Welcome to another edition of Birb Brain! If you were expecting this to be a psychedelics-only based newsletter, I apologize. I’m writing for me, and I find a lot of different things interesting. My overall intention with this substack is to create a space that is something kind of like Vice meets Freakonomics. There’s a lot of topics a lot of professionals aren’t willing to touch, because they’re taboo, risque, etc. I’m not above talking about markets in weird places.
I’m going to share a very personal story at the end. I’ve tried to make it as palatable as possible. It isn’t. Consider this a trigger warning, and don’t read it.
What is a simp?
Let’s start simply, no pun intended. Urban dictionary provides the following definition for a simp:
“ – A man that puts himself in a subservient/submissive position under women in hopes of winning them over, without the female bringing anything to the table.
– A man that puts too much value on a female for no reason.
– A man that prides himself with ‘Chivalry’ in hopes of getting sexual gratification from women.
– A square with no game other than ‘Rolling out the Red-Carpet’ for every female”
It’s more than that though. Simps crave acceptance, attention, and affection. They are an evolution of the ‘reply guy’, and they aren’t above spending cash in case that will win them some affection and attention.
Wikipedia offers up a slightly better explanation:
“Simp is an Internet slang term, mainly pejorative, for a person, usually male, who gives excessive attention and sympathy to someone else online, usually female, to gain their affection. Urban Dictionary defines a simp as "Someone who does way too much for a person they like". Nathan Grayson of Kotaku describes simping as an "openly thirsty version of stanning".”
This, I find, is slightly more accurate. Simps are a part of the digital economy at this point, and the markets offered towards them are growing.
Gamer Girl Bathwater and the rise of simping
Belle Daphne, a “gamer”/youtuber personality with a global following (more than 4 million instagram followers), announced she would be selling $30 bottles of “bath water for all you thirsty gamer boys” in an Instagram post. That post garnered more than 500,000 likes.
This being the internet, the sale was widely mocked. It’s been so mocked that it’s become the archetypal joke about simping - if you’ve ever heard the phrase “gamer girl bath water”, well, this is the origin. The joking, however, was great publicity. The bottles of bath water sold out immediately. Admittedly, this is due to her large following, but memes travel in unpredictable ways, and Belle’s reach expanded massively. While we’re all memeing, Belle took a bath and made more money than most people did all year. She did something she would have done anyway (bathe), and monetized it.
Monetizing attention and women’s time has become a trend, and shades of findom have woven their way into the dating world. “Venmo me $1 and see what happens” is a common tinder bio, the phrase “get a bag sis” exists, and it’s not rare to hear the phrase “send me $x so I know it’s real.” This is not necessarily a bad thing: women are putting themselves on a pedestal, empowering themselves, and making men pay for it.
The concept has found a home in contemporary rap as well: one only needs to listen to Cardi B’s “money”, or OG Hot Girl Megan Thee Stallion’s “Cash Shit”, in which the up-and-comer specifically points out that men trying to get with her are simping: “Bitch, I do pimp shit, huh / Ho, you on simp shit” points to the ubiquity of the phrase ‘simp’ at this point. In language, it’s a little bit of a meme, an in-joke. If you don’t know what it means, it’s hard to explain, and points out that you’re out of touch - if you do know what it means, you’re free to laugh and point it out.
Another name you might have heard is Caroline Calloway. Even if I had all the time in the world, I don’t think I could properly explain why she is famous. It’s not really the important part. Caroline posted a nude on her twitter, and pinned it, saying it was an apology for not writing the second part of her tell-all fast enough. This gained a lot of attention, and gave her fifteen minutes of fame. She then made an onlyfans, and charged $49.99 to subscribe to it. She claimed this would make her something like 230k a year. Sex workers across the internet were furious; they felt this was someone dipping their toe into a world they didn’t understand. Nevertheless, Caroline persisted, and made an absolute ton of money from anyone curious enough to pay $50 to see her naked.
At first, demand vastly outweighed supply in the panty market.
This story begins in Japan in the 1990s, when magazines started showing models in schoolgirl uniforms and bloomers. Shortly after, fetish shops caught on, selling the clothes, and the Burusera shop was born. Burusera is the Japanese word for a paraphilia, more specifically a sexualized attraction to the underwear or school uniforms of girls or young women. Burusera shops sell used girls' gym suits and school uniforms. They also sold other things from schoolgirls: undergarments, school bathing suits, socks, stationery, sanitary napkins and tampons. Oftentimes, these clothes were accompanied with pictures of girls wearing the items. This has been a controversial thing in Japan - child pornography laws and local regulations have made the Burusera a little harder to find, but they do still exist.
