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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 8, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm sceptical of your interpretation. I expect the same dynamics are in play in OnlyFans as have been in play in more conventional pornography for decades. Look up some of the most famous porn stars on the IAFD and you will rarely find them routinely performing extreme sex acts (double penetration, watersports, gangbangs etc.). It's a two-tiered market, wherein the top earners have enough name recognition to demand a premium for performing relatively vanilla sex acts (which less famous performers would only receive a pittance for), while the less famous perfomers can only make ends meet by holding their nose and taking the marginally higher fees associated with performing more extreme, disgusting and/or painful sex acts. If you watch a vanilla boy-girl scene starring Tori Black, you're watching it to see Tori Black; if you really want to watch a watersports scene, you'll take what you can get, and the identity of the performer is almost beside the point.

I presume that pornography salaries follow a power law distribution: 1-5% of top performers are more famous and make more money than the bottom 95-99% of performers. OnlyFans income most certainly does. The top earners are usually people who were already famous prior to starting an OnlyFans account, including Bella Thorne, Cardi B, and (amusingly enough in light of the years she spent ostensibly trying to distance herself from her initial foray into pornography) Mia Khalifa. I've read somewhere that the mean monthly income for a content creator is something like $300 - according to this article, the median monthly income is $180.

Niche fetishes are, well, niche, and one man's yum is very much another man's yuck. If you're not a top earner, you can find some highly specific niche and absolutely dominate it (carving out a comfortable $30k/year by being "the piss girl" or something); but no top earner is going to jeopardise her income by performing a sex act that 10% of their fanbase will find extremely arousing and the remaining 90% will be indifferent to or outright disgusted by. This is bound to result in lowest-common-denominator dynamics, wherein the top earners (who are disproportionately visible on the platform) play it safe by performing vanilla sex acts that few users are likely to be actively turned off by.

Additionally, I don't think the kinds of men who spend hundreds or thousands subscribing to OnlyFans content creators are in any way representative of the general male population. I suspect that these men are "whales", both in the sales sense of the term and a much less nice sense of the term. A woman who looks at what kinds of sex acts/fantasies/costumes etc. are most popular on OnlyFans is getting a window in the sexual fantasies of an extremely selected group, not into the sexual fantasies of the average man. Incest-themed porn does nothing for me, but apparently I'm not representative of the average porn consumer.

The end result is that a woman (not a content creator) who goes on OnlyFans is probably seeing:

  • a handful of conventionally attractive women (who were already famous prior to joining OnlyFans) performing fairly vanilla sex acts, in which most of the appeal comes from the name recognition and appearance of the performer, rather than the specific sex act itself
  • a larger number (but still small in absolute terms) of conventionally attractive women unknown outside of OnlyFans performing slightly less vanilla sex acts, but still fairly tame
  • a large number of unattractive women performing either vanilla sex acts (and making no money from them because they can't compete with the conventionally attractive and/or already famous women performing similar acts for the same price) or more extreme/weird sex acts which may be extremely popular only among the highly selected OnlyFans community and not the population at large

"Men like watching hot girls take their clothes off and finger themselves" is hardly a penetrating insight into the male condition; nor is "a much small number of men like watching unattractive women urinate". I doubt that any woman's impression of what the average man likes in bed is significantly changed by browsing the front page of OnlyFans for an hour. Especially when, even prior to the founding of OnlyFans, the West was already a pornography-saturated culture - I imagine just about every sexually active 25-year-old woman in the West has had a sexual partner request to ejaculate on her face or sodomise her at least once.