what OnlyFans' billions reveal about the market value of male desire

the economics of manufactured intimacy & attention as currency

In the wake of OnlyFans' staggering 2023 financial revelations ($6.6 BILLION in user spending)* a predictable storm of male outrage has erupted across social media. But beneath the surface-level discourse about shameless wealth and moral decay lies a far more complex psychological and economic revolution that's reshaping the fundamental power dynamics of desire.

*Before proceeding, it's crucial to acknowledge that this analysis focuses on the broader cultural reaction to OnlyFans rather than the complex realities of sex work itself. The median OnlyFans creator earns just $180 monthly, and I have serious concerns about exploitation, psychological trauma, and the often-devastating personal costs of sex work.

The platform's $6.6B in user spending exceeds the global box office earnings of every movie released in 2023 (year of Barbenheimer, lest we forget). The $5.3B paid to creators outstrips the combined salaries of the NBA, NHL, and MLB. A platform built on faux-intimacy is generating more revenue than Spotify; OnlyFans creators are out-earning Netflix stars; and the growth rate is outpacing both Instagram and TikTok's early years. This is proof of a tectonic shift in how the digital economy values intimate attention. While traditional entertainment sells distraction, OnlyFans has perfected the monetization of being seen. The platform hasn't just created a market for digital desire – it's proved that personalized intimacy, even in its most manufactured form, is now more valuable than almost any other form of entertainment we produce.

To dismiss these numbers as just another digital gold rush would be to fundamentally misunderstand their implications. OnlyFans has become a lens through which to examine every major fault line in contemporary society. Outperforming decades-old entertainment empires and traditional sports leagues, it's telling us something profound about masculinity in crisis, about the commodification of human connection, about the evolution of power dynamics in digital spaces.

OnlyFans has achieved something unprecedented: it has created a precise market value for manufactured intimacy, turning previously intangible forms of male attention and desire into measurable, monetizable metrics.

The conventional narrative around OnlyFans criticism often falls into predictable camps: conservative moral panic or feminist debates about empowerment versus exploitation. But as cultural critic (and my thinking/writing inspo) Magdalene J. Taylor astutely observes, "what many of these guys resent is not merely their own empty sex lives but specifically that women are able to capitalize on their sexuality in ways they can't." Their sexuality, once positioned as an unstoppable force that women needed to accommodate, resist, or channel, has been quantified by the market and found virtually worthless.

Beneath the outrage lies a broader malaise: the fragile, hollow, and lonely state of the modern man. Men disconnected from purpose or meaning, paying for the illusion of connection to assuage deeper feelings of insignificance. OnlyFans, like other aspects of platform capitalism, exposes this fracture but isn’t the root cause. Instead, it profits from and amplifies these vulnerabilities, perpetuating cycles of isolation.

As Bell Hooks presciently noted, male anger often masks a deeper existential crisis of relevance – and nowhere is this more evident than in the OnlyFans economy. Here, men face a paralyzing contradiction. Their collective desire generates billions in revenue, yet their individual sexuality has been rendered powerless, transformed from a tool of social control into mere consumer behavior to be harvested, analyzed, and monetized.

The platform has exposed the ultimate paradox of digital-age masculinity: men have become both the engine and the exhaust of a system that systematically strips them of what they believed was their intrinsic sexual power. Their gaze, once a weapon of social control, has been commodified into just another metric on a dashboard, alongside click-through rates and conversion percentages.

The commodification of sexuality is as old as civilization itself. From Mesopotamian temple prostitutes to the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, the story remained remarkably consistent: women as the product, men as the infrastructure.

The brothel keeper, the pimp, the porn producer: each positioned himself as an essential intermediary while creating the very conditions of exploitation he claimed to protect against.

This protection racket persisted for millennia because it was, fundamentally, about controlling access. Male gatekeepers maintained power not just through direct control of women's bodies, but also through control of the channels through which female sexuality could be monetized. They manufactured artificial scarcity, created systems of economic dependency, and positioned themselves as solutions to problems they themselves had created.

And this is what's making men lose their minds in 2024: OnlyFans has exposed this entire infrastructure as unnecessary! You don't need a pimp's "protection" when you have two-factor authentication. You don't need a producer's "distribution network" when you have direct-to-consumer platforms. You don't need a brothel's "security" when you have digital boundaries and screenshot detection. All you need is a smartphone and an internet connection.

The platform has eliminated the middleman. But it's also revealed that the middleman never added value to begin with. He was always just a parasite positioned between supply and demand, extracting profit not by providing a service but by manufacturing his own necessity. And now, watching women set their own prices, control their own content, and maintain their own boundaries from behind a digital wall, men are forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: their historical role in the sex industry was only about maintaining control of an infrastructure that technology has finally rendered obsolete.

