No one relishes English deterioration as much as the deteriorating English, and nothing gets us going more than our modern industrial impotency. “We used to make steel,” and all that. And, while there is still Rolls-Royce, it is now a commonplace online note of declinism to observe that our greatest recent corporate innovations have instead come in the fields of smoking, gambling and whoring.
There’s British American Tobacco, which is shifting from Lucky Strike to its “Vuse” vapes and “Velo” nicotine pouches. Meanwhile, as Ray Winstone might say, Bet365 is doing exactly what it says on the tin, and has made the high street bookie into a daily digital companion globally. And then there’s OnlyFans, which has changed the face of pornography, and has given us Bonnie Blue, the most famous sex worker since Theodora of Byzantium. Even the oldest profession can move fast and break things. That’s Britain in 2026: a massive, rainy Las Vegas, but with uglier people.
The main “Strip” of this massive Vegas is found, oddly enough given current events, in Manchester; apparently entire floors of those new skyscrapers have been turned into OnlyFans content studios. And that is just one thing among many I learned from OnlyFans: Inside the Machine, an assiduous and shocking BBC documentary presented by Amber Haque.
Haque’s documentary takes the form of a descent into hell. She begins in a comparatively idyllic scene, a gabled, red-bricked mansion in the suburbs of Manchester. In so far as one can periodise the genre, it looked like a pretty “classic” porno set: the girls smearing ice cream on their cleavage, the lads in a line, mooning the camera, and a grim, polo-shirted manager presiding over it all, snorting vape smoke from his nostrils. Haque meets Liam, a cheerful young model who makes $10,000 a month, and who left his job as a barber because “the world’s going to shit”.
But this isn’t a fraction of the story. Haque’s focus is on the new stratum of “OnlyFans” managers, or OFMs. This profession – or racket, or ring – comprises the men (and a very few women) who “manage” groups of OnlyFans models, handling their marketing, subscriber relations and monetisation in return for a cut of their earnings. “Harmless enough”, some might say. Others might ask, “Didn’t we used to call that pimping?”
And, like pimping, there’s a darker side to the deal. Haque speaks to models who allege the managers extracted vast commissions from their earnings, pressured them into sex acts and changed their account details to divert earnings out of their control. Some managers respond with violence when they don’t get their way.
Visiting South Wales – it’s striking how many models are based in depressed, post-industrial regions – Haque meets Rebecca, who had her windows smashed in and was strangled by masked men when she changed her password to escape the dark side of OnlyFans. When Haque asks lawyers and campaigners about these patterns, they use words like “servitude”, “human trafficking” and “modern slavery”. In the most extraordinary part of the programme, researchers allege managers are trading models, buying and selling the rights to their earnings.
Trades like this, part of an apparently vast pimping subculture, take place on platforms like the “OFM Empire” Telegram channel, which Haque calls a “corporate offshoot of the manosphere”. Get-rich-quick videos are produced by the most successful managers – how to acquire your first models, how to establish a contractual relationship – and the men trade advice for dealing with troublesome or uncooperative girls, sometimes violent in nature. Some of the men who have profited from models like this include Andrew Tate, whose camgirl network made use of OnlyFans.
“We don’t try to be everyone’s cup of tea. We’re happy to be someone’s glass of Champagne,” said the OnlyFans CEO, Keily Blair, last year. But the doc is mute about what should be done about this storm in Blair’s Champagne flute. There is talk of more regulation, while OnlyFans reassures the BBC that it has a stringent process for regulating abuse on the platform. But after such a disturbing exposé on how Britain’s most famous tech company makes money, you can’t help but wish that none of it was happening at all.
OnlyFans: Inside the Machine
BBC Three
[Further reading: The kids who want to be Kardashians]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment