduce that about 2% of American women aged 18 to 45 are selling themselves on OnlyFans, and about 1% of men are doing the same.
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The problem is way more bleak on the demand side of the equation. According to OnlyFans, nearly half of its 220 million users are Americans, or more than 94 million. Considering that 87% of users overall are male, we can assume that’s about 82 million American men, three-quarters of whom are reportedly in that 18-45 age bracket.
Let us hope that OnlyFans is inflating some of these numbers because the back-of-the-envelope math would indicate that those 62 million OnlyFans users are nearly half of all American men aged 18-45. If these numbers are indeed correct, OnlyFans is a crisis of consumption, not supply.