This phenomenon is appearing in all kinds of non-porn and porn-adjacent content. Quentin Tarantino, for example, was an early adopter, starting with his magnum opus Pulp Fiction in 1994, and has stuck with the preoccupation throughout his career. He featured Qualley’s own bare feet prominently in 2019’s Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. On Instagram, risqué but not technically pornographic OnlyFans models striking poses involving their feet will periodically appear on my feed — often multiple times throughout the day. Zoomers tend to be shy of sex conversations, but with clues here and there — feet jokes, the feet-featuring reels I’m sent, side comments that fixate on women’s footwear — it’s clear to me that it’s an interest among my cohort. 

The best statistics, however, come from foot-porn numbers, available from Pornhub, and concern material showing actual naked people in a video. According to the porn aggregator’s 2025 report, the “feet” category gained a 69% (don’t laugh) increase in views over the course of the year. More to the point, Gen Z viewers’ searches for “feet” were 347% more frequent than searches by other generations. The only category that Gen Z seemed to like more, compared with older generations, was “party,” at +385%. As Pornhub sadly put it, this was a manifestation of “the need for connection” sought by Zoomers. 

The 24-year-old Julia Filippo, among the most viral in the ever-expanding cadre of Miami OnlyFans girls, plays to the interest. Scroll her Instagram, and you’ll see her sucking on a long, phallic lollipop with her leg bent over behind her head, and four individual, smaller lollipops placed between her white-pedicured toes. In another post, captioned “glizzy time,” she’s in a bathtub filled with hot dogs: in one photo, her leg is bent up as she stares at the hot dog she’s placed between her toes; in three others, in slightly different poses, she’s pointing her toes, which are holding a mayonnaise-globbed hot dog, at the camera. Hungry yet? In still another, Filippo performs a sexualized version of the king pigeon yoga pose, staring at her foot with her tongue out, as if she’s ready to lick it. 

More from this author

Looksmaxxing is the new trans

By Nikos Mohammadi

Filippo has 1.2 million followers on her main Instagram account and 292,000 on her secondary one. Meanwhile, there’s also wikiFeet, where you can browse and rate celebrity feet. While men are included, it’s the women the website boosts and who get by far the most attention. FeetFinder, a platform that allows one to anonymously sell feet pics online, estimates that its “established creators” make between $2,000 and over $5,000 a month — just for pictures of their feet. 

In the outright porn category, adult superstars like Riley Reid have embraced foot fetishism, too, and wholly departed from hardcore content creation. Reid posted on X on Jan. 14, “did someone say feet content?” holding her open-toe heels up to a mirror, and on Mar. 18, “these feet got dance moves” to a video of her moving her feet around and wiggling her toes.

Graphic foot-porn tends to be some combination of the female performer enthusing about how “sexy” or “cute” or “little” or “smelly” her feet are (depending on the foot-proclivity in question), followed by her (or her co-star) maybe enthusiastically removing her heels or sneakers or sandals or pantyhose, maybe some toe-sucking (by her male counterpart, and sometimes, herself sucking her own toes), then maybe a footjob (like a handjob, but with feet), and … you can imagine the rest. There’s also fully solo feet-play, and lesbian feet play, involving genital stimulation, mutual foot-licking, foot-deepthroating, and other such goodies. Sometimes the actress’s feet will be well-kept and, dare I say, pretty; other times, they’ll be dirty, which is probably the point for some viewers. Still rarer, but definitely out there, is the inverse dynamic: a female porn actress sucking on a man’s toes. 

This odd new interest demands the question, why now? The foot fetish is one of the oldest recognized fetishes, and has long been an emblem of deviant sexuality, but during the great kink mainstreaming that took place in the era of Tumblr and the sex apps, it wasn’t particularly prevalent. An informal poll of Boomer and Gen X kinksters, including Melanie (her name has been changed), a 58-year-old woman who frequently uses the Kinkster platform to solicit BDSM encounters, turned up no one who’d ever encountered the interest in the wild. Melanie said she has been involved in the kink scene throughout her adult life and has met dozens of men through it, including of younger generations such as Millennials, and that she’s never come across foot fetishism.

Zoomers, however, were raised on porn, and no one can avoid it online anymore. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for US Senate in Michigan, who is a practicing Muslim, has a hijabi wife, and is 41 years old, has openly said: “every third video that scrolls on its own, is gonna be some OnlyFans model.” And the algorithm likely plays its part in encouraging the fetish. Filippo, for instance, is clothed on Instagram, even if scantily so, which meets Meta’s anti-porn threshold. Instagram seems to optimize such pornographic-but-not-officially-porn content. OnlyFans promotions on X, which have the option of showing graphic content, also seem to skew towards feet pics — leading one to suspect that such material gets the most clicks. The promotion by the platforms must, to some extent, create even more demand.

But in a more human sense, perhaps because Zoomers are overexposed to graphic porn content, eroticism has moved elsewhere, to content that is more interesting because it’s traditionally less explicit. The foot fetish is also alluring because it still has an aura of weirdness and taboo, so it can still shock in a porn-universe where little is shocking. What is more, in an increasingly sex-averse world, it substitutes as an object of desire. 

There’s traditional sex appeal to some of it — Filippo is conventionally attractive, showing a lot of skin, whatever — but it isn’t the point. Nor is the appeal sexual humiliation, in the old-fashioned sense. The Zoomer interest is of a different variety than, say, the 59-year-old, Leftist independent journalist Glenn Greenwald’s leaked tape from spring of last year, in which he paid to suck on a Brazilian male prostitute’s toes. Greenwald wore a schoolgirl skirt throughout the affair and showed the man that he’d sent him $2,000 by PayPal after he was done, to top off the humiliation ritual. 

To the straight Zoomer man, a woman’s foot is a location upon which to channel desire; he doesn’t want to experience pain or degradation or anything like that per se. The foot-as-object is the point, not submission. The foot provides very little sexually, in comparison to other body parts, and thus feels safer, and is even more appealing to a sex-avoidant generation. Will Gluck, the director of the new romantic-comedy One Night Only, said that he avoided significant nudity and sex-heavy scenes specifically because younger movie-goers are made uncomfortable by them. I, for one, am 19 years old, and I remember that in middle school, one of my more annoying friends stole my phone from me and proceeded to follow multiple foot fetish accounts on Instagram — I probably spent hours thereafter unfollowing all these accounts. That, at least, was my introduction to all this.  

Suggested reading

Do violent incels dream of orgies in the sky?

By Valerie Stivers

And there may be something to the foot itself. Women take better care of their feet than men and wear nicer shoes, but then why wouldn’t a man have the urge to masturbate to a woman’s manicured hand, too, or fixate on it during sex? Freud recognized the foot as an object of particular sexual fixation, speculating that it was a “phallic substitute,” for when a child recognized that his mother did not have a penis. 

