How Only Fans Became the Most Enraging Topic on Fetlife

Only Fans launched in 2016. The fanfare was as loud as a passing whisper. Nobody cared. In those days, K&P was an amateur affair, so if you sexually harassed a trending woman, they felt it. You knew they felt it.

This story doesn’t start until 2018, though—the year the US government passed an amendment called FOSTA, which allowed law enforcement to prosecute posts that were “perceived as promoting prostitution.”

Around 35% of all serial homicides target sex workers—the very people who had been relying on the internet to vet clients and share the names of predators. Many were assaulted by their pimps as well—and sites like Backpage allowed them to operate independently.

Overnight, sex workers were banished, and their capacity to screen dangerous men online was obliterated. As predicted, sex workers began dying that very day. A 2010 study found that the Craigslist Erotic Services Page had decreased the female homicide rate by 10% - 17%, so the deaths were hardly surprising. Not to sex workers, anyway.

Nor was it surprising that Only Fans finally spread all over Fetlife that year. Sex work had become deadlier, but nobody could kill you on the basis of a monetised image.

The men of Fetlife raged. They wanted smut. They just insisted it should be free. Only Fans is a Freemium tool: You don't pay a cent for it on Fetlife, but the mere suggestion of monetisation is enough to induce rage. Maybe dudebros hate it because they believe Only Fans models are less available than the rest of us. Maybe they hate it because Only Fans models are more likely to ignore harassing messages. Or maybe they hate it because their attitudes to sex work were borne in the Fifteenth Century. Those are my guesses. I don’t have many more.

Now, if you travelled back to the pre-FOSTA years, you’d find one Fetlife complaint above all: Women were tired of sexual harassment. That was it. That was our biggest bugbear. Dudebros didn’t complain much, and when they did, it was because there were no real women on Fetlife.

If you’re wondering, you qualify as real by having sex with random men you meet online.

In the post-FOSTA landscape, men had something even more enraging to complain about: How could they tell if their harassment was going to amateur content creators? This was deeply upsetting to them, which is a little annoying if you consider all the punishment their harassment had been doling out to women before Only Fans took off.

In other news, a horde of assholes began scraping social media to create 100 000-strong lists of sex workers in the wake of FOSTA. Their goal was to drive them underground by reporting them for tax evasion. That bill was just the beginning. It made the unofficial official, so it was divisive on a global scale.

Yep. The dudebros were furious, and they’re still furious.

They often attribute their rage to the assumption that Only Fans models don’t contribute to the kink scene, so a few years ago, I wrote a post about one of them. She ran a local munch, volunteered her time free of charge, and nursed new kinksters through their first years in the scene.

If you’re raging about Only Fans models’ contributions, I invite you to list the time and money you contribute to the kink scene.

Gavin de Becker once said, “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them.” This summarises the Only Fans Problem perfectly. More accurately, our raging dudebros are afraid Only Fans models won’t sleep with them, and Only Fans users are afraid men will kill them.

If you don't fear the latter and are still angry, maybe your priorities need to change.