I was recently at an old friend’s house, listening to her 19-year-old daughter trying to wheedle extra funds for her university living costs. My friend suggested that her child might like to double her waitressing hours. She was met with a pout and the sulky retort, “I guess I’m going to have to start an OnlyFans account.”
I later discovered that this is a hugely common threat among Generation Z. My friend snapped back she’d rather her daughter got some gang tattoos, because “that’s classier, quite frankly”. But many of today’s young women, raised on a visual diet of barely-clad social media influencers, don’t share those qualms. Their line of reasoning goes: “If Lottie Moss [younger sister of Kate] can do it, why can’t I?”
This mother-daughter divide even spilt out into the public domain recently when the news broke that former Emmerdale star Sammy Winward had “cut off” her 19-year-old daughter Mia when she set up an OnlyFans account after friends told her of their earnings on the site. Apparently Mia makes up to £30,000 a month selling racy photos and videos – but at the cost of both parents distancing themselves. According to the young model, “[Mum] said some pretty mean things when we did last speak. It was awful.”
The maternal case is hardly helped by the news that a sizeable number of svelte Olympic athletes (including Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman) have their own OnlyFans pages. Women of my generation, who grew up watching Torvill and Dean and gymnast Nadia Comaneci, were inspired by the physical poetry of their performances, born of years of gritty discipline. But modern twenty-somethings see a gym-honed body and ponder how best it can be monetised.
OnlyFans gained huge propulsion from the pandemic, when furlough and working from home meant many found themselves with time, space and privacy to experiment. By the end of 2020 the site had 1.6 million content providers and more than 82 million registered users. It had also enlisted a more diverse range of content providers, such as comedians, musicians and, yup, sporting stars. As the historian and generational expert Liza Filby, whose book Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad is published next month, says: “Gen Z have a radically different viewpoint on work to Gen X. They grew up with the world’s information marketplace in their pockets, via smartphones.”
She says this means they don’t believe in one salary stream, “but flip fluently between the roles of producer and consumer, building micro-communities and multiple streams of revenue online”. She also says these youngsters’ attitude, having grown up in the wake of MeToo, is “women are going to be objectified anyway, so we might as well make money out of it”. Filby points out it’s also a reaction to TikTok, where millions of views may increase your popularity but not your income. Gen Z are now much savvier about monetising the brief phoenix-like flare of their blazing youth.
You can see how this way of thinking finds its way into most British households. On a recent family-and-friends holiday in Greece I was mesmerised by the gravity-defying tininess of the bikinis worn by young women in our party, aged 19-22. They were basically thongs and nipple-pasties held together by string, designed for Instagram accolades and kept on by willpower alone.
And – yes – I do feel like a monumental hypocrite uttering these words because, as most of my family and friends are aware, I was no stranger to body-flaunting when younger. I posed for a number of underwear shots for my magazine, The Erotic Review, alongside colleagues. And when I was 37 a photographer friend, Circe Hamilton, asked if I’d be part of a series of naked portraits she was taking of “real women’s” bodies – i.e. not model types. Since I’d recently had a c-section and an appendectomy, I was feeling proud of my body’s recovery capabilities. So, I sat for Circe (wine may have been consumed during the session) and eventually discarded all my clothing except heels.
What I wasn’t anticipating was that one of the prints would make its way to the Chelsea Arts Club, where I’m a long-time member. A waggish friend then suggested hanging the photo in the gents’ loos. I know there are women of resolute principles who might find this distressing, but I was absolutely thrilled. It tickles me to think that one day, aged 88, I might inch into the club on my Zimmer and find there’s still some young buck ogling my bottom.