There’s also a sense of return to a pre-Sexual Revolution sexuality. Overstimulated by porn and scared by actual sex — and by many accounts having worse and more awkward sex at that — Zoomers long for re-mystification. 

The last really major era for the foot fetish, by contemporary standards, might have been the 1950s, with a defining artifact of the moment Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, featuring the late Brigitte Bardot. For Vadim, the actress’s feet were a topic of fixation in a way that immediately recalls 2026. Bardot plays a young orphan girl who’s been placed with a family — in Saint-Tropez, no less — where she navigates relationships with men from opposing ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. In the opening scene, the camera zooms in on Bardot’s feet as she’s sunbathing. In another, she’s scolded for walking around barefoot in the shop she works at, as if this alone made her a slut. She also bikes barefoot and walks throughout the town barefoot. All throughout the film, there are numerous close-ups of her feet. The film would come to define the wild and playful “Bardot aesthetic” and also was seen as shattering the sexual mores of the ’50s. That feet had the ability to do this is a tribute to their sexual power. 

Of course, what followed during and after the Sexual Revolution was actual sex — more of it in film; more of it in the real world; more of it pre-marital. Zoomers aren’t doing as much of that, but their foot fetishism demonstrates that sexuality, in some form, will always be present. When Zoomers do have sex, it’s also often different — many need to have sex as if they’re imagining themselves in a porno, wherein fixations on objects of desire such as feet would come in. Unlike Tarantino, who operates in a sex-and-kink-celebrating world, Vadim was not necessarily thought of as a foot fetishist. Feet were understood as an expression of sexuality, even if somewhat scandalous. What else is Gen Z’s foot fetish, if not just that? Chanel is just being honest about it — and making a great profit on a mere fraction of a shoe, as well. 

In the world that porn has built, young men’s efforts are literally infertile: explosions of violence or otherwise that yield a big, pleasurable nothing. Hatfield’s anti-porn crusade paradoxically embodied this fundamental impotence.

The man was clearly unstable, and his manifesto, with its frequent references to knowledge of secrets that remain “almost entirely hidden from people,” betrays delusions of grandeur. But the manifesto is also of cultural significance, considering the ascendancy of the incel ideology among swathes of the online Right and the percolation of many similar ideas about men, women, and dating in the mainstream. Its Right-Left ideological flattening — Hatfield was both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist; he rails against transgenderism and Western cultural supremacy  — is significant, too, representing the bitter end of Christian metaphysics, even on the Right. 

Hatfield’s manifesto is the first, but possibly not the last, appearance of hypergamy, a new buzzword of the online Right, in a mass-shooting. The word has its origins in an Indian caste law that required women to marry men of the same or higher caste and, in modern parlance, means “dating up.” The desire to “date up” could generically be assumed to be shared by both men and women — aspirational mating is a universal human urge, after all — and to include desires for partner-benefits like social status and finances. But in today’s manosphere and as embraced by Hatfield, it concerns only physical attractiveness. In Hatfield’s definition, this is the only quality that matters when a woman chooses whom to have sex with — which she can do freely in contemporary culture. He defines it as a “phenomenon in which females simply copulate as they please with a plethora of attractive males, as opposed to monogamy, in which the same females would be bound legalistically [sic] and culturally to just one male.”

As the theory goes, a man’s height and physical attractiveness are signs of “health” and “genetic quality” which are desirable qualities in a mate because they suggest healthier offspring. Hatfield is cribbing from evolutionary psychology, which argues that women are more invested in any individual child than men are, since men can have hundreds of children, and women only a few. Thus women are supposedly especially motivated by attractiveness — which signals health, meaning a better chance for survival of the offspring — in their choice of sexual partners. Women are also choosier about partners than men are for the same reason: the sum number of chances a woman has to pass on her genes is very limited; men have hundreds, or theoretically even thousands, of such chances, no childbearing or nurturing work required. 

More from this author

The sexual revolution was always a failure

By Valerie Stivers

When you combine the female preference for tall, attractive men with a liberal sexual culture, according to the incel theory, you get a situation in which tall, attractive men are having lots of sex with multiple female partners, and the other men are having no sex at all. This, supposedly, has nothing to do with the men’s habits, personalities, or physical presentation, but is purely genetic. In the “hypergamy state,” as Hatfield writes, the “common man” is hopelessly “cast out of the divine realm of truly intimate love and attraction” through no fault of his own. “The only things that matter when it comes to experiencing love as a male … are the length of the bones in your legs, and the shape of the bones in your face.” 

All this takes many wild leaps, but it is to some extent — and more than Hatfield actually references — based on theories of evolutionary biology and psychology that are becoming increasingly popular. One such popular, biology-based idea about the psychology of dating is the conviction among very-online Zoomer young women that the birth control pill “makes you choose the wrong guys.” A groundbreaking work on the matter is evolutionary psychologist Dr. Sarah E. Hill’s book, How the Pill Changes Everything, which focuses on the Pill but also provides a fascinating walkthrough of the evolutionary view of modern dating. According to Hill, the preference for healthy offspring is — and in many more ways than Hatfield’s manifesto suggests — encouraged by female biology, and gene-maxxing in fact does play a significant role in women’s partner choices, though the standard seems more likely to be highly complex issues of genetic compatibility, which is predicted by sexual attraction, rather than brute height-and-looks measurement on some objective scale. Hill would also argue that social and psychological traits such as female partner-choosiness are hardwired by evolution. 

Hill’s research doesn’t support incel conclusions throughout. She has found that women in the pre-ovulation phase of their menstrual cycles are more likely to choose men they find sexier or better-looking. Post-ovulation, the preference switches to men they find rich, nice, or reliable. Her argument is that since hormonal contraception sets female hormones at a permanent “post-ovulation” state, it may be skewing partner choice toward provider types,  and away from the men women are most attracted to. The skew is bad in that it affects birth rates and marital happiness, since couples who have good sexual chemistry also seem to have better child-health outcomes (due to genetic compatibility) and lower divorce rates. Given that around 30% of women in their 20s are on hormonal birth control of some kind, with the share presumably higher among the sexually active, many women in the dating pool, artificially influenced by hormones, in fact should be seeking personality over looks. 

Still, the underlying premise that sexual behavior follows rules of hard science is shared by both men and women. And distorted through a million video clips and Reddit threads, such material could make the position of short, unattractive men seem desperate indeed. Hatfield calls it the “ghastly state of things that the Western world has found itself in” and a “situation of terrible loneliness, isolation, and social degradation.” 

In his theory, this problem for men is particular to the modern world, because while hypergamy ruled in the state of nature, the misty dawn of agriculture and civilization somehow naturally produced monogamy, supposedly a great leveler against the tyranny of female choice. He discounts or is unaware that Christianity was the foundation of monogamy in the West, and that it substantially improved women’s cultural position. Instead, he views monogamy as a spontaneous “stabilizing” development that served the purpose of bringing formerly discarded men into useful social participation by giving them something to live for — subservient wives. “Having gained secure and steady access to intimacy through the institution of monogamy,” he writes, “these men could now experience copulation and romantic love, thereby attaining self-actualization, something which was previously inaccessible to them.” 