In his groundbreaking work Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource, Roy Baumeister argued that historically, female sexuality has been treated as a valuable resource while male sexuality was often viewed as abundant and therefore less valuable. But what's fascinating is how OnlyFans has both validated and complicated this theory. While the platform confirms Baumeister's basic market analysis, it reveals something he never anticipated: that the real commodity isn't sex at all, but the architecture of desire itself. Baumeister's work focused on physical intimacy as the primary currency of sexual economics. But OnlyFans has revealed a far more valuable resource: the ability to industrialize and scale the feeling of being desired. OF has created an entirely new form of sexual capital, one that exists purely in the realm of digital possibility. The genius is in keeping that possibility eternally unrealized while making it infinitely renewable. Where traditional sexual economics dealt with finite resources (time, physical intimacy, exclusivity), OnlyFans has discovered that manufactured hope is the ultimate renewable resource.

I think of Baumeister's market theory here — how technology has created an entirely new sexual marketplace, one where the traditional rules of supply and demand have been turned inside out. The scarce resource isn't sex, or even the possibility of sex, but the illusion of unique desirability at scale. It's a market innovation that would have been impossible in the physical world Baumeister studied, where scarcity was tied to physical limitations. In the digital realm, scarcity itself can be manufactured, automated, and optimized for maximum profit.

When men rage about "women getting paid just to exist," they're actually articulating something profound about their own existential crisis: the unstated assumption that male existence must be justified through action, achievement, or production, while female existence alone somehow generates value.* It’s a cry for help in the crisis of masculine identity colliding with platform capitalism. This model of value creation is completely invalidating the traditional male script of earning value through conquest, competition, or achievement. These men are watching their entire framework of self-worth – built on the idea that value must be earned through doing rather than being – collapse in the face of a market that seems to validate their deepest fear: that female existence itself might have intrinsic value while male existence must constantly prove its worth. The platform doesn't just challenge their earning potential – it challenges their entire conception of how value should be created and assigned in the world.

*When we speak of "male existence must be justified" versus "female existence generates value," we're describing a perception created by market dynamics, not an inherent truth about human worth. All human beings possess intrinsic value. What OnlyFans reveals is not a natural order, but rather how platform capitalism can reshape and monetize gendered dynamics of attention, desire, and power - transforming previously implicit social exchanges into explicit market transactions, and in doing so, making visible (and profitable) the very power structures it claims to disrupt. The platform doesn't create these dynamics; it simply automates and optimizes them for maximum economic extraction.

The very nature of sexual power has been transformed by technology. The traditional male role relied on physical presence, on the ability to dominate space and control access. But in a world where intimacy is mediated through screens, where desire is filtered through algorithms, where power flows through digital networks rather than physical spaces, those traditional forms of male control become not just obsolete but laughably primitive. OF is democratizing sex work, yes, but it is also revealing how much of male sexual power was always about controlling the infrastructure of desire rather than desire itself. When that infrastructure becomes digital, when physical intimidation becomes impossible and emotional manipulation becomes trackable, when every interaction can be screenshotted and every threat can be reported, the entire edifice of male sexual power reveals itself as a paper tiger in a digital world.

I believe OnlyFans creators aren't actually selling sex or even sexuality – they're selling something far more psychologically complex: the perfect simulation of being chosen. It's a ruthlessly efficient exploitation of a uniquely male psychological blind spot. Men have been culturally conditioned to see themselves as the choosers, the pursuers, the ones who bestow attention and desire. The platform flips this dynamic on its head, creating an environment where men compete for attention while simultaneously believing they're the ones doing the selecting. It's a masterclass in what could be called "inverted pursuit" – the art of making someone feel like a hunter while they're actually being harvested.

The platform weaponizes male ego against itself. Every personalized message, every custom video, every "just thinking about you" notification is designed to hook into the male fantasy of being uniquely deserving of attention while simultaneously standardizing that attention into a scalable product. And the more a man pays to feel specially chosen, the more he becomes just another interchangeable subscriber in a vast economy of automated desire.

This explains why the fury about "unfairness" cuts so deep. Men are watching women profit AND watching them perfect the science of desire in ways that render traditional male sexual power obsolete! The platform has effectively A/B tested the male gaze into submission, turning what was once considered men's natural advantage (their role as desire's arbiters) into just another metric to be optimized.

Like any other tech platform, OnlyFans has mastered the art of making users feel uniquely special while treating them as completely interchangeable. The platform's billion-dollar success comes from understanding something profound: in an age of infinite digital, parasocial, manufactured faux-intimacy, the feeling of being authentically wanted may be the scarcest resource of all.