Light On Dark Water

This Headline Caught My Eye

OnlyFans Now Has More Than 3 Million Content Creators

A couple of months ago here I mentioned OnlyFans:

And I'm informed by a commenter at National Review that many ordinary girls "from good families" are appearing on OnlyFans, a web service where men pay to see women be sexually provocative, a term which is apparently quite broad (see Wikipedia). This, according to the same commenter, is making the young men who know these girls in real life and might want to "date" them pretty unhappy.

Three million.

 

Maclin Horton

23 responses to “This Headline Caught My Eye”

  1. Rob G

    3M creators, which includes a 40% increase just last year. If my rough calculations are correct this means that they added over 850,000 creators in 2022 alone. Unreal.

    Reply
  2. Joel D

    So who is this well-informed commenter at National Review?

    Reply
  3. Mac

    No idea. It wasn’t one of the magazine’s writers. By “commenter” I meant someone in the comments section, who may have been using a screen name. It might be possible to find it again but now I don’t remember what article it was attached to. And of course I’m just taking his word about the phenomenon, so tracking it down wouldn’t really tell us anything.

    Reply
  4. Mac

    This is the post of mine that I referred to:
    https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2023/03/any-day-now.html
    It’s sort of rambling.

    Reply
  5. Joel D

    I guess in that case I would advise against claiming you were “informed” by that person. Maybe you felt informed, but in fact you were merely told.

    Reply
  6. Mac

    A fair, if slightly pedantic, point. I take it you doubt the story?

    Reply
  7. Anne-Marie

    Am I understanding that comment correctly? Producing content for OnlyFans disqualifies a girl from being dateable, but buying the same content doesn’t disqualify the boy? Faugh.

    Reply
  8. Mac

    Well, that’s up to the girls, isn’t it? Maybe it does in fact disqualify at least some boys in the eyes of at least some girls.
    But I admit to chuckling at your comment. Not because it isn’t a fair complaint, which it is, but because this is one of those things that are irrational and unfair but nevertheless a fact of human nature. It is totally unfair that many women place a man’s wealth or potential wealth at or near the top of what they find attractive. But there it is. From things I’ve read, it’s a big factor in the contemporary mating situation: a number I’ve seen quoted says that 70% of the young women are chasing 30% of the young men, and part of the reason is that they want a guy who is further up the financial and social hierarchy than they are. So as they themselves have, as a group, climbed above many men, the pool of acceptable husband prospects has gotten smaller.
    No matter what women say about wanting equality, independent careers etc., I’m satisfied from personal observation that it’s a big danger for a marriage if the woman makes more than the man.

    Reply
  9. Rob G

    “Producing content for OnlyFans disqualifies a girl from being dateable, but buying the same content doesn’t disqualify the boy?”
    Just because it doesn’t, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t!

    Reply
  10. Mac

    By the way, I don’t think it necessarily follows from the comment quoted from National Review that either the commenter or the boys he’s talking about consider it ok for the boys to pay to see whatever it is. It really doesn’t say anything one way or another about that. Just that the boys tend not to like the idea that a girl they’re interested in is stripping or worse for whoever is willing to pay her. Some might actually like the idea, but does the girl really want to attract them?

    Reply
  11. Rob G

    Good point. When my daughter was young we used to tell her not to dress provocatively, because while she would definitely be “attractive,” the type of attraction she would arouse would not be good.

    Reply
  12. Mac

    It’s a long-standing male-female argument. Who’s responsible if he reacts to the way she’s dressed in a way she doesn’t want him to? Common sense is often a casualty. As you probably know the argument gets weird and ugly in some Christian circles, with rather authoritarian men demanding a degree of covering-up that’s really way out of the norm for our culture. I ran across a very angry debate about women wearing pants.
    But then our norm has gotten pretty out there. I’m still kind of amazed by the prevalence of the bikini.

    Reply
  13. Stu

    As things tend to do this has us circling back to Chrissie Hynde. When her autobiography came out she was criticized for describing her own sexual assault when she was young as being partly her own fault and stupidity for dressing the way she did, and then hanging out with shady characters. As you might imagine, she was attacked by the woke mob. Common sense indeed; but then young people sometimes are very lacking in it so do need to pay attention to their adult role models (who they hopefully have).

    Reply
  14. Mac

    “circling back to Chrissie Hynde.” Of course!
    I should be able to walk through a very high-crime area of a city like Chicago without fear of being robbed or otherwise harmed. But common sense tells me not to.

    Reply
  15. Anne-Marie

    To clarify, my “Faugh” was directed to a hypothetical boy who would pay for OnlyFans but consider the girls in it beneath him for dating purposes. You’re right that the comment itself doesn’t take that position, but I bet such boys do exist, contemporary versions of Angel Clare. Yes, it’s a fact of fallen human nature.

    Reply
  16. Mac

    I’ll go further than bet. I’ll state it as a fact. Boys and men. It’s pretty much a constant, in one form or another, through all times and cultures.
    I had to look up Angel Clare. Never have read a Hardy novel, though I did see the old Masterpiece Theatre dramatization of Jude the Obscure, which made a very strong impression on me. “Done because we are too many”…shudder…

    Reply
  17. Rob G

    I love Hardy but can’t stand Jude. I’ve read the major novels, most of them more than once, but I doubt I’ll ever reread that one. I found its anti-religious element simplistic and overwrought. Practically every time the “free-thinker” Sue opened her mouth I just wanted to roll my eyes, which does not make for a good reading experience.

    Reply
  18. Mac

    That’s interesting, because in my 40-plus-year-old memory of the series Sue’s liberationist ideas are a major cause of the disaster. I definitely was left with a sense of foolish abstract ideas doing mischief in the real world.

    Reply
  19. Stu

    I went through a period where I also read Hardy’s major works, which I would consider to be:
    – Far From the Madding Crowd
    – The Return of the Native
    – The Mayor of Casterbridge
    – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
    – Jude the Obscure
    I enjoyed all of them, but I think that Tess is the one I would recommend if forced to choose. They are all tragedies, and certainly Jude is by far the most tragic. I believe it was so disliked that Hardy stopped writing novels after its publication.
    There is certainly something interesting about stories that do not have happy endings. English literature went through a long spell of “the marriage plot” stories where you know that the main character will marry at the end; the only questions being who and when.

    Reply
  20. Mac

    I.e. Jane Austen? 🙂

    Reply
  21. Stu

    LOL not just Austen but I suppose she is the most famous one in that category.
    I should not have said that Far From the Madding Crowd is a tragedy. It does have some tragic elements, but is not in the same category as the other four mentioned.

    Reply
  22. Rob G

    “Sue’s liberationist ideas”
    Yes, I think that’s part of how it plays out, but I just found her and her pontifications very annoying!
    In addition to the ones you mention, Stu, I’ve also read The Woodlanders, which is very good, and his early novel Under the Greenwood Tree, which is actually a pastoral comic novel, and is surprisingly enjoyable. Among the “serious” novels I’m not sure why the former doesn’t get much attention — I found it to be as solid as the others.

    Reply
  23. Stu

    Next time I get back around to Hardy I will need to try those two, Rob!

    Reply

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