Now, Hatfield says, capitalism has eroded monogamy, pushing women into the workforce and giving them the freedom to return to their preferred state of hypergamy. Hence, his call to social violence seeks to end “high capitalism,” and to return women to enforced monogamy with the type of men he refers to as “common” — not tall and attractive. The manifesto concludes with a list of 12 categories of  “class-A targets” that would hasten this state of affairs; section V — yes, he uses Roman numerals — addresses targeting the headquarters of players in the porn industry. “Be unflinching, go forth and KILL THEM ALL!” he commands.

It’s nothing new to say that incels hate and dehumanize women, viewing them purely as sex objects. A description of one woman as a “vaguely female-looking clump of humanoid biomass” in Hatfield’s manifesto is fairly typical. Nor is it new to say that for all their talk of love and intimacy, what such men are really focused on isn’t even sex, but instead status and self-worth. Hatfield’s rant is clearly envious of the kind of dominant man he claims to despise. His fever-dream descriptions of the vile and disgusting life of pleasure and bliss lived out by attractive men are almost touching in their transparency. “And let nobody convince you,” he writes, “that the more wealthy of these males do not occasionally indulge in the blackest depths of depravity and twisted perversions, together with countless attractive women of differing backgrounds, within various orgies and other such hideous events, that take place in their skyscrapers, mansions, and at many luxury hotels in major cities.” Sounds terrible! 

Moreover, the length of the section in the manifesto where Hatfield responds “in dialectical format” to “objections” that he could get a girlfriend if he just changed his behavior, suggests that the whole thing is a desperate cope to avoid accountability, and that the incel project really is just the Right-wing version of progressive victim culture. 

Suggested reading

Cole Tomas Allen is a postmodern symptom

By Sohrab Ahmari

However, the fully consumerist, materialist understanding of love and dating is, to some extent, a new and unwelcome development. Materialism, according to natural-law philosopher Heinrich Rommen, “regards man as nothing more than a highly evolved animal” and puts “in place of a personal God … a doctrine of impersonal eternal force or of perpetually recurrent changes of matter in accordance with the blind necessity of the laws of nature.” Marxism is one form of materialist metaphysics — society is determined by “the conditions of production” — though Marx, unacknowledged, retained much of Christendom’s old framework of good and evil. What Hatfield calls “biological consciousness” is another kind of materialism — everything happening between men and women is in accordance with our lower animal natures. 

That such a philosophy serves humans poorly is easily visible. The manifesto uses a dehumanizing terminology of “females” and “copulation”; elides the difference between copulation and love; assumes marriage is a mutually hostile transaction for individual benefit; and mostly lacks concern that, in its preferred future state of affairs, most women would be married against their wishes. More frightening is that all the underlying — and essentially Christian — ideals that humanized previous materialist systems and made them aspire to nobility and justice are just … missing for the incels. Moral relativism, and its corresponding ideology of individualist self-pleasure, have been espoused for generations, but it’s never previously been tried without underpinnings of some kind of vestigial morality. Hatfield — and we might here genuinely say through no fault of his own — was trying it. 

In this sense, Hatfield is one of an emerging cohort of young people — and not only men — committed to violence for causes that are either overtly or covertly in search of self-esteem. The confusing new reality in which the political sides seem to be getting mixed up is often attributed to “internet extremism” looking the same in any flavor, but it actually represents a deeper convergence. Is Tyler Robinson — the pro-trans youth accused of assassinating Charlie Kirk — on the Right or Left? It’s hard to tell. Is Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot an insurance executive, a Left-wing freedom fighter? Is he any different than the failed Seth Scott Hatfield, his Right-wing-ish doppelgänger? And don’t the armed or violent ICE protesters in Minneapolis feel like they’re on the same continuum, despite their arguments of righteous civil disobedience? 

The search for self-esteem, without any kind of restraining hand, isn’t going well. Hatfield targeted the porn industry for peddling a false and humiliating substitute to a good he believed every young man somehow deserves: unfettered “copulation” with an attractive woman. He pathetically failed in his mission, but was highly successful in terms of fully living out the mandate to take only himself and his group’s interests into account, as dictated by the framework most contemporary young people now share. To do otherwise is the kind of hard, self-denying work that the Christian commandments were rather good at, and no materialist version has come close to. Without this kind of work, all activism is masturbatory — and fruitless. 

This is a company that has been awarded government funding. On Monday, it was reported that Scotland’s national arts quango is reviewing REIN’s £85,000 award, “because its hardcore content is more explicit than initially indicated”. The publicity suggests that three performers will be doing an explicit sex scene — actual, non-simulated sex. Which perhaps explains why the company is seeking applicants with “experience of porn and sex work”.

These applicants must be “Dyke identifying performers”, but the list of sub-genres is long. It is topped by trans dykes, followed by, among others: poly(amorous), stud, baby, bi, asexual, fag, daddy, and princess dykes. In fact, the site clarifies that anyone who has “a relationship to the word DYKE” can apply. That is, anyone at all.

This is pornography, postmodern style. Here, lesbian terminology is being subverted beyond all recognition. And there’s no reckoning with the thorny question at the heart of the endeavour: is it even possible for lesbians to produce “ethical pornography” for the consumption of other lesbians, when “girl on girl action” is one of the most popular genres among men?

For the libertarian, porn is about freedom; for the libertine, fulfilment; for religious conservatives, it is immoral and depraved. Many feminists, like me, see it as misogynistic propaganda. But if my 40 years of researching the industry have taught me anything, it’s that porn is just big business, one of the most profitable industries on the planet. Annual revenue has been estimated at up to $90 billion, nine times more than Hollywood’s revenue.

And unfortunately, the lesbian market is just too small to be attractive to the key players in porn. Therefore anything in the “girl on girl” genre must, if it is to generate profit, appeal to men.

More from this author

The Lesbian Project has begun

By Julie Bindel

As Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, tells me: “I think the industry phrase ‘girl on girl’ is key… Porn producers I have interviewed over decades never talked about making ‘lesbian porn’.” He spells it out: “The target audience is straight men.”

“But wait”, I hear you cry, “loads of women love watching porn!” In fact, in 2017, an article published in Marie Claire claimed that women were more likely than men to watch lesbian porn. But the research was conducted by YouPorn, which is owned by the same businessman whose portfolio boasts MindGeek, Pornhub and RedTube. Another recent article claims that women are “by far” more likely to access lesbian themed porn. The source? Pornhub, which has more than 40,000 lesbian porn videos in its archives. Obviously, it’s in the site’s best interests to suggest that porn is consumed and enjoyed primarily by those most harmed by it.

