Under the hot Los Angeles sun, hoards of mostly men wrap around the corner of the iconic Hollywood Palladium venue. Some hold manila folders full of photographs, others bundles of red roses. A man drives down West Sunset Boulevard, rolls down his car window, and yells out. “What are you guys in line for?”
“It’s a porn thing,” another man yells back, who had been showing another person in front of him in line the Instagram account of an adult content creator. A short woman threads down the sidewalk holding a cardboard sign with a Bible verse, facing it towards those in line.
These men were lined up for X3 Expo, the largest adult content convention in the world. The two-day event features hundreds of adult content creators ready to meet and greet their fans, sex toy stands, and live screenings of adult films. The black and red decorated walls of Hollywood Palladium house an interior full of barely dressed creators standing by science fair-like cardboard posters, fleshlights designed to mimic the vaginal entries of favored porn stars, and beds with black satin sheets ready for photoshoots with fans.
The creators ranged from people brand new to the industry, to adult entertainment veterans. But all were joined by the same vision: posting adult content online. For creators, events like X3 Expo are beneficial for expanding their network within the industry while also giving them the opportunity to garner new fans and meet preexisting ones.
Loud music blasted through overhead speaker systems as attendees shuffled their way through lines of people waiting to talk to and take pictures with creators. On the tables of their displays, creators set up different price points for photos with their autographs, DVDS, stickers, as well as pictures that could be taken right then and there. Around the venue, fans could be seen taking pictures where they held onto creators by their backsides, while others just stopped for a quick chat and a side hug.
At the event, one of the most famous adult content platforms of the past two decades, PornHub, had its own booth, alongside other platforms that have also grown in popularity, including Fansly and Adult Empire. But in recent years, the popularity of all these sites has been overshadowed by a platform that nearly all creators at the X3 Expo can be found on: OnlyFans.
“I had a friend reach out to me, and she was like, ‘Hey, I’m starting this group. Do you want to be a part of it?” a creator named Bunny Skies said. “Then I hopped right in. My first week on OnlyFans, I made $10k. So I quit my job, and I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going in full time.’” Skies has now been in the industry for around six years.
But OnlyFans isn’t the typical porn site. In fact, OnlyFans is not an official adult content platform at all, but instead, a paid subscription-based site with content ranging from cooking tutorials to fitness videos. But since its creation in 2016, the site has become a household name in the adult entertainment industry.
On OnlyFans, content can range from live streams, messages, photos, or videos. Creators can then choose how much to charge for their content, with OnlyFans taking 20% of creator earnings. Monthly rates on OnlyFans can be up to $50, but creators can also choose to have a free account and instead offer pay-per-view content.
The platform has caught the attention from the public and those outside the industry not only for its celebrity appearances, but for the substantially high word-of-mouth earnings that people have shared they’ve made on OnlyFans. One popular creator named Sophie Rain, has previously told CNN that she made upwards of $100 million on the platform.
“You know, everyone loves OnlyFans,” creator Leya Falcon, who has been in the industry for 15 years, said. “They’re great for talking to fans and everything.”
Unlike previous iterations of adult content platforms like PornHub, OnlyFans offers something different for creators. On OnlyFans, creators can have more control. Its website states that “OnlyFans creators own 100% of their content.” That differs greatly from other porn site competitors like PornHub, which has faced controversy in the past for containing nonconsensual revenge porn and rape videos as well as child sexual abuse material — often referred to as CSAM.
Despite its popularity within and outside the adult entertainment community, not all of its attention has been positive. Since its boom in COVID-19, the platform has grown to be the poster child for all that people think is wrong with the porn industry. This has emerged mostly out of the mention of OnlyFans in political campaigns and in mainstream movies and TV shows that cast it in a negative light, giving new air to a decades-long debate on the ethics of pornography.
The “Sex Wars” of the 1970s — a moment in the second wave feminist movement that split supporters into pro-porn and anti-porn sides — seems to have emerged again in the 21st century. The new era of this debate has garnered attention from wide-ranging political and activist groups: radical feminists, free speech advocates, artists, politicians, and right-wing Bible thumpers. OnlyFans has stood out as a clear target to these groups, as it has practically become the public face of the pornography industry.
During the Sex Wars, conservatives, who were similarly against pornograpy as some feminists, found themselves overtaking the anti-porn standpoint. Supreme Court rulings like Miller v. California in 1973 — which established the legal definition of obscenity that is still used in court rulings today — marked a major win for the conservative side of anti-porn movement. Despite their shared disdain for pornography, their disagreements on almost every single other political belief lead the two groups to not mesh well together. Due to lack of legislative power and a refusal to work with their anti-porn counterparts, feminists who were against pornography saw themselves losing control of the movement.
Despite the current criticisms, OnlyFans doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. But as its popularity has continued to grow, the same supporters and critics of the 70s are arising again and are becoming increasingly fervent and divided. But will feminists stand a chance against the increasing conservative takeover this time around?
