The Commodification of Intimacy
Intimacy has shifted from private connection to digital commodity. Platforms like OnlyFans promise empowerment yet raise questions of exploitation, trust, and privacy. This essay explores how desire, relationships, and culture are reshaped in the age of commodified intimacy.
I've been thinking about OnlyFans a lot lately. Not in the way you might assume, but as someone watching intimacy itself become a product category.
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to sell sex, you needed a studio, a distributor, a whole apparatus that extracted most of the value. Now a person with a phone and a subscription platform can cut out the middlemen entirely. That's genuinely liberating in ways that matter. Women especially have seized this, building audiences and incomes that the old industry would never have allowed.
But here's what I keep coming back to: every video and every image is also a transaction. The subscriber's gaze still governs what gets made. Creators talk about autonomy, and they have more of it than a performer working for Brazzers in 2005. Yet the market still shapes the product. You're free to post whatever you want, but the algorithm rewards what sells. The line between agency and performing for approval gets blurry fast.
How relationships change
The couples I know who've navigated this split into two camps. Some figured out how to communicate, set boundaries, even collaborate. They treat the digital persona as separate from the private person. Others watched trust erode slowly, not from any betrayal exactly, but from the constant low-grade competition for attention. Your partner scrolling through DMs at dinner. The performance never quite turning off.
Desire itself has changed shape. It used to live in imagination or whispered confession. Now it's curated, monetized, available on demand. I find this both fascinating and unsettling. When intimacy becomes a service you can subscribe to, what happens to intimacy inside actual relationships? Expectations shift. The comparison becomes constant.
The privacy problem
The 2020 OnlyFans data breach sticks with me. Thousands of creators discovered their content circulating on forums and torrent sites. Not leaked by hackers targeting them specifically, just scraped and shared because it could be. The platforms promise independence, but they can't promise privacy. Your most intimate content lives on servers you don't control, protected by security policies written by people who don't know you exist.
This gets darker with AI. Deepfakes already let anyone generate explicit content of anyone else. VR will make simulated intimacy more immersive. At some point we'll have convincing synthetic versions of real people, generated without consent, consumed by people who may not know or care about the difference.
I don't have a clean conclusion here. The platforms aren't going away. The top creators make real money, and the economics work for enough people that the market will persist. What I keep wondering is whether we've thought through what it means to turn connection into a product. Not the sex part, which humans have commodified forever. The intimacy part. The parasocial relationship where subscribers feel they know someone who doesn't know they exist.
Maybe that's always been true of celebrity. Maybe OnlyFans just makes explicit what was implicit in every fan magazine and talk show appearance. But scale changes things. When millions of people can purchase the feeling of closeness, and millions more can sell it, we're running an experiment on human psychology that we didn't exactly consent to.
