Onlyfans

Consider the tradthot

In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.  Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.

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Republican mass debate hysteria

Justice Louis D. Brandeis advocated for “more speech” as the best remedy for falsehood. But how much speech is too much speech? The Republican Party is pushing the upper limits, scheduling even more primary debates in the new year — even without President Trump. CNN is hosting two of them: one on January 10 at Drake University in Iowa and a second on January 21 at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. Between the two, ABC News and WMUR-TV will host one in coordination with the New Hampshire Republican State Committee on January 18... also at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. The ABC debate is “subject to RNC guidelines,” rather than being RNC sanctioned. Why?

Biden’s economic blame game

President Joe Biden presided over an event at the White House on Monday in which he announced the creation of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience and promised actions to “strengthen supply chains, lower costs for families and help Americans get the goods they need.” This news might bring a sigh of relief to many — finally, the Biden administration is taking inflation seriously! But the White House first led with a “Bidenomics” victory lap that felt more like a slap in the face than a swelling pocketbook. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg gave opening remarks in which he chastised the media for “saying that Christmas was going to be canceled” due to supply chain disruptions in the winter of 2021.

Who does George Santos subscribe to on OnlyFans?

Ever since the House Ethics Committee released its damning report on George Santos yesterday, the chatter has been non-stop. Yes, it appears the flamboyant fabulist used campaign funds to subscribe to sex workers on OnlyFans — but whose content is Santos paying for?  Two early claimants have emerged on Twitter/X. First, from plus-size porn star Leila Lewis. “THIS GUY WAS SUBBED TO ME HAHAHAHA,” she tweeted, following up with “i rated his dick 😭😭😭.” An unenviable prospect.  The other comes from Twitch streamer Soogz1, who boasts 2.3 million Twitter/followers. “my top spender 🥹🫶,” she wrote yesterday, along with a screenshot purporting to show that a user called George Santos had spent $435,621.13 on her content — $340,752.

George Santos spent campaign money on OnlyFans, Botox, makeup and Hermès

The House Ethics Committee released its long-awaited investigative report into New York representative George Santos on Thursday. The document puts forward "substantial evidence,” showing that the congressman engaged in a “complex web” of criminal activity, knowingly breaking campaign finance laws. The committee, under the leadership of Chairman Michael Guest, has voted unanimously to adopt the report. In effect, the “substantial evidence of potential violations of federal criminal law” had been sent to the Department of Justice, which will determine what the next steps in the Santos case look like.

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The joy of French motorways

From our UK edition

The news that Heineken, the Dutch brewer, has sold its business in Russia to a local buyer for a token $1 – at a loss of €300 million, but with job guarantees for 1,800 Russian workers – raises moral issues about when and how multinationals should withdraw from pariah states. A database compiled by Yale professor and corporate responsibility campaigner Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, tracking 1,586 foreign operators in Russia since the invasion of Ukraine, counts 534 as having made a clean exit versus 219 (including BT and some smaller UK-listed companies, alongside a plethora of Chinese names) ‘digging in’ for business as usual.

Welcome to the weird world of transfishing

A woman behind a popular Instagram meme account, @manicpixie.transgirl, with 34,900 followers, this week admitted that she had been “transfishing.” In other words: she was a cis woman who had been lying the whole time about being trans. Welcome to the other side of the coin of the very similar, controversial “transtrending”: when people pretend to be transgender without altering their appearance. For example, a gender-conforming man who claims he is a transgender woman for attention or pity may be a “transtrender,” where a natal woman who purposefully dresses or speaks in a particular way and claims she is trans is a “transfisher.

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RIP Twitter. Meet Threads

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg formally challenged each other to a cage fight on June 21. Out with free-market capitalism, in with post-liberal tech feudalism, and accompanying duels! However entertaining, this whole debacle was spectacularly stupid, for two core reasons. The first is that the jiu-jitsu trained Zuck would clearly obliterate the rather portly, older Musk. The second is that this came as a response to a Twitter post on their real fight, with $44 billion on the line, between Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s clone competitor of it, Threads, which launched last night. It had 2 million users within two hours; 10 million with seven hours; and this is without any mainland Europeans, as the EU continues to be led by the moronic.