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The so-called ‘Sex Wars’
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John Stoltenberg has digital notifications set up to alert him every time his late partner, Andrea Dworkin, is mentioned somewhere online. “It runs the gamut from vile contempt to adoration,” Stoltenberg said. “‘Please save us Andrea,’ kinds of messages, ‘please come back,’ — which I wish, too.”
Dworkin was known as one of the most prominent and polarizing figures of the so-called “Sex Wars” of the 1970s through 1980s — a flashpoint in second-wave feminism, where supporters stood divided on the topic of pornography. On Dworkin’s side were the “anti-porn” feminists, those who argued that the material promoted violence, sexism, and the subjugation of women. Many anti-porn feminists views can understood by a popular phrase adopted by many in the movement, first coined by feminist Robin Morgan: “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”
On the other side were the “pro-sex” feminists, who argued that banning pornography would impair the ability for women to explore their sexuality and limit them financially.
Stoltenberg had met Dworkin in 1974, when he had walked out of a poetry reading in Greenwich Village because “it had been hateful toward women” and found Dworkin outside, who had left for the same reason, according to a published note he later wrote. That spring, Dworkin would publish her debut nonfiction book “Women Hating” which made the argument that hatred of women has ruminated throughout the centuries, through art, politics, and history.
Stoltenberg, now 81, shivers looking back on the writing process of one of Dworkin’s books, “Pornography: Men Processing Women,” published in 1981. The couple feared that readers wouldn’t pick up the book because of its polarizing subject matter. Conservatives didn’t agree with the way Dworkin’s critique of pornography focused on inequality and female exploitation instead of obscenity, pro-sex feminists were critical of Dworkin’s views arguing she didn’t support female sexuality.
At the time, Stoltenberg said the two were living off food stamps and their home was filled with stacks upon stacks of pornographic magazines and VHS tapes that Dworkin was analyzing for her piece of social criticism. She had set out on an ambitious book, which was initially set to be three different installments, but Stoltenberg said that they had run out of money. Dworkin published the book in 1981, and it has since become one of her most recognizable works.
Dworkin became a figurehead for a larger national anti-porn movement. New York Public Library archives show a glimpse of the size and fervor of the anti-porn feminist movement. Women Against Pornography, later renamed to Women Against Violence in Pornography & Media, was one of the largest and most recognizable anti-porn groups, with protest activity ranging from coast to coast. In a WAVPAM pamphlet from 1979, pictures of Dworkin can be seen at a talk along other anti-porn feminists like Adrienne Rich and Susan Brownmiller.
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WAVPAM hosted what was known as “Take Back the Night” marches, where women would march throughout the night and hand out pamphlets, to reclaim the night time as a time that women could feel safe in. One Women Against Pornography pamphlet shows that over a thousand women had come to just one march in New Haven, Connecticut. Anti-porn feminists also were known for taking women on tours of red light districts and pornographic bookstores, in hopes of educating people about the dangers of pornography.
Anti-porn feminists tried to translate their protest activity into legislation, but often did not find success. In 1983, alongside legal scholar and feminist activist Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin drafted an anti-porn ordinance in the city of Minneapolis that would allow people who were featured in pornographic content to sue distributors and creators of pornography for sex discrimination. The ordinance was passed by Minneapolis’ city council, but later vetoed by its mayor at the time. A similar law was enacted in Indianapolis, but was later ruled unconstitutional for infringing on first amendment rights to free speech.
Despite both anti-porn feminists like Dworkin and pro-sex activists operating under the same sphere of feminism, the two sides were starkly divided against the topic of pornography.
Carol Sternhell, a journalism professor at New York University who used to attend Take Back the Night protests and supported WAVPAM, said that she remembers the stark divide between the sides vividly.
“It was over the top,” Sternhell said. “Feminists and everybody wanted some of the same things, like an anti-male violence and equal everything, but it was a bitter fight. In my memory, it was a bitter fight.”
Sternhell described herself as standing on middle ground when it came to the pornography debate. Some of the figures she favored were Ellen Willis and Ann Snitow, who were also mostly in the middle of the debate but leaned more pro-sex — meaning that they believed pornography shouldn’t be outlawed nor looked down upon.
On the pro-sex side were well known figures like Margo St. James, who founded the group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), and Carol Leigh, who legitimized the term “sex work.” They looked to legitimize sex work as a respected form of employeement and remove the stigma around prostitution.
The pro-sex standpoint emerged from a changing historical moment. With the rise of American counterculture and second wave feminism in the 1960s, people were looking to expand freedom of sexual expression and push back against traditionalist values. In this cultural backdrop, the pro-sex standpoint flourished.
The pro-sex feminists also had support from large organizations. The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, was also greatly opposed to the anti-porn movement during the Sex Wars. Dworkin even called the group “exceptionally corrupt” and a handmaiden of the pornographers” in an essay titled, “The ACLU: Bait and Switch.”