So, what’s the difference between this and OnlyFans? Principally, I didn’t make any moolah out of my nudity, and at the time it was a largely private audience. Around the same time, I was asked if I’d disrobe for a briefly relaunched Penthouse, for cash, and said no. Then the editor of GQ, Dylan Jones, suggested I might like to get naked for his magazine, as I was one of its sex columnists. Somehow this seemed like a bit too much exposure, but I’ve wondered ever since if I was wrong. Just as I’m certain I made a big mistake circa 2002 when I said to my then business partner that I wouldn’t countenance selling sex toys to help finance our erotic literary endeavours, because it felt too low rent. Over the next decade, I watched as companies such as the UK’s Lovehoney and Sweden’s Lelo made millions flogging expensive vibrators to the middle classes. Top furniture designer Tom Dixon even came up with “the Bone”, a sleek black sculptural toy.
My observation of evolving sexual mores over the past 25 years suggests that there are ever fewer penalties attached to openness around sex and displays of nudity. When I looked at the celebrities who are, or have been, on OnlyFans – outside Olympians – there was a kaleidoscope of names. Actress Bella Thorne (who said she made $2 million in two weeks), rapper Cardi B ( $21 million in a year) and The Sopranos’ Drea de Matteo are all to be found there. I was amused to learn Lily Allen had been posting snaps of her feet after her podiatrist told her she had a five-star ranking on Wikifeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website.
So, maybe my mother friends are being over-protective when they shudder at the thought of their daughters (or sons) being on OnlyFans. In fact, perhaps Gen Z should take a leaf out of actress Denise Richards’ book and take to the platform in emulation of their portfolio-career offspring. Sami Sheen (daughter of Richards and Charlie Sheen) is a high earner on the site and has even described herself as a “sex worker”. When Richards saw the sums her daughter was earning, she freely admitted she wanted a slice of the cherry pie herself.
I’m not sure it’s the money that appeals, so much as the thought of appalling your children. My sons are already deliciously mortified about my portrait in the CAC gents. So just imagine the blackmail potential of threatening to reveal your wobbly bits on OnlyFans. When I suggested it to my 71-year-old husband, he said: “Go for it! It’s one way of making up for my lost winter fuel allowance.”
https://www.fiverr.com/users/artistsocialnet
I was recently at an old friend’s house, listening to her 19-year-old daughter trying to wheedle extra funds for her university living costs. My friend suggested that her child might like to double her waitressing hours. She was met with a pout and the sulky retort, “I guess I’m going to have to start an OnlyFans account.”
I later discovered that this is a hugely common threat among Generation Z. My friend snapped back she’d rather her daughter got some gang tattoos, because “that’s classier, quite frankly”. But many of today’s young women, raised on a visual diet of barely-clad social media influencers, don’t share those qualms. Their line of reasoning goes: “If Lottie Moss [younger sister of Kate] can do it, why can’t I?”
This mother-daughter divide even spilt out into the public domain recently when the news broke that former Emmerdale star Sammy Winward had “cut off” her 19-year-old daughter Mia when she set up an OnlyFans account after friends told her of their earnings on the site. Apparently Mia makes up to £30,000 a month selling racy photos and videos – but at the cost of both parents distancing themselves. According to the young model, “[Mum] said some pretty mean things when we did last speak. It was awful.”
The maternal case is hardly helped by the news that a sizeable number of svelte Olympic athletes (including Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman) have their own OnlyFans pages. Women of my generation, who grew up watching Torvill and Dean and gymnast Nadia Comaneci, were inspired by the physical poetry of their performances, born of years of gritty discipline. But modern twenty-somethings see a gym-honed body and ponder how best it can be monetised.
OnlyFans gained huge propulsion from the pandemic, when furlough and working from home meant many found themselves with time, space and privacy to experiment. By the end of 2020 the site had 1.6 million content providers and more than 82 million registered users. It had also enlisted a more diverse range of content providers, such as comedians, musicians and, yup, sporting stars. As the historian and generational expert Liza Filby, whose book Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad is published next month, says: “Gen Z have a radically different viewpoint on work to Gen X. They grew up with the world’s information marketplace in their pockets, via smartphones.”
