Quitting OnlyFans

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Quitting OnlyFans"

Podcast: Today, Explained (Vox)
Date: April 3, 2026
Hosts: Sean Rameswaram, Noel King
Guests: Amelia Tait (The Guardian), Rebecca Jennings (New York Magazine)

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Overview

This episode of Today, Explained explores the seismic changes at OnlyFans after the death of its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, and the wider cultural forces that are threatening the site's dominance—including the growing movement among young men to quit pornography altogether. The conversation traces Radvinsky’s controversial legacy, the business risks facing OnlyFans, the rise of anti-porn apps, and new cultural divides around sex work and masculinity.

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1. The Secretive Life and Death of Leonid Radvinsky (02:11–07:50)

Key points:

• Background:

  • Born in Ukraine, moved to the US at age 6, excelled at chess and academics, graduated top of his class at Northwestern (02:25).
  • Early foray into adult content via Cybertania as a teen, with his mother as company director; business sold questionable access to explicit content, possibly a scam (02:55–04:21).

• Rise to Power:

  • Built multiple businesses in adult content, including webcamming and an investment fund.
  • Purchased OnlyFans from the British Stokely family in 2018, turning it into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon (04:29–05:53).

Notable quotes:

• "He was very precocious in the pornography sphere." – Amelia Tait [03:44]
• "The size of the company has absolutely rocketed." – Amelia Tait [05:52]

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2. OnlyFans' Business Model and Mounting Challenges (05:53–09:13)

Key points:

• OnlyFans pays creators 80% and takes a 20% cut.
• Radvinsky earned up to $701 million in annual dividends; company valued up to $8 billion (06:15).
• Business faces existential risks:
  • Payment processors (Visa, MasterCard) may cut ties if illegal content surfaces.
  • AI-driven "girlfriends" seen as a future challenge.
  • Cultural and feminist criticism: Is OnlyFans empowering, or exploitative?

Notable moments:

• Reversal of porn ban after backlash from creators (08:58).
• "There is always the risk of banks and credit card operators deciding that they no longer want to operate with the business, and that would be catastrophic." – Amelia Tait [08:07]
• "There is a desire to say this is a social media company… a business that rests on the empowerment of women... but there is a conservative and also a feminist pushback." – Amelia Tait [10:24]

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3. The New Threat: Quitting Porn (16:08–27:16)

Key points:

• A booming trend among young men in the "manosphere" to quit porn for self-improvement, inspired by influencers from Andrew Tate to Andrew Huberman (16:12–18:01).
• Introduction of "Quitter" (without the E), an app to help men quit porn—founded by two young men steeped in manosphere ideology (18:34–19:52).
• App features a panic button that turns on the selfie camera ("you're better than this") and community support groups (19:54–21:00).

Notable quotes:

• "You see a lot of these guys...telling men that you are wasting your life by, you know, cooning to porn." – Noel King [17:27]
• “[The app] helps you…suppress the urge to go look at porn by showing you the least sexiest thing on earth, a picture of your own face.” – Sean Rameswaram [20:30]

Memorable moments:

• Sincere, earnest (and sometimes sad) stories shared in app community forums (21:00–21:37).
• Rapid growth of quit-porn apps; passive-income and "vibe coding" make this a profitable trend (21:56–22:30).

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4. The Motivations and Cultural Backlash (22:30–26:08)

Key points:

• The app founders are as interested in monetizing the self-improvement trend as helping peers, expressing influence ambitions akin to Logan Paul or Andrew Tate (23:02–23:53).
• The anti-porn movement is entwined with anti-OnlyFans sentiment; often, resentment is directed at women’s financial success via OnlyFans (25:12–25:52).
• Cultural rift: Is sex work online empowering or degrading? Is there an emerging monoculture or just splintered, hostile online "microcultures"?

