Only Fans’ First-Gen Creators Are Retiring—and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist | WIRED

Overview

Only Fans’ First-Gen Creators Are Retiring—and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist

On April 28, just before noon, Win White logged onto X and posted a series of messages to his 65,000 followers who, until that moment, were mostly unaware of his past as an Only Fans creator.

Details

“I’m asking humbly that we all refrain from sharing content from before. If you see it, save it … cool,” he wrote. “I know where I’ve been and I think I’m entitled to a life after that at least.”

That morning White, 29, had received several DMs about an old clip of him making rounds. Though he has done his best to separate his old life from his new one—last year he deleted his Only Fans account and the separate X account where he posted content—it often has a habit of catching up with him. “All that work that I did for Only Fans, I did out in California. I don’t really talk about it on this page. So I panicked,” White tells WIRED.

Still, he had a hunch how his request might be received, and how nasty the responses could get. “From the moment that I sent the tweet I knew that this isn’t something that everybody is going to adhere to. I don’t expect any type of respect.”

The reactions, which ranged from empathetic to mostly mocking, maligned White for his past choices. “You were desperate then so deal with the now,” one X user commented. As more people piled on, the ordeal ignited an intense discussion around the boundaries of consent and the ethics of consumption.

Only Fans underwent massive growth between 2020 and 2023. A gay Navy veteran, White signed up for the platform in September 2022 because he wanted to establish independence from a toxic relationship he was trying to get out of. By August 2023, the year he quit, Only Fans had more than 3 million creators. White says he shot maybe 40 videos in total, and mostly filmed solo scenes, with the exception of a few he did with a former partner.

The experience had started to feel inauthentic to who he was, on top of the reputational consequences not being worth the scant payout. “I only did it when I needed money to do something extra curricular. It was never my day job. I didn’t get rich off of it.” There’s another thing, White says, “I really sucked at it,” which is why he was so caught off guard by the responses to his posts asking people to stop sharing his content.

Many people argued that White’s plea was unreasonable. This is the internet and, well, the internet is forever. “You can't ask millions of strangers to collectively agree to a ‘hush’ policy on content that you personally put out and kept live. That’s just not how this works,” posted one X user, with another piling on: “Digital footprint lives here and doesn’t leave here.” Others called the request hypocritical given that they had paid for the work. Added @stuntqween: “I’m all for respect—but it’s quite comical when retired OF gays finally accumulate the funds that they’ve dreamed of (from making porn) then all of a sudden it’s ‘take that down!’ Babe we paid for that OF content, shared your content to SUPPORT you & funded your lifestyle.” Those in support of White contended that it came down to one issue—consent—saying the inability to start over constitutes an unfair social punishment. Asked @Mr Flyyy Guyyy, “Why are y’all so comfortable disregarding a person’s consent?”

Over the last several years, there has been a notable exodus of high-profile creators from Only Fans, including influencer Blac Chyna and Great British Bakeoff winner John Whaite, and some are having to navigate tough questions as they quit the business.

What happens when someone who makes porn no longer wants to be associated with their past? What obligation do consumers have to creators who want to move on? The moral friction, it seems, lies in how consent is defined.

“We teach young people that consent is an ongoing negotiation and that anyone can withdraw consent, at any time, during a sexual encounter, for any reason. What does that mean when it comes to the afterlife of someone’s porn work when they’re now out of the business? I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this question,” says Lynn Comella, who researches sexual politics and consumer capitalism at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. “But it is a conversation worth having.”

Last December, Camilla Araujo, who claims to have earned over

Asked if he considered the consequences of online sex work—aware that people might not be willing to ever let him forget what he’d done—before getting into it, White hesitates before responding. “I always knew it was a possibility. I just didn’t consider that there’s no boundaries. Pretty much what you naysayers are telling me is that my body isn’t mine once it goes on the internet. And I believe the contrary.”

White googled what legal action he could take on the images he owned, “and AI could have been lying to me, but you can revoke consent on things like that. I didn’t sign any contracts. That was my material. That was my property.” Only Fans creators retain copyright in their photos and videos, and reposting them without permission can amount to copyright infringement. Creators can also revoke consent on the distribution of their videos at any time, but legally forcing removal hinges on whether a contract was signed and what the contract stipulated.

When a creator does revoke their consent, continuing to share or profit on their content becomes non-consensual distribution—what’s known as revenge porn—and creators can take legal action against people who do so. Creators can also issue takedowns via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get content removed from sites and social media pages. “If I really wanted to take it there and make an example out of somebody, I believe I could,” White says.

Over the years, Comella says, there has been far more attention on the ethics of porn production versus consumption, which includes “paying for, and not pirating or stealing, the porn you watch and, at a bare minimum, respecting performers’ boundaries if you are DMing or engaging with them online.” Yet even as porn has become increasingly prevalent in the age of social media, she says some of the negative responses still speak to a specific, if unfortunate, “worldview in which sex work stigma is so all-encompassing a person is seemingly stripped of their humanity, forever, if they do sex work even once.”

White hasn’t taken any legal action against people who continue to repost his videos, nor is he naive about how the internet works. Though he doesn’t regret his time as a sex worker, he fully understands that what he’s requesting is somewhat of an impossible ask. He blames social media and what he calls the evolution of access to performers.

“To respond with such vitriol, to try to tear me down. It made me worry about how many people are wolves in sheep’s clothing in real life. The consumers are actually dangerous,” he says. “The response said a lot about how the goalpost can move on something as simple as consent. I wouldn’t imagine a nut being this important to anybody.”

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Key Takeaways

• Only Fans’ First-Gen Creators Are Retiring—and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist

• On April 28, just before noon, Win White logged onto X and posted a series of messages to his 65,000 followers who, until that moment, were mostly unaware of his past as an Only Fans creator

• “I’m asking humbly that we all refrain from sharing content from before

• That morning White, 29, had received several DMs about an old clip of him making rounds

• Still, he had a hunch how his request might be received, and how nasty the responses could get