It’s tempting for porn apologists to view lesbian porn as Mexican sexologist Karimme Reyes does: as “an egalitarian sexual encounter in which the enjoyment of the other person and vice versa is very much taken care of. There is no focus on the obsession for penetration and you can see an enjoyment in different forms of pleasure for all tastes.”

Suggested reading

Why women love lesbian romance

By Kathleen Stock

But this ideal doesn’t match reality. I’ve been on three different porn sets over the years, and have spoken to directors, “minders”, and on occasion performers. On one, the team was shooting entirely lesbian porn; I asked if the performers were lesbians. “Yes, of course,” came the reply. And yet, each and every performer was accompanied by a pimp describing himself as her “boyfriend”. One performer, an actual lesbian, told me she absolutely hated doing a scene involving “strap-on anal” (not the most common or popular sexual practice among lesbians). She also told me she had suffered a vaginal tear because her female co-performer, who had never had sex with a woman before, had no idea how to penetrate her.

Typical titles of “lesbian” videos on the big porn sites include: “Cheerleader seduced by teachers”; “Mummy wants her pussy eaten”; “Two hot babes, fisting”. There’s an entire “Wild scissoring” genre, and one for lesbian threesomes, lesbian squirt parties, and Japanese lesbians on heat.

It’s worth comparing these titles to those on For Her Tube, which platforms content supposedly by women, for women. There are more than 3 million videos in the lesbian section. Some titles sound tamer than others: “I think about sex with a woman,” or “Two gorgeous housewives, giving into their wild, lesbian urges”. The usual fisting and giant sex toy themes are there too, and even a naughty lesbian nun. Then there is some hardcore sadomasochism. It’s not dissimilar to what you would find in mainstream porn, which is guided by male fantasies.

Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, does not believe that lesbians are being targeted as consumers: “There are over 143,000 videos on Pornhub under the lesbian category. In 2023, according to Pornhub stats, ‘Lesbian’ was the most searched term,” she says. “We know from studies that men are the main consumers of porn so clearly these videos are made for men.”

Suggested reading

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

It would be nice to think that lesbians could enjoy artisanal porn produced by a collective of “DYKES”, all of whom have happy experiences on set, only doing stuff that really turns them on, with regular health checks. Erika Lust, the self-described “ethical porn producer”, claims to promote the rights and fair treatment of performers: she is a big fan of the role of the intimacy coordinator — so much so that at last year’s Oscars she called for a new category: “Best Intimacy Coach in a Motion Picture”. But intimacy coordinators are used on film sets during scenes involving nudity and simulated sex; porn, of course, involves actual sex. As does the REIN production, which similarly sets a lot of store by the intimacy coordinator.

And yet, this project conspicuously ignores the fact that the vast majority of “lesbian” porn is violent, degrading or painful; like all other genres, it is defined by domination, sadism, and brutal, endless penetration. Because, to cut through in a saturated market, porn producers will objectify female bodies in every imaginable way, for the sexual pleasure of predominantly male audiences.

The inherent misogyny of porn is a key reason why so many lesbians tend not to consume it. It’s not made for us. I don’t believe that women have sex with each other wearing five-inch spike heels and brandishing three-inch sparkling false talons: this is how men fantasise about women getting it on. There is evidence, however, that lesbians watch gay male porn — perhaps because it is the only kind free from misogyny.

Does that mean it’s impossible for porn featuring women to ever be ethical? To go back to the Scottish project: what if they really did manage to just hire lesbians — who were totally comfortable with everything they were doing during the performance? And what if there were only lesbians in the audience?

It’s still exploitation. The porn industry profits from non-consensual acts and causing harm to performers. And even if the spectators are lesbians, it doesn’t make the dynamics safer. I once interviewed female strippers at a since-closed bar in Soho, and many told me how much they hated stripping in front of crowds of baying lesbians, some pushing banknotes into the dancers’ underwear. Women who seek enjoyment from the sexual debasement of other women are not dissimilar from their male counterparts. Live sex on stage is prostitution, not, as REIN might have us believe, art.

Since the advent of “content creator” platforms like the one offered by Pornhub, it can also be a very well-paid job. One performer, Wolf Hudson, explains how he went from earning $4,000 a month working for porn studios, to well over $10,000 as a free agent monetising his work through Pornhub’s Modelhub service, which launched in 2018. “Content creation has shown that performers have always been in charge,” he says. “Without us, there would be no industry.”

For Milf performer Cherie DeVille, Modelhub was a source of “autonomy, power, a good bit of money”. Siri Dahl says it’s the reason she was able to buy a house. More than that: she credits her porn work with giving her, as a survivor of sexual abuse, an arena in which she had full control of her sexuality. “Like, one of my favourite things about the industry I work in is the fact that we care about consent.”

Through Modelhub, verified performers can collect a share of the revenue from ads served against their videos. They can also charge consumers for downloads or custom videos. Essentially, it was an answer to the problem that had been stalking porn since the internet decimated the industry in the Noughties: how the hell was anyone going to earn money from making it? Which means that Modelhub was Pornhub’s answer to a problem Pornhub had played a significant role in creating.

By the time Pornhub was founded in 2007, the porn industry — like the music industry and Hollywood — was already foundering under pressure from the internet. Porn had done very well out of the VHS era — some histories even credit it with VHS’s victory over Betamax in the format wars — and had been expected to do equally well from DVDs. But DVDs arrived at roughly the same time as the mass internet, meaning that porn was, suddenly, everywhere all of the time. And all of it was free.

Suggested reading

Pleasure: a disappointing debut

By Ann Manov

Previously, consumers had expected to be ripped off for their porn, handing over fistfuls of dollars for a handful of scenes strung together. Now they could download an illegal torrent of anything they could imagine, a process made simpler by the foundation of the “tube” sites, which allowed users to upload their own videos — or anyone else’s. It wasn’t in the sites’s interests to police copyright violations, since they made their money by serving ads, and more videos simply meant more eyeballs, which meant more profit. So, the late Noughties were a golden age of pornography for almost everyone involved, apart from the people who actually made it.

In a 2009 sketch of life in “the Valley” (the San Fernando Valley in LA County, where porn studios have historically made their home), the writer Susannah Breslin charted a bleak scene. The producers, nearly all men, were largely despairing of turning a profit, as they competed against pirated versions of their own work; the ones who did were those willing to push their scenes to greater and greater extremes of shock and violence. The women who participated talked, not about liberation and empowerment, but about their debt and shame. One female performer told Breslin, through tears: “It is kind of wrong, I think, and it’s very degrading, I think, and it’s just — I need the money that bad.” She made $500 for a shoot.

At the time Breslin was writing, at least, porn was not an industry that universally “cared about consent”. It’s a principle that often seemed to be honoured more in the breach, through scenes that eroticised the coercion and rape of women. A woman who says “yes” to being beaten and fucked on camera because she needs $500 to get through the next week is hardly offering her free and happy participation.