Notable quotes:

• "They want to have DJ careers and be YouTube influencers…we want to be Andrew Tate, but like with, you know, less toxic." – Rebecca Jennings [23:14]
• “They call OnlyFans prostitution with Wi-Fi and the clearance aisle of femininity.” – Noel King [25:09]
• "It really seems to be a lot of this is based off of a resentment that young women are able to use their sexual power to get rich." – Noel King [25:52]

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5. The Future: Has OnlyFans Peaked? (26:08–27:49)

Key points:

• OnlyFans’ future hinges on continued content trust and banking relationships.
• If payment processors cut ties, the platform could collapse.
• The anti-porn movement, propelled by manosphere and self-improvement communities, could reshape cultural attitudes toward porn and sex work (26:34–27:16).
• The online cultural landscape is fragmented, with many insular communities and no wider consensus (27:22).

Notable quotes:

• "There really is no monoculture anymore...instead you have all of these very fractured communities that all want different things." – Noel King [27:22]

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:11 | Introducing Amelia Tait; Radvinsky’s secretive background and early career | | 04:29 | How Radvinsky acquired OnlyFans | | 06:15 | OnlyFans’ explosive growth and Radvinsky’s wealth | | 07:58 | Risks for OnlyFans: payment processing and AI | | 09:13 | Feminist vs. conservative critiques of OnlyFans | | 16:08 | Introduction to the anti-porn movement among young men | | 18:34 | The Quitter app: design and backstory | | 19:54 | App’s panic button/shame mechanism and community chats | | 21:56 | The business of quit-porn apps and rise of clone competitors | | 23:14 | Founders’ influencer/entrepreneurial ambitions | | 25:09 | Manosphere’s anti-OnlyFans rhetoric and cultural resentment | | 26:34 | Is OnlyFans at its peak? Future rests on finance and social attitudes | | 27:22 | Fragmentation of online culture, no single narrative or consensus |

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Overall Tone & Language

The episode blends investigative journalism, close analysis, and a conversational tone that alternates between curiosity, skepticism, and empathy. Memorable, at times blunt, quotes and deeply personal testimonies (from users of the Quitter app) keep the conversation grounded and thought-provoking.

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Memorable Quotes

• "He made billions of dollars off a website that encouraged people to bare it all for the entire world to see. Leonid took a 20% cut and the creators got 80. Some say OnlyFans revolutionized sex work, made the world's oldest profession safer, easier. Others called Radvinsky the world's most successful pimp." – Sean Rameswaram [00:00]
• "You see a lot of these guys...telling men that you are wasting your life by, you know, cooning to porn." – Noel King [17:27]
• "It really seems to be a lot of this is based off of a resentment that young women are able to use their sexual power to get rich." – Noel King [25:52]
• "There really is no monoculture anymore...instead you have all of these very fractured communities that all want different things." – Noel King [27:22]

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Conclusion

This episode unpacks the complex, shifting nexus of technology, money, cultural attitudes, and gender politics surrounding OnlyFans and online pornography in 2026. It questions whether OnlyFans’ dominance can survive not only payment risk and AI disruption, but also a new groundswell of anti-porn activism—a movement that’s as much about digital self-help and social resentment as it is about morality.

Transcript

[Sean Rameswaram]

You've probably never heard of Leonid Radvinsky, but you've probably heard of his website. It's called OnlyFans. In case you've been living under an ascetic rock for the last six or seven years, OnlyFans is the biggest hub of amateur pornography on the Internet. And Leonid Radvinsky was maybe the most successful pornographer in the history of the human race until he died of cancer maybe a week ago at the age of 43. We don't exactly know when or where he died because Leonid was a super private person. Kinda ironic because. Because he made billions of dollars off a website that encouraged people to bare it all for the entire world to see. Leonid took a 20% cut and the creators got 80. Some say OnlyFans revolutionized sex work, made the world's oldest profession safer, easier. Others called Radvinsky the world's most successful pimp. But now that he's dead, his game changing website is at a bit of an existential crossroads. And we're gonna take you there on Today Explained. Support for the program comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Have you heard of him? Every story on the show exists because someone wanted a deeper understanding of the world around them. Anthropic says Claude was built to follow that same instinct. It doesn't hand you the tidy version. It helps you work through the complicated one, pushing back on your assumptions and helping you sit with what doesn't add up. And with deep research, Claude digs across dozens of sources where they agree and where they don't. So you can trace the reasoning yourself. You can try Claude Free at Claude AI todayexplained.