The ACLU is still active today and has continued its defense of pornography and those in the adult entertainment industry. The Free Speech Coalition, which was later founded in 1991, has also been a large legal defender of pornography and sex worker rights.
But throughout the years, pornography has evolved tremendously then at the height of the Sex Wars. During the 1970s and 80s, pornography existed in the form of photographs, VHS tapes, magazines, and movie houses.
By the 2000s, internet pornography began to rise and later proliferate to its current technological state. Despite the growing access to porn at the start of the internet age, the feminist debate died out significantly. But since the recent rise of large platforms like OnlyFans, a great ideological divide on the topic seems to be emerging again.
The World of OnlyFans
Fans that sign up for NyNy Lew’s content see her as an adult fantasy. Her pictures and videos, available from anywhere from OnlyFans, to PornHub, to X, show her engaging in anal and oral sex, sometimes with multiple men and women. Fans flood her comments with heart eyes and fire emojis. She calls herself a “squirter” — the term used to describe when a woman is able to release large amounts of fluid from the urethra from sexual arousal. Lew said she can “squirt” up to seven feet in distance. “I have a really big catalog,” she added. “I have range, and I have aim too.”
But these pictures and videos depict a reality much different from Lew’s day-to-day life. During most of the week, the 36-year-old spends her time caring for someone with dementia. She’s a mother who takes care of her teenage son, who suffers from sickle cell disease, a lifelong blood disorder. She’s an independent creator, meaning she doesn’t work with an agency that can help her organize her schedule, shoot her content, and meet collaborators.
“It’s really hard. I’m still trying to find the best formula,” Lew said. “I am a very strong individual, and content creation can eat you up.”
“I try not to let it consume me,” she added. “When I did let it consume me, it affected my pockets to the point I needed to go get a job and reset and figure out what I wanted to do — if I still want to do this or not.”
Lew’s introduction to OnlyFans was rocky. Prior to joining the platform, Lew was a dancer and did artistic nude photo shoots. After doing a shoot with a photographer she met off of Instagram, Lew said he posted the pictures of her onto his OnlyFans without her knowing.
She said she didn’t thoroughly read an agreement she signed prior to the photo shoot. But it eventually led her to creating an account of her own, where she posted uncensored photos of herself and her boyfriend at the time.
“While [the photographer] was shooting me, he’s like, ‘why don’t you sell your photos?’ and so I signed up for OnlyFans,” Lew said. “He planted that seed, and then I started putting my uncensored stuff on it for people to see. And I started there being naked, but I didn’t do porn or anything like that.”
At the start of her OnlyFans career, Lew said she was only making around $50 to $150 a month. But after hearing about the amounts that other creators were making on the platform of up to $50,000 a month, Lew said she began to invest more seriously into her content.
She said that navigating the industry hasn’t been easy. To help creators that are emerging in the industry, she said that she has been working on a “Bible for spicy creators” that aims to teach people “how to swim with the sharks.” Lew said that for herself, she’s had a wide range of negative experiences in the industry, whether it’s been through people she found out could not be trusted or dealing with racism.
“This industry is filled with weirdos,” Lew said. “There are low-level weirdos, and then there are high-level weirdos. So you might be dealing with weirdo level one, and then there’s weirdo level 10.”
“There’s big ass names that I dreamed of collabing with, but their names are so bad, their allegations are so horrible and dangerous, that I refuse to put myself in that situation,” Lew said.
For many creators on the platform, building trust can be very difficult. In the past, OnlyFans has been sued for nonconsensual content being uploaded onto the platform. The platform has also had issues with third-party adult content talent management agencies that have emerged, that creators have accused of being exploitative.
But those aren’t the only issues creators have with the platform. The reality is that for most sex workers, OnlyFans isn’t their preferred platform, but rather just the most well known one, mostly due to celebrity appearances. Many veterans in the sex industry have begun turning away from it, citing several issues with the platform.
For one, it is very difficult to grow as a OnlyFans creator on the platform alone. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, CEO of OnlyFans Keily Blair said that OnlyFans doesn’t operate using a personalized algorithm, unlike other social media sites. This means that fans are only able to find creators using very exact search terms, and aren’t recommended creators. The platform similarly does not host ads on its interface, nor data monetization.
“The only thing you can search for is their username,” Blair said. “And the reason for that is actually because we found historically across the internet, that when broad search terms are applied, people can seek to abuse those to promote content that is illegal or harmful or things along those lines, whereas if somebody genuinely wants to subscribe to a creator, they will know their username already, and they’ll be able to find them.”
This has been an aspect of the platform that has caused issues for creators.
“I’m not gonna lie, OnlyFans are starting to lose me. They don’t give you no traffic,” Lew said. “It’s only popular because people hyped it up. But how are people gonna find you? OnlyFans is still like a good platform to make money on, but that’s if you’re busting your ass and putting in the work, especially if you’re a new creator.”
When asked about what keeps her going in the industry, the answer is simple.
“The reward, I am addicted to it,” Lew said. “If I post something and get good engagement, it just hypes me up to post more and create more content and level up. And money, too.”
