Article for the times about OF
It’s a Monday morning, I’m 24 years old and wandering around a Ralph Lauren store in Sloane Square, central London. And unlike most people my age, I can pick out anything I want because I just made £23,000 in my first month on OnlyFans. If you’re assuming that my career as a sex worker stems from an underprivileged childhood or a lack of education, you’d be very wrong. I went to a private boarding school in Hertfordshire, which I left with three decent A-levels. Needless to say, it wasn’t a school in the business of turning out glamour models.
In fact, it wasn’t long ago that I was a journalist building a
TikTok audience for a major news organisation. But now the sound of my heels clicking across the floor of a New York newsroom has been replaced by the snap of my bra strap against my skin, that whole life gone in a single iPhone flash. So how and why did I pack it all in to become a porn star?
I’ve always had a knack for making content. Compared with other pupils at my school, I wasn’t particularly academic. I was only interested in making videos, and would skateboard through the courtyard with a GoPro attached to my head during GCSE revision periods. It was not surprising, then, that I wasn’t interested in further education, but I felt the pressure to make the eye-watering fees my dad had paid worth it, so I accepted an offer from Loughborough University to study art. It was there that I discovered I have ADHD; I found it all so hard and overwhelming and, after a year of extreme stress and feeling like a massive failure, I dropped out.
I came home directionless, broke and, in my father’s eyes, ungrateful. To him the inner workings of my brain represented laziness and a lack of ambition. I was trying my absolute best, but the education system just didn’t seem to work for me. Then, when I was 19, Covid hit and, like everyone else my age, I took to TikTok.
My posts would occasionally get 400 views, nothing special, but one day I got 10,000 views after I posted my impression of a British secondary school teacher. I was elated, so I made a few more: 15,000, 20,000. I couldn’t believe it. I saw this as my chance to make a living out of doing something I love and started treating it like a full-time job. I hit 100,000 followers in three months; before I knew it, I was at 500,000 and being asked to make ads for huge brands like the BBC, Disney, Amazon Prime and Royal Ascot. I signed with a talent agency when I was 20, at which point I was earning £3,000 in an average month and £6,000 in a good one. I’d done it: I was TikTok famous.
It was then that I was offered a job as a video producer at a newspaper. They’d seen my editing skills on TikTok and wanted me to help build theirs for a global audience, which felt like such an exciting step towards a more dependable career. My homegrown video skills, plus the silver polish from my boarding school, landed me perfectly in this role. I was quickly promoted and sent to America to run operations from there. I absolutely loved it and was so proud of myself.
However — and this is where the story sours — a couple of years in, a new boss was hired and that changed everything. To me he was a bully (that’s an understatement) and in the end I felt I had no choice but to leave. It was devastating: a dream job lost. I had, however, built up contacts and experience and felt confident that I could find another job.
I had no idea what was ahead.
I moved back from America, but my parents had been through an expensive divorce and I was well past being on their payroll. They wanted to help but they couldn’t, and it wasn’t an option to live with either of them. I had no safety net, and six months later I was still jobless and painfully broke. The move back to the UK had financially crippled me (it cost me £6,000 to break the lease on my apartment, buy flights home, ship all my belongings and pay my final US taxes). My credit cards were maxed out.
I also wanted so badly to work in journalism again. I had signed up to a course to try to get another qualification, which made me even more desperate for money. I started skipping meals to afford the train to college, and after eight hours of lessons I would head to my pub job until 2am. The fall from grace had crushed me. I was exhausted, and the financial stress had started to control me. I began drinking heavily — free drinks from the pub — to numb my anxiety and cope with the pressure.
My mental health was declining fast. I was about to hit the bottom, then one morning I woke up to a letter through my front door: a final warning from American Express.
I needed cash, quickly. My original TikTok account had been trolled and shut down since I took up a corporate job and I never appealed to have it reinstated. I would have to start from scratch, and this was the best I could do.
I logged on to OnlyFans. I still had 45,000 followers on Instagram and knew that would be a good place to promote it. But I also knew it would affect my work. I was worried about what my old colleagues would think, how quickly this would spread around the newsroom, and that I was always going to be “that girl who did OnlyFans”.
But I was desperate. I swallowed my shame and embarrassment, knowing that everyone in my life would see, and posted an Instagram story of myself in a low-cut top with a link to my OnlyFans page.
I felt like I’d locked myself naked into a one-way glass box in Times Square. That post flew: it had 20,000 views and 500 shares. But the weirdest thing? Not a single person messaged me. I felt not just physically naked, but emotionally. I had never even sent a nude before.
I walked back into my journalism class after that debut weekend and I knew everyone was watching. It was like I had bad body odour but no one was brave enough to tell me. Everyone came close enough to smell it and to verify the rumour but would dart away and watch from the periphery. From then on it was clear that nobody wanted to be my friend, a dynamic I quickly became used to — particularly since I had earned $2,000 (£1,500) on my first day posting and $2,500 the next. I had paid off my tuition fees in two days.