[Noel King]

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[Amelia Tait]

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[Amelia Tait]

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[Sean Rameswaram]

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[Noel King]

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[Amelia Tait]

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[Noel King]

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[Amelia Tait]

That's why you rack today. Today.

[Noel King]

Explain.

[Amelia Tait]

My name's Amelia, gentleman. I'm a reporter with the Guardian newspaper.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And this gentleman has been writing a lot about porn lately. So we asked her to tell us about this secretive figure, the late Leonid Radvinsky.

[Amelia Tait]

So what we do know about him is he was born in Ukraine. He was born in Soviet Ukraine in Odessa. He moved with his family to the US when he was about six. He was a very good student. Was Very good at playing chess, went to Northwestern University and studied economics and graduated in the top of his class. But even as a teenager, even before he graduated, he had somehow understood that there was money to be made in pornography or in adult content websites. And as a teenager, he set up his first website called Cybertania, which was quite grim in that it sold passwords to Internet users that purported to allow them access to very, very explicit content, often promising to give access to bestiality and child sex abuse material.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Yikes.

[Amelia Tait]

It's uncertain whether or not that content, whether or not the passwords actually allowed users access. But anyway, that was what the business model was.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And you're saying he was able to do this as a minor, how?

[Amelia Tait]

He asked his mother to be director of the company. So he was very precocious in the pornography sphere. It's a tiny point, but I suppose he would have said it was a significant point. There is a question mark about whether or not he did actually grant people access to that illegal content. The website promised to, but it may not actually have worked. So to some extent or another, it was a scam in the adult industry, adjacent web area.

[Sean Rameswaram]

So how does he go from a minor scammer to a major player in Internet pornography?

[Amelia Tait]

So after university, he continued to be in the adult industry. I believe he set up a webcamming company allowing users to see women via live streams. He also set up an investment fund. He was based in Florida. And the little that we do know about him comes from a webpage that he had where he talked about only about his investment fund and not about pornography. But the critical moment in his life came, I think, in 2018, where he became aware of a British company called OnlyFans, set up by a family of British people in a town in Essex. And this family, the Stokely family, had set up in 2016, the company OnlyFans. Leonid Radvinsky had heard about this website and he decided to buy it. He paid an undisclosed sum for it in 2018, and I imagine that the Stokely family felt that they'd done quite well from it. However, they will no doubt be kicking themselves now, eight years on, because the size of the company has absolutely rocketed.

[Sean Rameswaram]

During the 2020 coronavirus lockdown, streaming services like Netfl and Hulu saw a huge surge in popularity. However, there is one media company that went under everyone's radar, but has taken over the world of Entertainment. Adult entertainment, that is. OnlyFans may not be safe for work, but its business model is the envy of the world.

[Amelia Tait]

By 2023, Leonid Radvinsky was taking huge dividends out of the company and paid himself $472 million by 20. Before, that had increased to $701 million. By the time that Leonid Radvinsky died 10 days ago, his net worth was estimated at $4 billion, or somewhere between 4 billion and $5 billion. And the company itself was valued at somewhere between 5.5 billion and $8 billion.

[Sean Rameswaram]

OnlyFans is crazy successful, but at some point, Leonid realizes he's gonna die and he tries to sell the company off, supposedly to ensure his family is taken care of once he's gone.