Other creators, like Ally Dua, a 24-year-old NYU student who posts content on OnlyFans, began on the platform for similar reasons. She joined OnlyFans in 2021, when she was about to turn 19. The New Jersey native said that her inner circle took it well and she told her mother right away when she was planning on making her account. She added that she would describe those close to her as supporters of sex workers.
Dua joined OnlyFans at the peak of its popularity. In 2021 alone, the platform reported in public filings that it had over 2 million creators and hit over 187 million fans — a growth of 128% from the previous year.
Many creators joined OnlyFans during the pandemic, as it had become difficult for adult entertainers who relied on sex work for their livelihood to continue to work in person, due to quarantine rules. In 2020, the revenue in the stripping industry was estimated to have decreased 17.4%, with strip clubs across the country closing due to COVID-19 protocols. Lawsuits began hitting states like New York and California, alleging that strip clubs were unfairly hit with closures that impacted the livelihoods of their employees while other entertainment venues were still allowed to be open and operating.
With OnlyFans, many were able to continue to make money in a similar line of work while remaining in the comfort and safety of their own home. Others were able to get access to social interaction that they couldn’t have otherwise.
“I lived alone and I was touch-starved, you know? And I was like, ‘I need some attention,’” said a creator named Kaela Luna. “So I started OnlyFans, started making money that way, and just kind of took it casually, until last year.”
As OnlyFans began to grow throughout 2020 and onwards, notable celebrities started to create accounts. Cardi B joined the platform as a creator in 2021, shortly after the release of her hit song W.A.P, with estimates that the rapper may have made over $9 million from selling content on the platform (not adult content, but rather paid exclusive content). Rapper Iggy Azalea, actress Bella Thorne, as well as singer Lily Allen all later became creators on the platform, with Allen exclusively posting images of her feet. Public financial filings show that the platform had over 4 million creators and over 377 million fan accounts in 2024, growing 24% in fans from the previous year.
All this combined with the promise of potential high earnings, creators were hooked.
“Something that was super attractive was the money,” Dua said. “At that point, I had already been selling explicit photos, but using primarily Snapchat for that business. It was Snapchat and CashApp. With OnlyFans, everything’s right there.”
On the platform, Dua said she does not offer any free content. The paywall to access her content was $10 but said she recently changed it to $5. The content on her main feed she describes as not containing anything too revealing. She added that more explicit content is offered as pay-per-view and can range from anything from $15 to $200, depending on what the content is. She said that OnlyFans isn’t her full time job, but rather a “hustle.” “A girl got to pay her rent, but a girl got to also eat,” she added.
Although she has dabbled with a few other platforms, she said that she enjoys the security that a platform like OnlyFans brings.
“I don’t mind OnlyFans taking their 20% I would rather trade that 20% for that security, knowing that OnlyFans is a secure platform, rather than risking my fucking private information being sold,” she said, referring to the amount OnlyFans takes per sale.
Throughout her time on her platform, she has learned that one of the most important aspects of finding success on the platform is building your specific niche and promoting yourself. She said that she recognizes some of the subscribers on her page as people from her high school and people she had gone on dates with, others are just complete strangers.
Aside from the earnings, Dua said she likes to post content on the platform as a form of artistic expression. She added that she doesn’t have a set posting schedule. If there is a day that she feels good in her skin, she’ll take photos and then gradually release them on her page.
“This is my human body, I’ve shared it enough, I’m really not scared of what other people have to say,” Dua said. “I’m in a very unique position being an artist and knowing that I’m not going to pursue a nine-to-five and I’m not going into corporate America where these background checks are gonna crush and destroy my career opportunities. I’m in a field where sexuality is something that very much drives my art.”
Despite OnlyFans being known mostly for its adult content, it has tried to change its image. In August of 2021, OnlyFans made an attempt to backstep from adult content, announcing it would be banning sexually explicit material. The CEO of OnlyFans at the time, Tim Stokley, told the Financial Times that the pending ban was meant to appease banks and investors, who were citing “reputation risk” when it came to investing in adult content platforms.
After the announcement, OnlyFans was struck by massive backlash from adult content creators and users of the platform. The company later posted onto X, formerly known as Twitter at the time, that it would not be going through with the ban. From there, the platform only became more and more popular.
But there are signs that OnlyFans could try to push against its image as an adult entertainment site again.
In May of 2025, OnlyFans was put up for sale for a whopping $5.5 billion. It still has not been officially bought. Like former Stokely predicted all those years ago, investors have been feeling weary about purchasing the platform. Forbes reported that Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based asset manager and private credit firm, is eyeing acquisition. After OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky abruptly passed away of cancer in March, the race for the platform’s new owner has become even more pressing.
Unnamed investors told Forbes that after reviewing the deal, that they saw “warning signs around slowing growth and risks for the site’s relationships with its biggest creators.” Under the ownership of Architect Capital, the platform would reportedly shift its focus towards less adult content, mirroring its more PG subscription-content competitor Patreon.
