López ( 2020) cited a 75% increase in OnlyFans signups during the months of March and April 2020, which has been attributed to the massive unemployment and displacement of face-to-face sex industry workers brought on by COVID-19-related shelter-in-place mandates. However, mainstream audiences have increasingly begun to regard OnlyFans foremost as an erotic content platform following the rapid influx of SEM creators during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The website is marketed as a non-adult content social media platform designed to connect subscribers with exclusive content from creators in a variety of industries (e.g., fitness, cooking, sports). OnlyFans was created in 2016 by Fenix International Ltd and was later purchased by the owner of. This exploratory study was designed to provide a deeper understanding of the inter- and intragroup differences of OnlyFans users and nonusers, which may elucidate the changing landscape of online SEM access for both consumers and creators. This exploratory study sought to do the following: (1) obtain demographic and background information about OnlyFans users compared to nonusers, and (2) compare the sexual attitudes of OnlyFans users and nonusers based on biological sex. Though an extensive overview of previous SEM research was beyond the purview of this study, the following sections describe direct-to-consumer platforms, such as OnlyFans, broadly identifies SEM users, and outlines the relationship between sex and sexual attitudes to establish the need for a preliminary analysis of OnlyFans users’ characteristics and sexual attitudes. Examining OnlyFans users’ sexual attitudes and characteristics therefore has important implications for emerging research at the intersection of human sexuality, online behaviors, and the broader SEM discourse. ![]() Learning more about OnlyFans users would also greatly add to the paucity of SEM research and discourse because the sex industry has historically been stratified in ways that obfuscate digital sex work and minimize the diversity of sex workers (Cunningham et al., 2018 Laurin, 2019 Ray, 2007). Obtaining a deeper understanding of the sexual attitudes and demographic characteristics of OnlyFans users would provide an important foundation for future studies on subscription-based, direct-to-consumer platforms.īecause OnlyFans represents a new platform for people to buy, sell, and access SEM from an entirely online environment (Cunningham et al., 2018), identifying user demographics and sexual attitudes are of paramount importance to understand the evolving nature of the sex industry (Bernstein, 2007 Sanders, 2008). To date, an empirical analysis of OnlyFans users remains absent from the literature. The meteoric rise of OnlyFans, as well as similar cam platforms during the COVID-19 pandemic, represents a novel phenomenon that remains understudied in sexuality research. ![]() ![]() For example, the subscription-based, direct-to-consumer platform OnlyFans has become increasingly popular, boasts more than 100 million registered users, and has paid out over $3 billion to content creators (OnlyFans, n.d.). Greater accessibility to sexually explicit material (SEM) via smartphones and the Internet has uncovered new frontiers in sex research and sexuality studies among diverse populations (Cunningham et al., 2018 Downing et al., 2014 Peter & Valkenburg, 2011 Walby, 2012). Findings from this study may be helpful for future studies on OnlyFans and other forms of subscription-based platforms. Our findings also revealed that OnlyFans users and nonusers endorsed similar sexual attitudes related to permissiveness, communion, instrumentality, and birth control across sex. Based on our findings, OnlyFans users were predominantly married, white, males who identified as heterosexual or bisexual/pansexual. Participants were predominately White ( n = 475, 66.2%) additional representation of ethnic/racial groups included Black/African-American ( n = 121 16.9%), American Indian/Alaskan Native ( n = 10 1.4%), Asian-American/Asian ( n = 32 4.4%), Hispanic/Latinx ( n = 53 7.3%), Arab American/Arab ( n = 10 1.4%), and biracial or multiracial ( n = 17 2.4%). In this study, participants from a US-based sample ( n = 718, M age = 29.46, male, female ) were solicited using the Mechanical Turk platform. The present study contributes to the existing body of SEM literature by providing a demographic analysis of OnlyFans users and an assessment of sexual attitudes between users and nonusers across sex. Although the subscription-based platform OnlyFans has become an increasingly popular way for content creators to share and access SEM, the demographic information and sexual attitudes of users across sex have not yet been reported. As new forms of sexually explicit material (SEM) platforms emerge, sex research and sexuality-based studies must also evolve.
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