[Amelia Tait]

There was an attempt, I think, to sell it last summer that didn't come off. And then from the beginning of the year, the company went into exclusive negotiations with a San Francisco based investment fund called Architect Capital. We know that the sale didn't go through before Radvinsky's death, but the owner of Architect Capital, James Sagan, remains in exclusive negotiations to buy the firm with those interested in looking after the family trust.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Buying OnlyFans isn't like buying Instagram. So we asked Amelia what challenges come with an acquisition of this sort.

[Amelia Tait]

We've seen revenues grow very reliably over the last five years, but there are risks to being in this sector. Periodically, credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard will threaten to turn off their payment processing business if there is robust evidence that any of the content that's being sold on, on the site is illegal. And there have been, historically, there have been some breaches, but nevertheless, it's an. It's a business that operates in an area that can become risky. And there is always the risk of banks and credit card operators deciding that they no longer want to operate with the business, and that would be catastrophic. OnlyFans is banning porn. Why?

[Noel King]

Well, the company says the decision was

[Amelia Tait]

made to comply with requests from its

[Sean Rameswaram]

banking and payment providers.

[Noel King]

OnlyFans doing a total 180 scrapping plans to ban sexually explicit material. It received plenty of pushback from content creators and advocates who argued that the ban would only drive such work underground and thus making it more dangerous.

[Amelia Tait]

And also, there's no doubt that AI is going to be a huge disruptive force in pornography globally. I went to a conference in the autumn where I saw the beginnings of incredibly sophisticated AI girlfriends and AI models who perform the commands of Internet users at the click of a button. I think probably we're still a few years off that being an existential threat for OnlyFans, but it's certainly something that the people in the industry are very much aware of and anxious about. There is a desire to say this is a social media company, that it's a business that rests on the empowerment of women, allowing women to make money from taking their clothes off in a way that is sex positive and liberating and isn't something that we should feel concerned about in a progressive society with open minded views about sex. That's one side of the argument, I suppose. But there is a conservative and also a feminist pushback to that that says actually, even if you're paying the content creators on this site, even if you're allowing them to take 80% of the revenues generated, and even if a small number of women are becoming extremely rich on the back of that work, there is still an argument that this perhaps isn't the greatest business to be involved with, that it is exploitative towards women, that it's grooming an entire generation of women to believe that self objectification is an easy way to make a lot of money. And I think there's a lot of queasiness about the business model. So although we see a lot of kind of very successful women talking about how much money they've made on the site, there's another story that talks to a long tale of people who have gone on the site and performed explicit acts and perhaps haven't made very much money. So not everybody thinks that this is an incredible tech business that they will want to invest in.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And we didn't even get to the biggest threat to OnlyFans of all, a trend among young men to quit porn altogether. We're gonna get to that when we're back on Today Explained. Support for the show today comes from Acorns.

[Noel King]

Aw.

[Sean Rameswaram]

The money you make today can affect your future so it helps to make a plan. Acorns wants to help you do the most with what you have now so you can plan for the future you want. Acorns say they're the smart way to give your money a chance to grow. They say you can sign up in minutes and start investing even if all you're starting with is spare change. You can sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus investment you can join the over 14 million all time customers who have already saved and invest over $27 billion with Acorns. Okay, you can head to acorns.comexplained or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote and Acorns Tier 2 compensation provided potential subject to various factors such as customers accounts age and investment settings does not include acorns fees Slash Results do not predict or represent the performance of any ACORNS portfolio. Investment results will vary. Investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor View important [e-mail] explained. Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude do you know Claude? There's a reason you listen to this show. You want to actually understand what's going on, not just hear a headline. Thanks for listening. Anthropic's Claude works the same way. It doesn't flatten a complex topic into one neat take. It helps you think through the nuance challenges where your logic is thin and follows the threads most tools skip past. Deep research pulls from dozens of sources, surfaces contradictions, and gives you a full breakdown you can actually trace. And it can help you get your work done. Cowork lets you point Claude at folders on your computer, notes, research documents, and it just starts working through them. Thanks, Claude. Anthropic was founded by scientists, FYI, who said they wanted AI that expands human thinking. FYI, you can see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner and try Claude free@ Claude AI todayexplains. Noel, we haven't practiced this, but if I asked you right now, in this moment, let's say, what is it? You know, spring 2026 why is it important to support journalism right now?