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Blair told the Wall Street Journal that she was aware of the controversial conversation that OnlyFans has erupted. Although she admitted to sometimes telling a small white lie that she works as a lawyer instead of the CEO of the platform, she said that she welcomes the discussion.
“As a society, having a better and more open conversation about sexuality is incredibly important. That conversation needs to be age appropriate,” Blair said. “The reality is that sexuality is part of the human experience. I don’t think people only see things that are sexy on OnlyFans. Look at fashion, perfume, cars, film, Hollywood. I mean to say that this is an OnlyFans issue is not, I think, entirely fair.”
Creators have been swept into the controversy of the platform too. But not all feel optimistic about the direction of the conversation, nor the future of sex work and OnlyFans.
“It looks like there’s more acceptance of OnlyFans after the pandemic and all that, like ‘oh, everyone has OnlyFans,” but no, people still view anyone in any form of sex work — porn OnlyFans, stripping, any of that — as less than human,” Falcon said.
“You can win the Nobel Peace Prize as a porn star and people will still be like, ‘No, you deserve to die.’”
The Rebirth of the Feminist Pornography Debate
Sternhell has taught an undergraduate class at NYU titled, “Women and the Media” for several years. One of her lessons is specifically focused on pornography and the arguments for and against it that arose during the Sex Wars. She said that she has watched her students’ perspective on pornography change drastically in the last few years.
“This year, I felt there was more criticism — maybe the last few years — since [pornography has] been so much on the internet,” she said. “For a while, my students were all on the libertarian side. I think that’s moved some, [but] not very many people are happy. Nobody was saying, in fact, it’s great that porn is everywhere. Nobody was saying that.”
On a Thursday in the middle of March, students in Sternhell’s class shared what they thought of the current state of pornography. Many shared the same concerns about pornographic content. Students expressed that they believed pornography that they’ve heard of and have encountered as grotesquely extreme and seemingly omnipresent, accessible from just one wrong click on a sketchy pirating site. One student said that in pornography, women are “not being treated as a person,” another added that pornography was fundamentally misogynistic. When it came time to discuss the potential arguments on the pro-sex side, students sat quietly and looked around at one another, seemingly waiting to see who would be able to break the silence.
But the anti-porn conversation extends beyond Sternhell’s classroom. Trinity College Dublin’s philosophical society hosts a weekly debate. In 2025, the students hosted a debate focused on the rise of OnlyFans, where speakers brought up similar concerns and echoed the same points popularized by anti-porn feminists like Dworkin.
“Online pornography is violent, without exception,” said Harper Alderson, a student at Trinity College Dublin. “Online pornography legitimizes rape by packaging it as sex. I regret the rise of OnlyFans because it has contributed to the proliferation of online pornography and normalized pornographic sex.”
She pointed out issues with the fact that the top creators on the platform must rely on building a social media presence, which has made the profession more palatable and glamourized.
“The language of porn changed when OnlyFans came into the mainstream. It changed from sex work to content creation and performers to entrepreneurs,” Alderson said. “This rebranding made porn culturally palatable, and it uses influencer logic. Porn was previously treated as a shadow economy, and it is now financially and socially integrated into Silicon Valley’s influencer capitalism.”
At large, a new anti-porn wave seems to be catching on. Earlier this year, two publishing houses, Picador and Penguin, reissued three of Dworkin’s most notable books, “Pornography: Men Processing Women,” “Right-wing Women,” and “Woman Hating.” The books had been nearly impossible to find prior to the reissuing, as they had been out of print for decades.
On several social media platforms, young users have recently formed communities over Dworkin’s works. On Reddit, over 900 users upvoted a post about the reissuing of Dworkin’s books.
On TikTok, users quote “Pornography” and other books that Dworkin has published like, “Intercourse” and “Right-wing women,” and analyze the contemporary treatment of women. One video of a young woman in her car quoting Dworkin accumulated over 400,000 views.
“Me telling unsuspecting men to google ‘Andrea Dworkin pornography’ when they start talking about watching porn,” text on another TikTok video that got 400,000 views, reads.
Stoltenberg, Dworkin’s partner, said that to him, the reissuing of Dworkin’s books felt like a vindication and a sign of an emerging new interest in the feminist anti-porn stance. He added that he believes that a large part of why Dworkin’s book, “Pornography,” is becoming popular again is because its arguments still stand true with the emergence of digitized pornography.
“The meaning of [Pornography], in terms of male power and male identity, is a constant in the pornography that is now available widely in this technologized form,” Stoltenberg said. “It’s still doing the same thing societally, in terms of maintaining and eroticizing male supremacy.”
Figures of Dworkin’s time are beginning to reenter the current conversation surrounding pornography. MacKinnon, who wrote the anti-porn ordinance with Dworkin, published an op-ed in the New York Times in 2021, where she denounced OnlyFans as a “pimp” and “not a safe platform for ‘sex work.’” Most anti-porn feminists denounce the use of the phrase “sex work” as they believe it legitimizes sex as a profession.
