“hard show,” he tells me of what people desire the
most—videos of him masturbating or images of his
erect penis.
On Instagram, an influencer is helping sell prod-
ucts, essentially to add a degree of cool to, say,
sunglasses or dietary supplements. On OnlyFans,
influencers are themselves the product. Castelli has
no qualms about that. In his best-performing month
so far, he estimates that he netted about $8,000. Even
as he is set to appear on another French reality show
this fall, W9’s Les Princes et les Princesses de l’Amour,
he doesn’t plan to quit. “It will be the best period to
make money,” he says.
“So is the Clément Castelli on Instagram the real
you and the Clément Castelli on OnlyFans the fantasy
you?” I ask him. Within seconds, a gray chat bubble
fills my screen. “Exactly,” he says.
In some cases, how influencers present themselves
on OnlyFans is a kind of reversal of their online iden-
tities elsewhere, trading the high gloss of Instagram
for the low-grade aesthetic of amateur porn. In other
cases, there’s not much distance between Instagram
personas (shirtless selfies, full-body bikini shots,
angled butt portraits) and OnlyFans personas (shirt-
less selfies, full-body bikini shots, angled butt por-
traits). Either way, many influencers who upload erotic
content or “perform”—as it’s often referred to—on sites
like OnlyFans don’t see themselves as participating in
sex work. The association makes them uncomfort-
able. Even as they promote their OnlyFans connec-
tion (discreetly) on Instagram and reveal much more
to subscribers, they are reluctant to discuss the work
in more open forums.
Many of my emails to influencers went unanswered.
Some who did respond quickly ghosted, even with the
guarantee of anonymity. One source, a trainer who’s
done promotional work for an energy drink company,
told me he’d speak only if the focus was on his “back-
ground with social media, modeling, and the fitness
industry,” noting, “I’m not sure a story on cam sites
would align with my vision for the future.” Another
influencer I began speaking to via text, an athlete from
the South with more than 350,000 Instagram fol-
lowers, insisted on keeping his identities separate.
Before he abruptly ended communication in May, he
told me he was going to delete his OnlyFans account
in a few weeks and didn’t want to be remembered for
what he’d done on the site. It wasn’t who he was. (His
account remains active.)
But these warring selves, if in fact we interpret them
that way, can also be an expansion of who one can be.
The internet has become a place to treat identity and
anonymity like a stack of cards in perpetual shuffle,
whether on Second Life or in the quarrelsome forums
of Reddit. Social media platforms function as digi-
tal canvases of endless self-creation and branding.
Media theorist danah boyd describes how we have
multiple online selves. Think of it as the collective
singular, an I made up of we. Because these selves
exist within the same hyperlinked highway of limit-
less information, they at times have a tendency to
reach audiences for whom they were not intended—a
phenomenon she calls context collapse. The assorted
selves we perform on Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook,
and elsewhere synthesize.
The selves we portray on major platforms tend
to meld into the most watered-down and palatable
version of ourselves, adds Brooke Erin Duffy, a Cor-
nell professor who studies social media and creative
labor, “because you have so many different audi-
ences—friends, family, church group members, col-
leagues, future bosses.” The we starts to fuse into
a bland I. But sites like OnlyFans throw open the
doors to more daring, less consistent self-branding.
“What these more niche communities do—whether
it’s a subscription site or it’s something like Twitch—
is enable people to challenge context collapse and
maintain more siloed identities.”
Duffy warns of how one’s rotating selves can cause
friction. “There’s a need to keep a distinctive self, a
persona, separate. If they collapse again, if they brush
up against one another, influencers are vulnerable to
critique and people saying things like, ‘You’re being
inauthentic.’”WE ARE A SOCIETY that fetishizes visibility. But “in
hyping this ideal of visibility,” Duffy tells me later,
“influencer culture fails to recognize that visibility
entails a higher degree of vulnerability.” I think that’s
partly why I followed influencers to OnlyFans and
JustFor.Fans—and then subscribed, and then kept
watching. I was curious: Just how far would they go?
Just how vulnerable were they willing to get? How
vulnerable was I willing to get? Even separated by
computer screens, acts of self-pleasure force one into
a state of defenselessness. And it’s there, on that plane
of emotional volatility, where I began to question parts
of who I was and what I coveted.JASON PARHAM
(@nonlinearnotes)
is a senior writer
at wired. He wrote
about the Oprah
Winfrey Network in
issue 26.08.