[Noel King]

Well, Sean, the world is a little overwhelming at this moment. There is a lot going on. It can be a little scary. It's also kind of beautiful and it's worth explaining.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Yeah, I would argue in addition to that, there's a lot of trash information out there. Like people even want to rely on AI. But AI isn't being fact checked. It's just pulling from a bunch of places. And sometimes you've seen it giving you the wrong information. We fact check our show. You hear at the end of the show every day who fact checks the show. We put a lot of effort into making sure that we are bringing you the most accurate information possible and you can support that effort.

[Noel King]

That's right. If you believe in the journalism that

[Amelia Tait]

we do as much as we do,

[Noel King]

you can become a Vox member. Vox.com members 30% off.

[Amelia Tait]

Can you believe it?

[Sean Rameswaram]

Let's go.

[Noel King]

Your first year.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Sign up now. Thank you. Today explained Sean Ramis for I'm here with Rebecca Jennings, who's a features writer at New York Magazine. Rebecca, we just heard about some potential threats to OnlyFans their future. But you recently wrote Maybe about the biggest threat of all.

[Noel King]

People quitting porn.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Yeah, people quitting porn. This is a whole thing.

[Noel King]

This is a whole thing. Especially a whole thing on like the manosphere Internet. I think we've all seen the Louis Theroux documentary. If you've been even a little bit online.

[Sean Rameswaram]

I teach guys to be proper guys, not these little Sawyer boys gimps that walk around in the modern day. I was entering the manosphere, a wild

[Amelia Tait]

frontier of streamers whose behavior is reshaping the culture.

[Noel King]

You've seen people talking about what's going on with young guys these days, and what's going on is that they're really, really, really into self improvement.

[Sean Rameswaram]

When you do hard things, you then are fortified and reinforced for the inevitable hardship that life is. Because all of life is hardship. With brief moments of bliss, my friend. Sometimes I have a tough time feeling proud of myself.

[Noel King]

Do you know what that you know? And I think I've had other people

[Sean Rameswaram]

call in our, our show that have talked about that.

[Noel King]

And so part of that is by cutting out things that they believe are bad for them, porn being one of them. And so you see a lot of these guys in this manosphere from, you know, the, the really like toxic red pill guys from like Andrew Tate.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And pornography as a whole is simply just, I think, of a tool which is used to ensure that the male populace stays as docile as possible to

[Noel King]

the more centrist, science based thought leaders like Andrew Huberman and Scott Galloway, who are telling men that you are wasting your life by, you know, cooning to porn.

[Sean Rameswaram]

If your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over

[Noel King]

to the ability to get aroused when

[Sean Rameswaram]

you're one on one with somebody else. I remember somebody referencing many years ago when I was first getting in the field, that porn addiction at the time, it was having the same impact on the brain in young men as crack cocaine.

[Noel King]

And it's harming your brain and preventing you from going out, finding a girlfriend or a wife and just being the best you you can be.

[Sean Rameswaram]

This is how I went from broke to rich in three months. The first step is quitting porn. Put Goon here because that's what people like to say now. And the framing of your piece about this is not really necessarily Andrew Tate or Manosphere. It's actually the fact that now there's an app for that, right?

[Noel King]

There's a few apps for that, but the one I focused on is called Quitter.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Quitter without the E. Quitter without the

[Noel King]

E. Of course A vintage app speak like Grindr or Tumblr. This is Quitter and it's founded by two guys. One a 20 year old British kid named Alex Slater and the other 22 year old American named Connor McLaren. Both of them grew up very steeped in sort of manosphere or Internet ideology.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Why do you start quitting just out of curiosity? I know what is it about, actually. Tell everyone what's it about. So it helps, pretty much just helps guys stop gooning. Like I feel like Andrew Tate pushed this and Hamza even pushed this self improvement movement where people wanted to be the best version of themselves.