The “sex work is work” position sometimes attempts to negate experiences like this by trying to argue for continuity between sex work and other forms of labour. “Maybe the difference is the contact or the penetration?” argued a 2015 post by the academic Lisa Wade. “But there are other jobs that centrally involve bodies and some involve kinds of penetration. What about the dentist climbing in your mouth?”

This would be a more robust comparison if dentists were paid for allowing us to climb into their mouths rather than the other way around, if PPE wasn’t required in dental surgeries, if the average dentist’s salary wasn’t upwards of $200,000, and if more dentists ended their shifts crying about the degradation of it all. It only holds if there’s nothing uniquely valuable about sex, and yet the sex industry would not exist if there was nothing uniquely valuable about sex.

More from this author

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

More convincing, perhaps, is the argument that sex work can be degrading, but the degradation is a function of a badly structured industry rather than inherent to sex work. And it was Pornhub that decisively changed that structure. Under pressure from tube sites, many of the studios that populated the Valley went bust, at which point Pornhub (or, more specifically, Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek) was there to buy them out. The result, explained a 2014 Slate article, was “a vampiric ecosystem”: “Mindgeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek.”

Eventually, though, vampires need new blood. Modelhub was a way to provide this, and the performers could only be grateful for it. After all, it was better to be your own boss than be exploited by a studio. It didn’t matter that Pornhub was the reason their economy had collapsed: the condition of the “content creator” on any platform is one of Stockholm Syndrome, endlessly prostrating yourself to the algorithm gods that profit from your labour.

But Pornhub was still, at base, the thing it had always been: a tube site, with all the problems that implied. There were the copyright breaches, of course, but there was also much worse. “If you let just anyone upload anything,” says DeVille in the documentary, wide-eyed, “you’re going to get anyone uploading anything.” So, there was revenge porn. There were spycam videos, videos of rapes and assaults. There were children. “If you’re interested in the ‘Content Formatter’ job,” warned a Glassdoor post quoted in the 2014 Slate article about Pornhub, “just be aware you’re basically a glorified child porn screener, and you will be watching disgusting videos all day.”

In theory, moderation should have meant that none of this material made it onto the site. In practice, a team of about 30 was attempting to screen between 700 and 1,000 videos a day. Scrubbing through at high speed, with the sound off, it is impossible to tell a simulated rape from the real thing. Even if a video was flagged, there was no guarantee it would be removed: former moderators have said that management discouraged them from pulling popular content. And even if it was taken down, there was nothing to stop it being uploaded again.

Like the performer Breslin had met in the Valley, the moderators doing this work undergo it for money, not desire: it’s easy to joke about “watching porn for a living” until you realise the stuff they were filtering included incest and bestiality. Moderators ended up suffering burnout and panic attacks. As one researcher into the industry has said: “Horrifying labour conditions make free porn possible.”

Suggested reading

The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

For a long time, though, Pornhub remained a PR triumph, thanks to a mix of quirky data-mining stories (which state has the most searches for cheerleader? The answer may surprise you), celebrity tie-ins (hello Kanye) and headline-grabbing gimmicks, like sponsoring a snow plough. That finally started to change in 2020 with Nick Kristoff’s New York Times article, “The Children of Pornhub”. Among the horrors he detailed were a missing 15-year-old girl from Florida whose mother found 58 videos featuring her on Pornhub, and a 14-year-old girl from California whose sexual assault was uploaded and seen by a classmate. Because the uploaders of illegal content tended (for obvious reasons) not to be verified users, they couldn’t profit from this material. But Pornhub could still serve ads against it.

In the documentary, the performers sound — for the most part — appropriately horrified that this material existed on the platform where they worked. But what distresses them most of all is the terrible unfairness of their work (on Pornhub) being associated with child sexual abuse footage (also on Pornhub). The documentary doesn’t push this point, but the disjunction still stands: they seem to believe they should have their share of Pornhub’s profits, without responsibility for the abuses that helped underpin them. Plus-size performer Gwen Adora dismisses the reaction to Kristoff’s article — which resulted in payment handlers including Mastercard and Visa cutting off services to Pornhub, and Pornhub deleting millions of unverified videos — as a “Twitter kerfuffle”.

On the one hand, pornographers maintain that the highest value of all is sexual self-determination, embodied in their work. On the other, when women and girls are violated and their violation is compounded by being turned into a masturbatory aid, this is simply a “kerfuffle”. Siri Dahl explains how distressed she was that Kristoff quoted her in his article without mentioning the fact that she’s a survivor of sexual abuse. Her experiences do not seem to have made her more empathetic to women whose abuse happens through porn. If your job relies on a platform that makes money from rape, maybe your job simply shouldn’t exist, however nice it is that it’s enabled you to buy a house.

The porn industry breaks everything down in the end. The studios strip-mined the bodies of performers, then Pornhub strip-mined the studios in turn. But even the winners in the flesh trade — and the performers interviewed for this documentary are undoubtedly in the top tier of their profession — seem to be corroded by belonging to it. Sex work is work, but what kind of work?

A kind of work where sharing a shopfront with child porn is an occupational hazard. A kind of work where the mythology of individualism bleeds into a near-sociopathic solipsism. A kind of work where people become things, and what happens to those things ceases to be anyone else’s concern. A kind of work where the exploitation is baked in, all the way down. Once you accept the proposition, all kinds of moral compromises become possible.

Richardson was more concerned with women’s representation in the electorate than in art galleries. But the two are intimately connected — at least as far as modern art criticism is concerned. In Ways of Seeing, his 1972 classic on art and perception, John Berger argued that in the Western tradition of painting, women are stripped of agency, even as viewing them as objects confers agency on the (presumed male) viewer. In this worldview, Berger says, “Men act and women appear”; women are never just unselfconsciously “naked”, they’re always “nude”, which he defined as “to be seen naked by others, not recognizing oneself”.

Perhaps, then, Richardson was onto something. If being painted as an object strips women of agency, artworks such as the Rokeby Venus argue against the idea that women are people with agency, and as such should be able to vote.

A chorus of voices has since joined Berger in arguing that “artistic” objectification of women is on a continuum with the pornographic sort, and both are at war with women’s political representation. At the same time, fine art has increasingly become more sexually explicit. Now, we’ve reached the endpoint of this convergence: full reverse takeover of art by the porn industry.

This reached a nadir with the launch by online porn colossus Pornhub of “Classic Nudes”, an online guide to the wank-fodder potential in museums. But hidden between the relentlessly cynical lines of this cursed website lurks a counter-revolutionary longing for the one thing pornography can’t offer: erotic restraint.

I really feel for the anonymous individual who wrote the text for “Classic Nudes” (I worked for some years as a commercial copywriter). To get the gig, you would need a working knowledge of art history, which for most people comes with a love of fine art, and a capacity to think seriously about the subject. Imagine spending a fortune for a BA or MA in this field, only to find yourself making rent by writing about the “super-obvious sexual imagery” in Salvatore Viniegra’s 1891 painting of  the first kiss between Adam and Eve, noting the way Eve’s hair covers “Adam’s Garden of Eden” and the way the “massive snake” in Adam’s hand represents his “old testament”.