Eventually, panty-selling found its way onto the internet, and took on a life of its own. Websites started springing up, full of girls looking to make money. Enter the supply. There are now podcasts dedicated to teaching girls how to sell their underwear, and how to set fair prices. There are forums dedicated to girls sharing their tips and tricks, like wearing underwear for multiple days in a row, or taking photographs in many pairs in quick succession in different lighting, creating the illusion of different days, and so on.
As this caught on, we’ve pushed into a glut: the price has fallen, and we’ve seen content creators try to differentiate themselves. There are markets for everything you can think of, panty-wise. Those who will do more extreme things are generally able to reward themselves and command a higher premium. This is the panty equivalent of a crowded trade: everyone’s in it, everyone’s doing it, and it’s not novel anymore. The price starts to drop, interest wanes, and the bottom falls out. It even became a minor plot line on Orange Is The New Black.
Panties aren’t the only place we’ve seen a glut of supply overtake a once-rabid crowd of demand. Feet pictures, and the feet picture market, have become so oversaturated that there are mainstream jokes now. “Feet pix” has become code for “guy that asks for weird stuff” in the teenage lexicon; it’s a hilarious joke now. It’s kinkshaming, and I’ll give it that, but it’s also generating a lot of attention. Feet pictures, and the girls willing to take them, used to command high prices. You could get a lot of worship if this was your niche: the foot crowd is generally pretty harmless. Prices, however, have dropped. In 2015, you could sell feet pictures in bundles, but small ones: something like 5/$20 was acceptable.
Now, creators are working much harder, doing multiple “shoots” a day, posting, engaging with their audiences, and for something more like 20/$20. They’re getting on webcam shows, broadcasting live all sorts of fetish-related foot activity.
Is Onlyfans next?
Onlyfans is a lucrative business. There are many, many people out there who earn more on the platform than they did at their day job. While researching for this article, I found accounts of people who actually quit their day jobs, as Onlyfans brought in more money.
In one case, a web developer earning 60k a year quit her webdev job, and now pulls in over $1M annually. These stories have been popping up for a while, and the platform has gained a lot of popularity.
It’s been a slow burn - the graph below is Google searches for “Onlyfans”. From 2018 to late 2019, Onlyfans saw a steady (but slow) rise in searches. Then, suddenly, the term takes off - any guesses why?
Let’s zoom in and really examine this. Here’s 2020:
*oops
Things really start to pick up in April, coinciding pretty neatly with the start of lockdowns, and unemployment numbers that shot up pretty quickly. We see a spike back up in August, when things were looking bleak, and millions of people were having trouble getting both the pandemic unemployment assistance and their unemployment insurance benefits.
During 2020, millions of people lost their jobs. Millions more weren’t making enough to really get by. The pandemic produced a lot of people who needed to pay their rent, and Onlyfans gave them a platform to do it on.
For the people who already used the platform, or had a following, this was awesome - at first. For everyone who came after, they found a much more competitive landscape than they thought they would. Established accounts, which already understood marketing, content creation, and interaction with their fans felt the shift too, with “regulars” disappearing, or spreading their money thinner. The growing supply is leading to the erosion of pricing power, and has helped exacerbate an already growing problem: inequality.
The revenue of content creators on Onlyfans follows a classic power law distribution. The top accounts make something like $100,000 a month. The median account makes $180 a month. As it is, the top 1% of accounts make 33% of all the money. The top 10% of accounts make 73% of all the money.
To think about it differently, through a lense that most of you are more familiar with, I’ll use the Gini index. For those who aren’t familiar, the Gini Index is a fairly standard way to measure inequality in a nation. The index is on a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 implies a communist utopia, and 1 implies a single greedy capitalist owns all of everything. The Gini index of OnlyFans is 0.83. The most unequal society in the world, South Africa, has a Gini index of 0.68.
Bottom line: Onlyfan’s distribution of wealth is less equal than an ex-apartheid state.
Onlyfans is more than porn: it’s a media giant, hiding in plain sight.