[Noel King]

You know, they were both looking for something that they could get rich on. And they found out that like a lot of men their age are really struggling with what they believe to be porn addiction. Although maybe older people would like say, oh, you're masturbating and watching porn once a day. That's nothing to be like, you know, really ashamed about. But to these men that grew up watching these influencers, they are really, really, they really struggle with that. And in terms of like what it says about themselves or their self esteem. And so they're like, oh, we can capitalize on this. And so within like two weeks, they built this app called Quitter. And for $30 a year, it will help you supposedly quit porn for good.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Did you download the app and figure out how it worked?

[Noel King]

Oh, of course I downloaded the app. I used the app not really in the way it was intended, but I used it just to see what was going on there. And the real, the thing that gets written about mostly about this app is that there's a panic button, which if you start to feel like you want to watch porn, you click a panic button and your phone starts vibrating and it immediately turns on the front facing camera. And so you just like see a picture or a video of yourself and like the, the text will come up on the screen being like, you're better than this.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Wow.

[Noel King]

Remember why you quit?

[Sean Rameswaram]

And it's so funny that it helps you, I don't know, suppress the urge to go look at porn by showing you the least sexiest thing on earth, a picture of your own face, right?

[Noel King]

And it's sort of using shame as a way to sort of help people that are struggling with this and the other. The thing that really struck me though is so much of it is about like writing down your feelings and interacting with community members. There's all these different, like group chats you can be in and they're starting startlingly earnest and a Bit like sad.

[Sean Rameswaram]

I'm 25. I have a crippling porn addiction. I've spent probably $20,000 on pornography. I have no sex lives because I have erectile dysfunction whenever I try to get with a girl.

[Noel King]

These young men that really have no self esteem and feel like they don't have control of their lives, you know

[Sean Rameswaram]

what it's like to finish jerking off and have that shame all over your body. Even if you go wipe it off, if you put it in a sock, if you wash your hands afterwards, or in the towel when you go back and have dinner with your family, when your mom says that the food's ready, you feel the guilt and the shame on you.

[Noel King]

And I was just really startled by that and a little bit moved by that. And then, you know, you hear all. You watch some of these manosphere guys who are just like ripping into them all the time, and it's like, God damn, no wonder you're feeling like such crap about yourselves.

[Sean Rameswaram]

This app, is it popular? You mentioned there are others.

[Noel King]

Yeah, there's. So when they started, they said there was only like, you know, one or two on the market, but after the success of Quitter, it's really exploded. Like when you search on the app store for a porn quitting app, there's like a dozen that come up now. And like addiction quitting apps in general are now really popular thanks to like vibe coding and stuff. You know, like on passive income subreddits, people are sharing ways that like, they made all this free money basically by making an app with Claude code or something and then putting it on the app store and then just like watching the money roll in. So this is now like a pretty popular way of these type of guys to make money.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Okay, but this makes me want to ask, are these guys you mention, these young guys, one Brit, one American who started this app, are they doing it to make money or are they doing it to help out their fellow young men who are, you know, falling down these rabbit holes of sex work, pornography, whatever it might be.

[Noel King]

I think the answer is very clearly to make money. But they also know that there is money to be made in helping people. So I think, you know, these guys are flashy, you know, like they want to drive fancy cars.

[Sean Rameswaram]

This is a pretty surreal environment that

[Amelia Tait]

I've found myself in.

[Sean Rameswaram]

10 million dollar Miami house living with all my boys.

[Amelia Tait]

We have Lambos, Ferraris, GE, 3 RSS.

