Who Uses OnlyFans Anyway?
Who uses OnlyFans? Sex workers, like many others, were negatively impacted when the pandemic shutdowns occurred. Because OnlyFans allowed them to create a socially distant income stream, the site exploded in popularity.
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The subscription based site marketed for all types of content quickly became a hotbed for sexual and explicit content and bespoke pornography.
At present, the site has more than 100 million users and has paid over $3 billion to the content creators. OnlyFans had a 75% increase in new users between March and April of 2020. In other words, the pandemic shutdown directly corresponds to the rise of OnlyFans.
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Who uses OnlyFans: A Hundred Million Users
Researchers saw OnlyFans as a new avenue to research human sexuality. And, specifically, to study the sexual attitudes of people who use OnlyFans vs those who do not.
Dr. Stacey Litman and colleagues did just that and recently published a study with their findings.
The study included 718 adults who completed an online survey. The average age of participants was 29 years old and about equal numbers of male and female. Some were college students and some were individuals who found the survey on the MTurk site.
Participants were predominantly white.
In addition to their demographics, the participants also completed the Brief Sexual Attitudes Scale. The scale looks at attitudes about sex related to permissiveness, birth control, communion (communication and connection) and instrumentality (the purpose or function of sex).
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What did the study find?
OnlyFans users were mostly married (89.5%), white (68.9%) men (63.1%) who identified as either heterosexual (59%) or bisexual/pansexual (37.8%).
The researchers then compared the Brief Sexual Attitudes Survey results between OnlyFans users and non-users.
No significant differences between the two groups was found. Meaning, OnlyFans users shared sexual attitudes with non-users.
This is one of the first known studies about OnlyFans users, therefore the results are preliminary.
However, based on this sample, OnlyFans use versus non-use cannot be explained by sexual attitudes. In other words, people who use OnlyFans are not more permissive in their ideas about sex than people who don’t use the site.
Because of the traffic that the site receives, we know that something is driving people to go there. That motivating factor is yet to be determined.
Reference: Litam, S. D. A., Speciale, M. & Balkin, R.S. (2022). Sexual Attitudes and Characteristics of OnlyFans Users. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51, 3093-3103
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