Doomscrolling through the timeline this week, my eye was caught by an arresting headline. “I WAS A PASTOR. NOW I MAKE BANK ON ONLYFANS AND HAVE NEVER FELT MORE FULFILLED” it blared. Clicking despite myself, I found the story of Nikole Mitchell; a “Pastor-turned-stripper and companion” and “top OnlyFans creator” who, I also learnt, posts teaser photos of herself on X getting “absolutely DEMOLISHED”.

The first half of Mitchell’s narrative related how she had been brought up in America’s Nineties sexual purity movement, taking the pledge and practising abstinence before becoming a stay-at-home mother of three. Living “a modest and devout life” with her husband in the Midwest, she became a pastor in her local evangelical church. The second half of the piece effectively described a conversion experience, in which our heroine saw a bright light on the road to Damascus and realised that her deepest, most authentic self was an insatiable bisexual slut. Renouncing every aspect of her former self, she duly moved to California and turned on the webcam.

“Instead of preaching from a pulpit, I take off my clothes and get down and dirty on OnlyFans. Instead of denying my sexuality, I embraced my sluthood. I am now the happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest I have ever been! There is finally congruence. There is integration. There is alignment.” There is no mention of what her children think about their mum’s presence on social media, delightedly detailing the stretchiness of various orifices.

“So what?” you might ask. Or as one man complained when I posted, only slightly facetiously, that this was the worst thing I’d ever read: “What is it about other people being happy that upsets you?”. In any case, Mitchell’s story certainly wasn’t the worst thing I have ever seen on X. That was earlier this year, when I had the misfortune to click on a link featuring OnlyFans performer Lily Phillips, and learnt for the first time about the concept of a “cumwalk”. In case you don’t already know, this involves walking about a town centre with what looks like glitter all over your face, except it’s not.

Phillips is the woman involved, quite literally, in a race to the bottom with fellow OnlyFans luminary Bonnie Blue about how many hundreds of men they can have sex with on film in one go. Confusingly, Blue and Phillips look almost identical and both have East Midlands accents. Initially this gives you a false sense of relief as you dismiss what you are seeing as a lunatic one off. But if it helps tell them apart, Phillips is the Derbyshire girl from the widely-circulated documentary last month, talking the director through her extensive collection of dildos and insertable traffic cones, before a team of assistants set up a marathon gangbang for the delectation of her subscribers. Blue, meanwhile, is the one from Nottingham who haunts various Freshers’ weeks, standing outside student union buildings with a felt-tipped placard saying “BONK ME FOR FREE LET ME FILM IT”.

Shown in the documentary weeping with exhaustion after fielding a 100-strong queue, afterwards an unbowed Phillips told the world she now had plans to hit the big 1K. Reportedly furious that her former friend had nicked her idea, Blue then rushed to climb sex-Everest first, eventually triumphantly announcing that she had just conquered 1007 men in 24 hours. Phillips has since declared she will be working up to the goal, a bit like doing the three peaks as a sponsored training run before Nepal. “What’s the point in just going straight to the thousand? Then you’re not going to profit off of it. If you do 300, then 500, then 1,000, it just makes a little more sense.”

Apart from that age old motive, Derbyshire-Nottinghamshire rivalry, what could explain what is happening here? Cancel culture brought us the concept of the “purity spiral”: as journalist Gavin Haynes told it, a process of “moral outbidding”, “when a community becomes fixated on implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and no single agreed interpretation”. The result is a “moral feeding frenzy” as members vie with one another to demonstrate who is the purest. In contrast, the OnlyFans apparatus seems to be trapping some people in what you might call an impurity spiral. This time, though, the value without upper limit is anticipated male gooning — another modern concept, and apparently nothing whatsoever to do with being an Arsenal fan — and camgirls are outbidding each other with more and more extreme ways of producing it.

“The OnlyFans apparatus seems to be trapping some people in what you might call an impurity spiral.”

Obviously, there’s the money. A popular take is that these women are the ones in control of their sad sack subscribers, helplessly pinioned one-handed to the mouse button. Phillips is said to have made £2 million from OnlyFans. Blue is making £600,000 a month. Mitchell was making $100,000 a month in 2021 according to the New York Post, though some of that could be from her side hustle as an inspirational life coach (free gift: “7 tips to make a sh*t ton of money”, though weirdly she doesn’t mention her main income source).

The average OnlyFans income is pitiful, at around $150 a month, so you can see why there might be a cynical interest in capturing more attention. Still, Phillips, Blue and Mitchell seem sincere when they say they adore their work, the odd fit of exhausted crying aside. Watching the Phillips documentary and seeing her talk us through her massive collection of sex toys and props, I concluded that OnlyFans is a new kind of Panopticon. Thousands of naked camgirls are stuck in tiny rooms getting ever freakier, entranced by fantasies of themselves as desired by excitingly faceless men, irrespective of the grim reality of the drooling deadbeats actually watching online.

Though I could be wrong, Phillips seemed to me to be fascinated by how she thinks she appears to an imagined audience, carrying the erotic vision of it with her wherever she goes — and especially into stinking rented Airbnb bedrooms, crammed with expectant flesh-and-blood subscribers. They too were basically a kind of prop for the benefit of viewers elsewhere. “When I did 37 guys in a day, I genuinely can’t remember any of their faces” she tells the filmmaker. “If I don’t find someone attractive I struggle to look at them when I’m having sex with them.” “But you don’t struggle to have sex with them.” “No, no, no.”

Later, after making a bespoke “jerk off instruction” video for some bloke paying her to tell him to eat his own semen, she says “it’s kind of fun, you’re kind of like playing an acting role”. This would have felt like superfluous information, except that I felt it inadvertently got to the heart of the matter.

Back on X, my own mental prison of choice, I have certainly seen people posting at each other as if they were really talking to someone else entirely: a person in their head they are very angry with, or someone they want to impress. I may have even done it myself. And why wouldn’t it be this way? You can’t see or hear fellow users and most of them have made-up names anyway. People talk about the phenomenon of “audience capture”, but in my experience it’s rarely your actual audience that ends up consuming you. On X, the psychic projection results in lots of aimless snark, ranting and humblebragging. Translated into the world of livestreamed porn content, you get unexpected creativity with traffic cones instead.

People tend to treat OnlyFans as relatively benign in relation to obviously sinister outfits like Pornhub, but when it comes to worrying where porn culture will all end, it seems like it might carry its own special risks. We are told the erotic plasticity of women is far greater than the relatively fixed desires of men; meaning cultural and social factors are more likely to affect what they find arousing. Women make most of the content on OnlyFans, seamlessly moulding bodies and libidos to badly typed-out fetishes in order to wring higher order self-objectifying pleasure out of the process. Women performers outbid other women performers in increasingly extreme behaviour, locked into exciting rivalries to feel the most desired, to become the most monetised. And all with nobody else in the room.

In the old days, whatever other physical and mental risks they ran, porn performers were safely separated in time and space from their audience. Their gymnastics were trapped on the videotape like flies in amber. Nowadays they cumwalk among us, even as new jerkoff instructions ping into their phone from lecherous men with credit cards, identities and faces thrillingly vague. Maybe it’s true that I just don’t like people being happy, but it all seems a bit unhealthy to me. In an impurity spiral, as in the original version, there is apparently no upper limit to the crazy.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/