[Noel King]

They want to have DJ careers and be YouTube influencers. Like, they're very interested in living the sort of influencer entrepreneur lifestyle that has been popularized by the manosphere and by people like Logan Paul. Even like one of them told me, they're like, I want to be the next Logan Paul. They're like, well, we want to be Andrew Tate, but like with, you know, less toxic. It's like they're very clearly modeling their care off of these guys. And so yeah, it's like, I think it's to make money, but also they know that there's a lot of money to be made in the self improvement space. So I think like the way they say it, it's like they want to create like even more apps or more like ebooks and more courses to help men, you know, improve.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And we talked recently about this character, James Fishback, who's probably a long shot gubernatorial candidate in Florida, but he takes aim specifically at OnlyFans and that culture. If you are a so called OnlyFans creator in Florid, you are going to pay 50% to the state on whatever you so called earn via that online degeneracy platform. Are these guys too presenting quitter as sort of an alternative to have being like a power user on OnlyFans or is it just porn more broadly or sex work more broadly?

[Noel King]

It's Pornhub and OnlyFans together. I think like those are really the two like big bads that they're, that they believe that they're up against. Which is ironic because they're both like living in Miami where all the influence, all the OnlyFans girls live.

[Amelia Tait]

Welcome to Miami.

[Noel King]

So it's like there's sort of like two sides of a very similar coin in this, in this Miami kind of scape. But, but yes, they like on their, on Twitter's official Twitter, they have tweets where they're like, they call OnlyFans prostitution with WI fi and the clearance aisle of femininity. They say porn stars shouldn't be allowed to have kids. Also, these tweets are very clearly AI generated.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Porn stars shouldn't be able to have kids, guys.

[Noel King]

I mean, yeah, it's like rage bait. And a lot of that, I would argue comes from a lot of young men who've seen many of their female peers on the Internet have huge successes and get rich off OnlyFans and they really resent that. And I think that's where a lot of the contempt for OnlyFans comes from, is this idea of like these women are outpacing you. It's the same argument that we're having about like women's test scores going up or women in more like, scientific fields, it's like these women are getting rich on the Internet because of guys like you. Therefore, like, in order to sort of beat them, you have to sort of overcome that urge to want to pay their. Pay them money.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Right.

[Noel King]

It really seems to be a lot of this is based off of a resentment that young women are able to use their sexual power to get rich.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And do you think the fact that so much of this backlash in the manosphere, which of course is drawing the attention of men who don't consider themselves part of the manosphere, but it's certainly attracting impressionable young men. Do you think it means that OnlyFans itself has kind of maybe peaked and is now having some of, like a more of a waning influence on, say, impressionable young men?

[Noel King]

I mean, OnlyFans is in a completely different place than it was in the pandemic. It's been around for 10 years. But the reason OnlyFans has succeeded is because people trusted enough to put their credit cards in it and because the banks, for now, are allowing their payment providers to be used on OnlyFans. And if that goes away, which it has threatened to do in the past, the whole thing crumbles. And so it basically depends on where we're at as a culture in terms of how people feel about porn and sex work and sex online. And if that is changing as a result of these manosphere influencers, then that could really change what OnlyFans is or how we talk about this stuff.

[Sean Rameswaram]

And where we are at as a culture on all this stuff continues to feel sort of divided.

[Noel King]

Fine, yeah, like everything. There really is no monoculture anymore. And so instead you have all of these very fractured communities that all want different things that have no. I have almost no bearing to each other because they exist in completely different planes on the Internet. And these guys are one of them.

[Sean Rameswaram]

Read rebecca [e-mail] thank you so much to Kat Tenbarge for helping us with the show today. It was produced by Dustin De Soto, edited by Aminah Al Saadi, fact checked by Andrea Lopez Crusado and mixed by Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore. Today Explained is distributed by wnyc. The show is a part of the Vox Media podcast network. You can find more [e-mail] and you can listen to this one ad [e-mail] members. The rest of us on the team are Noel King, Miranda Kennedy, Jolie Meyers, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wesinger, Ariana Spuru, Hadi Mwagdi, Miles, Bryan Peter Balinon Rosen and Navishai Artsy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and we want to welcome Gabriel Donatov to the show. Great to have you at today, explained. Sam.