Who's Fault is OnlyFans?

Part 1: Why Christians Need Better Models to Untangle the Sexual Chaos

An Eye, projected onto a concrete wall that I found in NYC

In finding synonyms for ‘animalistic’, I’ve been tempted to drift towards ‘undignified’, ‘savage’, or even ‘abhorrent’, but I have since realized that if taken literally, the best word would be ‘simplistic’. Humans have a remarkable ability to seize the most fundamental aspects of nature and jumble them with dialogue, theories, responses, disagreement, connections, on and on, until we are hopelessly entangled in a thing no one can make sense of. We think we deserve admiration for the kingdoms we build out of hostility and strife, but don’t admire ants for doing the same for themselves out of instinct and skipping anarchy altogether.

Sex is animalistic, but we have sewn on so many appendages that nature’s fingerprint has nearly vanished. It is a political topic now, not something we do, but who we are. The ideological environment in which my generation was raised has left a strong disparity between ourselves and the world older people know. We are crawling through the ashes and flames of a Freudian-Pride-post Sexual Revolution world, convinced that sex is no longer nature, but god. We search it for meaning though it refuses to, despite our worship, give us direction to a promised land, leaving many to settle for cheap hedonism as a means to delay their existential dread.

Within this tempest, the church has found herself immersed in her own muddled complexities from the rushed yet imperfect responses rapidly evolving cultures demand. Evangelicals are recovering from that Purity Culture craze. Over and improper reactions to the Sexual Revolution have convinced many communities that sex is an issue that must be accompanied by hushed voices and creased brows.

The onslaught of the digital world combined with the utilization of sex in market strategies has elevated porn from magazines hidden in the closest to being a normalized yet mighty predator, and Christians have neglected the implications. A sharp unspoken divide has expanded between men and women in the church. Radically different perspectives continue to hinder healing and ministry.

This essay speaks of this divide and how we mend it through an unexpected yet vital manner: economics. Yes, a basic understanding will do Christians wonders in unifying the church to deal with sexual chaos. If mankind has stripped away the naturalistic simplicity and beauty of sex, commoditizing it for financial gain, we must meet the problem at its origin. We cannot limit ourselves to conversations of what sex ought to be, but by learning the dirty dynamics of sexual economics, we can put ineffective naivety behind us and apply our values.

In part 1 of this essay, I will look for hope of finding structure in this chaos through economics’ primary tool –models– recognizing both their necessity and danger. In part 2, I will dive into further economic thinking to determine who is at fault for the current reality of sexual content, specifically considering OnlyFans as the recent game-changer to the industry.

Much of the economic discipline involves constructing and testing models to predict and explain behavior. However, models, by definition, simplify reality and therefore leave out details that, while not encompassed by the model, we should not entirely forget. For this reason, blind loyalty is quite foolish. As they exist within broader variables that cannot be accounted for, they must be revisited and tested. Alternatively, we cannot let exceptions to models convince us they are useless. We would not get anywhere. When we are not aware of the models we have adopted, we are prone to either fault. Here is how we apply model-thinking.

Many young men have shared with me that porn is their deepest struggle, vocalizing an authentic desperation to put it behind them forever, yet feeling helpless as no matter where they turn, something triggers a relapse. Especially when coming from broken households or difficult family dynamics, it would almost be a miracle if they did not fall into some level of porn addiction. These are good men and they despise this behavior in themselves.

Women likewise, have shared with me stories of how they've been victimized by male sexual aggression, from infuriatingly common ways – I remember walking a short distance back from my friends, all women, in NYC, watching them get cat-called every few seconds – to severe heartbreaking stories that have left unfathomable scars.

From the stories I hear, the type of victimization seems to correlate with gender, with men suffering addiction and women suffering sexualization. Of course, there are exceptions, but this underlying and heavily evidential dynamic withstands. Inversely, from my experience and observation of modern music, movies, and media, we are consumed in a blame game. To many women, men are entitled perverts who reduce them to their bodies as if doing so were an inherent trait of masculinity. After all, most rapists are men. And how many women reject a guy’s advances at the bar only for him to turn around and call her ‘bitch’? Men, alternatively, often direct their sexual hurt at the immodesty of women, feeling as if their sexuality is both constantly hijacked and undermined by our culture. These views typically stem from valid experience, but bleed into blanket perspectives of entire genders.

I am indebted to everyone who has opened up to me with their personal stories, but they have placed me in a rare position by which I have found disappointment. Not many hear these stories, especially from the opposite sex. Too many men are painfully unaware of how women’s lives are defined by their non-consensual sexualization. I also believe most women lack a basic understanding of the ways men view their own and other’s struggles with unwanted sexual behavior and the despair of finding any escape short of abandoning life to build a log cabin in the wilderness as a hermit. I have seen this divide propagated within Christian circles.

A photo I took in Barcelona of one in Picasso’s 1957 series ‘Las Meninas’

This climate of sexual confusion has made forming models very difficult, yielding a desperation to escape the chaos by grasping any proposed theory. Somewhere along the way, models have shifted from insightful guides to rule books. A woman has every right to ask a man for his number, but we still operate in a society where it is a more male-affiliated task. This would be a model. It is entirely different from saying a woman should never ask a man for his number.