Lorna Bracewell, a political science professor at Flagler College, wrote her dissertation in 2012 about the politics of the Sex Wars. She said that when she would bring up the topic of her dissertation during that time, people would look at her “quizzingly.” Now she feels like was just ahead of the curve. In 2021, she got her dissertation published.
“There is a radical feminism renaissance,” Bracewell said, of the reissuing of Dworkin’s book. “I’ve lived through this sort of resurgence of interest, and I was a part of that. I now realize, in retrospect, I was an early adopter.”
For many anti-porn feminists, a clear demand is present. They encourage the adoption of the Nordic Model — a legislative framework that seeks to regulate prostitution by criminalizing the buyers of services rather than sex workers themselves.
Nordic Model Now, a UK-based grassroots group, encourages the adoption of the model, and has publicly spoken out against OnlyFans.
“Popular myths suggest that OnlyFans is a harmless, easy way to make lots of money, that it can be sexually empowering for women, and that women can easily maintain control of their content,” a blog post on the website reads. “These myths lure women into setting up an account, only for them to discover when it is too late that the reality is somewhat different.”
Stoltenberg said that MacKinnon is a proponent of the model, and that Dworkin had been as well when she was alive.
The Nordic Model has been adopted in countries like Sweden, Norway, and Canada. In the U.S., prostitution is illegal in every state except for Nevada. In 2023, Maine passed two laws that follow the Nordic Model, being the first U.S. state to do so.
But pro-sex advocates are still fervent despite the recent new interest.
The pro-sex side of the pornography debate still retains many of its organizational supporters from the times of the Sex Wars, and has seen new ones emerge. Aside from the ACLU, which is still active as a pro-sex work legal instuition, more organizations such as the Red Umbrella Fund have arisen as helpful informational and financial hubs for sex workers. The Red Umbrella Fund first began in 2012 and has offered grants to sex work organizations from around the world.
Smaller sex work advocates are also making their voices heard. Grace Francis is a 25-year-old sex worker based in the United Kingdom who entered the industry when they were a college student. They have grown a following on both TikTok and X under the username ethical.hoes, where they post content related to sex work advocacy and pushes back against anti-porn standpoints.
For Francis and other sex work rights activists, there are several things that are at the top of the sex work rights agenda. At the top of the list is opposing the adoption of the Nordic Model, as it has been criticized for being overly victimizing and limiting work opportunities for sex workers. Another top issue is combating internet safety and age verification laws, which have also been criticized for censorship and limiting sex workers’ ability to have discoverable work.
Francis said they first became interested in sex work advocacy after entering the industry as a cam girl — a type of sex work where someone is able to perform carry out sexually explicit activity or conversation via webcam. Like many others, they entered the industry during the pandemic. They were a student at the time and had developed long COVID — a chronic condition that can impact those who have had COVID-19, often causing debilitating symptoms — and were looking for ways to be able to continue to live affordably while remaining at home.
Francis’ social media accounts first began as a place for sex workers to learn more about the industry and how to navigate issues with things like ensuring STI testing within the industry and safe workplace environments that encourage consent. As their platform grew outside the scope of just adult content creators within the industry and began to reach those who opposed pornography, Francis said they then began tailoring their content to address the debates surrounding the ethics and politics of pornography and the sex work industry.
“I started realizing that there were bigger conversations that needed to be had now that I was speaking to people who weren’t just other sex workers, who already sort of knew that these things were going on,” Francis said.
Many of Francis’ videos on TikTok are replies to those who push back against their support for sex workers’ rights. They said that they feel that their audience is pretty “50–50” in terms of being pro and anti-porn, and that they’ve encountered pushback from both right and left-leaning accounts. They said that in the beginning of their account’s success, they sometimes struggled with responding to anti-porn pushback, but have learned to grow patient with the comments.
“When I first started, I was angry and I had all of these feelings about all of these things that I’d experienced in the industry that I hadn’t found a way to talk about,” Francis said.
“I’m not always successful,” they added, speaking to dealing with a divided audience. “But I think I try to just focus on coming across more educational. I think since I’ve done that, I have also noticed a reflection of that in the comments of more people who are actually understanding and listening to what I have to say, instead of just getting equally angry and defending their position back.”
The Growing Right-Wing Threat
Nearly 50 years ago, anti-porn feminists found themselves sharing the anti-porn viewpoint with an odd bedfellow, conservatives.
By the early 2000s, anti-porn feminists lost the monument of their movement, which experts attribute to several different reasons. Whether it was because of their refusal to coordinate with their right-wing counterparts or because of their small size failing to help them have any political influence, conservatives were able to overtake the movement.
All these years later, it seems like the newfound Sex Wars might not be able to avoid its fated history. Contemporary, high-profile right-wing figures have joined in on the new anti-porn movement and are seeing mild success with their demands.
