Sleaze, Tech, and the End of Love

Beware of the dark side of internet relationships and sexuality:

Those who have seen the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz will remember this memorable line spoken by Dorothy to her dog: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” That is certainly true of the internet and digital age.

And it is certainly true when it comes to sexuality and sleaze. Everything is changing, and for the worse. One of the major developments is in the porn culture. Women and children are especially at risk. Thankfully some are speaking out about this and sounding the alarm. They are warning us about the many dangers lurking out there.

Consider a case in point: While I have heard about OnlyFans before, I have never actually seen it or been to its site. I am not even sure if I can: Is it a paid thing, or just some website? OK, I just answered my own questions by doing a quick search. Wikipedia says this:

“OnlyFans is an Internet content paid subscription service based in London, England. The service is widely known for its popularity with pornographers, but it also hosts other content creators, including athletes, musicians, and comedians.”

So now that I know at least that much, let me continue. A recent post on the social media reminded me of a new book that I have been wanting to further write about, so I will use that comment as a means to segue into the book.

The remark was by an Australian Christian that I have been following on X. Jasmine Rose had posted this comment: “OnlyFans and hookup culture have wrecked healthy relationships by turning intimacy into cheap, disposable transactions. I will tell my children the ultimate goal in life is a strong marriage and raising a family.”

I was aware that there was something dark and sleazy about OnlyFans, so I grabbed a new book off my shelves to see what the authors have to say about it. I refer to Pornocracy by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel (Polity, 2026). Sure enough, they do discuss this, so I will quote from that part of the book in a moment.

But let me start by looking at what the writers say in their opening chapter, “Not Your Granddad’s Porn”:

Anyone who wants to have an informed, meaningful discussion about present-day pornography and its harms must first understand its nature. They need to understand how profoundly porn has changed since the days when Playboy was in its pomp.

 

This chapter is not a full-scale survey of the pornographic landscape since the arrival of high-speed internet. To do justice to such a complex, multilayered subject would take a book of its own. Nor can we much more than mention the uncountable victims of trafficking, kidnapping or coercion to serve the industry’s insatiable demands. These women and children, and their stories, deserve far more space than we can afford them here.

 

Instead, we will highlight some of the most extreme, ubiquitous and — crucially — highly popular themes in online pornography today. We’ll also look at how degrading and abusive pornography affects the women who appear in it, as well as the industry’s contempt for the victims it creates on both sides of the screen.

 

We aim to give just enough of a glimpse to show that today’s porn is as far removed from your grandad’s centrefolds as a petting zoo is from an abattoir. (p. 6)

In the rest of the chapter they go on to look at these areas:
-Normalising the extreme
-Sexual violence
-Incest
-Barely legal
-The performers
-How Big Porn gets away with it
-Hiding in plain sight
-The children of porn
-Limbic capitalism

But it is in Chapter 8, “The Death of Love” where they discuss this particular website and others like it. They say this:

The early years of the internet taught two crucial lessons about the digital revolution: first, that porn is the quintessential ‘killer app’ — a service or function that creates intense desire and rapid adoption for a new technology platform. Secondly, that public awareness of technological and pornographic trends lags several years behind reality. Parents and teachers had no idea what boys were doing in their bedrooms or the computer lab until long after pornography had become embedded in teenage brains. Nor did politicians or the media.

 

Three decades hence, we’re little wiser about the scale, import or impact of next-generation pornography, as two recent, near simultaneous news stories illustrate.

 

Throughout 2024, Reuters conducted an in-depth investigation into OnlyFans, uncovering the horrific scale of sex trafficking across the platform and interviewing eleven women who said they’d been forced to perform sex acts on the site. A few days after Reuters published its fifth article in the series — which focused on a heartbreakingly young-looking woman from Wisconsin who ‘was basically imprisoned in this room to keep making money’ — the BBC’s flagship news programme Today chose to focus on a very different OnlyFans story. The pop singer Kate Nash had decided to sell pictures of her bottom on the site to raise money for a forthcoming tour of the United States, a decision she described as ‘empowering’. The interviewer chose not to challenge Nash on whether she thought trafficked women on OnlyFans felt a similar empowerment.