In addition to the thousands of regular people signing up as creators, celebrities are also hopping on the trend. Bella Thorne joined, and made over $2M in the first day. This brought around a ton of backlash, and led to onlyfans instituting new rules: The updated rules dictated that no vendor on the site can charge over $50 for pay-per-view content and no user can tip more than $100. This was meant to cap the amount celebrities could make, and make things more ‘fair’, but many have complained that it’s done the opposite.
Understandably, the majority of content creators were not pleased about the corporate mainstream takeover: if you have $100 to blow, and have the choice to see a celebrity naked, or a girl from Manhattan, Kansas who lost her job but has a conventionally nice body, which are you going to choose? The one everyone’s talking about, or a girl named Jessica going by a fake name studying to be an engineer? Sure, she might be a basketball fan, just like you, and you might gain more enjoyment out of the interaction that she has to go out of her way to give you in order to bring in revenue, but who is everyone talking about?
Celebrities aren’t just joining to be naked as a novelty. Cardi B, for example, has an onlyfans (subscription price: $4.99/mo) titled “welcome to my world”. Cardi has said that she’s not planning on undressing for content: she’s interested in showing fans what her life is like. With the advent of the internet, celebrities have to work much harder to have a private life, and Cardi is flipping that on its head - since fans are going to be nosy, she might as well profit off of it. And that’s just one example: Rapper Swae Lee has an onlyfans. The Dream has an onlyfans. Why? It’s simplicity over everything, and it’s uncensored. Raw, even.
Onlyfans’ business model is simple: they’re a platform that hosts content behind a paywall. The content creators set a price, and Onlyfans takes 20% of that. It’s the airbnb of simping: monetization of paying for selfies, rather than spare rooms. It’s not even entirely fair to make that comparison, because an airbnb can only be rented out by one person at a time. With the Onlyfans model, someone can broadcast and reuse content for thousands of people, at the same time.
Back in early May of 2020, twitter @yrechtman tweeted the following: “A week ago, OnlyFans posted that they had paid out $700M to creators lifetime to date. Now the headline image says $725M. At a 20% take rate and with the approx timeline, that’s ≈$800m-1.5B GMV run rate and $150-300M revenue run rate. This is a billion dollar media company.”
I’m not going to take credit for work I didn’t do - instead of pretending that I’ve crunched the numbers myself, there are others that agree with this valuation.
Xsrus.com wrote the following in an article attempting to value Onlyfans: “In 2019, they had over 60,000 content creators and 7m registered users. Extrapolating from the Google growth trends, it’s safe to say they have at least 10m users today. I calculated the average revenue per creator per month (about $250) and the average subscription fee (about $8.7) from my scraped data. Applying the 20% commission and assuming only half the users and creators are active, we end up with a lower bound of $90m, and an upper bound of $104m.
But how much are they worth? According to one article, Onlyfans takes home 60% of their revenue, net processing and fees. This means they make profits between $54m and $62m. Since the business really doesn’t have to do anything besides host the platform, collect fees, and store content securely, it’s probably worthy of an EBIT multiple of around 15x. This gives a total valuation of between $810m and $936m.”
The really crazy part is that this number is honestly probably too low. There’s more than likely well over 12 million users on the site, according to the Economist.
According to Bloomberg, Onlyfans is generating something like $2 billion in sales - if they keep 20%, this puts them at around $400 million in sales a year, which is much larger than competitor Patreon, currently valued at over $1.2B.
In short, the long-standing, seedy porn industry is being disrupted. We’re getting a farm to table of porn, which is cutting down on the abuse of women in the porn industry, right? Creators are logging on to onlyfans, and de-stigmatizing sex work. However… It isn’t all sunshine and daisies, and as onlyfans has grown, so have it’s problems.
More Money, More Problems
With the passing of FOSTA/SESTA (the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act” and the ‘Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act”), the hosting of sex work became controversial and legally put the entire digital sex work industry in a grey area. Allegedly, the acts were passed to crack down on sex trafficking, but instead, it’s mainly deplatformed sex workers trying to pay the rent. Craigslist and Reddit have both shut down parts of their websites frequently used by sex workers and clients since then, and the number of platforms for them are dwindling.
