OnlyFans isn’t revolutionising sex work, and using it ruined things I once did for personal pleasure

The site gives more visibility to a certain type of sex work, but like all social media, it invades every aspect of your life

I joked to another sex worker recently that five years ago every journalist asked us, maddeningly and repeatedly, about sex robots. Now, the obsession is OnlyFans.

As a full-service sex worker (full service" is the industry term for penis-in-vagina penetrative sex), the prominence of OnlyFans in media discourse is frustrating, but I understand it in the same way I understood that last preoccupation. Combine a moral panic (prostitution) with an older generation's feeling of being left behind by technology (AI, the gig economy) and you have an intoxicating topic. Like sugar-baby website SeekingArrangement before it, OnlyFans is giving more visibility to a certain type of sex work and, thanks to the pandemic, it's also booming - as newcomers flock to it and in-person sex workers have had to pivot to online.