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Livvy Dunne and the era of the hot, rich female college athlete

Livvy Dunne is in a “cute lil jammy set Santa got me” when she answers questions from some of her 3.7 million adoring Instagram fans. You’ve probably never heard of her unless you spend a lot of time on TikTok. But twenty-year-old Olivia Paige Dunne is now the highest-valued women's college athlete, with an estimated net worth of $3.3 million. And fair play to her: at twenty years old, I was working for minimum wage as a waitress. I know very little about college sports or gymnasts such as Livvy, but nowadays having 7.1 million TikTok followers, as she does, means something. If she were to never partake in another event, she could still bring in a monthly salary far higher than most. https://www.tiktok.

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Why is anyone still defending OnlyFans?

From our UK edition

Starting in October, OnlyFans, which has 130 million users, two million contributors and billions in revenue will ban its creators from posting pornographic material on its site, which many sex workers use to sell explicit content. Nude photos and videos will still be permitted provided they are consistent with OnlyFans’ policy, the company has announced. As soon as the announcement was made, the narrative quickly focused on how unfair and discriminatory this move was, with many saying that the victims of the ban would be ‘sex workers’. The BBC suggested the porn ban would be a ‘“kick in the teeth” for creators’.

Why is OnlyFans really banning porn?

You’ve probably heard by now that effective October 1, 2021, OnlyFans will be banning sexually explicit content on its site that is all but exclusively known for hosting sexually explicitly content. OnlyFans has done what every start-up aspires to, at least in one sense. Both consumers and creators of content on OnlyFans have transcended mere ‘user profile’-status and have penetrated the mainstream, becoming infinitely stereotyped, talked about and joked about archetypes. When someone quips that a woman ‘probably has an OnlyFans’, it doesn’t matter if she actually has one or not. That kind of signifier means something. OnlyFans has left a real mark on Western culture; something that few tech companies are able to achieve.

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The Brave New World of ‘sex-positive’ education 

The first time I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I was thrown by the references to children as young as seven engaging in ‘erotic play’. Even in a work of dystopian fiction, I thought, that seemed a little much. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Because now it’s starting to happen in the real new world we live in. Last week, the Daily Wire reported that second graders at a Wisconsin public school have access to an online educational database that contains sexually explicit material. How explicit? One book accessible through the database contains ‘in-depth analysis of anal sex, oral sex, one-night stands’, as well as the use of dildos. Another teaches kids how to use Grindr and other ‘sex apps’.

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‘The internet raised me’: the strange world of online star Belle Delphine

From our UK edition

Belle Delphine lives in a mock Tudor house in a gated community in Hove. It’s necrotic, and soothing. You could be anywhere, and this is apt. Belle lives on the internet, where she entertains her subscribers, who pay $35 a month through the website OnlyFans. She is 21, and she grew up on the internet. ‘It raised me,’ she says. I watch one of her films before we meet. It shows her dressed as a Disney princess in a long pink wig and small clothes. She attacks herself with paint and rides a fluffy unicorn while shouting. Is the unicorn the internet? Is she the unicorn? I hate the film — the childishness makes me uncomfortable — but it isn’t for me. I make my husband watch it and demand he describes his emotional response. He makes a strangled noise.

ICEbae joins OnlyFans

Lock me up! If you hate illegal immigration and love thirst traps, Cockburn has wonderful news for you.Kiara ‘ICEbae’ Cervantes, a Customs and Border Protection Officer who went viral last year when pictured at the border with Vice President Mike Pence, has made an OnlyFans account.For a monthly payment of $30, fans of the stunning border officer will have access to her personalized NSFW content. 'Ask and you shall receive 😜,' her bio reads. 'Excited to get personal and closer to my amazing and loving fans! 2020 has been rough, but hopefully I can be your reason to smile and push through these difficult times! ☺️'‘I think I'm coming down with a case of undocumentation!’ one user joked. ‘Tell AOC we breaking up and tell ICE to come get me!

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There’s nothing ’empowering’ about the sex work on OnlyFans

From our UK edition

OnlyFans.com (OF) is the latest kid on the block to be billed as a safe, consequence-free way of selling sex and home-grown porn that empowers women. The social media site is similar to Instagram, but users pay to subscribe to creators’ feeds. The top earners on OF are women whose subscribers are male. These men pay between £5 to £20 a month to view images considered too pornographic for Instagram. Subscribers can also direct message women and pay tips to get personalised videos or photos, ‘depending on his individual sexual tastes.’ OF is a huge money machine and is doing extremely well during the Covid-19 lockdown. It now has around 17.