By raising shaky theories into authoritative instruction, Christians have hindered themselves in combating the rising porn industry. For example, the popularized insistence that the direct application of Ephesians 5:33¹ is that ‘women want love and men want respect’ has contributed towards abusive environments and detaches individuals from their sexual nature and broader beliefs on sex. I appreciate

Sheila Wray Gregoire

’s progress in this false interpretation in her book The Great Sex Rescue, which utilizes biblical principles and substantial empirical data to reach more theologically sound conclusions.

Men often hide behind their biology, treating lust as a sin they are doomed to have unless we witness great societal change or the Holy Spirit slams them with an expedited booster shot of sanctification and miraculous deliverance. (Men NEED sexual release, have you heard that one before?) Some insult the purpose of matrimony by viewing it an escape from lust. Some also take the relationship between sexual capacity and biological rhythms to construct ideas of how sex is ‘more emotional’ for women as if the greatest thing the two sexes have to share are entirely different experiences for either. Christian literature on sex and marriage tends to drop men and women into their neat little boxes with high walls and pretty ribbons, but this is the fault of giving weight to delicate and outdated ‘models’ and fails to accommodate the cultural evolution, which has taken great strides in recent years.

This authoritative rigor undermines the initial use of models. Models must be malleable and we must not ignore the existence of outliers. This is how they evolve, progressing our understanding. The reality is that many men suffer from female sexual aggression and a staggering increase of women are becoming porn-users. Yet lust remains a male vice and modesty a female virtue.

I have had to quell frustration on multiple occasions upon hearing Christian women talk about porn with statements along the lines of “Men just need to stop watching it”. I find this very destructive as it undermines the hardship men endure with addiction and adds a layer of shame to female porn-users being told that they deal with a ‘masculine’ struggle. This bars them from the greatest aid in overcoming addiction: community support. Though I have not often heard men say equivalent statements about modesty in my social circles, I am well aware those statements are alive and well.

We cannot act efficiently if we have no model to act on, but treating them as rules of reality is damaging. We have some clear indicators of where to start a model. There is a tendency for men to blame women and for women to blame men, but not with the same accusation. Both tend to depict men as the initiator of sexual action. This may categorize women as the temptress, as seen in accusations concerning modesty and dress, but men still play the significant role as the deciding force of obtaining sexual pleasure. Alternatively, both sides view women as the origin of such, whether that is considering men having to prey on women to satiate their appetites, or whether the idea centers on men defending their integrity until being overcome by the seductress. This would make sense, considering how the vast majority of heterosexual porn content depicts the woman as the exhibitor of sexual pleasure and the man as the mechanical means of achieving it. Both are dehumanized but in different ways with different consequences.

Reality is that men are able to go many places that women cannot at night. Photo taken by a friend in Belfast City Center

Whether or not these traits are socially conditioned or refer to the ontological nature of men and women is beyond the scope of this essay, yet by holding the belief that men and women were created distinct from one another, we should expect some level of asymmetry. (This belief should also be accompanied by trust in this difference naturally manifesting and not relying on the enforcement of man-made systems.) There tends to be a perceived emphasis on women as the suppliers and men as the consumers, as there has historically been for thousands of years. We see this enforced in larger social pressures surrounding genders, women rooting value within their being, and men rooting value within their action, the princess as the prize to be won, the prince as the adventurer. But these are no more than light guardrails. Men and women who deviate from their ‘role’ in this model are not deserving of additional condemnation for doing so.

Many bearing intentions of equality and inclusivity do not like hearing these generalizations, but I claim they are exactly that. Generalizations. If we ignore empirically evident tendencies, we become inefficient. There is a reason as to why 70% of OnlyFans creators post exclusively adult content, with 84% of them being female.² To those in denial of how different sexes perceive and contribute to sex culture, get outside.

On the other hand, many Christians have fallen into shallow inflexibility with their ideas of how the porn issue involves both sexes. Too few Christians fail to grasp the interlocking nature of these perspectives and are only aware of one side of the coin. While men’s and women’s groups allow for wonderful focus and unique intimate communal elements, it is in these places where this harmful divide continues to widen and inaccurate models persist. There must be more cross-sex dialogue to depict reality. Then, maybe, we can find a holistic perspective of the problem and fight efficiently. Know thy enemy.

Men are broadly considered perverts because some genuinely are. Women are generalized as threats to integrity because some market their bodies for personal gain. Often, the type of victimization we identify with most, either due to our gender or experience, filters the grace we allow through nuance. Some of these men objectify women because they were taught that sexual dominance and practice are sources of approval and value, raised by childhood traumas that blind or make them feel helpless towards their own actions. Some women who make a living from online sex work do so for the purpose of seeking validation, confidence, and wanting people to find them beautiful, having been told by many voices that this is the means to do so. We tend only to understand one of these excuses. Sure, men should just stop watching porn, but women should stop making it. Let’s pause the blame game and honestly ask ourselves free from this bias, whose fault is it?

In Part 2, I will examine this question through further economic application.

1. “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” (ESV)

2. I received this number from a third-party site that promotes OnlyFans pages, which itself uses Stata.