By: Ivannia Morton and Natalie Hernandez 

When she graduated from high school, all Lizze Matthews wanted was a way to get out of Iowa. Growing up in Des Moines was often hard for the 20-year-old, biracial young woman, who says she experienced a lot of racism from her peers when she was growing up. “They would call me names relating to animals,” Matthews said as she sat in her dimly lit room. “It was super dehumanizing and degrading. I was always made fun of for my hair. Kids would pull my hair, throw stuff in my hair, to the point where I started straightening it.” 

She dreamed of a life beyond her Midwestern town, a different life than the one typically pursued by most people there. “I live somewhere where you go to college, you get married and you have kids,” she said. “[But] one, I don’t want kids, two, I don’t want to get married, and three, I don’t want to go to college. So I was kind of in this place where I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know what I can do,’ because I was just 18 years old.”

Not knowing where to turn, and needing cash in order to become independent and move away, made Matthews a perfect candidate for the lure of the online sex work industry, which she saw being glamorized as lucrative and empowering on social media sites like Tumblr. She became intrigued with the idea of selling her nudes on OnlyFans, which has exploded in popularity since the beginning of the pandemic. With a million content creators worldwide and 85 million registered users, the site paid out more than $2.2 billion to its creators in 2020, an OnlyFans spokesperson told the Guardian. After attracting shout-outs from such icons as Beyoncé and Cardi B, it’s not hard to see why OnlyFans became appealing as an income stream for young people, many of them facing unemployment and other hardships during the pandemic. 

Rebeca Jennings, senior correspondent for The Goods by Vox, who covers social media platforms, influencers, and the creator economy says that for some, sex work might be the most lucrative option.

“There are other obviously alternatives to sex work. But, people choose sex work when they feel like that’s the best option for them. In an economy like this, where [people] are very much individualists, it’s very, every man for themselves. The creator economy offers that alternative,” she says. 

However, the promise of quick cash on OnlyFans masks the true experience of many of its content creators, according to Matthews, who now regrets having joined the site. “No amount of money is worth your mental health and your mental sanity,” she says. “I just hope that young people realize that money is not everything, and it isn’t worth doing things that you’re not comfortable with doing.”

A self-described “internet kid,” Matthews got inspired to make an OnlyFans account after seeing a YouTube video from social media influencer and adult entertainer Lena the Plug entitled, “How I Make Money on OnlyFans.” Since it went up in early 2020, right before the pandemic hit, this video has attracted more than 1.8 million views. In it, Lena the Plug walks viewers through a step-by-step on how to become a successful OnlyFans content creator. Speaking in a conversational manner, she makes it sound easy and fun. “I love that I get to feel sexy and cute every day,” she says. 

 

The video explains how OnlyFans works: It’s a social media site similar to Instagram, where subscribers pay a monthly fee to see creators’ content, most often nude pictures and nude videos. The site takes 20 percent of the monthly fee (anywhere from a few dollars to much more, depending on the popularity of the creator), which Lena describes as “standard,” and “pretty fair.” She gives tips on things that creators can do to increase their followings, such as chatting with subscribers “and making them feel special every day.” She vaguely warns of “all the consequences that come with it,” but doesn’t go into what any of these consequences might be. Reports of the dangers that exist for creators on OnlyFans include harassment, stalkers, and even sexual violence. 

For Matthews, at the time, joining OnlyFans as a creator felt like a perfect fit. As someone who had always been comfortable with her body, she believed she had found the perfect way to make money on her own terms. However, it didn’t take long for her to see that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. 

In May 2021, Matthews turned to TikTok to express her feelings about her experience on OnlyFans. She starts her video—which went viral, with more than 9.6 million views and nearly 2 million likes—with a picture of another TikToker crowing, “OnlyFans just bought me a three bedroom apartment in Miami.”
In her video, Matthews responds by saying: “As someone who did OnlyFans for two years, freshly 18, and didn’t make their money off of it, I’m very sick to see people glamorizing OnlyFans like this all the time on TikTok. One, you guys are not going to be making that much money. For example,” she says with a skeptical look, “$100K a month, posting bikini pictures, seductive pictures in lingerie? You are going to have to pop things open that you do not want to show, do the most—you know what I mean.” Though she doesn’t elaborate here, it’s safe to say we do know what she means.

“You will also not make that much money unless you are using you’re an existing following or an existing following to promote your OnlyFans,” Matthews goes on, in her viral post. “The only reason I made a lot of money on OnlyFans was because it was my OnlyFans and people wanted to see my body”—in other words, it wasn’t as easy to be anonymous on the site as Lena the Plug had suggested. According to Matthews, creators attract more subscribers among people who already know who they are, either in person or online. New creators are encouraged to promote their accounts on other platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and even post snippets of their paid content. And so, “It also destroys your public and job reputation,” Matthews says in her TikTok video.

While sex work has become increasingly accepted and normalized, with mainstream outlets such as the New York Times arguing that it should be seen as legitimate work, it unfortunately still carries a stigma for those who do it, in many circles. Soon after posting her first nude photos on OnlyFans, Matthews says that her presence on the site began to take a toll on her day-to-day life—she became known as the “OnlyFans girl” among those who knew her in Des Moines, Iowa. 

