Students Take a New Workstudy job, OnlyFans

On the nights that Lily has to clock into work, she closes the tabs full of her schoolwork and has to commute only a couple of feet from her desk to her floor-length mirror. Her uniform consists of her favorite lingerie and her only coworker is the phone in her hand. 

Lily is one of many college students who saw a high-demand for virtual sex work and turned to OnlyFans as a part-time job. 

When bars began to close because of COVID, college students flooded OnlyFans for the prospective sexual adventures they used to have. Though posting salacious images on the site is a possible goldmine right now; students face more apprehension than other creators.

Since quarantine, Onlyfans has become one of the biggest media sites to enter the world of pornography. OnlyFans serves as a platform for creators to post titillating content on their terms to subscribers. The site has gained a reputation of being different from other sexual webcamming sites because of its regulation and autonomy it gives creators. Though OnlyFans is not exclusively a pornography subscription site and caters to other genres, sex workers have flocked the site for its profitable monthly subscription model.

Serena and Lily, who have chosen to go by their stage names for privacy, are both college students who started creating content on OnlyFans because of COVID. 

Serena, a 22-year-old, started her journey in the sex work industry in 2017 as a stripper when she was an 18-year-old NYU student. When Serena was hoping to transfer to UNC-Chapel Hill in early 2020, she made a promise to God that she would stop stripping if she got admitted. 

"I did okay for a while I didn't strip, probably for a whole six months. Then my parents stopped supporting me because they were going through financial troubles, so I didn't have money to eat."

However, Serena's experience as a stripper in North Carolina was short-lived due to COVID restrictions. The men who used to frequent the clubs to spend their money on drinks and lapdances were now choosing to have socially distanced nights at home.

Serena had gone from making hundreds every night to making $20 and going home at 9 p.m. 

"For me to go into the strip club to shake my ass and show my boobs and do all that. It has to be worth it. I at least want to walk out with like 500 bucks," she said.

After receiving multiple inquiries on her Instagram from followers to make an OnlyFans, and in need of some extra cash, she decided to make her account under a pseudonym. 

Lily, a 20-year-old senior at Stony Brook University, became intrigued in making an OnlyFans after seeing its growing popularity on social media. Lily spent hours in her bedroom watching youtube videos of OnlyFans creators in similar circumstances. She wanted to find advice on how to tap into the content behemoth without a large Instagram following or promoting it on her personal social media. 

"I started with Reddit pages where I would drop my account link and a picture. I would get a few subscribers from there, and then I put it out on my public Snapchat, which was a big, big platform for me," Lily said. 

With a couple of quick Google searches, it is easy to find that Serena and Lily are not the only students with similar stories. OnlyFans themselves have written blogs on how to succeed as a creator while staying in school.

More students are turning to virtual sex work because they need the cash, says David Knox, a Sociology professor at Eastern Carolina University specializing in sexuality.

  "They eat noodles out of cans. Their parents have lost their jobs, are stressed by Covid-19 and surviving.  Sex work for females is a quick way to earn money.  I talked with a beautiful woman/stripper and asked, 'What are you doing in the business?' She replied, 'Student loans. Do you know how long it will take me to pay them off working at McDonald's?'" Knox said.

COVID has also amplified all the opportunities that OnlyFans presents. Both Serena and Lily saw a growing potential of possible subscribers. 

Serena said, "People are bored, like, what else are you gonna do except sit home and talk to some girl on the internet on your phone? The girl you've followed on Instagram for three years and fantasized about."

Lily said that with so much more information traveling through social media, it never felt like a better time to do it. “Making the account during COVID made me feel very secretive, I was always on my computer anyways, nobody needed to know.”

Serena describes her page as "all the fun happens in the DMs," meaning she posts boudoir-inspired pictures for those who pay the basic $15 monthly fee. However, she sends more intimate content to loyal subscribers via OnlyFans DMs for an extra price. 

She has cultivated 130 loyal subscribers through this approach and makes between $1000-$2000 a week. Serena said that she uses all her OnlyFans checks to pay off debts and invest in her future.

Lily has created a page she calls "provocative with no nudity" while being true to herself. In the early days of her OnlyFans, Lily never posted her face and would edit fake tattoos onto her pictures. Now, she's comfortable showing her face and even gets comments from her subscribers complimenting her smile. 

Lily charges $12 months, but by showing her authentic self, she makes $450-$500 a month, depending on how often she posts.

With the plethora of OnlyFans success stories, it is easy to see why everybody sees the appeal in creating accounts. However, the job is not just photoshoots and direct deposits. 

Serena said she wishes that social media would stop glamourizing sex work and be honest about its implications. For Serena, her journey with sex work hasn't been quick, easy money but instead has put her in situations that have led her deeper to her faith.  

"I know a lot of women in sex work who turned to faith because you need something outside of people on earth to believe in. Because in sex work, you see how truly shitty people can be," she said. 

Knox said that he believes the success stories on social media are luring students into sex work. "Students, like humans in general, are short-term thinkers.  ‘Make $500 tonight’ becomes the goal- which impacts one's self-concept and creates the habituation of fast income. One's relationships, family, etcetera are all delayed consequences." 

Serena has also had to cut people out of her life who looked at her differently for being in the sex work industry, but her biggest fear is her conservative father finding out about her account. 

"I don't think the content I post is bad, my dad would, but either way, I'm getting disowned. I might as well make it worth it." 

With such a steady income, Lily sees herself working for OnlyFans for the foreseeable future. Still, she hopes that people will also start seeing her as more than her job.

"I go to school. I had another job. I have friends. I have a boyfriend. It doesn't consume me, So I don't think that should represent who I am,” Lily said. “I am not 'the girl that does OnlyFans'. I have a name."

Serena said she wishes that women think long and hard about whether this is an industry they want to get involved in and not just a desire for quick cash. 

  "I think more people need to take a second to really think about how this is a job that's going to affect me, and it's going to be like my livelihood. Like, how is it going to affect me mentally," she said.