“Supporters of conservative anti-porn, they’re elected officials. They’re the highest parts of government, and so that has just become so much more powerful than feminist arguments,” said Nancy Whittier, a sociology professor at Smith College who has published several books on the Sex Wars. “I think the feminist critique has kind of shrunk. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still there, but I don’t think it’s as publicly visible.”
The conservative anti-porn side has the advantage of clear public advocates and legislative influence. In 2023, a clip circulated online of House Speaker Mike Johnson in which he said that he and his son use a platform called Covenant Eyes, which is meant for monitoring user pornography use. Similar forms of technology, including an upcoming nationwide cell phone network that blocks pornography from users’ phones, are becoming more common.
Right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk have also proudly taken up the “anti-porn” title in the past and have encouraged their followers to do the same.
“[Pornography] does result in domestic abuse, broken marriages, and adultery,” Kirk, who founded the right-wing organization Turning Point USA, had said in an interview with Covenant Eyes Podcast in 2023, opening up about his own pornography addiction. “The way the porn industry tries to spin it is like, ‘Well it’s a release for men to not do those things.’ It’s the opposite, right? It leads to greater and more violent and vile levels of sin.” Kirk recently passed away in September of 2025 after he was shot while speaking at a Utah Valley University event.
Unlike anti-porn feminists, anti-porn conservatives oppose pornography usually on the basis of obscenity and the embracing of traditional, and often Christian, values, rather than focusing on exploitative concerns that feminists propose.
Republican lawmakers are increasing their push for legislation that seeks to regulate pornography. In May 2025, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), reintroduced the “Interstate Obscenity Definition Act” into Congress, a proposed bill which aims to redefine obscenity more broadly, which could pave the way for a nationwide ban on pornography.
“Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment,” Lee wrote in a X post about the bill. “But hazy, unenforceable definitions have allowed pornography companies to infect our society, peddle smut to children, and do business across state lines unimpeded.” But the bill never left the committee.
In Michigan, Republicans introduced a bill in September that would ban online pornography. Similarly, the bill similarly failed in making its way through the legislative system.
Some political figures have even used OnlyFans specifically to argue against pornography as a whole. James Fishback, a Florida gubernatorial candidate, said that if he were to be elected, he would impose a 50% “sin tax” on income earned by OnlyFans creators in the state. Creators on the platform, including Rain — the creator who shared she had made millions on the platform — pushed back against this proposal.
Experts said that the reason why the new generation of anti-porn conservatives may have more success in their movement is because they’ve been able to find an entry point that has gained the support of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Neil Kaplan-Kelly, a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Flagler College, said that in recent years conversations surrounding pornography have shifted away from concerns regarding exploitation, and have begun to focus much more on child safety, which has helped the right-wing anti-porn stance become more popular and widely agreed upon.
“What’s happening is, especially on porn stuff, is that it’s been shifted towards child debates and grooming children, especially as with trans folks and legislating that,” Kaplan-Kelly said.
Project 2025, a 900-page list of objectives that has become the blueprint for the Trump administration, suggests that pornography “should be outlawed” and its producers and distributors “should be imprisoned.” The document, when speaking on pornography, similarly puts an emphasis on child safety concerns, arguing that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.” The tie between pornography and the LGBTQ+ community could then have collateral damage for the queer community if pornography were to be banned.
The focus on children has helped laws that aim to combat or regulate online pornography platforms to have bipartisan support.
In 2021, at the height of OnlyFan’s popularity, over 100 members of Congress on both sides of the aisle signed a letter demanding that the Department of Justice investigate OnlyFans for CSAM concerns. Reuters later published an in-depth investigation into the platform and its reports of CSAM in 2024, finding at least 30 cases of child exploitation, citing cases obtained through public records. An OnlyFans spokesperson told Reuters that it immediately removes any suspected CSAM and makes a report to the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline.
Although it is a federal crime to show children pornography, a number of legislators have recently attempted to push even further for child safety by introducing age verifications bills, which require adult content platforms to verify that their users are above the age of 18. At least 25 states, including Florida, Texas, and Utah, have passed age verification laws. These laws and pending legislation have been largely bipartisan.
Those in the sex work industry have argued against the implementation of age verification laws, as many view it as an attempt to censor adult content as a whole. In 2023, when many states began to enact these laws, PornHub wrote in an X post that traffic on its website went down 80% in the state of Louisiana after it had passed its age verification law and brought up concerns with user safety. Privacy experts have also brought up concerns with unsafe data retention when it comes to these laws, as age verification often includes the uploading of government-issued IDs.
“These people did not stop looking for porn,” the post reads. “They just migrated to other corners of the internet that don’t ask users to verify age, that don’t follow the law, that don’t take user safety seriously, and that often don’t even moderate content.”
OnlyFans has faced issues when it comes to age verification. In March of 2025, Britain’s media and telecommunications regulator Ofcom fined OnlyFans around $1.4 million for failing to disclose how it checked for user age.
But the tension isn’t exclusively in the political sphere, it has bled into the cultural realm.