She says this means they don’t believe in one salary stream, “but flip fluently between the roles of producer and consumer, building micro-communities and multiple streams of revenue online”. She also says these youngsters’ attitude, having grown up in the wake of MeToo, is “women are going to be objectified anyway, so we might as well make money out of it”. Filby points out it’s also a reaction to TikTok, where millions of views may increase your popularity but not your income. Gen Z are now much savvier about monetising the brief phoenix-like flare of their blazing youth.
You can see how this way of thinking finds its way into most British households. On a recent family-and-friends holiday in Greece I was mesmerised by the gravity-defying tininess of the bikinis worn by young women in our party, aged 19-22. They were basically thongs and nipple-pasties held together by string, designed for Instagram accolades and kept on by willpower alone.
And – yes – I do feel like a monumental hypocrite uttering these words because, as most of my family and friends are aware, I was no stranger to body-flaunting when younger. I posed for a number of underwear shots for my magazine, The Erotic Review, alongside colleagues. And when I was 37 a photographer friend, Circe Hamilton, asked if I’d be part of a series of naked portraits she was taking of “real women’s” bodies – i.e. not model types. Since I’d recently had a c-section and an appendectomy, I was feeling proud of my body’s recovery capabilities. So, I sat for Circe (wine may have been consumed during the session) and eventually discarded all my clothing except heels.
What I wasn’t anticipating was that one of the prints would make its way to the Chelsea Arts Club, where I’m a long-time member. A waggish friend then suggested hanging the photo in the gents’ loos. I know there are women of resolute principles who might find this distressing, but I was absolutely thrilled. It tickles me to think that one day, aged 88, I might inch into the club on my Zimmer and find there’s still some young buck ogling my bottom.
So, what’s the difference between this and OnlyFans? Principally, I didn’t make any moolah out of my nudity, and at the time it was a largely private audience. Around the same time, I was asked if I’d disrobe for a briefly relaunched Penthouse, for cash, and said no. Then the editor of GQ, Dylan Jones, suggested I might like to get naked for his magazine, as I was one of its sex columnists. Somehow this seemed like a bit too much exposure, but I’ve wondered ever since if I was wrong. Just as I’m certain I made a big mistake circa 2002 when I said to my then business partner that I wouldn’t countenance selling sex toys to help finance our erotic literary endeavours, because it felt too low rent. Over the next decade, I watched as companies such as the UK’s Lovehoney and Sweden’s Lelo made millions flogging expensive vibrators to the middle classes. Top furniture designer Tom Dixon even came up with “the Bone”, a sleek black sculptural toy.
My observation of evolving sexual mores over the past 25 years suggests that there are ever fewer penalties attached to openness around sex and displays of nudity. When I looked at the celebrities who are, or have been, on OnlyFans – outside Olympians – there was a kaleidoscope of names. Actress Bella Thorne (who said she made $2 million in two weeks), rapper Cardi B ( $21 million in a year) and The Sopranos’ Drea de Matteo are all to be found there. I was amused to learn Lily Allen had been posting snaps of her feet after her podiatrist told her she had a five-star ranking on Wikifeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website.
So, maybe my mother friends are being over-protective when they shudder at the thought of their daughters (or sons) being on OnlyFans. In fact, perhaps Gen Z should take a leaf out of actress Denise Richards’ book and take to the platform in emulation of their portfolio-career offspring. Sami Sheen (daughter of Richards and Charlie Sheen) is a high earner on the site and has even described herself as a “sex worker”. When Richards saw the sums her daughter was earning, she freely admitted she wanted a slice of the cherry pie herself.
I’m not sure it’s the money that appeals, so much as the thought of appalling your children. My sons are already deliciously mortified about my portrait in the CAC gents. So just imagine the blackmail potential of threatening to reveal your wobbly bits on OnlyFans. When I suggested it to my 71-year-old husband, he said: “Go for it! It’s one way of making up for my lost winter fuel allowance.”