Imagine, too, introducing Luca Giordano’s 1696 Bathsheba at her Bath with a potted account of the biblical story of King David and “B.C. hottie Bathsheba”, that takes in David’s “total dick move” of getting Bathsheba “knocked up” before sending her husband to be killed in a war. And imagine capering thus across theology, ancient history and the intensely human and tragically complex field of commitment, jealousy and desire, to conclude blithely that “the real story here is about Bathsheba’s smoking curves”.

And yet the real real story here is not Bathsheba’s curves, but how difficult it has become to imagine a painting being about anything other than those curves. This stunted imaginative state has in fact been some time in the making.

Even as Viniegra was painting suggestive images of Adam and Eve, other painting schools were pushing at the constraints of realistic figurative art. Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism (among others) all responded to the increasingly high-tech modern world with less photo-realistic paintings.

The most notorious opponent of all this early 20th-century boundary-pushing is probably Adolf Hitler. A keen painter, Hitler detested abstract art, which he felt propagated the degenerate visions of inferior races into the cultural mainstream.

The 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition Hitler organised set out to collect and denounce examples of such aesthetic corruption. The event was wildly popular, albeit not for the reasons Hitler intended: the “degenerate” designation attracted visitors and many loved the paintings. The tension this set up, between the repressive forces of order and the liberatory force of boundary-pushing art, produced the template for every controversy-courting art exhibition since.

It also left anyone who wished to defend norms or boundaries standing uncomfortably close to a true monster. The presumption was thus tilted inexorably for the other camp: more tradition-smashing. But this in turn created a dilemma.

Suggested reading

We're living in a pornstar's world

By Mary Harrington

For one tradition challenged by 20th-century art, whether in the John Berger or Art Activist Barbie style, has been the representation of women as “nude”. But another tradition in need of smashing was the one that nudes, while nude, must be tastefully so. The result was that even as feminists denounced the “male gaze” in visual art as dehumanising and porn-adjacent, other corners of visual art became steadily more sexually explicit.

In 1998, for example, the West Midlands Police paedophile and pornography unit mounted a (doomed) court case against the University of Central England for displaying two “obscene”’ photos by Robert Mapplethorpe. Fast-forward another decade and a half, and the convergence was still more advanced: Paul McCarthy’s installation “WS” featured a half-dressed Snow White in what looks a great deal like the early stages of a gangbang with the Seven Dwarfs.

A couple of years later, performance artist Emma Sulkowicz appeared in Ceci C’est Pas Un Viol (“This Is Not A Rape”). This 8-minute video recorded Sulkowicz having sex with an anonymous actor in scenes that appeared to begin consensually but ended in what looked like non-consensual anal rape.

If you’ve drunk the 20th-century boundary-pushing Kool-Aid, either as an artist or a pornographer or — like Emma Sulkowicz — both, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t all be fine. From this perspective we can argue, with art historian Julia Friedman, that “Classic Nudes” is a route into fine art: “a democratizing project, one that could expand the museum-going audience by engaging their interest”.

And there are plenty for whom pushing everyone’s boundaries on acceptable levels of explicitly sexual imagery seems not just to be an acceptable part of culture, but something more like evangelism. Back in 2015, Richard Dawkins suggested that we might “beam erotic videos to theocracies”, seemingly on the assumption that viewing porn would help such benighted places break out of their hidebound superstitions.

And just last week, nepotism enjoyer and liberal arch-troll Flora Gill tweeted that we should produce “entry level porn” for children. This suggestion, though roundly condemned and swiftly deleted, nonetheless reappeared a few days later for debate on Woman’s Hour, suggesting an elite Overton window just itching to sidle ever further in the direction of porn-as-moral-crusade.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

For it remains widely received opinion that openness is good by definition: a view also shared by Pornhub’s art guide. Here, what’s hidden is assumed only to be so because of the type of superstition Richard Dawkins would like to see cleansed from “theocracies” through the transmission of porn.

Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing In A Stream (1654), for example, in which a woman lifts her petticoats to paddle, is described by our Pornhub copywriter as “a precursor to the sort of porn that starts with a romantic bubble bath and ends in unspeakable things being done with a rubber duck”. Rembrandt’s gentle riverside eroticism, then, is a primitive precursor to more mature works of slippery-when-wet horndoggery such as, say, “Naturally Busty Gabbie’s Sensual Bathtub Sex”.

Of Rubens’s Nymphs and Satyrs (1615), Pornhub tells us it was created by a society “certainly orgy-curious, but also frustratingly constrained by the strict religious order of the day”. Clearly the 17^th century would have been greatly improved by access to Richard Dawkins-approved pornography. What struck me about it, though, and what leaks from every jaded paragraph penned by Pornhub’s tragically suborned art historian, is the implicit admission it makes: openness kills eroticism.

Rubens’s world might have been “frustratingly constrained”, but that constraint also delivers the painting’s erotic charge. The same applies to every innuendo pointed out by Classic Nudes: every half-glimpsed crotch, every frilly dress suggesting vaginal lips, every hand caressing a snake. The power lies, precisely, in not saying the quiet part out loud. The dividing line between art and porn may shift as cultural taboos change; but what distinguishes art from porn is its relationship to boundaries.

Art dances with boundaries; porn hates and seeks to destroy them. And this isn’t a static condition, but a process, for consumers as well as producers. Studies have shown porn consumers have to go looking for ever more forbidden taboos in order to keep getting the same frisson of transgression.

In his proposal for porn evangelism, Richard Dawkins added that of course such content should be “gentle, woman-respecting eroticism”. Gill likewise argues that the point of providing curated porn to children is because at least that’s better than the “violent, hardcore” variety.

So evangelism should employ nice porn, not (as Dawkins puts it) the “violent, woman-hating” sort we see so often on, er, Pornhub, where common tags include “raped teen” and “crying teen”. But what the proponents of openness refuse to acknowledge is that their commitment to boundary-smashing inexorably finds itself, whether in art or porn, precisely in the monstrous places they’re so keen to disavow.

Instead of nodding politely, like the producers of Woman’s Hour, to the proposal that we foster yet more “openness”, we should listen to the poignant message-in-a-bottle conveyed by Pornhub’s Classic Nudes: constrained eroticism is infinitely sexier than the sort that’s on display for everyone. And the alternative will always, inexorably, end up producing abominations. Perhaps next time they’ll even call it art.

School was where I overheard the boys discussing the relative merits of the anointed hot girls outside class (I say “overheard”, but they filled the corridor with their bodies and the air with their newly-deepened voices, so there was no discretion involved at all, and anyway, boys will be boys). School was where I learned to dread the comments which let me know where my slow-to-change body sat in that hierarchy (because boys will be boys). School was where I envied the girls set above me and dreaded the kind of attention they received (because boys will be boys). And school was where I eventually learned to shrink my body defensively when I sensed someone behind me — because boys will be boys.