The HBO TV show Euphoria has recently made headlines for its inclusion of OnlyFans into its plot and has erupted a conversation about the platform. On the show’s new season, the character of Cassie, played by actress Sydney Sweeney, joins OnlyFans. Clips from the new season have gone viral, showing Sweeney’s character dressed up as a dog and even as a baby to create content for her OnlyFans account.
The scenes have caused uproar in its audience, as well as right-wing commentators like Megyn Kelly calling the show “sick” and condemning it for “sexualizing infancy.” Despite the controversy with the inclusion of OnlyFans in the show, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson has stood behind the decision of incorporating it into the plot.
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, a conservative anti-porn organization, made a post on X condemning the Euphoria’s depiction of women, adding that in this new season, “every female lead is tied to sexual exploitation. OnlyFans, sugar dating, pimping and working at a strip club.”
“Even in a culture that generally normalizes and celebrates sex work as empowerment, viewers are starting to question it,” NCOSE social media coordinator Caroline Callicutt said in the video. “This isn’t freedom, it’s a dark reflection of where our society is heading. Yes, women deserve dignity, respect and agency over their bodies. But exploitation doesn’t become empowerment just because it’s normalized or profitable.”
Francis, the UK-based sex worker advocate, said that they believe that a lot of the pushback to OnlyFans comes from misleading portrayals and misunderstandings of the type of content the platform actually houses, naming the depiction of OnlyFans in Euphoria as an example. On OnlyFans, terms related to animals, beastiality — known as “pet play” or “puppy play” in the BDSM community — or any other phrase insinuating intercourse with animals are banned on the platform.
“I kind of see OnlyFans as a very vanilla site, in a way, it doesn’t allow a lot of these like things that people expect to find there,” Francis said. “When you think of anti-porn rhetoric, a lot of it’s about choking, or age play, or heavy BDSM, and none of those things are allowed on OnlyFans. But still, you have people repeating these talking points.”
To combat the right-wing hold that has been emerging in the new anti-porn movement, Whittier says that anti-porn feminists today will need to know what they want and find a clear way to meet their goals.
“It’s hard for movements to organize when they don’t have a clear demand,” Whittier said. “I don’t know what the online equivalent of that would be, but that’s something that could happen,” she added.
In general, clarity is a big issue in the pornography debate as a whole. An immense issue that the pornography debate suffers from, which is seldom addressed with lawmakers, is a lack of information.
At large, the topic of pornography is understudied, leaving many unanswered questions about how it impacts those within and outside the adult entertainment space. This lack of information leads both sides to form opinions that aren’t backed by reputable research, and much more on personal experience.
Researchers at the American Institute for Boys and Men — a Washington D.C.-based think tank that researches and forms policies related to men — hosted a webinar that aimed to clarify what is known and unknown about the impact of pornography on men. What they found was that research was incredibly sparse, especially in measuring societal associations with pornography.
Shane Kraus, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that took part in the webinar, said that there are several gaps when it comes to what is known about the way society consumes pornography, including positive and neutral uses of pornography, uses of pornography in older people and diverse groups, as well as how people build tolerances for content.
“It’s very difficult to do this kind of research, because pornography, as mentioned earlier, is very difficult — no one wants to talk about it, but it’s happening among the youth,” Kraus said. “So, I think this [means] long term studies with self reports, but also objective measures, looking at tracking people’s behaviors. But again, among diversity, age, race, relationship status. We really need that data.”
Emily Rothman, a Boston University professor who has done extensive research in pornography use, said she believes previous research into pornography has shown that certain content is harmful for some people in certain contexts, but that people in general aren’t impacted the same way by pornography.
She said that studies that she has done, and others similar, have shown that education about sexually explicit media has helped young people learn how to use pornography in healthier and more beneficial ways.
“My team has contributed a couple of papers on that topic, demonstrating that when you engage youth in conversations that feel meaningful to them, that are sort of evidence based, science-driven, non-judgmental, and invite them to engage as sort of partners and critical thinkers that they will and that they absolutely are capable of learning and absorbing information,” Rothman said.
But she added that access to this education is lacking. When parents, students, educators, and law makers are all on separate pages, finding agreement on how to form a robust educational system to teach youth about how to engage with adult content will be an ongoing battle.
“There needs to be political will to fund research that will evaluate these programs, and there needs to be school boards who say, ‘Yes, you can implement that here, and we can test whether it works.’ So that’s another thing that we have to work on,” she added.
But as long as the movement stays as divided as it has been, it’s unclear if educational and legislative progress could be achieved. When it comes to the future of the industry and the conversations surrounding it, several creators expressed that they aren’t feeling hopeful.
“[Pornography is] just becoming more popular, and people are just mad. This country, and these countries are ran by misogynistic people, so it’s really about control. They don’t want women to have autonomy. They don’t want women to be liberated,” Lew said.
“They want to have control. They want to stop it. They want to find ways to make it harder. That’s all. It really comes down to it. It’s nothing else.”