Nobody enjoys the deterioration of English as much as the deterioration of English, and nothing drives us more than our modern industrial impotence. “We used to make steel,” and all that. And while Rolls-Royce still exists, it’s now a common internet note of declinism to note that our greatest corporate innovations have come instead in the fields of smoking, gambling and fornication.
It’s British American Tobacco, which is switching 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 turned the high street bookmaker into an everyday digital companion globally. And then there’s OnlyFans, which has changed the face of porn and given us Bonnie Blue, the most famous sex worker since Theodora of Byzantium. Even the oldest profession can move quickly and break things. This is Britain in 2026: a massive, rainy Las Vegas, but with uglier people.
The main “strip” of this massive Vegas is found, surprisingly given current events, in Manchester; apparently entire floors of those new skyscrapers have been turned into OnlyFans content studios. And that’s just one of the many things I learned from OnlyFans: Inside the cara harrowing and shocking BBC documentary presented by Amber Haque.
Haque’s documentary takes the form of a descent into hell. It begins in a relatively idyllic setting, a gabled, red-brick mansion on the outskirts of Manchester. As far as the genre can be periodized, it looked like a pretty “classic” porn set: girls smearing ice cream on their cleavage, guys in a row, glaring at the camera, and a glum, polo-shirted manager presiding over it all, snorting hot smoke from his nostrils. Haque meets Liam, a cheerful young model who earns $10,000 a month and who quit his job as a barber because “the world is going to fail.”
But this is not a part of the story. Haque’s focus is on the new breed of “OnlyFans” managers, or OFMs. This profession – or racket, or ring – involves men (and very few women) who “manage” groups of OnlyFans models, handling their marketing, subscriber relations and monetization in exchange for a cut of their profits. “Harmless enough,” some might say. Others may ask, “Didn’t we call that pimping?”
And, like pimping, there’s a darker side to the deal. Haque speaks to models who claim managers have extracted huge commissions from their earnings, pressured them into sexual acts and changed their account details to take the earnings out of their control. Some managers respond with violence when they fail.
Visiting South Wales – it’s surprising how many models are set in depressed, post-industrial regions – Haque meets Rebecca, who has her windows smashed and strangled by masked men when she changes her password to escape the dark side of OnlyFans. When Haque asks lawyers and activists about these patterns, they use words like “slavery,” “human trafficking” and “modern slavery.” In the most extraordinary part of the program, the researchers claim that the managers are trading models, buying and selling the rights to their profits.
Trades like this, part of a seemingly widespread subculture of pimps, 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 land your first models, how to create a contractual relationship – and men exchange tips for dealing with problematic or uncooperative, sometimes violent, girls. Some of the men who have benefited from models like this include Andrew Tate, whose cam network used OnlyFans.
“We don’t try to be everyone’s cup of tea. We’re happy to be someone’s glass of champagne,” OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said last year. But the Doctor is silent on what to do about this storm in Blair’s Champagne Flute. There is talk of more regulation, while OnlyFans assures the BBC that it has a strict process for regulating abuse on the platform. But after such a disturbing exposé of how Britain’s most famous tech company makes money, you can’t help but wish it hadn’t happened at all.
OnlyFans: Inside the car
BBC Three
(Further reading: Kids who want to be the Kardashians)
