Once outlawed, sexual content has moved from the shadows into a new digital marketplace where creators are seizing financial power.
In the ’70s and ’80s, magazines like Playboy and Penthouse were contraband in South Africa. And heaven help you if the Nats thought police found a reel of porn in your drawer.
That was then. In 1994, democracy rolled in and suddenly sex crawled out from under the bed and slipped under the covers.
Still, it lived in the shadows. Because good people didn’t have sex and the naughty ones weren’t supposed to be nice.
One platform burnt that rulebook: OnlyFans, the pay-to-enjoy subscription site where creators dream up their own brand of naughty and sell it to a world that can’t get enough.
There’s an insatiable appetite for kink out there. Ask Sexpo, its swelling visitor numbers prove it year after year.
But OnlyFans and its peer sites like Fansly are not just about selling fantasies.
The women behind the screens say it’s about independence, security, sometimes survival. They talk about paying bills, raising children, building nest eggs.
Others just enjoy the thrill.
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The common thread is power. For once, they’re the ones holding the joystick in the cockpit.
In the mid-20th century, titillation was a man’s business.
Men banked the cheques, women played the props.
Whether painted across pin-up caravans or topless on stage, they were the product, not the profiteers.
That script has flipped over the past five years. Today, some creators pocket millions and, in South Africa, many rake in hundreds of thousands of rands.
It’s still a shadow economy, creators endure stigma, it is largely tax-free until the SA Revenue Service’s recent note, but it has given thousands of women – and men – who might never crack the formal job market a way to make a living.
The balance of power has shifted in creator’s favour.
Today it’s the woman in front of the camera who is also controlling the set behind the scenes.
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