There’s a lot in the act, but the central point of concern for sex working people online is found in section 5. Section 5 states: “ENSURE FEDERAL LIABILITY FOR PUBLISHING INFORMATION DESIGNED TO FACILITATE SEX TRAFFICKING OR OTHERWISE FACILITATING SEX TRAFFICKING”
This act also makes allowances for States Attorneys to specially prosecute these cases. It is a very vaguely worded law, but its specified targets are online platforms, websites, companies/corporations behind site hosting.
In essence, the act expanded liability for internet platforms which host content generated by third parties around holding that information. While the act creates liability for those websites for “knowingly facilitating sex trafficking,” there is no clarity for what that means. It also allows more people to file civil suits against websites.
What does that actually mean? It means that websites engaging with the sex trade have to assess their liability, namely the liability of holding assets related to the sex industry. Right now, each website is tasked with making their own decisions, with the threat of very expensive litigation hanging over their head. Holding sexual content becomes a massive risk, and more trouble than it’s worth. This, rather than culling sex trafficking, deplatforms sex workers, and pushes them into more dangerous spaces. Sex workers use the internet for harm reduction - and I’ll circle back to this at the end.
Speaking of deplatforming…
SESTA/FOSTA aren’t the only bad guys: Instagram and Tumblr have both waged a war on the female nipple, and sex in general.
It started in 2018, when Tumblr banned all porn. They did this in an attempt to get back into good standing with Apple. Tumblr’s algorithms failed to identify and filter out child porn, and Apple kicked the app out of the app store. Rather than improve their algorithms, or even worry about the problem, Tumblr banned anything pornographic in nature. This was a huge blow to the online sex-working community, because it was a forum both for working, and for talking to the community. The ability to learn from others, screen out potentially dangerous clients, and save money to leave abusive situations was wiped away. Knowledge is what reduces harm, and instead of having an educational space, these sex workers were on their own again.
Left with not a lot of choice, a lot of these sex workers are turning back to pimps. Pimps, knowing the game is changing, are harassing girls to come back, claiming that they “need them” again, and engaging in the same criminal behavior they were before. Cleaning up the internet is one thing, but pushing out the sex workers has pushed them back onto the streets, which is immeasurably more dangerous.
No money, still problems.
Financial discrimination is a massive problem for sex workers, and policy is hurting people all over the world. People have lost their livelihoods after being kicked off of a platform, only to discover that their bank no longer wants anything to do with them. In more than a few cases, crowdfunding platforms have kicked off sex workers who are attempting to raise money for things like healthcare.
Here’s a small list of companies that either have been reported on as actively discriminating against sex workers, or expressly prohibit transactions stemming from sex work:
Visa, Mastercard, JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Capital One Bank, Citi Bank, Paypal, Stripe, Square, Braintree, Google Wallet, Intuit, Coinbase, GoFundMe. Imagine conducting business without using any of these companies.
Paypal in particular is tough with their terms of service. If they assume that someone is involved in the sex trade, they will shut down that account and, in some cases, keep the money. Paypal has also recently stopped allowing Pornhub to make payouts to content creators via the platform, which stopped payouts to over 100,000 people.
Visa and Mastercard are also waging a war. Right after Paypal cut off pornhub, they announced within an hour of each other that they were also cutting off Pornhub, leaving thousands of people now unable to receive payouts through the two biggest credit card companies.
Their problem clearly isn’t with the money - they’re more than willing to keep that. It’s really about control, and the stigma around sex. In at least one case, Chase/Quickbooks/Intuit has closed the accounts of companies who so much as sell sex toys.
Without merchant accounts, companies can’t accept credit cards, both from individuals and from large retailers. This makes it nearly impossible to really stay afloat.
Discrimination is far reaching - and this is a huge market opportunity. It isn’t as simple as the regulations that keep banks from accepting money from cannabis related business: while legislation is shifting there, it’s still federally illegal. The same is not true of digital sex work. The reasons for cutting off sex workers are shifty, and based in puritanical values.
It wouldn’t be Birb without the vaguely philosophical bit
I think the philosophical implication section is something I’m going to keep around: I can get on my soapbox, and this is my newsletter, so I can do what I want. I may cover a lot of topics, but I think this is my favorite part.
While you may feel sex work is not right, or should be illegal, I have one question for you: why?
There is huge demand. While porn may lead to the objectification of women, user-created content is empowerment, not exploitation. If a person can make thousands of dollars doing this, why shouldn’t they?
