Dear Women With OnlyFans
illustration by Emma Baynes
Dear OnlyFans Women,
I’m writing to you to apologize on behalf of the part of me that hates you. I swear that part of me is tiny, and despite my best efforts to crush it into a fine powder that I can wipe off of me like a layer of dust, it won’t go away. It stays attached to me like a gnarled barnacle: stubborn and grotesque. I hate you not because you’re you, but because I’ll never be the type of pretty that the boy I love would pay to see my body like how he pays to see yours. And though he says he loves me and I believe he does-I can’t help but feel as though my soul is the object of his affection, and my body is just the heavy burden that comes along with it. The feminist in me resists accepting that in some twisted way I long to be objectified, but I do. Although in some ways my physical flaws and imperfections allow me to be a person to men, and maybe because of that you hate me too. I wouldn’t be mad at you if you did. Part of being a woman is making a choice, though often it’s made for us: Am I a woman or am I an object? Pick your poison, I guess. I’ve always been a woman, which is like a regular person only slightly less. To be an object isn’t any better. Both of us are stuck on the same never-ending patriarchal Carousel, just strapped into different horses.
To be fair to myself, I never hated you until I knew he subscribed to your content, among several other women’s as well. I happened to see a video where a young woman, around my age, complained about how all her past boyfriends subscribed to OnlyFans. So I asked mine, not because I thought he did, but to silence the tiny voice in the back of my head that was yelling, Just check! You can’t EVER trust a man! ASK HIM! And I did, and to my genuine surprise, he said yes. And then nonchalantly sent the following text message: Why do you ask? That baffled me. I burst into tears. My brain began running through all of the perfect women I’d seen advertise their OnlyFans: perfect tits, perfect ass, beautiful face, and lips, somehow both skinny and curvy. My brain flicked through these images like an old movie, each frame lagging for a second before rolling to the next one. I was hurt and I was angry for many reasons but one of the main ones was because I liked sending nudes. I liked having sexual agency, and I enjoyed knowing that the photos I sent him of me turned him on. But after learning about his OnlyFans subscriptions, I felt cheap. I felt pathetic for sending him photos and videos because I wanted to, while he paid for different women to do the same. I ended up asking him to delete all of the photos and videos I’d sent. Even the thought that he saw me doing similar poses to these perfect women left me deflated.
During another argument we had over accounts he followed on Instagram, I remember asking him, “How would you feel if you saw I followed tons of accounts of men, almost naked, obvious bulges, six-pack abs?” To his credit, he answered honestly. He told me he would feel hurt and self-conscious. But I realized this was part of the problem. Accounts like those don’t exist. And even if they did, it’s nowhere near the booming industry of “InstaBaddies” who have millions of male followers and hefty sponsorships. And as I thought about this more, I realized that I wouldn’t even be interested in following accounts like that in the first place. Supply equals demand, and women are not demanding to objectify men. Part of my discomfort is how easily men can separate a woman from her body. It’s hard to accept that somebody you love is able to reduce a real person to a simple tool for pleasure. I know you are a person, and just like how I feel towards one of my friends who once told me she felt like a “human fleshlight”, my heart breaks for you. And maybe you don’t care how I feel, or you find it patronizing. And if it’s the latter, I hope you know that is not my intention. Being a woman is hard, I am not immune to seeking any possible way to lighten the patriarchy’s consistent weight on my own shoulders. I get Brazilian waxes often, and that is certainly not done “for myself.” And I definitely don’t find it empowering to be on all fours while a random woman spreads my ass cheeks and rips off hot wax. But I still do it. And I do a lot of things that make me feel like a bad feminist, the biggest one being anytime I feel resentment or jealousy towards another woman. I feel awful that I compare myself to you, it’s not fair to either of us. And maybe my anger is misplaced, but it can feel so real that it almost consumes me entirely. I see sixteen-year-olds on social media already marking their calendars for their eighteenth birthday when they can start sex work. I see OnlyFans creators having their content stolen and leaked by their own subscribers. I see men with crippling porn addictions and erectile dysfunction at twenty-five, replying on Twitter to a woman’s selfie and writing that she’s, “an eight at best.”
When I feel stuck and lost I often turn to some of the iconic feminists who I look up to, one of them being Audre Lorde. She wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I don’t believe that sexualizing ourselves and exploiting our own bodies for men will lead to our freedom as women. But I’m also so tired. And there are other women who will experience a type of exhaustion that I have the privilege to never have to face: women of color, single mothers, queer women, disabled women, transgender women, fat women, survivors of domestic violence, and so many other women who are suffering and tired. And that’s really why I’m writing to you to apologize. We are all tired, we all make compromises to make our existence easier, and the hatred that I feel towards you is more rooted in insecurity than it is in sisterhood, and I detest that. I’m so sorry.