I’ve always been confident about how I look and I even enjoyed the fantasy of selling my body in a sensual way. I would create the content in my bedroom, in a dark ground-floor flat-share in Battersea that had recently been re-wallpapered to cover the black mould. There was a bed, some velvet green curtains and a dresser, and I’d shoot my content in a gold ornate floor-length mirror.
I recognised usernames of subscribers from my early TikTok days, patrons who had followed me for years online and were now around to see me take my kit off. Some subscribers paid my paywall fee of $7.99 and didn’t say a word; others messaged me every single day like a lover.
I started off posing in my underwear, in increasingly suggestive positions. I attracted a lot of older men and several requests were beyond my imagination — semen-eating, urine-drinking — but many of them just wanted someone at the end of the phone. Often the service I was providing wasn’t sexual gratification but comfort.
I think I found OnlyFans easier because of my sexuality. I’m queer and am generally only attracted to women. Male lust feels completely non-sexual to me and very easy to work with. My view of myself was unaffected by their praise or criticism.
On OnlyFans you can earn via subscriptions, tips and through messaging. Fans can treat you when they like a particular piece of content. Through messaging you can send personalised content (usually more explicit) behind a paywall that your fan has to pay to unlock.
My first extreme video earned me £7,600 in two hours
Soon I started to attract the “whales”, an industry term for subscribers who shell out vast amounts of cash and sometimes make up the majority of your income. I had “John”, who would regularly send me thousands of dollars in tips just to say good morning to me. My most lucrative way to earn was by focusing heavily on my biggest spenders. John spent £80,000 on me in a year.
At times it felt immoral soliciting this kind of money from strangers. In a way, I cared about them — after all, they were the only people being really kind to me through all this.
Slowly, underwear pictures became topless, which then became nude videos with sex toys. The red lines I’d drawn for myself were being pushed past with every increase in pay. What could I do next to earn more? What started as monthly £300 Ann Summers hauls quickly became weekly £2,000 Honey Birdette splashes. I was paying for holidays for my parents, dinners for friends and, because I felt sheepish about how much I was raking in, pretending to extended family members that I was borrowing items of expensive clothing. I remember the day I filmed my first masturbation video: it earned me $10,000 (£7,600) in two hours. A line I promised I would never cross, no matter the desperation, but I was blinded by the feeling that I had already failed. So why not? It bumped me into the top 0.5 per cent of earners on the platform.
I learnt about all different kinds of kinks through personal video requests: jerk-off instructions, slave play and dominatrix videos were popular. More left-field requests, such as drowning play, fluid-eating and belly button fetish work, were politely declined. I rarely felt threatened or intimidated by anyone but was canny enough to know that some requests could land my images somewhere on the dark web.
I had also taken extreme precautions to prevent stalkers, which I had been warned about. I used a double-encrypted VPN, only posted on social media once I’d left a location, and friends weren’t allowed to take photos inside my house that showed the windows in case someone could identify the street.
As my audience grew, so did my commitment. I launched new social media pages on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and X and would post about five times a day on each. I hired a social media manager and a personal assistant to help me send out such a sheer volume of content — after all, my expertise is growing a brand online. On Instagram I made rage-bait content about my earnings — performative, crass content showcasing wealth in a way that angers people so that they engage with the content and boost it. It rocketed my exposure. I put behind-the-scenes videos on TikTok that garnered a huge response from other girls interested in giving it a try.
Eventually, I signed with an agency, as most popular creators do. But this was a mistake: they not only take a cut of your earnings but they cut corners too. In a desperate bid to sell my content, they once claimed that sex acts had put me in hospital. I broke my contract with them and that incident coincided with a general feeling that it was time to stop. I started to feel hollow and like my self-worth was plummeting again. It had been a way to pull myself out of financial difficulty, but it had quickly become my whole life.
I often get asked what my family thinks. My mother was exceptionally supportive and said if she could’ve done the same thing at my age she would have; my father said he was upset it had come to this, and he didn’t need to elaborate.
In the end, I earned £250,000 in a little more than a year. Not only did it pay off all my debts, but most of it is invested and will continue to earn me money. It bought me breathing room to work out how to move forward. It also pushed me further than I fathomed I could go, and I learnt that desperation has a way of renegotiating your principles. What surprised me most wasn’t the money or even the nudity but the loneliness — both mine and that of the men who were searching for something too.
I always wanted to be a woman who works for herself and owns nice things, which I finally was, but was it worth it? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel sadness for the lengths it took to get here and what I lost along the way. I feel like I sacrificed my reputation, my dignity, my friends.
I had been 22 years old and working in a New York office with big dreams. By the time I was 25 I was being berated online for being a slut. But this experience has taught me resilience and emotional stamina and, although it’s rooted in a controversial corner of the internet, I think it can open doors for me in ways that I couldn’t see before. I wouldn’t say OnlyFans is inherently good or bad. It’s complicated. For me, it was a choice that saved my life.