There’s nothing shameful about sex - the Victorian Era attitude towards it has really set this country back years - and I don’t see what’s shameful about taking pictures of your body in exchange for money. We’re all labor; what’s the distinction here that makes this exchange of labor for capital not okay?
Children? Why are you showing porn to children? Onlyfans, pornhub, etc, aren’t advertising to children. Children are less likely to find the scrambled Cinemax channel these days, since everything has shifted online. It’s something you seek out.
No one is saying that child/sex trafficking is okay; that’s certainly not my point and it’s willfully ignorant to pretend otherwise. There are better, more effective ways of doing it than refusing to take legitimate sex worker’s money, but with poorly thought out legislation, we end up hurting the people we’re attempting to protect.
It goes further than just sex workers. Bad policy also hurts those it is trying to help.
Tell me if you’ve heard this story before: An underage person, typically one who identifies as female, sends explicit photos to a person who identifies as male, who is (usually) questionably older, and in some cases of legal age.
Things go sour, and the boy (in this scenario) seeks to hurt the girl for some slight, perceived or real. He accomplishes this by sending these photos to others, violating the girl’s right to control who sees her body. People may argue that she “should have known what she was getting into”, and shouldn’t have taken photos in the first place. That’s fine, you want to blame the victim, but that cat’s already out of that bag. We’re past that.
If the girl had been of age, there is straightforward protection in some states against revenge porn. That’s pretty standard. It’s still a work in progress - but as of date, a whopping 38 states have passed laws on revenge porn.
Here’s where things get tricky: now let’s say that the girl is under the age of 18. Do you know what happens in that situation? She can go to her parents, who can go to the police, and attempt to charge the boy. Since the girl is underage, the sender will be charged with distribution of child porn. Horrible sounding crime, horrible crime, lifetime on the sex offender’s registry. However…. The girl can now be charged with production of child porn. Which of these two charges is worse? The victim is now in far more trouble than the person who sent her pictures around to everyone.
This, with the rise of the *chans, and isanyoneup, isn’t a story, it’s reality in many cases. Do you want to guess where it leads? It leads to a huge uptick in teenage suicides. Now you have a dead teenager on your hands, because she wanted to send a boy she liked a sexual image - since, you know, that’s what’s been coded into our society: if girls want boys to like them, they have to “put out” or “be exciting”. I’ll refrain from delving deeper into this, because I will lose some people here.
My last question to you is this: do you really feel no sympathy? Are you genuinely of the mind that she shouldn’t have done it and it’s all her fault? Why are you so quick to point at the girl as the source of the problem, and not the boy for violating the trust? Why is it just acceptable behavior that women should know to avoid? There are markets, as discussed above, and honestly whole economies entirely dedicated to getting men off. Why are women discouraged by men from working in the market that is pointed towards the male gaze?
[This is where the trigger warning I mentioned before comes back. Stop here if you’re uncomfortable with violence against women.]
I want to take a moment to share a very personal story. I do not do this because I want people to message me and say they’re sorry. I am doing this because… well, you’ll see.
I had a friend in high school who sort of took me under her wing. She cut my hair, sang me songs, and taught me a lot about life. She was a little older than me. She graduated, and hung around my hometown. I left. We drifted. Every time I saw her when I came back to visit, she seemed like she was doing well. At first.
I started seeing her less and less. She was in a different scene, a different crowd. She kind of fell into an opiate addiction. Her parents tried to take care of her, but they were pretty well off and also pretty absent from what I knew of them.
One day - my senior year of college - I got a message from another hometown friend. It was just a link. I will not link it here. This link, when I clicked it, brought up a news article. The news article said that my friend was found dead, with her throat slit, at the edge of the woods, in a rough part of my hometown.
She was 24.
What happened? I got a little obsessed trying to find out. Through a combination of secondhand knowledge and a couple of police reports, my knowledge is this: My friend’s addiction took over her life, and she started engaging in sex work via Backpage. Somewhere along the way, she met a pimp. This pimp gave her customers. One of them killed her, allegedly because she brought somebody with her for protection.
We cannot let any more lives be taken because we want to pretend sex work doesn’t exist. We cannot push people back into the shadows because we’re afraid to face the reality that some people feel differently about sex than we do. She chose to use her body to make money. I don’t have a problem with that decision. Neither should you. This is the reality, and we should make it better, so more sex workers don’t get brutally murdered.
Rest well, SRG.
queen ily