The double standards shown towards women and men who make money from OnlyFans

It’s no secret that those who know how to work a platform like OnlyFans can make a lot of money. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.

The relationship between content creators and their success on the sex worker’s subscription service can be complicated, as evidenced by a recent tweet that pointed out the invariable difference in the way financial success is perceived depending on your gender as a performer.

People still don’t like women making careers out of sex work - shock horror! But are seemingly more than happy to celebrate the “grind” of men that are doing the same thing.

Author and model Hogoè Elimiera compared the internet’s reaction to two content creators being able to purchase their own homes off the back of their OnlyFans money.

It’s clear to see that those female content creators are subjected to misogynistic double standards when their male counterparts are rewarded. Thousands of people have joined the discussion, and the original tweet has since received over 140,000 likes.

Who was she comparing to make her come to this conclusion?

It was the responses to two very similar tweets that served as a reminder on how misogynistic conversations surrounding sex work can be.

An Atlanta-based male creator that goes by the name of Gucci recently posted about being able to afford his third home due to income from his work on the platform. As it stands he charges $25 per month, and has over 50,000 likes across his profile. This announcement was met with praise from hundreds of men across Twitter, congratulating him on his “blessings”.

Female creator Goddess Angelina also announced a smaller but no less valuable version of that success - being able to use her OF money to purchase a three bed apartment in Miami. Her first home, to be clear.

The reaction was very different - all sorts of references were made to her anatomy and sexual activity, with people going as far as calling her work “prostitution”.

Now people are talking about what that really means for those on the platform, and who consumes their content.

The same men shaming women for being on the platform are likely to consume content made by sex workers/performers in some way - more than half of men use pornography as their primary form of sex education, and almost as many maintain that habit into adulthood on a weekly basis.

At the height of the pandemic last year OnlyFans’ CEO Tim Stokely claimed they were receiving sign-ups from “about 200,000 new users every 24 hours and 7,000 to 8,000 new creators joining every day”.

The app doesn’t release a comprehensive makeup of the gender composition of its content creators, but one US study calculated that as many as 70 per cent of creators on the platform could be women. What we do know is that they are the highest earners.

OnlyFans opened up the pathway for sex workers to operate in safer conditions and make money on their own terms - anybody that has a problem with that is probably still using PornHub for free.

More: Why the real scandal of the “outed” New York City EMT worker goes beyond sex work