Matthews’s posts started innocently enough: A shot in her underwear or in a bikini wouldn’t hurt anyone, she thought, right? The pictures weren’t far off from what she was already posting on Instagram. But it wasn’t long before she realized that being on OnlyFans would bring consequences, some of them disturbing. She sighs as she recounts how men who recognized her from the site tried to grope her in public. She became afraid that being on the site would make strangers feel that they had the right to assault her. As someone who already had social anxiety, the pressures of being on OnlyFans began to weigh on her; but as the money kept flowing in, she pushed herself to stay on the site and keep producing content. She was making anywhere from $25 to $1,500 a month, she says. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the average OnlyFans model makes only around $180 a month.  

Matthews’s mother, Molly Schwab, remembers the exact moment when she found out that her daughter had become the “OnlyFans girl”: It was through an Instagram post Lizze had published herself. “It said, if I’m going to out myself to my entire family, you better subscribe or something like that. I’m like, what is she talking about? I didn’t even know what it was,” says Schwab. “So I called a girl I know who knows things and I’m like ‘Hey, what’s this OnlyFans?’”
Matthews did the Instagram post because she needed to turn her own social following into OnlyFans subscribers. It was the marketing that made her money, but it also meant she was outing herself to friends and family. “I knew the people who were going to be buying my OnlyFans were people who know me because I’m not famous,” she explains. “They were going to be people that I went to school with, that I had worked with, that I see all the time.”

Schwab says she was disturbed by her discovery; she knew her daughter’s presence on the site could be problematic for Lizze. “I went to [her] and I’m like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this?” Schwab says. “I was disturbed. I mean, she’s my daughter. I think people can be open with whatever they want, but I don’t want her to not be secure in herself because of what she’s shared with other people.”

Schwab’s biggest concern, she says, were the implications OnlyFans had for Lizze’s mental health. “I didn’t want it to mentally mess her up. And I knew it would mess her up and I’m like, don’t do this, you know? It’s not worth it. I know it’s a pandemic and we’re all stuck in the house, but don’t do it. And I think I kind of left it there,” Schwab said. 

But Matthews didn’t stop when her family found out. She continued on because, during the pandemic, she couldn’t find a job; she had to stay inside. At first, making money was worth more to her than the cost to her mental health.

“Once you start making that money and people offer you money for certain things,” she says, referring to the extra images and acts that subscribers will ask for, “you really start to step out of your comfort zone and start to become someone else. It’s a lot of work, and it does not seem like it, but it’s not easy to always be in a sexy mood. It was just super mentally draining on me and being so young, I think was my biggest mistake,” she says. 

One of the ways to avoid these pitfalls for youth would be to offer them better jobs and more guidance on how to find them, experts say. Lauren Weisberg, 18, a youth researcher who is connected with the Intergenerational Change Initiative, a participatory action research group, says that students in the United States aren’t given enough options in terms of what they can do after high school, which contributes to them turning to social media platforms as a way to make money.

“Young people are seeing these influencers make so much money and have these big houses and fancy cars,” Weisberg says, “and so they’re like, okay, well my school and my environment isn’t preparing me for what I want to do after school and I see this person was making money. It’s super easy. Let me turn to that. It’s like really, really hard and mentally and physically like draining,” she goes on. “We need to help young people more like educate themselves on all their options and be prepared for life after high school.”

After Matthews started to gain a following, she raised her prices for “special requests” on the site and those requests included seeing her in the nude. That’s when she saw her income soar on the site. “If you wanted something specific, you had to request it from me and then pay even more. So mostly I would obviously do like full nude,” she says.

This new territory was strange and difficult for Matthews, she says. Confidence in her body only took her so far, and it soon became overwhelming to sell sex. “I’m not like a sexual person,” she says. “I don’t think of myself as sexy or like anything like that. It was also kind of hard for me to like, think of content to do.”
“No one ever talks about how much you have to do, or what you have to do,” she goes on. “All they said was post stuff, and people pay you. That’s basically all you ever really heard about OnlyFans and that’s pretty much all you’ll really ever hear.”  

Does OnlyFans exploit its creators? Andrea Juarez Mendoza, another researcher for the ​Intergenerational Change Initiative, says that there is a fine line between sexual exploitation and sexual liberation. “What does it mean for someone to be sexually exploited?” she asks. “They are the ones that are profiting from their own body and labor. If there’s someone else profiting, then that’s exploitation. But if a person decides for themselves, ‘this is what I want to do with my body then it is totally up to them to decide what to do with their body,” she says.

“Each of us is in the market with our bodies, our labor,” Juarez Mendoza says. “What is it for someone to own the means of production of their body in a capitalist society? How do we reframe the narrative of sexual exploitation when it’s someone who is taking ownership over their own body?”

For Lizze, production had to come to an end. The constant demand for churning out new content had begun to feel like a burden. “I didn’t want to do it anymore,” she says. “Any time someone would ask for content, I wouldn’t want to make it; I didn’t like to do it. I was also sick and tired of people bringing it up in public all the time. It is my bed, and I have to lie in it, but at the same time, people don’t come up to me every day anymore.”

Now Matthews works in sales, as a lead lash consultant at an eyelash studio in Des Moines. “I definitely have some work to do to become the happiest I want to be,” she says. And her “biggest goal” is still to “move out of Iowa,” after she turns 21.

Matthews says she hopes that by sharing her story, other young people will think twice before joining OnlyFans, to make sure this is a well-researched and educated decision they wholeheartedly believe is right for them. 

“One of the biggest things I’ve learned in life is that it’s not about making money,” Matthews says. “Money comes and goes. Who cares how much money you have? Who cares how nice your house is? You know, money is nothing.”