I don’t know how much this was the thing that drove my own bedroom retreat (it’s never one thing, is it? But it so often is this thing among many). But for whatever reason, I became a committed school-avoider, and I spent my school-avoiding years reading about people having an even crappier time of being a teenager than I was. That meant those twin bibles of angst, The Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar; and I don’t know whether I noticed at the time, but it makes a lot of sense to me now that Holden Caulfield’s breakdown involves wandering New York, while Esther Greenwood secretes herself in a crawlspace under her house to overdose — the tiniest chamber it is possible to fold herself into.

I don’t know if it’s really possible to be a school-avoider now. You could obviously just stop going, but I don’t see how you can wholly get away from it like I did. I’ve got two teenagers of my own now, and they are of course constantly attached to their phones. Now, those corridor conversations happen on Snapchat, constantly — you could avoid them, but only at the cost of cutting yourself off entirely from communication with the world.

The other thing that teenagers have now, and I did not, is internet porn. When boys decide to size up the available girl-flesh, their appraisals are informed by a worldly acquaintance with the female body in various states of penetrative duress — an NSPCC study from five years ago found that by the time children were 15, 65% had seen pornography, with boys viewing it more often and more deliberately than girls. And 53% of boys who had seen online pornography considered it to be “realistic”.

One of the things I’ve found consistently through 18 years of parenting two children is that I simply never manage to land my life lessons in time. The moment I realise that some particular horror of growing-up is liable to impinge on them or their friendship group, it’s usually already happened. And how, in any case, is a parent supposed to discuss the grisly realities of the pornified world without, well, discussing the grisly realities of the pornified world? I count myself a pretty honest parent, but even so, it’s hard to envisage having the steely unembarrassability required to sit them down for a Talk about Pornhub.

Adolescents are caught between the inevitable innocence of their age, and a terrible excess of information. It’s impossible to warn them against something they can’t yet imagine; and once they’ve encountered pornography, impossible for them not to imagine that what they’ve seen in some way represents the truth about sex. A truth which, according to the front page of Pornhub, involves “hot stepsisters”, girls who want to be “passed around”, and “horny bitches” who love anal.

Suggested reading

Women already have a Jordan Peterson

By Sarah Ditum

This pervasive, brutalising culture of sex is part of the background to the accounts of sexual assault and harassment collected by Everyone’s Invited — over 11,000 when I last looked, all of which only tell us in more detail something we already knew. The abuse of girls and women is endemic, and schools are no kind of a safe space. A 2019 survey for the National Education Union reported that more than a third of girls at mixed-sex schools had experienced sexual harassment at school, and nearly a quarter had experienced unwanted touching of a sexual nature.

Everyone’s Invited became a story this time because of the names of some of the schools involved. Which raises the bitter thought that if only one girl gets sexually harassed, that’s a tragedy. If thousands get sexually harassed, that’s only statistics. Unless the reports happen to involve some famous British public schools, in which case sexual harassment in schools can become a national crisis for several days and finally receive parliamentary attention. The Department for Education has just announced an immediate review into sexual abuse in state and private schools.

So now we have this moment where we might, perhaps, be able to talk about what we should do. It won’t last long: already, people are starting to worry that all this concern about girls risks doing that most terrible of things and “demonising boys”. You can feel sympathy lurching back to its habitual centre of gravity. Yes, it’s bad that girls suffer these habitual intrusions and humiliations; but how much more compelling it is to imagine the pain of the boy wrongly accused, outcast, ashamed. Boys will be boys! And wouldn’t it be a pity to stop them just so girls could get to be girls.

Suggested reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

How good an argument some seem to find that for shushing the girls and doing nothing. How hard it seems to be to remember that boys are vulnerable too — scattered among the harrowing testimonials from girls on Everyone’s Invited there are a few male voices of distress, reporting terrible things done to them or cruelties they watched their peers commit. Boys do not, on the whole, want this grotesque version of masculinity to be the one they attain; but where will they find a better option?

For schools to intercede against this attitudinal tide is a lot to ask. But many of them are not even trying: 64% of teachers in the NEU survey were unsure or not aware of their school’s policies and practices on preventing sexism. And while the relationships and sex curriculum was updated by the government in 2019, there’s still a tendency to treat it as a discrete component of education that can be dealt with in its allotted periods.

Children have no such respect for the boundaries of the timetable. The beliefs they are acquiring about sex and relationships spill into every part of their lives, and teachers need to be attuned to sexism — and ready to counter it — wherever it manifests. They need to have independently established processes for dealing with incidents of harassment and assault that involve pupils, whether as victim or aggressor; they also need the ability to impose appropriate behavioural management (and where necessary, penalties) on children. They need to find the resources to do all this at the same time that they somehow also deliver an education.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Tanya Gold

We’ve been here before, with #metoo and #everydaysexism and #hollaback, if your memory goes long. A project like Everyone’s Invited can give us a strong sense of what’s wrong, but it’s not (and never claimed to be) the route to restitution. As feminism seems to be repeatedly in the process of finding out, raising consciousness is the easy part. Moving from the knowledge of collective trauma to the politics that stops it happening again is time-consuming, often expensive and — after the catharsis of revelation — an anticlimax.

Without that move from recognition to reformation, though, all you end up with is a lot of hurt disclosed to ultimately no effect. A lot of hurt, and a hunger for justice. Although given that the criminal justice system is currently failing woefully to prosecute rape, it’s hard to promise that much justice will be forthcoming. What is reported in classrooms only mirrors what happens in the adult world.

We might reassure ourselves that children will grow out of their worst impulses — and many will, though some of the sexual violence described on Everyone’s Invited has the sound of a lifelong habit that a boy will never shake without intervention, if at all. But children must be given something to grow into as well. A promise of not having to live with violence, and not having to see cruelty tolerated, that will give them something worth leaving their bedrooms for.

I also remember, in the last City job I held, watching with grudging admiration as an office receptionist on her second job sidestepped the entire corporate hierarchy to be appointed company secretary on a six-figure salary, with her main qualification being (as far as anyone could tell) her close personal friendship with one of the senior brokers.

If you’ve got it, why not make use of it? In the digital age, that means you’re an idiot if you’re satisfied with posting thirst traps on Instagram instead of monetising your simps on OnlyFans.

Founded in 2016 and used by (predominantly) women creating and selling “adult” content, OnlyFans doesn’t publish reports on its visitor numbers, but the company’s headcount appears to have trebled over the course of 2020. Its Twitter following has grown by 84% over the same period, and Insider reports that the website has seen a 75% month-on-month increase in signups since April this year.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The period between July and September saw 181,000 new UK redundancies, the most brutal spike in job losses since the Great Crash in 2008. On top of this Matt Hancock’s Q&A this week confirmed (albeit obliquely) that under Tier 3 restrictions there’s no shagging allowed unless you already live with your sexual partner. So as coronavirus has annihilated offline jobs, along with our scope for in-person socialising, a digital meeting point for attractive-but-skint young women and lonely men with money to spare was bound to grow in popularity.

