Late last week, I warily opened the latest article to be written about OnlyFans, a platform that allows creators to monetise social media posts behind a paywall. I began using the site back in 2017 when it was still in its infancy, and when no one outside the freelance modelling community was talking about it. This year it became big enough to interest the mainstream media, and I have waded through numerous misbegotten attempts by writers to explain the phenomenon. I’ve seen journalists fixate anxiously on the large sums some creators are earning, express concern that it might harm teenagers (though under-18s are locked out of the site), and agonise over the possibility that users might ask creators to do things they don’t want to do (a hazard in many service jobs). The latest example of this trend is an article by Louise Perry for the New Statesman entitled “How OnlyFans Became the Porn Industry’s Great Lockdown Winner—And at What Cost?” Reading it, I barely recognised the site I now use on a daily basis. …