Iggy Azalea dangles a cherry over her tongue. She rolls across a bed in a motel room bathed in sex-dungeon lighting. A vintage camcorder captures her every move. “Surprise!” the Australian rapper declares, as she announces a collaboration with adults-only subscription site, OnlyFans. “I’m dropping a mixed media project called Hotter Than Hell!” Azalea, best known for hits including “Fancy” and “Change Your Life”, promises photographs, videos, merch and “hot as hell things”. She leans further into the optics of joining OnlyFans, a platform best known for its use by sex workers, by teasing “scandalous s***” in the works: “My art slut era has arrived.”
OnlyFans is a self-described “subscription social network” where users pay a direct fee to performers, influencers and “creators” to get access to videos and photos. Launched by British entrepreneur Tim Stokely in 2016 with the intention of promoting content made by all types of people – fitness instructors, artists or musicians – it quickly became synonymous with sex work. This was, after all, a rare digital platform in which adult entertainers could sell, share and produce explicit content on their own terms, and pocket the majority of the profits; OnlyFans itself takes just 20 per cent. By 2019, The New York Times had dubbed the platform the “paywall of porn” and, thanks to its loose content policy, the name OnlyFans rapidly became shorthand for homemade adult material.