And alongside articles discussing OnlyFans, alongside other “creator” sites, there’s also been a drive to normalise online “sex work”: even the London freesheet Metro has published a how-to guide for would-be OnlyFans entrepreneurs.

So what, you might ask. At least if they’re generating the content themselves, as Ariel Anderssen points out, OnlyFans gives would-be erotic models considerably more scope for control of their content than is often the case. By comparison with PornHub, for example, a website notorious for its laxity in taking down footage even of underage rape, this is surely an improvement?

But the meteoric rise of OnlyFans is less a story about the market for sexy images, than it is about two trends with apparently only an oblique relationship to sex: social atomisation and stagnating youth employment.

Both these phenomena long pre-date the Covid era. Loneliness has been much discussed in recent years, with the ONS reporting that the number of people in the UK living alone went up a fifth between between 1999 and 2019, from 6.8 million to 8.2 million people. This isn’t just the elderly: the majority of this increase is driven by the number of men aged between 45 and 65 living alone.

Nor is the shrinking of employment opportunities for the young a Covid-era phenomenon. In 2016 the BBC was reporting stagnating graduate wages, while a 2018 ONS report shows that non-graduate young people fare even worse. But Covid has brutally accelerated this trend: the BBC reports that young people are most likely to have been furloughed, as well as being hit disproportionately hard by redundancy, and make up a third of new Universal Credit applicants. The TUC reports that women aged 25 and under have been at the greatest risk of job losses during the pandemic.

But just as it’s accelerated other societal fractures, such as educational inequality, the pandemic has leaned into both these trends. But again, you might ask: so what? Isn’t OnlyFans just a formalisation of a sexual “marketplace” we’ve always had, in which young women trade dewy skin and luscious curves for resources?

Certainly this “marketplace” notion is a well-established idea today. In fact, it’s a view of men and women that crops up both in feminism and, curiously, also in anti-feminism. For example, in the bleak worldview of “incel” (involuntarily celibate) men, marriage is understood as ‘a system of legalised prostitution by which a man bribes a woman with food/drink, resource security, emotional security, amazing sex, and often a place to stay. This in exchange for letting him have regular sexual intimacy and to know who his children are’.

More from this author

In defence of fantasy

By Mary Harrington

But in case you imagined that feminists are keen to challenge this perspsective, think again. Viewing committed relationships as indistinguishable from prostitution is a well-worn feminist argument. Radical feminists only? Wrong: Teen Vogue, the bible of intersectional pop-feminism, assures us that far from being exploitative, “Sex work is real work”. And many young women who use “sugar baby” websites to meet and earn “pocket money” from wealthy older men in exchange for sex frame what they’re doing as feminist empowerment.

This is all backed up by a popular understanding of the sexes borrowed from evolutionary psychology, in which men compete for the opportunity to spread their DNA, and women compete to attract the man with the best chance of supporting children, within an overall sexual “marketplace”.

Women, in this view, put out mainly as a way of securing resources. If we feel uncomfortable about “sex work” it’s really our unease at the way exchanging money is just saying the quiet part out loud. According to Cathy Reisenwitz, a “sex-positive” writer and campaigner: “Most female whorephobia comes from us (mostly unconsciously) viewing sex workers as scabs in the sexual marketplace. Women are afraid that if men are allowed to easily, safely buy sex they won’t commit to financially supporting any one woman for life.”

But does this actually give a good account of what men and women want? It’s not at all clear that we’ve always seen sex as a marketplace. A keyword search of Google’s database of millions of books, for example, shows “dating marketplace” practically unheard-of before the 1970s, at which point — along with “sexual marketplace” — it begins to grow rapidly in popularity. Ngram isn’t perfect, but the results suggest that thinking of sex in market terms is a trend that’s been gathering pace for decades. And yet in the grand sweep of human culture, a few decades isn’t a very long time: if we didn’t think of sex as a marketplace before the 1960s, why are we so keen to treat it like one today?

Because for all that it’s become a common cultural trope, it’s also not clear that a “dating marketplace” describes what men and women actually want. I’m too old and married to have first-hand experience of dating today, but a straw poll recently among twenty-something friends suggests the reality might be more complicated than the raw sexual Thatcherism implied by the “marketplace” trope. For example “Matt” (not his real name), a 26-year-old straight man dating in London, described a situation radically unlike the one set out by incels or sugar-baby feminists.

As Matt sees it, it’s not so much young women as young men today who yearn for a relationship: “men seem to ‘settle’ into okay-ish relationships more than women do,” he told me, “because the competition is so fierce and they basically cling to something that is acceptable, but not what they really desire. Women seem to have more choice, and can dictate terms more.”

More from this author

Prince Harry is royal Kryptonite

By Mary Harrington

But for Matt, this isn’t about sexual access. Rather, it’s another sign of ebbing possibilities for his generation: “An occasional point of conversation among my male schoolfriends is to moan about the fact that most of our dads were married/having children at our age,” he said. His is a bleak vision not just of sexual prospects for his generation, but of the prospects for everything. The failure to settle down is just “another reason for our generation to wonder why we are so useless”.

Pop-science invocations of evolutionary psychology in the context of dating advice tends to assume the “males seek sex, women seek commitment” model. But if Matt and his friends are anything to go by, this vision of men as rampant, lubricious, DNA-spraying horndogs just isn’t the whole picture.

And indeed, once you delve into actual evolutionary psychology it’s clear that the field is far more nuanced than “pop” representations would suggest. This paper, for example, makes the case that the “males compete, women choose” model of mate selection just isn’t the whole human story, because in reality men don’t just impregnate women and then disappear. Rather, humans of both sexes on the whole prefer to cooperate on raising families.

Suggested reading

Is casual sex immoral?

By Louise Perry

From this perspective, the dominance of a “marketplace” understanding of intimacy doesn’t reflect reality so much as colonise it. And this hyper-focus on a competitive, transactional dynamic that is really only part of the story comes at the expense of cooperative yearnings that are in fact equally valued – by both sexes. And by formalising the competitive picture of a “sexual marketplace”, OnlyFans contributes to this crowding-out of cooperative human intimacy by synthesising something a bit like it as a product for paying subscribers: an aspartame version of intimacy, sweet enough to hit the pleasure centre but of questionable long-term health benefit.

Thus OnlyFans virtualises, and monetises, the complex and shifting field of desire, longing and human connection in a form perfect for the lockdown-era social landscape of atomisation, loneliness and unemployment. It’s a perfect “dating marketplace”, reproducing the most asymmetrically competitive, transactional elements of male/female desire, without any need for mutuality, generosity or — crucially — for human touch. It’s a truly 21^st-century vision of love.