I wish I could do OnlyFans, too

In one of the latest episodes of Euphoria season 3, Cassie stares down at her body in confusion as it balloons to monstrous proportions, a metaphor for her feverish, grotesque rise to fame on OnlyFans. The show, already criticized for its gratuitous nudity and female objectification, turns her body, again, into spectacle. Towering over skyscrapers in a leopard-print thong, she becomes a blonde Godzilla, her careless flick of a ponytail sending a helicopter crashing from the sky.

The scene seems to borrow from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but also reflects something darker about the internet’s tendency to transform women into fetishized objects and threats. Cassie has always desperately craved love and validation from men, having grown up in a fractured household with an absent father and an overwhelmed, fawning mother. Here, her gigantic body seems to mirror an ego inflated by male attention, a false confidence mistaken for empowerment.

Yet while men desire her, they also fear and resent her. Her enormous body becomes a metaphor for the patriarchy’s discomfort with women who recognize and monetize their own sexuality. She becomes uncontrollable and, therefore, must be destroyed. Sydney Sweeney herself has translated her stunning body into colossal fame, but we have seen this story before. Sex symbols often get punished for capitalizing on their desirability. Pamela Anderson and Marilyn Monroe, two of the most famous sex symbols of their generations, were both devoured and spit out by the mainstream media machinery. Monroe famously did not survive it.

OnlyFans is now fully mainstream. This spring, it is a major storyline on HBO’s Euphoria and the premise of Apple TV’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles. It is not only trending on television. It is trending in real life.

Last week, former American Pie star Shannon Elizabeth, 52, reportedly earned more than $1.2 million in her first week on OnlyFans.

She is not alone. A growing number of Gen X and early-2000s sex symbols are joining the platform, including Denise Richards, Carmen Electra, Jamie Pressly, and Drea de Matteo. Many frame the move the same way: after decades in Hollywood, with declining opportunities due to their age, they are tired of other people controlling their image, careers, and earning power.

It is impossible to ignore OnlyFans’ earning potential. Sophie Rain, one of the platform’s highest-profile creators, claimed to have made a life-changing $100 million over three years, an almost unimaginable windfall, without even posting nudes

I understand the appeal better than most.

Before I became an author, I was an early-2000s Asian American sex symbol in the import modeling scene. The internet was in its infancy then, but the subscription model was already crystallizing. In 1995, model Danni Ashe taught herself HTML and launched Danni’s Hard Drive, charging a monthly membership fee for nude photos and eventually building it into a multimillion-dollar online empire.

My old website landing page - KailaYu.com

A few years later, I launched my own subscription-based website, where I sold Playboy-style nude sets, videos, behind-the-scenes photos, and hosted weekly chats with fans. I was 21 years old and making the equivalent of five figures a month. The money was instant. But even more than that, I was desperate for male validation, like Euphoria’s Cassie. The attention was even more intoxicating than the income, and it came at a cost.

I have written extensively about how self-objectification and fetishization eroded already fragile self-esteem and contributed to years of addiction and self-destruction. What felt like empowerment at the time was, for me, something much more complicated.

Years after I was assaulted by a pornographer at 19, I argued that the legal age to perform in hardcore pornography should be raised from 18 to 21. I was especially concerned that many of the pornographers I knew of were middle-aged men or older, men who had mastered techniques for manipulating teenage girls barely out of childhood.

At the time, I interviewed neurocognitive scientist and ethicist James Giordano, a professor of neurology at Georgetown University Medical Center, who told me, “There’s been plenty of evidence to debunk the idea that the brain is not mature when an individual is in their later teens, but at that age, the brain circuits still need to be reinforced.”

Those circuits drive teenagers to seek new experiences, he explained, but their ability to compare them with prior ones is limited because they have so little life experience. What they also often do not understand is the power of negation, that they can say no.

Young women also do not always have the emotional maturity to understand the life repercussions of the internet, where sexualized content will follow women indefinitely on search results. The internet is forever.

Sydney Sweeney as Cassie in Euphoria and Sophie Rain

But then OnlyFans exploded into the mainstream, changing the conversation almost overnight. Suddenly, women no longer had to work with middle-aged, predatory pornographers. They could create their own content from the comfort of their homes. For a while, I wondered whether the law I had once wanted was no longer as urgent.

I could certainly relate to the desire to capitalize on an opportunity. Back in the early 2000s, when I was coming of age, my biggest dream was to become a Playboy model. I write in my memoir FETISHIZED: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty.

“I, along with many women in my generation, worshipped at the altar of Playboy, even as post-feminists. Playboy Enterprises was the kingpin of early aughts ‘raunch culture’ (a phrase coined by Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs), with the hit television show The Girls Next Door teaching young women to aspire to be sugar baby wives for a septuagenarian misogynist. Playboy could catapult a woman to mainstream success. After all, Baywatch, the biggest show on television with more than 1.1 billion viewers in 142 countries at its peak in 1996, featured a bevy of bouncing Playmates throughout its run, including Pamela Anderson, Donna D’Errico, Erika Eleniak, and Carmen Electra.

At the end of the twentieth century, porn culture had become mainstream. We thought we were relishing in the fruits of sexual freedom and fully controlling our bodies and narratives. Between the Girls Gone Wild commercials, which became inescapable on late-night television, and Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, popular men’s magazines featuring scores of scantily clad women, it was a considerable coup to appear on the pages of these magazines. Young women thought themselves powerful. During this period, models and pop stars normalized and celebrated the shedding of clothing.

We, along with my fellow pinups and Playboy models, were in a collective hypnotic state, not realizing that the gorgeously ripe, shiny red apple of sexual freedom we were relishing was filled with worms; we were purging ourselves of feminist achievements and sending ourselves backward.”

That’s why watching the OnlyFans boom among older celebrities leaves me conflicted.

I’m a feminist, which means I believe women have the right to make their own choices with their own bodies. I do not want to judge any woman who genuinely feels empowered by OnlyFans. I can only speak from my own experience: capitalizing on my sexuality did not empower me. It nearly destroyed me.

Part of me feels relieved. In a culture that has long treated women over 40 as invisible, these women are proving there is still a massive demand for them. Hollywood has spent decades teaching all of us that women age out of desirability. The success of older stars on OnlyFans suggests otherwise. There is something genuinely radical about that.

But another part of me wonders whether this is empowerment, or simply a more lucrative version of the same broken system.

I’m more inclined to believe a 55-year-old woman when she says she feels empowered by reclaiming her image than a 21-year-old who may not yet understand the long-term psychological cost of commodifying herself. Age can bring nuance, perspective, and a greater ability to weigh the true cost of our decisions.

And yet, I find myself more aligned with Pamela Anderson, whose recent renaissance has come not from leaning further into sexuality, but from stepping completely away from it. But Pamela was also uniquely brutalized by the media, and not everyone gets the chance to reinvent herself that way.

The truth is, the line between objectification and empowerment is thin. And if I’m being honest, there is still a part of me that sees the money these women are making and feels a flicker of envy.

I wish I could do OnlyFans, too.

I just know what it costs.