 

The timing of the Today item perfectly illustrates how the abuse potential of emerging technologies often goes unrecognised until it is far too late. If even the national broadcaster is unaware of the real story, what hope is there for the rest of us?

 

We originally intended to make this chapter about the future of porn, but really it’s about the unacknowledged, underexamined present: how technologies like artificial intelligence, deepfakes and robotics are, like the early web’s nudity and the extremity of today’s tube sites, reshaping people’s experience and expectations of sex. We will show that they herald a future of even crueller, more abusive and more transactional relationships; worse, how the blurring of the physical and digital realms is already destroying the concepts of intimacy and sexual love. (pp. 116-117)

They go on to say this about AI and the new technologies:

There are numerous glaring problems with the idea that technology does not multiply and intensify sexual harms, or create entirely new ones. First, it’s undeniable that the internet and digital recording devices open up fresh avenues for abuse, and at barely comprehensible scale. For example, the authors of this book are children of the 1990s; we remember when making images required a costly and time-consuming trip to get them developed. Today, it’s trivial to create and distribute unlimited images to an audience of millions in seconds.

 

This capability is now massively augmented by the arrival of Generative Al (Gen AI) applications that enable users to turn any photograph into a pornographic image without the subject’s consent. One prominent example is ClothOff, which invites users to ‘undress anyone using AI’. The website receives more than 4 million monthly visits, and there is no meaningful age verification for users, nor for the people in the photographs.

 

The result is a wholly novel form of sexual abuse: the ability to create explicit pornographic images, often of children, from people’s public Instagram feeds. As the mother of one 14-year-old victim put it: ‘It’s a shock when you see it. The image is completely realistic … If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, I would have thought that image was real.’ (p. 118)

They look further at such developments and then write:

With digital sexual exploitation now added to the hazards of childhood, children are changing too. One Australian teacher of almost two decades’ experience described how she has seen students evolve into a state of ‘hypervigilance’, intensely aware of the dangers lurking on Instagram and other social platforms, and constantly worrying about keeping their personal photos and videos private, ‘less a spiteful or just-plain-reckless student get hold of them’.

 

Child protection experts have been raising the alarm about deep fake pornography for years, warning that students, schools and police are ill-equipped to deal with nudifying technology to create abusive imagery. Young people’s heedless adoption of the latest technological trends places them on the frontline of deepfake pornography, but adult women are increasingly conscious they are targets too.

 

As pornography researcher Caitlin Roper writes in her book Sex Dolls, Robots, and Women Hating, women are made into pornography by men while going about their day-to-day lives: ‘Through the use of hidden cameras, which are cheap and readily available, men can surreptitiously film women in toilets, showers, locker rooms, hotel rooms and their workplaces.’

 

This is not, then, the future of porn but the very real present, where both the digital and physical realms are suddenly filled with new threats to women’s safety, dignity, privacy and humanity. With fewer and fewer places to hide, the only way women can protect themselves is by restricting their participation in the public square. What the Taliban enforced through women’s whipping and execution, the West is achieving through its own ‘sex positivity’ progressivism.

 

While politicians inch towards developing effective legislation, there is a deafening silence from those who have the greatest power to fight this new threat: Big Tech. In fact, some of the world’s most influential technology companies are complicit; several nudify apps use sign-on infrastructure from Apple and Google, giving these apps a ‘veneer of credibility’. (pp. 120-121)

It sure is getting to be a brave new – and ugly – world out there. Women and children especially suffer in the pornocracy, but we are all harmed.

Update

This from the July 6 Herald Sun: “Generation OnlyFans: The porn pipeline luring schoolgirls into selling their bodies. Australia has 140,000 OnlyFans creators filming porn for profit – and parents will be horrified at the techniques some underground recruiters use to groom girls who haven’t even turned 18.” (The article is behind a paywall.)

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